The New Beginning

Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Thomas H. Naylor on Morris Berman's Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline in The Hucksters of Empire:

Perhaps the most interesting chapter in Why America Failed is the one on the American South. Berman argues that, notwithstanding the slavery and racism (which he abhors) that existed there, the Antebellum South with its agricultural economy and its traditional culture provided the only alternative to the dominant high-speed, high-stress, high-tech, imperialistic, industrial culture found elsewhere in the United States. Before the Civil War, the Rural South represented a communitarian alternative to the dehumanized, mass-production, mass-consumption, narcissistic lifestyle that was beginning to permeate most of the rest of America – an alternative to the politics of money, power, speed, greed, and progress. The Antebellum South discovered the joys of simple living long before simple living came back in vogue in the 1990s.

The real tragedy of the Civil War was that it was not possible to find an alternative way to end the scourge of slavery which did not result in the deaths of 625,000 individuals. It was a classic case of throwing out the baby (traditional culture) with the bath water (slavery). What was at stake in the Civil War was nothing less than the clash of two radically different civilizations according to Berman.

Throughout its history America has tried to “fix” traditional societies which it perceived to be obstacles to progress.

What the North did to the South is really the model of what America in general did and does to “backward” (i.e., traditional) societies, if it can. You wipe out almost the entire indigenous population of North America; you steal half of Mexico; you literally vaporize a large chunk of the Japanese population; you bomb Vietnam “back to the Stone Age” (in the words of Curtis LeMay); you “shock and awe” Iraqi civilians, and so on.

Berman’s chapter on the South is the most insightful piece I have ever read about the region where I spent over a half century of my life. It reads like a tragic Southern novel entitled What Might Have Been, But Could Never Be.

Is his assessment of the early settlers too negative?

According to Berman the seeds of the Empire’s destruction were sewn in the sixteenth century by the early European settlers who were, above all, into “hustling” – looking out for number one. Ever since then, “hustling, materialism, and the pursuit of personal gain without regard for its effects on others” have provided the dominant theme of the American culture. He or she who dies with the most toys wins the game. Enough never seems to be quite enough.

One should look to the moral choices (and culture) as the causes of decline, but perhaps there is an inevitability to it once the polity gets off track, so that even good people are stuck making choices that are not so good?

If they were being squeezed in the motherland by those with power, one can understand why they would go somewhere else (rather than seeking to replace the government).