“I can remember when “liberal” was a respected word.”-- My mentor. (respected as in a liberal college)
“The times they are a -changing”–Dylan’
Century 21 embraces a new, radical conservatism that is supported by evangelical Christians, polluting both religion in general and politics in particular. It is s another attempt to to glorify and preserve wholesale exploitation of man and nature–a side effect of the enlightenment.
“Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.”-- Emerson, in a letter to his friend Channing.
“The time is out of Joint”–Hamlet
“An old bitch gone in the teeth. . . a botched civilization.”–Ezra Pound.
The first step toward fixing a problem is to recognize that a problem exists.
I think materialistic capitalism’s immediate rewards obscures the fact of its toxic side effects causing one to look away from the problem.
Overlooked, the problem grows.
Only half-acknowledged doesn’t solve the problem. A full acknowledgement by the powers that be wouldn’t be expedient. Procrastination therefore is the ritual outcome. Expect the problem to keep going!
What would full acknowledgement of the problem entail? Economic disparities? Global warming? Human and animal extinction? Pollution of all waterways?
Monad is right. The power of most of us as individuals is insufficient to make the necessary systemic changes to correct the environmental problems. To whatever efforts we’re making to change the situation, we should add acceptance of it.
It was because I saw the question as a spiritual one that it is here. It isn’t just what people do but why they do it, what motivates them, what values do they have, and by what do they orientate their lives? I think that these are the more important questions, because they show the chances of recovery based on one’s worldview.
It is the ideals that are in question here. Do people have ideals that could be helpful in recovery? Or is the mentality more (as Germans say) “after me the deluge for all I care”?
That sounds a lot like: “start building the ark!”
To the degree that you live within a democratic system, you can act in environmentally responsible ways, participate in social action in support of the health of the environment, and support environmentally responsible politicians or become one yourself. Beyond that it’s out of your control. Why not accept it?
I suppose that the modern equivalent of Noah is the survivalist. Such a person tries to envision all the contingencies of the collapse of civilization and prepare for them. It’s a lifestyle. I haven’t adopted it.
Decline is not a new phenomena it goes back as far as the beginning of Greek civilization, it runs through our history.
Is this decline built on an obvious dislike of the Western world’s dominance and the major role it plays in the world today?
Agreed, but with an increasingly progressive reboot, after nei-Platinism offered a new expected renaissance from the dark ages’ illuminated proto religious revival. The romantic element of religious transformation may have added extra stimulus.
I’m not sure what decline you’re referring to. Please elaborate.
That’s one factor among many. According to Spengler cultures are living organisms with built-in lifespans. When a culture develops to the stage of becoming a civilization it begins to decline.
felix dacat wrote:
So it must true.
Is the West in Decline?
Postby Bob
Is the West in decline?
The “West” is more a concept rather than a geographical region and the term is used to refer to a group of advanced industrial nations, united by shared values, these nations include the United States, Canada and Western Europe and also Australia and New Zealand. The philosophical or literary variations on this theme of the decline of the West are many. Plato’s “Timaeus” the gradual development of degeneration of creation is only interrupted by divine intervention, in Paradise Lost, John Milton’s frightening depiction of the battle of the angels and before Spengler, Andrei Bely used a more dominant image than the German author, “Events here are coming to a boiling point. All of Russia is on fire. The fire is spreading everywhere. The anguish of the soul and sadness of the individual have fused with national mourning to produce one massive scarlet horror.”
Although the collapse of the West has been often predicted, it has also proved resilient.
Pope Francis said that the issue of common good had to become global.
The problem of course is who defines what is the common good. The Pope?
Sexual and Social morality hot a peak at around 1980. It’s been in decline, mostly ever since and the personal freedoms gained from the 1960s sexual revolution have now been chipped away.
Technological progress has continued a pace, but the dreams of the “Space Age” have been show to be fantasy, and the promised Lunar Tourism and Mars Base are things af sci-fi, and are likely to remain so.
Instead of exploring outwards we have recessed into obsessive inward looking social media, where endless twittering stupidity has brought into being a voyeuristic and self obsessed people.
Politcally democracy has declined and the new economic model of Milton Friedman has directed all rewards of the economic system away from those who deserve it, away from those who need it, and towards an ever richer minority.
Warfare has progressed away from close contact to an ever more remote controlled means of mass killing. Despite claims of “clinical strikes” this has not removed the truth of widespread death of the innocent. Alongside this remote control warfare has come a lack of will to win. The winning in warfare does not just go to those that are best equipped, but those with the strongest wills. Afghanistanis and Vietnamese, amongst others, have shown the West the folly of their arrogance.
Sculptor wrote:
The “hippie wave” and the subsequent “wave” that you call “egocentric materialism” basically belong together. Both are parts of the same culture and therefore the appearance of both “waves” is no wonder at all.
I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything better about the “hippie wave”. It had to end like this.
I came across this while looking BK’s metaphysics
Kingsley seems to have read and agreed with Spengler re: the evolution and decline of cultures and that we are in the stage where civilization having been achieved is now declining.
Before Spengler and the others, the poet Holderlin (1770-1843) saw the modern age as an age of dearth and lack. It is" the night of godlessness"–an “age of transition and expectation in which the gods or God no longer speak to us and in which the gods or God not-yet reveal themselves in a parousia (the second coming)”.
Martin Heidegger picked up on this after he wrote Being and Time. He came to see our time as the time in which the gods have fled and as the time of the God who is coming.
Ours is a time of need. It exhibits a double lack and negation: the No-more of the gods who have fled and the Not-yet of the God who is coming.
Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind, calls our time, “The Great Initiation”. In an initiation there is death and birth-- the death of the child–the birth of the man. In this case it is the death of civilization. And the birth of what?
Well those dudes r wrong because everything is fine and getting better. The only problem mang now faces in his promethean coming of age is the distribution and control of property (not private).
This is not to say that it wouldn’t be super fun to interpret the history of mang as some mythological unfolding of metaphysical design and spin stories about great empires falling to the assault of LGBTQ barbarians as we plummet into a new dark age.
The thing about the Spenglers and evolas is that they make history so fucking intriguing and full of diabolical forces that ur like fuck yeah I’ll ride the tiger.
But history and evolution is no where near as exciting as they think it is.