Cultural Decay ~ A Waste of Time in the Social Imagination...

In the past blog, we explored cultural appropriation, cultural data and capital as well as cultural deprivation and cultural lag in the social imagination... Now, we look at its state of decay. 

Edward  Gibbon was an English historian, writer and Member of Parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. He is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its open criticism of organized religion. Gibbon observed five marks of the decay of Roman culture. They were: concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth, obsession with sex and perversions of sex, the production of art that is freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original, a widening disparity between very rich and very poor and lastly, an increased demand to live off the state.

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage . . . . Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elite, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society.” ~  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...

 “If we do not live where we work and when we work we are wasting our lives and our work too.” ~ Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture...

 “Although the natural rights inherent in our( Constitutional) regime are adequate to the solution of this ( minority) problem...the equal protection of the law did not protect a man from contempt and hatred as a Jew, an Italian or a Black"..." 'Openness' was designed to provide a respectable place for those groups or minorities--to wrest respect from those who were disposed to give it--This breaks the delicate balance between majority and minority in Constitutional thought. In such a perspective where there is no common good, minorities are no longer problematic and the protection of them emerges as THE central function of government.” ~ Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind...

The quotes above are certainly illustrations of our times. The summary from Gibbon was concerning the Roman Empire; but essentially, it applies to America today which seems to have a death wish to either be destroyed or taken over by someone or something. Is America losing its cultural data and or capital and thus lagging behind other cultures? Perhaps, it is. How does that happen? The comments by Gibbon and other quotes above give us a pretty good idea... don't they?

As a sociologist, I would add that once a culture loses its identity as in loses its cultural data its cultural capital, it becomes lost in a kind of socio-schzophernic mood that can bring down any society. Take time to reread the above and reflect on America today and you too may observe this kind of loss; especially in the last quote. Why is that? Because, it shows that in America there are other minorities and many not even mentioned. As a melting pot, we were able to wrestle with our differences and in many cases, it was not pretty; but in this world there is the good, bad and the ugly. 

A top down government cannot nor is it able to make this world, this life pretty for everybody. In the social imagination of any culture, it is better to accept the good, bad and ugly and deal with it in the place where you are... As Wendell Berry said, "If we do not live where we work and when we work... we are just wasting our lives and our work too". To say it another way, if we do not live and work at the grass roots level, in the place where we are, we are wasting our time, our culture and our social imagination.