Introduction,
The Home and the World
excerpted from the book
Dark Ages America
The Final Phase of Empire
by Morris Berman
WW Norton, 2006, paper
p2
... under the "boy emperor" George W. Bush (as Chalmers
Johnson refers to him), we have entered the Dark Ages in earnest,
pursuing a short-sighted path that can only accelerate our decline.
For what we are now seeing are the obvious characteristics of
the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over
reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration
of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture-a troika
that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment
world; and the political and economic marginalization of our culture.
Of course, the Dark Ages were not uniformly monochromatic, as
recent scholarship has demonstrated; but then, neither is present-day
America. The point is that in both cases "dark" is the
operative word.
To understand what we mean by the term,
we need to look, historically, at what constituted the light.
In his famous essay of 1784, "What Is Enlightenment?,"
the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, "Enlightenment
is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage," which
he defined as his "inability to make use of his understanding
without direction from another." Sapere aude!, cried Kant;
"have the courage to use your own reason!-that is the motto
of enlightenment?'
These are fabulous words, and the ideals
they embody inspired the Founding Fathers and the American Constitution.
Commenting on Kant's call to reason the Israeli historian Shmuel
Feiner writes:
The explosive nature of this brief definition lies in its sweeping
criticism of the world, in which man, out of pessimism and passivity,
allows the existing order to dictate his life and those possessing
religious and spiritual authority to determine for him what is
truth. In contrast, the enlightened man is an autonomous, rational,
and skeptical person, who has the power to free himself of the
shackles of the past and authority, and to pave new and better
ways for himself and for all humanity.
p3
Dark Ages - "the gradual subjection of reason to faith and
authority"
British historian Charles Freeman about the Fourth Century during
the late Roman Empire - which marked the beginning of what has
been called - the "Dark Ages"
p4
Religion ... shows up in the current American tendency to explain
world events (in particular, terrorist attacks) as part of a cosmic
conflict between Good and Evil, rather than in terms of political
processes. This is hardly limited to the White House. Manichaeanism
rules across the United States. According to a poll taken by Time
magazine ... 59 percent of Americans believe that John's apocalyptic
prophecies in the Book of Revelation will be fulfilled, and nearly
all of these believe that the faithful will be taken up into heaven
in the "Rapture" (the latter discussed in Thessalonians).
According to the Book of Revelation, God is going to punish the
nonbelievers with various plagues, after which Christ will return
to earth-with a sword in his mouth-for the final showdown between
Good and Evil (the battle of Armageddon).'
The vengeful quality of the apocalyptic
vision comes across quite clearly in the Left Behind series by
Tim LaHaye (one of the founders of the Moral Majority) and Jerry
Jenkins, which had, by early 2003, sold more than 62 million copies.
One in eight Americans reads these books, and they are a favorite
with American soldiers in Iraq. The Book of Revelation is pretty
much the road map for the novels, and the worldview is reassuringly
black-and-white, with "good" triumphing in the end.
At the end of the series, Jews who have persisted in their faith
are consigned to the Everlasting Fire, along with Catholics, Muslims,
Hindus, and devotees of other "aberrant religions."
Seas turn to blood; locusts torment the unbelievers; and 200 million
demonic horsemen wipe out a third of the planet-a kind of cosmic
ethnic cleansing, as it were. It doesn't get much darker than
this.
Finally, we shouldn't be surprised at
the antipathy toward democracy displayed by the Bush administration,
a fact that has been reported on, in various manifestations, numerous
times. As already noted, fundamentalism and democracy are completely
antithetical. The opposite of the Enlightenment, of course, is
tribalism, groupthink; and more and more, this is the direction
in which the United States is going. Thus Mr. Bush's first official
response to his reelection was to create a cabinet of completely
uniform voices, as David Gergen, who has been an adviser to four
presidents, pointed out-"closing down dissent and centralizing
power in a few hands." In the world of groupthink, loyalty
is everything; and it was also this kind of tribalism, I believe,
that got Bush reelected. We are moving, or so it seems, toward
a one-party system, a kind of presidential dictatorship, one that
is fundamentally theocratic in nature.
