Civilization's Prodigal Generation

"The Course of Empire: Consummation," by Thomas Cole, 1836

Hatred of “civilization” is back in vogue. The storm clouds have been gathering for generations, but until recently they were a mere speckling on the horizon, confined to whimsical people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paul Gauguin or Margaret Mead – people who could afford to wile away their lifetimes turning their angst into fashionable theories. Few men and women had that privilege. That changed when the Industrial Revolution radically improved living standards all around the world (but particularly the Western world). Not surprisingly, as each succeeding generation saw their parents do things once thought impossible, they began to see the world in new ways. Their sense of mastery grew. With freedom from economic and governmental constraints came a longing for freedom from morality. Evolution wasn’t new (indeed, the essential tenets would have been familiar to all students of Greek philosophy) but the intellectual climate was. Darwin’s theory would have been universally rejected even fifty years before, but now the academia who ruled the Enlightened world jumped at the thought of boarding their ships like Tolkien’s Numenoreans and taking their grievances to the very shores of God’s country.

One hundred and fifty years later we’re still dealing with the fallout. If there is no Creator, then truth is relative, good and evil are mere conventions and life is meaningless. This new understanding of the world has been behind a relentless degrading of civilization, including the institutions, religion and arts that sustain it. It wasn’t so very long ago that Western Civilization courses were considered one of the brightest ornaments of a liberal education. Now there's an extensive campaign to mitigate them where they aren't discarded entirely. Multiculturalism reigns supreme, imposing its fluency in Ebonics, minority history courses, feminist, gay and lesbian studies on impressionable minds. Whether or not there's any intrinsic worth in such subjects, what's galling is that they're passed off as equally important as the humanities or Greek, Roman and American history. We’re essentially told nowadays that the art, architecture and culture of past civilizations, still magnificent to travelers even in ruin, are really no more remarkable than native huts and whittling. It just depends on how you look at it (And parents and teachers wonder why children are underachievers). Triumphs of science and technology that launched revolutions of the human condition are, by extension of this relativistic worldview, fruitless and vain. Thinkers, philosophers and conquering heroes represent oppression, not innovation. Consequently, where real oppression does happen, like to women in Muslim countries, we can’t be morally indignant because that would be insensitive to the culture or circumstances that produced it.

We must be quite a spectacle. Awash in wealth -even in what’s apparently the fiercest economic downturn since the Great Depression- with hardly a care in the world, yet hating every moment of it. Or is this self-loathing only a pretentious front put up to soothe our guilty consciences? If popular culture of the Avatar sort is the slightest indication, the American is to style himself a sort of Citizen Kane. This time disenchantment in Xanadu isn't confined to doubting whether the love of money can satisfy. It extends to doubting the morality of money and money-making themselves. And "Rosebud" is even more elusive. The neo-hippies of the self-sufficiency variety, the entertainment industry and Occupy Wall Street are all panting for a return to some fantastical, pre-Industrial state. Not that this ever existed, but the idea is that everyone farmed (but wasn’t a serf), ate only their own food (but didn’t die of malnutrition), made everything they needed themselves (including mining, smelting and forging all metal implements, presumably) had no need for society’s institutions (but was perfectly safe from theft, war and other myths), money (that cardinal token of vice whereby people are inspired to make things others want to buy) or banks or loans, and yet had plenty of time leftover for self-expression and writing free verse poetry (with homemade paper and ink?). If our familiarity with civilization has bred contempt, then our unfamiliarity with the lack of it has bred fantasies.