Before I left for New York, I started getting into a book called Dark Ages America. It’s essentially a book about the looming fall of the unofficial American Empire and the consequent descent into a new dark age. I could tell from the very beginning that the author’s views were not going to be entirely the same as my own, and though I’m still not very far in the book I’m sticking with my initial thoughts and guessing that the author, Morris Berman, does not approach the world with the same lens that I tend to use when trying to understand sociological and geopolitical trends.
What I’ve read so far is that the United States has been severely mismanaged since it became the dominant global power. We have abandoned nearly every effort that was laid out to make the world a safer and more just place for everyone, not just our kin and countrymen. One of the boldest steps toward this descent is the strong emphasis on market economics. Morris presents market economics as a co-conspirator with technology in the diminution of America’s ability to socialize in any serious community setting.
Milton Freedman taught us that we have to (repeat have to) compete with one another to do well. Why do you think we view success as not merely making a living to meet one’s responsibility’s but rather as ‘getting ahead’. It’s not only more important to win the race, finishing really doesn’t matter if you don’t win. Dominance and perpetual growth are the only true successes in a free market, why shouldn’t life be the same way?
Whereas Freedman gave an intellectual face to greed and vast gulfs of poverty, Henry Ford made it cool to build convenience. We are surrounded by gadgets and machines that are supposed to make our lives better. While many see technology as morally neutral, Berman begs to differ. These items are dislocating us from the world around us. If heat comes from a machine, it gives off no light (at least not to us anyway). This warmth has enveloped us, captivated our imaginations and dulled our very senses to the point that we can’t feel much outside of its grasp.
These two prongs, among many others, have inflicted fatal wounds upon the soul of the American body politic. The damage is not something that can be cured by any remedy that we can make. America is doomed to a slow and painful bleeding into weakness and obscurity, from self-inflicted wounds. Okay, up to this point I agree with Berman…
What I don’t see coming is the response that I would give to this problem, which is: repent.
I’ll leave you with the words of YHWH spoken by prophet Isaiah (if he’d spoken twenty-first century english):
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice.
correct oppression;
bring justice to the fatherless,
plead the widow’s cause.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