Nor does one see much by way of grassroots
objection to this trend. American hatred of freedom, for example,
shows up quite clearly in the statistics of public attitudes toward
the Bill of Rights. Anthony Lewis, who worked as a columnist for
the New York Times for thirty-two years, observes that what has
happened in the wake of 9/11 is not just the threatening of the
rights of a few detainees, but the undermining of the very foundation
of democracy. Detention without trial, denial of access to attorneys,
years of interrogation in isolation-these are all now standard
American practice, and most Americans don't care. Nor did they
care about the revelation, in July 2004 (reported in Newsweek),
that for several months the White House and the Department of
Justice had been discussing the feasibility of canceling the upcoming
presidential election in the event of a possible terrorist attack,
which would have been a first in American history. In a "State
of the First Amendment Survey" conducted by the University
of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the
First Amendment "goes too far"; 46 percent said there
was too much freedom of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers
should not be able to publish articles without prior approval
of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war to
be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government
should have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of
"certain religious groups" in the name of the war on
terror. Quite honestly, we may be only one more terrorist attack
away from a police state.'
p6
Only 12 percent of Americans own a passport
p6
As in the Middle Ages, when most individuals got their understanding
of the world from a mass source- i.e., the Church - most Americans
get their "understanding" from another mass source:
television ...
p6
As Los Angeles journalist John Powers writes in his book Sore
Winners, [George] Bush is in fact a mirror of the nation. We can
see his fractured image, writes Powers, reflected in the wildly
popular dog-eat-dog reality shows, the frenzy over The Passion
of the Christ, the celebration of consumerism as self-expression,
and the general climate of fear. Bush rules over a "polarized
culture of unreality" and it is this culture that created
him and gave him his power. Personally, he is a bit eerie, a kind
of hologram created by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, and sold to
the American people as a "concocted persona." He takes
"obvious pleasure in announcing violence," writes Powers,
and is "possessed of a need for order that borders on rage."
Yet this robotic behavior has proven to be quite effective in
an American context. The lack of intellectual suppleness or curiosity,
the distaste for ambiguity, are tailor-made for this particular
audience. Once again, both the population and the president can
simplistically relate to the world, medieval style, as a battleground
between the forces of Good and Evil. Ignorant of historical context,
and conditioned by the media to "think" in terms of
sound bites and slogans, the American public comes to regard Bush's
Manichaeanism and simpleminded view of the world as "sturdy
common sense." "If George W. Bush vanished tomorrow,"
Powers concludes, "everything genuinely awful about this
presidency would still be in place .... Bush World is not simply
the emanation of one sore winner. It's a collection of ideas,
values, symbols, and policies."
p8
... the U.S. infant mortality rate is among the highest for developed
democracies, and that the World Health Organization rates our
health care system as thirty-seventh best in the world, well behind
that of Saudi Arabia ...
p14
By 1995, 1 percent of the American population owned 47 percent
of the nation's wealth; by 1998, the 400 richest individuals in
the world had as much wealth as the bottom half of the world's
population more than 3 billion people.
p29
An estimated six million American children have been diagnosed
with attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), including
perhaps two hundred thousand between the ages of two and four.
