January 4th, 2008

OK, I've had a nice Christmas and a thrill-filled New Years ... and I'm now ready to start thinking darkly and cynically about what my future will bring. I already talked about part 1 of How the West Was Lost, and today I want to talk a little about part 2, which is more a symptom than a cause:

Culture rot: So pretty much all of us know the law commonly called Murphy's Law: "Anything that can go wrong, will." This is sometimes attributed to others, and I believe its origins are shrouded in the mists of time (as it were). There really was an American Engineer named Murphy, and he really had a set of laws, this being only one of them, original or otherwise. If this sort of thing really interests you, you can read up on it here.

One of Murphy's Laws that I am reminded of right these days is sometimes referred to as Number 7:

Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.

I think of it now, because that is just what our society—especially our societal mores—looks like to us living in this time. Put simply, an empire's fall is reflected in our children's values, and each successive generation's values have decayed just a slight bit more than the previous generation's values starting after the mechanization and post-World War II boom. From the 1960s onward, the chief harbinger of our Whole White Western World's deterioration has been reflected in the softer and looser moral approach to—and response from—children and those children's children.

I used to think that it was just the societal equivalent of an optical illusion: That is, it only looked like kids were getting worse and worse. But as my vision expanded, and as I grew older and more aware of the ubiquity of human nature, I realised that the change is occurring more slowly than within a single generation. And so the change being slower, it is easy to think that there is no change at all ... or at least that the only constant is the change itself.

But it isn't: Moralistic patterns of the 1910s, 1920s, even the "dirty" 1930s were not significantly different: Whether you think this is a good thing or not, Christian values were the norm and the expected default state. What we call good manners weren't just an archaic expression of futility; politeness, common courtesy, and kindness existed as the grease that fuelled our empire's growth, and sustained the infrastructure.

Despite how you may feel about marriage, men and women got married before (or because of!) having children, and more frequently at that. Whether you think it is an artificial societal construct or a natural phenomenon, people organised themselves into husbands and wives, then had children and raised them in families. Like it or not, those families were part of how our empire grew strong, whether or not children grew up happy and empowered, regardless of which or how many parents worked, and independent of consideration of sexual orientation or values.

There's always been an abuse of the body through overeating, drinking, and other drugs. But these abuses have risen to epic proportions in the last 40 or 50 years. There are desperate counter-measures put in place all the time: Alcoholism is beat back by organisations like AA; drugs are banned, outlawed, made criminal; cigarette smoking is banned inside or near doorways, around our children, within smelling distance of anti-smokers, in fact. But all this does is fuel a duality: The harder we lobby for a world we consider clean and sober, the harder those who abuse themselves have to fall. And it is not true that drug and alcohol abuse are in decline in our society. The harder we apply the thumbscrews to the addictive, the worse their lives get. Our diet is the next great target. Look at how much time and effort has been spent studying, discussing, and combatting obesity in the last 30 years. Now look at how many more of us have become obese. The pressure to "become healthy" is doing the exact opposite! It just feeds the duality.

Now, there has always been a spectrum of hero worship and anti-hero worship. We rejoiced in the adoration of the extraordinarily good and virtuous for as long as we've been sentient. But we've also exulted in the nastiness and dirty deeds of a few particularly notorious as well. But in the last 30 or 40 years, the hero worship has declined to a scant fraction of public attention while the nasty and intolerant, the drug-abusing, the unashamedly sexual, the grotesque, and downright criminal have captured the lion's share of our culture's hearts and minds.

More than anything else, this shows us the direction our Western Culture is headed. Forty years ago, we were all astonished and up in arms at the antics of British rock stars, such as the Beatles and The Who. Today, their antics look quaint, somewhat chaste, and clever by comparison to Paris Hilton's sex tape and Britney Spears' naked crotch shots used as fuel against her in her appalling child custody battle.

Again (and I cannot stress this enough), this is independent of whether or not you like and value these things yourself.

I deliberately chose my language in the first above paragraphs to describe Christian and marital values as "good". And I further made sure to point to only to the 20th century. This is because our empire grew in that time based on these values. And whatever is good for Christianity and marriage is also good for our empire. I don't want to push the idea onto people that our empire (or any empire) is necessarily good or desirable, but let's not bite the hand that feeds it, either: The very fact that I can sit here and write these words is an indication that I am faring much better inside this empire than I would if there were no organisation at all. You may think that it is possible to have the same great heights of sanitation, civility, medicine, science, and art outside of the infrastructure created by an empire—and you may even be right—but so far it hasn't happened. You may think that it is a good thing to see the societal mores of Christianity and so-called Family Values challenged and destroyed, but then you must also think it's a good thing for our Western Civilisation to come crumbling down too. (And I'm not totally sure I would disagree with you.)

But you can't have one without the other, as we are going to find out in the years and decades to come.

OK, that's it for today. There's more, but I'll address it some other time.

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