Morris Berman | |
|---|---|
| Born | (1944-08-03)August 3, 1944 (age 81) Rochester, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Educator, scholar, writer |
| Language | English, Spanish |
| Nationality | American |
| Citizenship | US (born); Mexico (resides) |
| Alma mater |
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| Notable works |
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| Notable awards | Rollo May Center Grant (1992) Neil Postman Award (2013) |
| Website | |
| Dark Ages America | |
Morris Berman (born August 3, 1944)[1] is an American historian and social critic. He earned a BA in mathematics atCornell University in 1966 and a PhD in thehistory of science atJohns Hopkins University in 1971.[2] Berman is an academichumanistcultural critic who specializes in Westerncultural andintellectual history.
Berman has served on the faculties of a number of universities in the U.S.,Canada, andEurope. Berman emigrated from the U.S. to Mexico in 2006, where he was a visiting professor at theTecnologico de Monterrey in Mexico City from 2008 to 2009. During this period he continued writing for various publications includingParteaguas, a quarterly magazine.[3]
Berman has written several books for a general audience.[4] They deal with the state ofWestern civilization and with anethical, historically responsible, orenlightened approach to living within it. His work emphasizes the legacies of theEuropean Enlightenment and thehistorical place of present-dayAmerican culture, in particular “exploring the corrosion of American society and the decline of the American empire.”[5]
He wrote a trilogy onconsciousness and spirituality, published between 1981 and 2000, and another trilogy on theAmerican decline, published between 2000 and 2011. Book reviewerGeorge Scialabba commented:
Most historians would be content to have written one deeply researched and interpretively wide-ranging trilogy on a large and important subject. Berman has written two... The second trilogy, a grimly fascinating inventory of the pathologies of contemporary America and an unsparing portrait of American history and national character, is a masterpiece.[6]
The term participating consciousness was introduced by Berman inThe Re-enchantment of the World (1981)[7][8] expanding onOwen Barfield's concept of "original participation," to describe an ancient mode of human thinking that does not separate the perceiver from the world he or she perceives. Berman says that this original world view has been replaced during the past 400 years with the modernparadigm calledCartesian,Newtonian, or scientific, which depends on an isolated observer, proposing that we can understand the world only by distancing ourselves from it.
Max Weber, early 20th-century German sociologist, was concerned with the "disenchantment" he associated with the rise of modernity,capitalism, and scientific consciousness. Berman traces the history of this disenchantment. He argues that the modern consciousness is destructive to both the human psyche and the planetary environment. Berman challenges the supremacy of the modern world view and argues for some new form of the olderholistic tradition, which he describes as follows:
"Participating consciousness" involves merger, or identification, with one's surroundings, and bespeaks a psychic wholeness that has long since passed from the scene. Alchemy, as it turns out, was the last great coherent expression of participating consciousness in the West."
In 1990, Berman received the Governor's Writers Award (Washington State) for his bookComing to Our Senses.[9] In 1992, he was the recipient of the first annual Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies. In 2000, Berman's bookThe Twilight of American Culture received critical acclaim.[5] It was named one of the ten most recommended books of the year by theChristian Science Monitor[10] and was named a "Notable Book" byThe New York Times.[11] In 2013 he received the "Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity" from theMedia Ecology Association.[12] Berman moved to Mexico in 2006 where he continues to reside as of 2023[update].[3]
I was Ph.D. from Hopkins in 1971 as well. All my bios, including Wikipedia, have it as 1972, but in fact it was 15 Feb 1971. Go figure.