One million children now receive Ritalin (methyiphenidate) every
day in school; other drugs in the "behavioral" tool
kit include Prozac and Pamelar (antidepressants), Risperdal (an
antipsychotic), and Adderall, now the most prescribed stimulant
in the country. In 2002, the Food and Drug Administration approved
the use of Prozac for children as young as seven years of age,
and in general there was a spike in the use of antidepressant
medication for the five-and-under crowd during 1999-2004. All
in all, the use of antidepressants among American children grew
three- to tenfold between 1987 and 1996, and there was a further
50 percent increase in such prescriptions from 1998 to 2002. In
fact, children in the United States now receive four times as
many psychiatric drugs as children in all other countries of the
world combined. Meanwhile, depression, anxiety, and behavioral
disorders are skyrocketing. What we probably need is a drug called
Reject-It-All. Unfortunately, the majority opinion seems to be
"repress symptoms, no problem." The minority opinion,
which points to the obvious-"overcrowded schools, stressed-out
parents with little time for the children and a society ... that
is intolerant of anything but success"-can barely get a hearing
in a culture characterized by frenzy and denial. But when the
use of psychoactive drugs triples among two to four-year-old Medicaid
patients between 1991 and 1995, the causes are likely to be sociological,
not chemical.
p61
As soon as he was inaugurated in 2001, George W. Bush began pushing
for a tax cut that would give 40 percent of the benefits to the
richest 1 percent of the taxpayers, and less than 1 percent of
the benefits to the bottom 20 percent. Passed that May, the tax
bill created an even greater upward redistribution of wealth and
income than was already in place. It conferred a monthly stipend
of at least $50,000 on the four hundred richest Americans, while
the bottom 20 percent got, on average, $5.40. The poorest 10 percent
got less than nothing, because the meager public services on which
they relied were going to be cut or reduced. Finally, in the wake
of September 11, the "economic stimulus package" passed
in the House of Representatives on October 24 earmarked more than
$140 billion in tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations,
in addition to retroactive benefits that would pay back some of
the taxes levied on corporations over the previous fifteen years(!).
The Senate, for its part, suggested a tax-cut package that would
cost $220 billion over three years, more than half of which would
go to the top 1 percent of the population, and 6 percent of which
would go to the bottom 60 percent. Political columnist Mark Shields
commented that he had never before heard of "going into a
war cutting taxes [and] rewarding the richest in society at a
time of sacrifice."
The data for 2001-3, reported by the US.
Census Bureau, make this trend quite clear. During that time,
the US. government spent $400 billion on tax cuts, most of which
went to the wealthy, while 4.3 million more Americans fell below
the federal poverty line (unrealistically set at $18,600 for a
family of four). The total number living in poverty (thus defined)
as of 2003 was nearly 36 million people, or 12.5 percent of the
total population (note that it had actually been worse-12.7 percent
under the Clinton administration, in 1998). Adjusting for inflation,
the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour was actually 30 percent
less than it had been in 1968. The number of Americans without
health insurance grew from 2000 to 2003 by 5.2 million to 45 million,
or 15.6 percent of the population. Meanwhile, the proposed federal
budget for fiscal year 2005 (as of this writing) is $2.4 trillion,
which includes a 7 percent increase in military spending, a 10
percent increase in domestic security spending, and a mere 0.5
percent increase in spending for a vast array of domestic programs.
The projections for 2009 are that child care assistance could
be cut for as many as 365,000 children, while those individuals
earning $1 million or more per year will receive an annual $155,000
in tax cuts. These cuts, if made permanent, will cost the government
nearly $1 trillion over the next ten years.
p62
... by 1998 the richest four hundred people on the planet had
as much wealth as the bottom half of the population, and 3 billion
people live on less than two dollars a day. During the past fifteen
to twenty years more than one hundred developing countries suffered
failures in growth and living standards that were more severe
than anything suffered by the industrial nations during the Depression,
and between 1987 and 1993 the number of people with incomes of
less than one dollar per day increased by 100 million, to 1.3
billion people. In more than one hundred countries, per capita
income is lower today than it was fifteen years ago, and nearly
1.6 billion people live in worse conditions than they did in the
early 1980s. In 1998, emerging markets represented 7 percent of
the capital value of world markets, but constituted 85 percent
of the world's population. A U.N. report of 2003 found that nearly
one-sixth of the world's population lived in slums, and predicted
that the figure would rise to one-third by 2033; and it specifically
held globalization, neoliberal economics, the IMF, and the World
Trade Organization responsible for this. "To date,"
editorialized the International Herald Tribune in 2003, "globalization
remains a flawed game whose rules have been fixed by rich nations."
