Quotes from Morris Berman

The nation no longer stands for the enlightenment tradition, but rather for military-political hegemony and the total commodification of life.

Love is the social equivalent of gravity.

Who can doubt that there is an American empire?—an "informal" empire, not colonial in polity, but still richly equipped with imperial paraphernalia: troops, ships, planes, bases, proconsuls, local collaborators, all spread around the luckless planet. —Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Cycles of American History (1984)

The West developed the notion of the "corporate body," the senate or representative assembly; Islam did not. The West, in a secularization of the Catholic corpus mysticum, eventually developed the idea of the corporation that lies at the heart of capitalism; Islam did not. Western science has the notions of the fact-value distinction, genuine critical analysis, and provisional truth; Islam keeps reason subordinate to faith.

If you doubt for a moment that there is a "vast, right-wing conspiracy" in this country, you must be living on another planet.74

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

I]nfinity is not part of the real world.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

It is also why there is so little tolerance for substantive dis- sent, or fundamental critique, in America. Since our identity is in fact quite brittle, we have to be constantly telling ourselves how fabulous we are.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

a "brave new world of affluent depravity."44 Genovese sees it as ironic that the defeat of the South, of slav- ery, opened the doors to an imperialism that imposed "unprec- edented misery and mass slaughter on the world.

Literacy, the most empowering achievement of our civili- zation, is to be replaced by a vague and ill-defined screen savvy. The paper book, the tool that built modernity, is to be phased out in favor of fractured, unfixed information. All in the name of progress.

For millions of Arabs and Muslims, this universe of abstract systems, this world of Western freedom and individualism, constitutes the soullessness of modernity. The attack on the World Trade Center, in this interpretation, was not so much an attack on the United States, but on modernity—secular, non-tribal modernity—itself.