The Moronic Inferno?

The world’s eyes have been fixed, these last few weeks, on the United States – and many of us have struggled to try to make sense of a country with such extremes of both good and evil, wealth and poverty. In the 1960s I found America an inspiration – whether its social scientists such as JK Galbraith, A Etzioni, M Rein and D Schoen or its political activists such as JF Kennedy, , Marin Luther King and Saul Alinsky. By the 1970s its ugly side started to show itself in the Vietnam War and Nixon - and, like many others, I duly turned against it. In recent years, indeed, we have started to ask the same question we used to ask about Germany – how can a country be both so exemplary and so awful? This is the first in a series of posts about that question…..

Of all the tens of thousands books written about the United States, one of the most gloriously impressionistic must be Martin Amis’ The Moronic Inferno – and other visits to America (1986) – a series of essays mainly about literary figures beginning with an assessment of Saul Bellow’s venture into 1980s Bucharest – “The Dean’s December”. Amis had been asked a couple of times about writing a book about America to which his response had been 

America is more like a world than a country: you could as well write a book about people, or about life.

 At the end of the book Amis explains that 

“I got the phrase 'the moronic inferno', and much else, from Saul Bellow, who informed me that he got it from Wyndham Lewis.

Needless to say, the moronic inferno is not a peculiarly American condition. It is global and perhaps eternal. It is also, of course, primarily a metaphor, a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy”.

 

“One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction? I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled. As I was collating “The Moronic Inferno” (in August 1985, during the Hiroshima remembrances), I was struck by a disquieting thought. Perhaps the title phrase is more resonant, and more prescient, than I imagined. It exactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the only reality”. 

And, when, in 1987, I eventually made the first of what were to be several trips to the US it was “The Moronic Inferno” which accompanied me  

I’m currently well into a quite fascinating intellectual history of the America of the past half century Evil Geniuses; The Unmaking of America: A Recent History - which actually makes a pretty good job of explaining the country - and about which I will write more fully later…For the moment I want merely to place on record what one Brit made of the country some 33 years ago…

Thanks to the German Marshall Foundation I was on a 6 week fellowship to understand the implications of the deindustrialization which we were experiencing in the central belt of Scotland – in which America, as usual, was ahead of us…..Specifically I wanted to explore how local communities (eg in the Pittsburgh area) were dealing with the effects of the closure of their steel mills. I was lucky enough to be “embedded” in the various municipal organisations with interests in community enterprise (including a brief period in the Chicago mayor’s office at the height of one of their schools’ crises) and soon found myself amazed by the role of charitable Foundations in this sort of work. 

I could feel the energy in the air.... I came highly sceptical about the US system but left slightly chastened - identifying no fewer than nine features of their local development process as ones from which we could learn – 

- bringing together younger potential local leaders from different sectors (corporate, trade union, religious, academic, charity, activist) in Community Leadership programmes  

- scanning for strategic work : the active, participative role played by the private sector in the process of setting the regional agenda in places like Chicago was impressive

- more pluralistic sources of Local Funding for community development work (the scale of corporate and tax-free grants to Foundations)

- coaching : the way community economic development skills were encouraged

- marketing : of voluntary organisations

- affirming : affirmative action in Chicago Council was handled very systematically in areas such as hiring and sub-contracting

- negotiating : the flexibility of the planning system allowed local councils to strike deals with developers to the direct advantage of poorer areas.

- persevering : the realism about timescale of change

- parcelling into manageable units of action: the British mentality seemed to prefer administrative neatness to permit a "coordinated" approach. American "messiness" seemed to produce more dynamism.