John Miller (11) (1946–)

Miller examines the dark side of the American character, the side that with rare acumen and skill he critically dissects. He enables us to understand America's growing disregard of aesthetics and the nature of the psychosis from which the US suffers termed Egotopia. In this, the US is not alone.

Miller's examination of the United States in the last decade of the twentieth century is devastating, and like the good physician, having diagnosed the disease and its causes, he does not fail to prescribe the cure. He makes brilliantly clear that the egotistical embrace of private sensibilities in the new American landscape, the narcissistic self-indulging that has replaced the self-transcendence of earlier days, is illuminated by the ubiquity of, indeed, the legitimisation and institutionalisation of, the "quick fix". In the anomic world in which people have grown out of touch with one another, such as therapy, Miller shows, serves as a principal mechanism for the transformation of public into private values and the development of the New Man. The result has been the emergence of the megaself, a perverted individualism negating moral, ethical, and religious constraints on individual behavior.

Miller writes incisively on the ugliness of our consumer society, anatomizing in detail the inner ugliness of egotopia, the debilitating defect of collective character that has the ca-pacity of ultimately destroying the last vestiges of aesthetic consciousness and civility. Our own worst selves, set loose and unrestrained, may yet put an end to a creature and a culture that once held such high promise.

The present American landscape, which is "ultimately a manifestation of the inner chaos that defines the New Man--rampant ego, blatant narcissistic self-indulgence," he would replace with an alternative landscape, an American public landscape defined not by market forces, but by "public and communal values even if its function were entirely and exclusively commercial." "Ultimately," Miller says, "the value of the public landscape would be precisely in proportion to its noncommercial appearance and visual character."… (mer)