Every age has a dunce. A society, or set of societies, that just don’t get it. They don’t learn history’s lessons. They don’t progress — they stagnate, and then regress, clinging desperately to failing ideologies, grasping at dead, obsolete ideas like a drowning person grasps at flotsam. But history’s tide is unforgiving. It cares little for the fool who clings to the driftwood, instead of swims for the shore.
Every age has a dunce, and the dunces of this age, my friends, are us. You and me. The Anglos. I think that we have to confront a difficult truth. One that’s especially difficult for me, as an Anglo, an English-speaker, and maybe for you, too. Our societies are not looking like they are going to make it.
Take a hard look at America and Britain. Do these seem like sane, enlightened, thinking societies to you anymore? Or just places where the most aggressively ignorant, cruel, and abusive rise to the top — cheered on by people who wish they were the most aggressively ignorant, cruel, and abusive?
More here – Eudaimonia and Co
But why have we got to this state of affairs? There must be some explanation for all this which could reveal something much more important about the human condition. Many numerically large and sophisticated human societies (paraphrased as civilisations) in the past have risen and then fallen, not just to become diminished, but to disappear altogether. And not suddenly either. The members of those populations watched as their demise approached having full knowledge that it was happening, but seemingly completely unable to recognise the impending doom or to do anything about it as a community. There may have individuals who understood but the collective majority could not have done so. But,again, what underlies this? Fascinating to me. Any ideas anyone? Any good reads to throw some light on this.
I wonder whether it is a simple matter of entropy – the energy required in all forms to keep a society going is simply no longer available. Alternatively, it could simply be that the individual’s desire to self destruct is now expressed on a societal level.
Well said , Mr Tate .
Entropy , just like gravity , is everywhere and all-consuming thoughout the universe !
Regards , Ramon .
I have been doing some interesting reading lately about our perception of our own mortality and our universal inevitable deaths. Homo sapiens is both blessed and cursed with consciousness. This includes consciousness of our mortality and the awareness of inevitable death. Irvin Yalom believes that it is deep within us all but that a large proportion of the human race is unable to come to terms with this fact and come to a state of peace, acceptance and tranquillity about it.
He believes that it explains a significant part of human behavour that becomes hurtful, damaging, acquisitive, power-hungry, greedy, requiring belief systems, including religion, rather than being based on what we actually know (or think we know) about the universe and our position within the universe. To a large part it is somehow our attempt to blot out what we perceive to be the grim final reality, death. This is a pathway where we are all individually utterly alone, without escape, trapped in our own awful narrative.
But it doesn’t need a lot of imagination to extrapolate to the consequences for a whole community embroiled in its own escape from this reality with these types of behaviours. Only the thing is that our community is fast becoming global, with western “culture” just a part of it.