The America Syndrome ─ Apocalypse, War, and Our Call to Greatness

In this thought-provoking, big-idea book, BETSY HARTMANN sheds light on a pervasive but—until now—invisible theme shaping the American mindset: apocalyptic thinking, or the belief that the end of the world is nigh. Tracing our nation's fixation with doomsday from the Puritans to the present, Hartmann makes a compelling case that apocalyptic fears are deeply intertwined with the American ethos, to our detriment. Hartmann shows how apocalyptic thinking has historically contributed to some of our nation's biggest problems, such as inequality, permanent war, and the exploitation of natural resources. While it is tempting to view these problems as harbingers of the end times, this mindset constricts the collective imagination and precludes social change. The truth is that we have much more control over the future of our planet than we think, and our fatalism is much more dangerous than the apocalypse. In The America Syndrome, Hartmann seeks to reclaim human agency and, in so doing, revise the national narrative. By changing the way we think, we just might change the world.

BETSY HARTMANN is a professor emerita of development studies and senior policy analyst of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Her research, writing, teaching, and lecturing focus on the intersections between population, migration, environment, and security issues, and she is widely published in popular, policy, and scholarly venues. She is the author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and two political thrillers,?Far Right, The Truth about Fire and Deadly Election. She is the co-author of A Quiet Violence: View from a Bangladesh Village,?and co-editor of the anthology Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties. In spring 2015 Hartmann was a Fulbright-Nehru Distinguished Chair in India, where she lectured and did research on Indian and international population policy. A long-standing activist in the international women's health movement, she is known for her work to challenge and reform population policy and promote reproductive and environmental justice. She received her BA magna cum laude in South Asian Studies from Yale University and her PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics.