Morris Berman: Reflections on the Decline of American Empire
Geopolitics & Empire
Geopolitics & Empire
4.2 • 568 Ratings
🗓️ 1 August 2015
⏱️ 39 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AXJgm4Hftg
From time to time I have the opportunity to meet with great minds in person. That happened to be the case recently in the historic Mexican city of Guanajuato where I joined American cultural historian, social critic and academic Morris Berman for breakfast to discuss his work related to the decline of America.
We mused on America and discussed his trilogy The Twilight of American Culture, Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire and Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline as well as touching on his most recent work on Japan, Neurotic Beauty, and where do we go from here.
Show Notes
America Floats Between Modernity and Collapse
Website
Books
amazon.com/Morris-Berman/e/B001HCWOWM
About Morris Berman
Morris Berman is well known as an innovative cultural historian and social critic. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and North America, and has held visiting endowed chairs at Incarnate Word College (San Antonio), the University of New Mexico, and Weber State University. During 1982-88 he was the Lansdowne Professor in the History of Science at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. Berman won the Governor’s Writers Award for Washington State in 1990, the Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992, and the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity (from the Media Ecology Association) in 2013.
He is the author of a trilogy on the evolution of human consciousness–-The Reenchantment of the World (1981), Coming to Our Senses (1989), and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality (2000)–and in 2000 his Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by the New York Times Book Review. Dr. Berman relocated to Mexico in 2006, and during 2008-9 was a Visiting Professor at the Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico City.
*Podcast intro music is from the song “The Queens Jig” by “Musicke & Mirth” from their album “Music for Two Lyra Viols”: http://musicke-mirth.de/en/recordings.html (available on iTunes or Amazon)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Here we are with Morris Berman. Thanks for joining us. |
| 0:12.0 | My pleasure. |
| 0:13.0 | We're here in the wonderful Vanahato, Mexico. |
| 0:18.0 | So, well, how are you doing today? Well, it's a very nice day in Guanajuato. It's a bit chilly, but here we are at the glorious |
| 0:26.6 | Café Atria. Very famous and I think it's great that you and I can bask in the fame of the |
| 0:35.6 | Café Atria. And so the fame of the Caféiats. |
| 0:43.3 | And so the purpose of this talk was to |
| 0:48.3 | look at some of your past work, basically the trilogy of |
| 0:52.3 | looking at the, I guess, the fall of the American Empire. How would you put it specifically? Yeah, the decline of the American Empire. How would you put it to Sydney? Yeah, the decline of the American Empire. |
| 0:58.0 | And then later look at Mexico and what you see here, |
| 1:03.0 | or what you and I see here and people, Americans like ourselves. |
| 1:07.0 | My first question was, what really woke you up to what was going on in America and what was wrong? |
| 1:14.4 | Where did it all start? |
| 1:16.1 | Well, I was writing that book in the 90s, and everybody was excited about Bill Clinton in that administration. |
| 1:30.8 | We were prosperous, isn't this great, we're all making money. In truth, those not all of us were. The upper 1% were making a lot of money. And in the |
| 1:39.0 | midst of all this hoopla about how great the U.S. was, what I was seeing was the slow erosion of the culture. |
| 1:47.6 | You would see government manufactured signs or corporate manufactured signs with a misspelling |
| 1:54.9 | of elementary words. You know, my God, you know, this is, you didn't see this 10 years ago, you know. |
| 2:02.4 | And just increasingly more violence and a great stupidity on the part of the American public that in the larger scheme of things like Monica Lewinsky, you know, things like Monica or O.J. Simpson, |
| 2:21.9 | that these were really trivial. They were sideshows. In a sense, that's true. |
| 2:26.7 | But basically, the notion was, you know, the United States is doing pretty well. I didn't think it was doing pretty well. |
| 2:33.3 | And so when I wrote that book, it was |
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