This was not my favorite Berman book. While I don't disagree with his characterization that America has always been a nation of "hustlers," I was not convinced that the South represented another paradigm nor am I convinced that Mexico is a better place to be than the U.S.
Selected excerpts:
He [Lincoln] and the Republicans held that today's laborer was tomorrow's capitalist, and that if a man failed to rise above this status he had only himself to blame. It was never, said Lincoln, the fault of the system. (The legacy of this, as John Steinbeck pointed out many years later, was that in America the poor regard themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires.") [p.128]
My own take on this vortex of violence is that from an early point, America had no real content. Hustling, after all, hardly qualifies as content; indeed, it can only generate an anti-society, which we now see all around us. In addition, in breaking away from England and Continental Europe, America acquired what Hegel called a "negative identity," one that was defined by what it was not, what it was opposed to. Hixson, following Louis Hartz, argues that our belief that we are special came out of not having, in contrast to Europe, a long history of feudalism and religion to endow us with a solid identity. And without the sense of a long historical tradition, America became dependent on representation -- on an image of itself to organize consent and coherence. This is why the boundless expansion of the frontier and the ideology of progress (as against the "savage," who is unprogressive) are so closely tied together and why our behavior toward perceived enemies is so extreme -- pathological, in a word.
It is also why there is so little tolerance for substantive dissent, or fundamental critique, in America. Since our identity is in fact quite brittle, we have to be constantly telling ourselves how fabulous we are. Thus Tocqueville wrote of America that "the least reproach offends it, and the slightest sting of truth turns it fierce; one must praise everything, from the turn of its phrases to its most robust virtues....Hence the majority lives in a state of perpetual self-adoration." [p.155]
In an interesting article entitled "A Postindustrial Prelude to Postcolonialism" (Critical Inquiry, 22, no. 3 [Spring 1996], pp. 466-85), Patrick Brantlinger quotes Andre Gorz as saying, "those who propose a fundamentally different society can no longer be condemned in the name of realism. On the contrary, realism now consists of acknowledging that 'industrialism' has reached a stage where it can go no further, blocked by obstacles of its own making." Brantlinger goes on to say that the idea of an alternative path, "the nonindustrial, nonviolent, decentralized, democratic, communitarian, and economically and ecologically sustainable path...may turn out to be the only rational blueprint for survival." This doesn't mean it will come to pass, but it might have some chance under conditions of major geopolitical disintegration. [Notes To Pages 181-187, p.227]
Yep, we may be rapidly approaching the point where realism is converging with idealism.
Related quote from one of the books that Berman indirectly cites:
The relationship between morality and afluence [sic.], the book's first major theme, brackets this study and reminds us of the persistent hope among intellectuals that Americans would curtail their spending habits and turn to loftier goals. From early in the nation's history, writers worried about the moral implications of consumers' self-indulgence and the consequences of changing patterns of comfort and luxury. Opposed to excessive commercialism and what they saw as the corruptions of luxury, they proposed instead varying combinations of genuine work, self-control, democracy, public welfare, high culture, meaningful recreation, and authentic selfhood. 1
1 Daniel Horowitz, The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939-1979 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004) 2, Questia, Web, 22 Dec. 2011.
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