As Colorado again makes news, this time for free flowing marijuana, instead of school or theater shootings, I followed one of Gerard's links to this piece On Decadence by Charles Hill.
“Decline” we Americans and Westerners mope about daily; “fall” most of us still hope to postpone. Decadence, it would seem, is the mean between the two.
An explosion of dynamic individualism propels civilization forward toward a better future; but that same dynamic proves incapable of virtuous control, causing greed, violence and deepening self-indulgence to spiral society downward toward chaos.
The Puritans were consciousness personified, assiduous diary-keepers who were ever watchful for the slightest signs of grace or degeneracy.
George Washington's Farewell Address, commonly interpreted as a warning to avoid foreign entanglements, was more concerned with maintaining the character of the nation amid the temptations of freedom. As the world’s first-ever free people, the individual virtue vital to successful popular government could only be upheld, Washington believed, by respect for religion.
Social science is the new scholasticism, an intellectual paradigm in which participants are published, prized, tenured and made prominent for their contribution to one great required idea: to prove “scientifically” that human beings have nothing resembling what formerly was called “free will.” An avalanche of “studies” now unsurprisingly asserts that we hold prejudices seated in a level of our minds so deep as to be inaccessible to our conscious awareness.
The advent of “screen culture”—cellphones, iPads, as well as old-fashioned TV and film—now ubiquitous among the young in their formative years of education, has shrunk consciousness down in a different way. Students increasingly seem conditioned by the fact that much of their waking life is populated by mechanically mediated images in which they can see other beings on screens but those others cannot see them. As a result the viewer can become oblivious to others, having no need to interact or maintain a minimum of civil conduct with them. To think back on Herodotus again, this is the Gyges question: What do you do when no one is looking? The “screenie” has invisibility even without privacy. As consciousness has atrophied, obliviousness—and no little rudeness—replaces it.The “screenie” has invisibility even without privacy. As consciousness has atrophied, obliviousness—and no little rudeness—replaces it. This phenomenon adds a new dimension to the age-old definition of decadence.
