Morris Berman QUOTES

1 " There is one problem, however, at least for alternative experiments of the American variety (and possibly some European as well), namely that we have no clear litmus test to determine which models are truly steady-state (non-expansionist) and which are business as usual hiding under “green wigs.” This latter trend is known as “greenwashing,” in which the language is hip and the bottom line remains profit. Thomas Friedman and Al Gore are major (and wealthy) players in this category, perpetuating the notion of “green corporations.” Other examples include a 2012 conference on “Sustainable Investing,” sponsored by Deepak Chopra, among others, which had as its slogans “Make Money and Make a Difference” and “Capitalism for a Democratic Society.” All of this is the attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too (or simply eat someone else’s cake); there is no real interest in disconnecting from growth, and it is growth that is the core of the problem. As Professor Magnuson tells us, while traveling around the U.S. to interview varous alternative businesses and experiments, he discovered that many of them were shams—capitalist wolves in green clothing. "

― Morris Berman , Neurotic Beauty: An Outsider Looks At Japan

2 " An idea is something you have; an ideology is something that has you "

― Morris Berman

3 " This is the ultimate heresy, then, and a possible outcome of a history of ascent, of system-breaks and paradigm-shifts that are exciting on one level, tedious on another: life characterized by so much somatic security, so much incarnation, that the need for “truth” is far less important than the need for love; and finally, not really in conflict with it. Incarnation means living in life, not transcending it. The last paradigm-shift has to be a shift to a world in which paradigm-shifts become unnecessary, if not actually banal. "

― Morris Berman , Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West

4 " Love denied, and the somatic experience of that denial, is─as de Rougemont recognized─the hidden, and gnostic/heretical, thread of Western History. "

― Morris Berman , Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West

5 " Negative identity is a phenomenon whereby you define yourself by what you are not. This has enormous advantages, especially in terms of the hardening of psychological boundaries and the fortification of the ego: one can mobilize a great deal of energy on this basis and the new nation [the US] certainly did. . . . The downside . . . is that this way of generating an identity for yourself can never tell you who you actually are, in the affirmative sense. It leaves, in short, an emptiness at the center, such that you always have to be in opposition to something, or even at war with someone or something, in order to feel real. "

― Morris Berman , A Question of Values

6 " [I]nfinity is not part of the real world. "

― Morris Berman , Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline

7 " how reality feels. People addicted to busyness, people who don’t just use their cell phones in public but display in every nuance of cell-phone deportment their sense of throbbing connectedness to Something Important—these people would suffocate like fish on a dock if they were cut off from the Flow of Events they have conspired with their fellows to create. To these plugged-in players, the rest of us look like zombies, coasting on fumes. For "

― Morris Berman , Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

8 " In 1997, the government spent $37 billion on military research and development, nearly two-thirds of what the entire world spent on the same. In "

― Morris Berman , Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

9 " We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotional/commercial bullshit, that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma. "

― Morris Berman , The Twilight of American Culture

10 " The result is that children now live in an “ethos of fantasy consumerism.” Modern American childhood, says Cross, "

― Morris Berman , Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

11 " The paradox of this arrangement was not lost on Lewis Mumford, who described suburbia as “a collective effort to live a private life.” In many ways, this goes to the heart of the matter, for it is a project based on self-contradiction—the tragedy of American domestic "

― Morris Berman , Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

12 " The problem is that this fluidity is not a choice we are free to make. Despite the unifying patriotic rhetoric that permeates the United States, on some level Americans are not really fooled: at bottom, each person knows he or she must continually “reinvent themselves,” which is to say, go it alone. America is the ultimate anticommunity.3 "

― Morris Berman , Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

13 " Ottoman Empire. “The West,” writes Huntington, “won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”29 "

― Morris Berman , Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

14 " The less affluent must be able, at least in theory, to catch up with the more affluent. Hence politics remains without substance, a realm from which the crucial dimensions of life, the core values, are excluded.42 Who, then, can criticize this situation? "

― Morris Berman , Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

15 " Nunca he oído conversar a ningún americano sin que pronunciara la palabra "dólar". "

― Morris Berman ,

16 " a world remade in the image of Walt Disney, and driven by an increasingly sophisticated communications technology, is the total breakdown of civilization.20 "

― Morris Berman , Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

17 " As one digs deeper into the national character of the Americans, one sees that they have sought the value of everything in this world only in the answer to this single question: how much mon- ey will it bring in? —Alexis de Tocqueville, letter to Ernest de Chabrol, June 9, 1831 1 "

― Morris Berman , Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline

18 " There is an old joke that asks, “What do you get when you cross a deconstructionist with a mafioso? Answer: someone who makes you an offer you cannot understand. "

― Morris Berman , The Twilight of American Culture

19 " The outlay for defense was 4.6 percent of the GDP in 1950; by 1953 it had risen to 13.8 percent. In 1940 the federal budget devoted 16 percent to defense; in 1959, more than 50 percent. By 1955, the American alliance system circled the globe, and we were pledged to the defense of practically everybody, including a host of despots and autocrats. The "

― Morris Berman , Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire

20 " populist fantasies. And the truth is that real change is historical, and if one is going to point to, say, "

― Morris Berman , The Twilight of American Culture

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