Slow Dissolve

The Twilight of American Culture, by Morris Berman (New York: Norton, 2000).

The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, by James Howard Kunstler (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2005).

Morris Berman's analysis of the death of American political, economic, and civic culture is well-argued and aims to be comprehensive. It draws on the work of an extemely wide range of relevant scholars and artists (i.e., fiction writers, script writers, and film directors), and unlike many such analyses offers practical solutions for dealing with the cultural and economic collapse that is already in progress.

Berman's work suffers from one glaring weakness: the word "oil" doesn't appear anywhere in his analysis, and he pays scant attention to the vital, physical infrastructures of daily life which the dying culture he so capably dissects is meant to animate.

Jim Kunstler, on the other hand, is concerned with only two aspects of our dying civilization: first and foremost, the elementary observation that the age of cheap oil and cheap gasoline is now over, a fact that American politicians and the American public so far refuse to acknowledge; and secondly, the destructive impact of the onoing, almost carcinogenic suburban expansion on the infrastructure and the economy. The two are linked, because suburban expansion is gasoline-and-automobile dependent, at a time when the cheap resources that would make such expansion practical or even doable are vanishing.

In fairness, Berman's book was published in 2000 and written earlier, at a time when the words "peak oil" had barely entered the informed American consciousness. Only Kunstler and a few other John the Baptist types were painfully aware of what was coming down the road at us at the time, and when we look at the topics Berman covers (rather than what he doesn't), his work is impressive, and dovetails with Kunstler's.

Berman's thesis is built around four facets of cultural collapse which he identifies as: 1) "Accelerating social and economic inequality," both within the U.S. and all over the world; 2) "Declining marginal returns with regard to investment in organizational solutions to socioeconomic problems" (an example of this would be the increasingly expensive bureaucratic apparatus of FEMA/Homeland Security and the shocking lack of results this costly behemoth achieved in the wake of Hurricane Katrina); "Rapidly dropping levels of literacy, critical understanding, and general intellectual awareness;" and 4) "Spiritual death...the emptying out of cultural content and the freezing...of it in formulas--kitsch, in short."

Berman ties these four elements together with the fact-heavy observations of authors such as Benjamin Barber (Jihad vs. McWorld) who have documented the accelerating and smothering monopoly of global corporations on both our economic and cultural lives. Theme parks and commercials have become substitutes for real experience and real thought, and this ties in with Kunstler's observation that beige-colored suburban tracts with their auxiliary strip mall shopping centers, all full of the same franchise fast-food joints, muffler shops, and furniture outlets, have replaced real communities.

Both authors offer real solutions to the current depressing state of affairs. For Berman, the answer lies in the "monastic opition," i.e. pursuing genuine learning, real art, philosophy free of commercialism, and generally embracing the ideals of the now dead and departed Enlightenment, not for purposes of achieving fame or reward, but for their own sakes, because these things are worth doing, and because as we enter the new dark ages, someone is going to have to preserve genuine knowledge and genuine art. This is what Berman calls the "new monasticism," comparing it to the European monasticism that preserved classical learning during the centuries-long dark age that enveloped Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

Kunstler is less sanguine, and maintains that we're all going to suffer greivously, and within a few years. But he also recommends some steps everyone can take to deal with the imminent collapse of infrastructure, starting with getting out of our cars and moving to places where we can live as pedestrians--San Francisco, say, as opposed to San Bernardino.

Berman's new book, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire, is coming out in April, and I'm hoping he has compensated for Twilight's shortcomings and will have something to say about the end of cheap oil and infrastructural collapse this time. Apparently we have now moved past twilight, since the Bush dictatorship has provided the historian with the example of decline on steroids. Berman's earlier prognosis of our final cultural watershed being "at least forty or fifty years down the road" (page 8), or the American political and economic system being "adaptive, at least for another fifty or one hundred years" has hopefully been radically foreshortened in the new work.

Kunstler's gloomy jeremiad, on the other hand, which was shocking in its prediction of imminent and immediate collapse, may have to be revised also. Kunstler is absolutely right in his observation that cheap oil is gone; it's already a fait accompli. But there is still plenty of oil in places like the Alberta tar sands, although delivery at the pump will be in the three-to-four dollar per gallon range, and that's going to change everything. Most especially, it will put a sudden end to the metastisizing of suburbia.

But the petroleum-based life will go on another few years, as even Kunstler admits in the latest post (2/13/06) on his blog, "Clusterfuck Nation" (http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/):

"Where are the scientists who will inform the public and its political leaders that we really are in trouble with oil and natural gas, that markets do not magically deliver rescue remedies on demand, that technology and energy are not interchangeable and mutually substitutable, and that our nation is about five years from falling into a condition of energy starvation that will bring down all our complex systems of daily life?"

Where indeed? The weak but possibly accurate answer is that as Morris Berman points out in Twilight, Americans seem to have a talent for solving serious problems at the eleventh hour, and as even Kunstler admits, it's only 10:45.

I'd recommend both these books to everybody who likes to think of himself or herself as informed, and I'd recommend that you read one right after the other, but in no particular order.