I’m currently tending an idea for a new book. It has arisen in connection with the following two thoughts, which in turn follow on from my reflections a couple of weeks ago on Ray Bradbury’s “book people” and Morris Berman’s “monastic option.”
First, for the past decade-plus I have felt/suspected that America’s collective adoration of apocalyptic fictions and fantasies is not unconnected to the now patent emergence of some truly catastrophic trends and scenarios in real life. This predates, by the way, Demon Lindelof and Brad Bird’s savvy exploration of the same idea in Disney’s Tomorrowland movie (which I heartily recommend even though it’s flawed).
Second, in The Twilight of American Culture—a book that I can hardly believe is now 23 years old—Berman mounted a devastating analysis, both academic and polemical, of America as a country and culture that is definitively past its peak and on the downhill slope of collapse.
Berman expanded his critique into a trilogy consisting of Twilight plus two additional books with similarly winsome titles, Dark Ages America and Why America Failed. In the latter he explicitly explained one of his guiding principles in writing it, which actually articulated an approach that had guided the previous two as well: He deliberately did not include what one reviewer referred to as a “happy chapter. Too many books, said Berman, mount a compelling, even an unanswerable, argument that some current situation is grave, dire, a clanging emergency—and then conclude with a single glib, fatuous chapter that lays out a plan to “fix it.” “[B]ooks of this sort,” he said in Why America Failed, “or any book about the United States, is required to conclude on a positive note, showing how things can be fixed, how they will be different in the future if only ‘we’ (which is who, exactly?) take matters into our own hands and create a different outcome. But this is fantasy. History doesn’t work that way, and I am not going to join the legion of authors out there who out of naïveté or a desperate kind of hope (or maybe just a desire for sales) attempt to pull a rabbit out of a hat at the eleventh hour. There is no rabbit, and the hat is coming apart at the seams.” In Twilight and the other books in the series, Berman said his view is that 1) history clearly shows a cycle of maturation and decline playing out in every culture and civilization, 2) this never, ever varies or reverses itself, and 3) the U.S. is clearly living out its own decline stage right now. As Agent Smith said to Neo, “You hear that, Mr. Anderson? That is the sound of inevitability.”
I find this view quite persuasive. So I guess I’m saying that I think we currently have both things happening at the same time. On the one hand, our collective addiction to apocalyptic fantasies is both spawning and reflecting a proliferation of real catastrophes. On the other hand, this trend or tendency is wrapped within a real and irreversible trajectory of decline and collapse.
As I mentioned two posts ago, Berman’s suggested action during such a time is to adopt what he termed “the monastic option”: Follow the lead of the famous Irish monks who “saved civilization” by finding some worthwhile area of endeavor—a field of knowledge, a set of skills, a blueprint for a humane way of living, whatever calls deeply to you—and deliberately seek a way to preserve and transmit this to a new culture that will arise in the future, after the present one has burned itself to the ground. To illustrate and flesh out the point, Berman explicitly makes reference not just to the witness of history, and not just to what he takes to be “new monastic” efforts that are currently underway (such as the Clemente Course in the Humanities), but to various manifestations of this theme of cultural preservation through a post-collapse dark age in apocalyptic and dystopian fictions, including, as mentioned, Ray Bradbury’s “book people” in Fahrenheit 451, who memorize and effectively become books during an age when reading is banned, so that one day, when things have changed, their knowledge can be written down once again.
You might infer from my recent focus on these things that such ideas have been occupying my attention. You would be right. As I said at the top of this post, I’m currently, and speculatively, incubating an idea for a new book that will fuse these ideas with my A Course in Demonic Creativity. In other words, a book about the discipline of the demon muse, the discipline of divining and aligning with your inner creative genius, as a way of identifying and cultivating your own monastic option, your own unique “great work,” in the face of the apocalypse.