A Question of Values

by Morris Berman

Reviewed by John David Ebert

You know that something fundamental and utterly irreversible has befallen the American publishing industry when Morris Berman, the author of The Twilight of American Culture and Dark Ages America, both published by a major house (W.W. Norton), is unable to find a publisher for his new book. As he remarks: “No American publisher was even mildly interested” since “clearly, a book like this is not going to make anybody rich.” Berman therefore decided to self-publish it on Amazon’s new self-publisher called Createspace. Read the rest of this entry »

Akhenaten and the Birth of Monotheism

An Essay by John David Ebert

I. Blackboard

The religious pattern of Western monotheism that becomes evident when the lives of Moses, Christ and Mohammad are drawn out on the blackboard is already clearly sketched out in the life of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten, the West’s prototypal monotheist. There is no way to describe the founders of the three great monotheisms of the West without first glancing back at the pattern laid down by Akhenaten, whose great experiment already forecasts their advent. Read the rest of this entry »

WikiLeaks and the Death of the Event

An Essay by John David Ebert

WikiLeaks was founded and launched in December of 2006 by Julian Assange together with a group of Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians, and technologists from countries such as Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa. Assange himself, a former computer hacker, is from Australia, and he founded the site for the express purpose of “exposing injustice.” “Our primary targets,” Assange told a New Yorker essayist, “are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and Central Eurasia, but we also expect to be of assistance to those in the West who wish to reveal illegal or immoral behavior in their  own governments and corporations.’ He has argued that a ‘social movement’ to expose secrets could ‘bring down many administrations that rely on concealing reality–including the US administration.'” Read the rest of this entry »

Death and the Generation of Human Culture

An Essay by Franz Borkenau

"Self-Portrait in a Tree Trunk" by Odd Nerdrum

Franz Borkenau is a little known Austrian philosopher who died in 1957 at the age of 56. His magnum opus, End and Beginning, from which I have excerpted the following essay, was published posthumously in 1981. It is an extensive meditation on the relation of death to civilization and it is a masterpiece. Because it is so little known, and because I believe Borkenau to be a philosopher of culture fit to rank alongside Oswald Spengler, Jean Gebser or William Irwin Thompson, I have decided to post this piece so that his work might reach a larger audience. Read the rest of this entry »

One Thousand Malkoviches:

Reflections On the Cultural Phenomenology of Celebrity

An Essay by John David Ebert

(The following piece is an outtake from my book “Dead Celebrities, Living Icons” that did not make the final cut due to space considerations)

(“The Birth of Narcissus” [1976] by Arthur Boyd)

Department Store Monitor

Everyone, by now, has had the following experience: you’re walking through a department store and you round the corner, momentarily caught by surprise at your own image reflected back at you upon the store’s video surveillance monitor. You pause, realizing that you have walked in front of a video camera, and then move on again without giving the matter a second thought. Its very banality has rendered the action insignificant. Read the rest of this entry »