Morris Berman: The American Way of Life, The Mexican Way of Life
Geopolitics & Empire
Geopolitics & Empire
4.2 • 568 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2016
⏱️ 50 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Morris Berman fields questions from Mexican university students. What used to be the American way of life? What is the “hustler” mentality? How will the American Empire transition? What does he think of people who deny the decline of American Empire? Why is the American Dream elusive or a lie? How should American leaders handle the decline of empire? Why is Donald Trump so popular? Why does he think Hillary Clinton will win the election? How does Dr. Berman define traditional Mexican culture? What happens to Mexicans who go to the USA? Where is US influence felt most in Mexican society? How can people engage in making change and fighting injustice? Comments on McFarland, USA.
Website
http://morrisberman.blogspot.com
Books
http://www.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 | So we'd like to discuss the American way of life, the society and culture and the ramifications |
| 0:06.1 | and politics and economy based on what you wrote about and why America failed, as well |
| 0:11.4 | as your blog posts and what you mentioned about McFarland, USA. |
| 0:16.4 | So maybe just to start, if you could briefly talk about how you view that old original American spirit, |
| 0:24.7 | as you described, the Puritan republicanism. |
| 0:29.8 | Well, the Purans were not just one thing. |
| 0:33.9 | Certainly the original settlers fell into the category of acquiring property and |
| 0:42.3 | the fact that America offered a very large real estate so to speak and they |
| 0:49.3 | were very interested in that it's just that mingled in with that was the belief that the goal, an important |
| 1:01.2 | goal was public service. So they weren't just one thing. And there were a lot of conflicts |
| 1:09.0 | around the issue of individual acquisition of property, |
| 1:14.7 | which is a big theme, and also the idea of public service. |
| 1:19.6 | But the Puritans were important in that, excuse me, going back to about 1616, there was a great interest on the part of Puritan |
| 1:32.2 | divines in this theme of serving the community. |
| 1:36.6 | And so what I argue in the book is that that was increasingly a minor theme. |
| 1:50.3 | And as the years went on, you only had a few alternative voices. |
| 1:54.0 | So I talk about Emerson and Thoreau. |
| 2:08.8 | And later on, John Kenneth Galbraith and Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs and then finally Jimmy Carter in 1979 who made the last public pitch on the part of a political figure that consumerism couldn't be the purpose of life. |
| 2:21.2 | But there was the alternative tradition. |
| 2:24.1 | And if that was a respected voice in 16 to 16, |
| 2:30.8 | although not without contention, as I said, |
| 2:33.7 | by 1979, the day after Jimmy Carter made |
... |
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