When the horde of neo-confederate, COVID-spreading, hate-crazed domestic terrorists, QAnon crackpots, Democrat hunters, anti-Semites, white supremacist bully boys and others stormed the capitol last month, it made me think of the end times foreshadowed by German historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler and his book written after World War I entitled, “The Decline of the West” and also the work of British historian Arnold Toynbee and his massive “A Study of History” that examines the inevitable failure and collapse of civilizations.
Do the capitol rioters represent the 70-some million voters who cast their ballots for the GOP and their King of Lies, Donald Trump? Were we witnessing in the riot an embodiment of a psychic schism in American culture that will only deepen and widen and never be resolved? Are there really tens of millions of Americans so afraid of change and what the future might bring that they prefer to dwell in the madhouse of Republican conspiracy theories, racist hysteria, rabid anti-intellectualism and class warfare than to face and work to solve the actual life-and-death problems that are threatening us all?
It’s entirely possible that political insanity has finally sucked all the conservative common sense out of our culture, sending millions of fellow citizens down the worm holes of the preposterous. But I still can’t quite believe that this has become our fate.
Arnold Toynbee amassed data to show that civilizations rise when a creative minority of people coalesce to meet a challenge threatening the survival of their society. When these creative minorities — scientists, inspired legislators, idealistic young people, business leaders, technocrats, artists and explorers of all kinds — cease being creative and solving problems, they descend into a merely dominant minority, clinging to power while new challenges go unmet and eventually bring their civilization to a halt. It’s clear that our civilization at present has still not risen to meet the challenges of climate change and the pandemics and natural disasters it causes, nor has it fully faced the scourge of racial prejudice and injustice that so scars our culture, and that we have left the crushing stress of poverty to continue to devour an ever-growing number of our people.
Oswald Spengler took a different view from Toynbee, but with a similar end. He saw cultures and their civilizations as organic entities with life cycles of their own. And the West — with its vast superstructure of wonder-working techno-science and the infuriating capital hierarchies that it produces — is at the “winter time” or “evening” of its powers, he felt. Spengler called the West a “Faustian culture,” one that sold its soul to a legion of devils, still proud and powerful but tragic as it helplessly senses its own onrushing decline and death.
If these metaphors are extended, it’s not hard to envision a world of bedlam, a madhouse world of chaos and destruction, replacing what was once a society of some competence and invention, a lunatic world in which challenges are not met but denied, a world like ours in which climate change deniers try to turn voters against science and so called “patriots” re-write history to fit their prejudices, like the Trumpian 1776 Commission that worked to write slavery and Jim Crow out of American history. The power of the inmates of bedlam grows with each election, it seems, and our country becomes ever more a land of hallucination and paranoia.
In his book, “The Patterning Instinct: A Cognitive History of Humanity,” sustainability activist and author Jeremy Lent takes off from Spengler and Toynbee to describe the increasing irrelevance and structural weakness of the old metaphors that gave meaning to our way of life — chief among them “the conquest of nature,” an organizing principle that has led to the poisoning of our ecosystem and the lethal altering of our atmosphere.
Lent thinks the metaphorical underpinnings of the Industrial Revolution — that stress competition and endless growth over cooperation and sustainability — have become so corrupted by conquering successes that the material world as we know it is “currently in the midst of one of the great critical transitions of the human journey, and yet it is not at all clear where we will end up once our current system resolves into a newly stable state.”
What turns out to be the “new normal” could well be unlike anything we know at the moment. It will either be based on new metaphors, new ways of assessing and meeting challenges, or it will see the illusion of a stable civilization circling the drain, clinging to old metaphors, irrelevant practices and narcissistic demagogues that are squeezing the life out of the world like a python wrapped around crocodile.
Since the January 6 capitol riot, I’ve come to see the future as arising out of a political contest going on right now, a contest between a deteriorating creative minority, which has transformed conservatism into a form of ridiculous and dangerous nihilism, and a still developing but strongly emerging new creative minority roughly symbolized by a coalition of activists that includes Black Lives Matter, # Me Too, the Occupy movement and those supporters of the Green New Deal who see climate change as the foundational reordering of the global ecosystem that must be countered if we hope to survive.
As we watch politics unfolding in our country and around the world over the next ten years, it is this dramatic conflict that we’ll be witnessing, a conflict that either makes the present moment of crisis a further entrenching of a historic decline or the birth of a new energizing worldview animated by the genius of pragmatic competence and the liberating soul of conscience and inspired cooperation.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Good Morning and as always my thanks for your Monday reflection. Yesterday I read an article in NYTIMES that offered me a possible explanation (in part) I had not considered regarding the current insanity.
The article, “The Internet Rewired Our Brains. This Man Predicted It Would.”, focuses on the premise that “one of the most finite resources in the world is human attention”. He says that our newest addiction, the internet, has such dominance in our lives that has taken control of what we consider reality. Many voices on the internet want our attention…of which we have a limited amount. Too many of these voices are sucking us in with lies..exciting and dangerous lies. Where we put our attention is what we come to value. Trump has successfully grab the attention of millions of Americans.
If you are not familiar with “the attention economy” I think the article might be of interest to you.
ON to the impeachment.
I have passed this equation on many of my friends.
Many of us live in several worlds at once. The internet, TV, and movies. Some people have gotten into power because they were movie stars, some TV stars, etc. Where masses see them. Some one else has done the thinking for them. Perhaps planet of the apes is not that far off.
Others read books, attend lectures, and care about their Environment, the health and well being of their fellow humans, and see most TV and Movies as fiction. And learn to stay away from internet sites offering a dream, send your money here and we will make you rich, or multi level marketing false hoods.
One movie comes to mind. A computer is asked by a boy, while it’s about to blow up the world, would you like to play a game. After a time the computer stops and says what game would you like to play. The Boy says Tick-Tack-Toe.
Biden understands how the game ends and is trying to defuse this this environmental bomb.
Consider W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” written between World Wars; “:…a vast image…troubles my sight/ Somewhere in sands of the desert…a shape with gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs/…And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
Indeed. – Then look at another poem written in later life, “Lapis Lazuli,” perhaps a transcendence, a healing.