In a comment on our previous post, Professor J.M. Smith said:
Our society is shot through with an incredible amount of intelligence, but a great deal of it seems to work in service of things that are low and stupid. Think of someone snap-chatting selfies using a smartphone and the internet. The end of their act is low and stupid but the means are awe-inspiring. I think Thoreau called this “improved means to unimproved ends,” but must say that I think he was probably too generous about the ends. How about “improved means” to degraded ends”?
I’m not exempting myself here. Countless engineers have strained every fiber of their being to construct a world in which I can do low and stupid things almost effortlessly (but not, of course, without complaint).
Plato said that the lower should serve the higher, but our thinkers take the opposite view. The bruits were not placed on earth to serve men; men were placed on earth to serve the bruits. Lowly men do not owe honor and service to noble men; noble men owe honor and service to lowly men. A good deal of modern Christianity seems to be saying that God worships us.
Exactly right. I’ve thought for years that it is a sign of an ascending civilization that what is lower aspires to what is higher, while the reverse is true of a civilization in decline. In 2013 I wrote, in a letter to a friend:
I’m horrified by the reversal of cultural aspiration that has occurred over the past few decades. Not so long ago, low culture aspired toward high culture. On the cover of Time were authors, artists, intellectuals. For eros, pop culture gave us Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth dancing in evening dress. Now, in our accelerating decline, what is higher aspires to what is lower: the eyes of all are turned toward the underclass, masturbating on stage in its underwear.
You could add to that pre-tattered jeans on sale in boutiques for hundreds of dollars, and the study of hip-hop and comic books in our institutions of higher learning while the great canon of literature and philosophy is abandoned. We are flying nose downward, and the terrain is getting closer.
4 Comments
I agree entirely. My take is here: https://politicsandprosperity.com/2020/01/05/peak-civilization-2/
LV,
That’s very good. As I said just the other day, the West has built its great tower of modernity with the stones it has pulled from its foundations.
You have an excellent blog, by the way, and I see that you’ve been at it even longer than I have.
Thank you for the compliment, and for the link. It boosted my traffic noticeably.
Another mark of decline is evidenced by the results of our high art when it ostensibly aspires to be high art. I imagine some of this is the end product of a post modernism which maintains “there is no high or low but thinking makes it so.” Years ago I decided to wage my own personal war against modernity by reading great books and learning great art. I have no formal training in this, so the program is a bit slip shod. At any rate, a great heap of contemporary high literature Ive read is atrocious and overly focused on the gutters of society for no transcendent purpose. ”Masturbating on stage” may be the single best characterization of contemporary culture and its high art. It is remarkable that a little over a hundred years separates Dostoevsky’s The Possessed from DeLillo’s White Noise.