p63
[A] searing indictment of the IMF can
be found in Joseph Stiglitz's masterful study, Globalization and
Its Discontents. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate who teaches economics
at Columbia University, cannot easily be dismissed, since he writes
from the vantage point of an insider. He was chairman of President
Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers and senior vice president
and chief economist at the World Bank. In a detailed, case-by-case
analysis, Stiglitz repeatedly castigates the IMF as destructive
and dogmatic, a major source of Third World misery. In country
after country, the IMF prescribed "solutions" based
on market fundamentalism that took no account of what effect these
actions would have on people. Its neoliberal policies often led
to hunger and riots; the few benefits that did accrue usually
went to the rich. Upper-echelon IMF personnel (for instance, Robert
Rubin and Stanley Fischer) typically come from the private sector
(Goldman Sachs, Citigroup), have little concern for the environment,
democracy, or social justice, and basically act as representatives
of the American financial community. They cut fuel and food subsidies
to the Third World and insist on cutbacks in health expenditures,
while Prada, Benetton, and Ralph Lauren come in for the benefit
of the few urban rich, and vast numbers of rural poor wind up
worse off than before. From the top floors of luxury hotels, he
says, the IMF directors impose policies that destroy people's
lives and don't think twice about it. "Globalization,"
concludes Stiglitz, "seems to replace the old dictatorships
of national elites with new dictatorships of international finance.""
(Meanwhile, back in the United States, we sit around asking ourselves,
. "Why do they hate us?" Duh!)
To Manfred Steger, a specialist in globalization,
there is no doubt that neoliberalism, or the Washington consensus
as it was developed during the Reagan administration and after,
has a civilizational bias. The whole thing, he says, was really
a gigantic repackaging of classical laissez-faire economics, now
labeled the New Economy. But the "metanarrative," as
it is sometimes called-that is, the story underneath the story-is
essentially one of "modernization," which casts Western
countries (read: the United States and the United Kingdom) as
"the privileged vanguard of an evolutionary process that
applies to all nations." (And make no mistake about it: the
so-called war on terror has the hidden agenda of trying to get
Islamic civilization to accept the value structure of Western
modernity-an agenda that a dissenting advisory panel within the
Pentagon was, by late 2004, calling a "strategic mistake.")
Globalization, adds historian and former CIA analyst Chalmers
Johnson, is "a kind of intellectual sedative that lulls and
distracts its Third World victims while rich countries cripple
them, ensuring that they will never be able to challenge the imperial
powers."
p81
President Woodrow Wilson, 1901, in defense of the annexation of
the Philippines
The East is to be opened and transformed
whether we will it or not; the standards of the West are to be
imposed on it; nations and peoples which have stood still the
centuries through ... [will be] made part of the universal world
of commerce and of ideas.
p82
Secular versus Tribal
What Isaiah Berlin called negative freedom
is a freedom that was hard won, in the West, through the great
bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
It is essentially the freedom to be left alone. Societies without
this type of freedom tend to be tribal (or organic) in nature,
heavily dominated by custom and tradition. In those cultures,
the separation of church and state-a mainstay of secular democracy-is
usually absent, Thus both Israel and Iran are torn by internal
strife along the secular-tribal spectrum, as are Turkey and-as
must be obvious in the wake of the 2004 presidential election-the
United States. In fact, many American evangelicals probably have
more in common with the citizens of Damascus than they do, say,
with many of the inhabitants of New York or Los Angeles (something
they would not, I am sure, be terribly happy to hear, especially
given the profound anti-Muslim feeling among many right-wing Christians).
p84
French scholar Emile Durkheim held that every society was held
together by a conscience collective, a "system of beliefs
and sentiments" that the members of any given society had
in common, and that defined the nature of their mutual relations.
