Toward the Twenty-First Century, by Jacques Barzun
This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve by Jacques Barzun.#
As is apparent from the title, this essay discusses where Western Civilization and how bad the Decadence really is.#
Sooner or later, the sophisticated person who reads or hears that Western civilization is in decline reminds himself that to the living "the times" always seem bad. In most eras voices cry out against the visible decadence; for every generation-and especially for the aging-the world is going to the dogs. In 1493-note the date-a learned German named Schedel compiled and published with comments the Nuremberg Chronicle. It announced that the sixth of the seven ages was drawing to a close and it supplied several blank pages at the end of the book to record anything of importance that might occur in what was left of history. What was left, hiding around the corner, was the opening up of the New World and a few side effects of that inconsequential event. A glance at history, by showing that life continues and new energies may arise, is bound to inspire skepticism about the recurrent belief in decline. [pg. 161]
What is the Decadence of the Modern Era? Why is there so much disbelief in old institution and ideas?#
How deep goes the disbelief? For history shows both big and little decadences. Decadence means "falling off," and it is possible for a civilization to experience a lesser fall from trust in its own ways without wrecking the entire fabric. The passage from what we call the High Middle Ages to the Renaissance and Reformation was one such falling away and new beginning. The time just before the French Revolution was another. At these moments-roughly the end of the fourteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century-Europe saw old institutions crumble, long-accepted thoughts dissolve, feelings fade away, and new ones take their place. [pg. 163]
The idea of decline should not be assumed to mean revolution, devastation, a complete destruction of civilization, or a loss. It is simply a change caused by failings in the old regime. It is not necessarily sudden, it can just be a "falling off."
Jacques tours through things that are seeing their support fade, starting with Governments as personified by their enforcers and enforcements: police and prisons.#
The police are often considered a corrupt, ineffectual part of the body politic, just as that body itself is felt to be a domination by evil forces over simple human nature. These changes mark the end of the liberal ideal, which saw in universal suffrage the key to self-government and in the rule of law the promise of a good society. So far has this ideal sunk that the rightness of any minority has become an axiom, and more and more people feel themselves to be not sovereign, but shamefully oppressed-a desperate minority.
In the place of the former attitude toward the state stands what might be called for short the Marxist analysis. It does not stem from Marxist propaganda alone; but its spirit is that which informs the literature of Marx and his disciples, the spirit of exposure and revelation, the animus of a war against appearances, the search for a reality made up of conspiracies and their victims.
It is a democratic spirit insofar as the passion for equality naturally stimulates envy and suspicion; but it is alos a racist spirit in that it attriubtes virtues and violated rights to one group, wickedness and wrongful supremacy to another. In this sense, visibly, women are a race oppressed by the race of men; the old, the white, and the "bourgeois" are races unjustly dominant over the race of the young, the colored, the poor, and so on down a long list. [pg. 165]
Jacques notes that a sign of the distrust of government is the completely indistinguishable forms of governance that are put to practice in this past century.#
No new ones, no practical or utopian schemes of society, have emerged in the present century. This lack may have a bearing on the prospects of Western civilization. Besides being unoriginal, the ideals and doctrines now at war are also undisputed in the sense that they continue to exist without support from deep philosophical conviction. Just as all regimes are "for the people," so groups and classes are "for equality and justice" and "against poverty and discrimination." Imperialism (colonialism) has no proponents left; racism as an official policy is restricted to the southern tip of Africa; and capitalism has been so modified that it is at many points indistinguishable from communism, itself also hybridized. Nobody supports the view that the poor are necessary to society or that "inferiors" exist or have a role to play in some hierarchical order. Egalitarianism is affirmed as universally as pauperism is condemned. [pg. 169]
Jacques points out that those being blamed for the "evils of the age" are the victims of the paradox of Egalitarianism.#
This verdict which condemns the middle class as responsible for the evils of the age is not being uttered today for the first time. Nor was it first pronounced by the Marxians or their predecessors and successors in socialism. It is not a purely economic indictment in any case. When the anti-bourgeois commonplaces, now nearly two hundred years old, are repeated today, they imply something other than a call to rescue the proletariat from the oppression of the powerful. They imply guilt for failing to create a better world, the great, rational society. After all, the conception of the general welfare springs from liberal thought itself as it turned away from laissez faire in the nineties and followed the lead of Bismarck and the socialists toward a state affording complete social security. And liberal-socialist thought is a bourgeois invention. Similarly, the "rights of the people" are not in opposition to the "materialism" imputed to the bourgeois as a sin, for surely these "rights" include the people's material prosperity. [pg. 173-174]
Jacques writes that the defining characteristic that our current state of culture has is it's supreme self-consciousness.#
The civilized frame of mind is always self-conscious, but perhaps none before ours has attained such an extreme of self-consciousness. We owe this sensitivity to our long historical memory, even if buried; to the breadth of our information, which gives us no respite to enjoy the present, for it continually turns into something else; to the peculiarity of our literature and our psychology, alike introspective and ruthless in imputing bad motives, suspicious of the leas self-satisfaction; to the bleakness of our science, which shows a purposeless universe of not even harmonious design; and finally to the fears that our great cleverness has raised up-fear of atomic destruction, fear of overpopulation, fear of our massed enemies and, in daily life, fear of all the diseases, mishaps, and dangers that technology creates and incessantly warns about. [pg. 178]
In the closing of this essay, Jacques looks at another diagnostic of our culture: control.#
The next diagnostic point is the question of morals and religion. Morality, like religion, has the double aspect of satisfying an emotional need and serving a social purpose. Without morality-some inner restraint-society must assign two policemen to watch ever citizen day and night. And without a religion which organizes the facts of life and the cosmos, men seek in vain for the meaning of their existence. Not all can find in art or science a substitute justification; and pure, unreflecting ambition or calculated hedonism is rare and demands special gifts. [...]
On second thoughts, art and science seem to offer better grounds for complacency. In our time, both have gained enormously in prestige and support; their practitioners are the only admired leaders. Ostensibly, the, art and science are flourishing, which argues a "healthy society." The metaphor of health is misleading-a health malignancy kills the patient. The arts are not malignant, but they are either hostile or ambiguous. They mean to awaken the complacent and they succeed. [...]
Science too has little to say comprehensively. It is none too well integrated within itself. The proliferating specialties, each with its private language and its stream of discoveries, do not cohere and settle large subjects; it has become a matter of pride that science is never done. If that is so, science is not what is founders expected and promised: a solid edifice of knowledge soon to be completed. Rather it is for a few an absorbing activity whose results can never give its patron civilization a cosmos fit for contemplation [pg. 180-181]