Morris Berman
Morris Berman (born August 3, 1944 in Rochester ) is an American essayist and cultural critic , who became known to a wide audience through several popular publications. His fields of work are the history of Western civilization and Western intellectual and cultural history with a focus on American cultural history.
Life
Berman studied mathematics at Cornell University and the history of science at Johns Hopkins University , where he earned his PhD in 1972 . He taught at various universities in the USA, Canada and Europe (e.g. at Johns Hopkins University and as a visiting professor in Kassel 1991/92) and emigrated to Mexico in 2006 - also because of his dissatisfaction with the politics of President George W. Bush . where he was temporarily visiting professor of the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education at its branch in Mexico City .
theses
His work Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844 from 1978 was an important contribution to the post- Marxist history of science. In it he showed how the influence of large-scale agricultural interests on the Royal Institution was replaced after 1815 by the influence of the emerging English industry. He approached the concept of functional rationality and Max Weber's theory of modernization and thus overcame the uncritical scientism of traditional scientific historiography of Marxist provenance, as embodied by the physicist John Desmond Bernal , who - completely under the spell of the East-West conflict of the 1950s and 1960s - the (mis) control of the research direction was analyzed primarily as an expression of the influence of military interests.
Berman later tried in several works to describe the many facets of the cultural (and also political) crisis that America fell into at the end of the 20th century. The obvious vitality of the USA, which is evident in the development of a creative culture of distraction and distraction, is an indicator of crisis on closer inspection. With this diagnosis he is close to Herbert Marcuse's theses about repressive desublimation or repressive tolerance and the role of the culture industry . There are also echoes of Durkheim's description of anomic social conditions , to which he explicitly refers. With Oswald Spengler , Bermann shares the idea of a kind of life cycle of the high cultures and with the anthropologist Joseph Tainter the idea that societies stagnate and perish when their investments in social complexity are no longer worthwhile or when only private ones invest.
He meets with the conservative columnist cultural criticism in the criticism of the widespread use of politically correct euphemisms or the alleged idealization of multiculturalism ; But he differs from it in the pointed thesis that the elites adopt the rhetoric of the underprivileged in order to defuse their demands.
In analogy to the crisis of the late Roman Empire , Bermann states four indicators of the cultural decline of American civilization, from which the rich elites benefit:
- an accelerating social inequality ,
- Declining returns from investments in the collective solution of social problems (and thus the lack of such investments, e.g. in the pension or health system),
- a falling level of general reading, independent judgment and critical thinking and
- mental numbness in “vital kitsch” and infotainment .
According to Bermann, societies in decline no longer believe in themselves; they only simulate the processes that previously helped to form their classical elites. The administrative bureaucracy with the task of quality assurance is becoming the dominant factor in the education and university system; the students or the companies sending them believe or should believe that they can buy academic products risk-free. In any case, strong “monastic individuals” who have no interest in material success and vagabond “nomadic” thinking are required in order to preserve critical intellectual energy for better times.
In Dark Ages America , Bermann cites the triumph of religion, fundamentalism and esotericism over reason as another crisis indicator , which means that 70 percent of Americans no longer believe in evolution. President Bush had a Christian plutocracy built a culture of Me, Myself, and I .
In Why America failed , almost a kind of obituary, Berman advocates the thesis that the background to the Civil War of 1861–1865 was a fundamentally unresolved conflict of values and culture between the northern and southern states, which resulted from the victorious implementation of the material values of the North (money) over the immaterial values of the South (honor, courage, courtesy, friendship) ended, while the question of the liberation of slaves was rather secondary. As a result of globalization , Berman sees the USA today entangled in similar conflicts with European cultures, Mexico and other countries.
Works (selection)
- Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844. (1978).
- The Reenchantment of the World. Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY 1981.
- The Twilight of American Culture. Norton, New York, 2000 (German: culture before collapse. Frankfurt am Main / Vienna / Zurich 2002. ISBN 3-7632-5177-4 ).
- Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality. State University of New York Press, 2000.
- Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire. Norton, New York, 3rd edition 2007 (German: Finstere Zeiten for America. End of an imperialist era. Frankfurt am Main / Vienna / Zurich 2005. ISBN 978-3-936428-50-6 ).
- A Question of Values, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Middletown DE 2010, ISBN 1-4537-2288-2 .
- Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline. Wiley, Hoboken NJ 2011.
- Spinning Straw into Gold. 2013.
- Neurotic Beauty: An Outsider Looks at Japan. 2015.
- The Man Without Qualities. 2016 (novel).
Awards
- Governor's Writers Award (Washington State) for Coming to Our Senses (1990)
- Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies (1992)
- Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity (2013)
Web links
- Berman's weblog
- CV ( Memento from May 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ↑ Etherwave: The Post-Marxist Social History of Science of Morris Berman, part 1, 2011
- ^ Culture before the collapse , p. 36
- ↑ p. 167 ff.
- ↑ http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/conscience-realist/2012/dec/22/morris-berman-americas-culture-me-myself-and-i/
- ^ Why America failed , 2011, p. 139.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Berman, Morris |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American essayist and cultural critic |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 3, 1944 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Rochester |