Remove this, said Durkheim, replace it with the pursuit of self-interest,
and a society would quickly collapse into a Hobbesian state of
every man for himself. This, to my mind, is largely what we have
in the United States today ...
... it is possible for the conscience
collective to be too intense, a condition that anthropologists
refer to as "hypercoherence" ... to examine how the
essential elements of a culture are internalized by individuals
as part of their personalities, Durkheim focused on, of all things,
suicide. He proposed that there are two fundamental types of suicide,
"altruistic" and "egotistic:' In the former case,
the individual is so pressured to conform that he feels he has
no identity of his own. In the egotistic situation, on the other
hand, the individual feels a constant pressure to stand out, achieve,
be apart from the collectivity. Enough intensity in either direction,
said Durkheim, and certain individuals will decide to pack it
in.
Durkheim also posited a third category,
"anomic" suicide, which he said arose when society was
turned upside down, when rules and conventions collapsed and individuals
felt themselves to be in crisis. Ironically enough, this state
of affairs might be descriptive of both Islam and the West. America
is disintegrating, in part, because it is living in a moral vacuum.
The Islamic nations are in crisis, in part, because they are simultaneously
attracted to and repelled by that moral vacuum (Iran is an obvious
example of this). My point is that if there is a "clash of
civilizations" going on in the world today, as the conventional
wisdom has it, one aspect of that is the larger archetypal drama
... is life going to be tribal in nature, or is it going to be
secular? Jihad or McWorld, as political scientist Benjamin Barber
has put it? This is part of what was involved in the events of
September 11.
Barber elaborated on this dichotomy in
a talk he gave at the University of Maryland thirteen days after
the attack on the World Trade Center. There is no way, he remarked,
that this attack can be dismissed as the work of a few crazies,
because the terrorists swim in a sea of popular support. Millions
of Muslims cheered the event, some openly, others silently. The
truth is that for them, the American international economic order
is a great disorder. It renders the majority of them poor, and
it tramples on their values. Hence, Barber subsequently stated
in an interview in the Washington Post, the impulse behind jihad
is nothing less than "a holy struggle against something that
is seen as evil." A large percentage of Muslims and Arabs
view TV programs such as Dynasty or The Simpsons as part of a
Western plot to destroy their religious values; they "feel
they are being colonized by Nike and McDonald's and by the garbage"
of the American media. Should we be so surprised that they applaud
our deaths?'
p87
... when Americans asked in the wake of September 11 "Why
do they hate us?," they didn't really want an answer. The
question was purely rhetorical; what Americans wanted was an explanation
that would justify their anger, their demand for revenge ...
p88
Europe and the United States ... have a dual heritage - Judeo-Christian
religion and ethics, GrecoRoman statecraft and law-that is really
not part of the Islamic tradition, fundamentalist or otherwise.
Roman law had the notion of the legal person, or corporate entity,
that could enter into contracts and obligations and act as plaintiff
or defendant in legal proceedings. This principle made possible
the effective functioning of representative assemblies-of government
as such. And it is precisely this type of assembly, or corporate
entity-Roman senate, Jewish Sanhedrin, parliament of many nations
within Christendom - that was absent from the Islamic world. Thus,
writes Lewis, "almost all aspects of Muslim government have
an intensely personal character .... The Islamic state was in
principle a theocracy . Without legislative or corporate bodies,
there was no need for representation or collective decision. "Not
surprisingly," he concludes, "the history of the Islamic
states is one of almost unrelieved autocracy." This is, in
short, a tribal and intensely personal world, not a secular and
contractual one.
p92
... Western science is based on doubt, experiment, and measurement,
and the truth is regarded as unfolding and provisional; whereas
in tribal cultures, the truth is typically regarded as revealed
- God-given and final. Group solidarity always trumps skeptical
questioning or the search for the truth.
p97
Samuel Huntington
" Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations
is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and
potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world."
p97
Samuel Huntington
"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas
or values or religion ... but rather by its superiority in applying
organized violence..."
