Book Reviews

By Morris Berman

This is an excellent book, one of the best of the sociological ones that I've read (many are reviewed here.) The title pretty much sums it up: the global American culture has reached its apogee and will soon fade away.

It's a simple truth that all civilizations die eventually, so for America it's just a matter of time. But Berman's thesis rests on the point that it's coming soon - in the next century or two. Berman points to clear signs, such as the growing inequality between the rich and poor, growing cultural illiteracy, and spiritual death, which were mirrored in the decline of the Roman Empire (the largest previous empire for which we have coherent records), and other great civilizations.

The good news is 1) there's no exact way to predict how this will happen, so it might not be that bad, 2) the culture will not necessarily burn out in a great catastrophe, it's possible it will just fade gracefully into a new culture, and 3) there are things we can do to help this transition. Berman calls this helping the monastic option, after the monks who preserved knowledge through the Middle Ages, and like those monks, it's all about infusing real knowledge into our culture.

This book suffers from intellectual elitism at points, which is probably easy to succumb to when you spend your time researching how dumb modern Americans can be. But the saving grace of the book is its emphasis on real solutions to promote the monastic option, and on an overall positive outlook in the long, long run.

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