p100
"What went wrong?" is basically "The actions of
the United States, as heir to the British Empire in the Muslim
world, are what went wrong." In October 2002, for example,
Osama bin Laden (OBL) declared the war would go on as long as
U.S. policies toward the Muslim world remained unchanged. And
his indictment, says Scheuer, "is pretty much factual":
American support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which
involves Israeli attacks on the Palestinian people; brutal sanctions
against Iraq (and no its occupation); the 1965 "regime change"
and subsequent slaughter of at least a half a million people in
Indonesia, whose killers the CIA assisted in coming to power and
to whom the US. embassy even supplied extensive hit lists; US.
military presence in the Arabian Peninsula (the shift of troops
from Saudi Arabia to Qatar in 2003 fooled nobody); support for
(or acquiescence in) oppression of Muslims by the Chinese, Russian,
and Indian governments (One wonders, however, why OBL isn't similarly
enraged at them); and protection of tyrannical Arab regimes so
that we can have access to cheap oil. The reason for their jihad
against us, said OBL in a statement to the American people, "is
very simple: Because you attacked and continue to attack us ....
You shall not feel at ease until you take your hands off our nation."
p101
One of the most insightful approaches to this topic is that of
the eminent historian Charles Beard, whose work was subsequently
enlarged upon by William Appleby Williams (The Tragedy of American
Diplomacy). For Beard, foreign policy was really an afterthought;
it grew out of domestic policy, which was essentially about money.
The centerpiece of the foreign policy strategy of William McKinley,
Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Warren
G. Harding, he argued, was economic expansion-exporting our economic
surpluses. This, in turn, meant pushing open the doors of trade
and investment everywhere, whether by polite coercion or by military
force. It was only via trade and investment, these presidents
believed, that the United States could flourish, and the permanence
of its domestic order be assured. In that sense, Beard argued,
U.S. foreign and domestic policy were two sides of the same coin.
p103
According to [William Appleman] Williams, when America ran out
of frontier-that is, when Manifest Destiny had run its course
and there was no more contiguous land to buy, annex, or conquer-the
root impulse got channeled into overseas expansion. It was during
the 1890s, when the United States was beset by a severe economic
crisis, and it recognized that the continental frontier was gone,
that the nation clearly formulated the argument that expansion
in the form of a foreign economic (or even territorial) empire
was the best way to maintain its own prosperity. The decision
for imperial expansion was part of the 1896 platform of the Republican
party, which captured the presidency and held it for the next
sixteen years. The famous Open Door notes of 1899-1900, written
by McKinley's secretary of state, john Hay, advocated not traditional
colonialism but rather the policy of "an open door through
which America's preponderant economic strength would enter and
dominate all underdeveloped areas of the world." Nor did
subsequent Democratic presidents (Jimmy Carter excepted) attempt
to deviate from this projections that, says Williams, can accurately
be described as a program of informal empire. As early as 1902,
Princeton University President Woodrow Wilson wrote that overseas
expansion was the economic frontier that would replace the American
continent as the territorial frontier. In effect, the Open Door
notes were merely the doctrine of Manifest Destiny gone global.
... Between 1870 and 1900, the American
share of world manufacturing went from 23.3 percent to 30.1 percent,
making the United States the foremost industrial nation. This
rapid growth was a big factor in its desire to flex its muscles
in the international arena. America worried that the other imperialist
powers would cut it off from the world's economic markets; its
industrial growth generated the desire for foreign expansion,
which created foreign interests that in turn (it believed) required
protection; and it also had a yearning for symbolic greatness--
i.e., the desire to be seen as a major player on the world's stage.
Add to this the fact that it was an alliance of Republican businessmen
that put McKinley in the White House, an elite clique that advocated
an aggressive foreign policy, an active search for markets, and
a large navy. These men were empire builders, and under their
influence McKinley was emboldened to compel Congress to follow
his foreign policy.
Dark
Ages America
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