Extolling amnesia as a virtue
As regard for tradition and heritage swirls the drain, so does our safety
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A theme that recurs frequently here at Precipice is the attempt to determine just when it was that everything came to be so unsafe. When did guardrails, bedrock societal institutions and agreed-upon norms give up the ghost and leave us in a jungle-like state?
There have been inflection points in recent decades at which these guardrails rather abruptly became significantly more weakened.
In a piece last August, I steered readers to a post by Erik Hoel at his Substack that makes a compelling case that the year 2012 was such a moment:
. . . the changes wrought by technology and an even more pronounced emphasis on the self in the last fifteen years have been . . . transformative.
For covering that territory, I think a piece by Erik Hoel, at his Substack The Intrinsic Perspective, that I came across just this morning does a thorough and bracing - indeed, horrifying - job. He. asserts, and convinces at least me, that 2012 was an inflection point in shaping the tenor of the present moment. Take some time to study the statistics he provides for such phenomena as teenage self-harm, US birth rates, dating patterns, pedestrian fatalities from cars, movie content, women’s mental health, and more.
What I see, in my personal face-to-face interactions as well as those on social media, is an ever more frantic attempt by us - be clear that I’m including myself in this - to distract ourselves from the cultural and spiritual vacuum we’ve created. It even extends to what those who see themselves as serious observers choose to preoccupy themselves with. News items about political inside baseball, certainly, but also attention to the who’s-up-who’s-down of the worlds of media moguls and institutional religion (what’s left of it) are presented as having some import beyond this afternoon, when in fact they have no stinking significance at all to anyone who sees what is really happening.
The terrible irony of our predicament is that even hints of a way to restore even the most rudimentary baseline of a common sense of humanity can’t get an airing, because nobody will take out his or her earbuds to pay it any heed.
There will be a reckoning, because there is a transcendent order, whether anybody cares to acknowledge it or not.
Revisiting that post spurred me to also revisit Hoel’s piece. I’d strongly recommend that you give it a look, if you haven’t had the opportunity. His graphs, showing sharp upward trends for depressive symptoms in US 8th, 10th and 12th graders since 2012, teenage self-harm episodes in four Anglo nations, explicit lyrics in Billboard Hot 100 hit songs, the number of Hollywood productions that are sequels or remakes, smartphone ownership, and pedestrian fatalities are pretty startling to take in as a whole.
There are fairly dramatic downward trends for reading and mathematics scores for US 13-year-olds, as well as trends in US birth rates.
I also wrote a post in June 2022 titled “On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift” about turning 13 in 1968. A quick review of some of that year’s tumultuous moments includes the Tet Offensive, the USS Pueblo situation, the MLK and RFK assassinations, student takeover of administration offices at Columbia University, and riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Much has never been the same since, and some of the issues and players are still at the fore of the present scene.
In August of that year, I took a longer view in the post “Five Hundred Years of Abandoning Our Essence”:
The Protestant Reformation made available new theological horizons, insights unconstrained by the parameters of Catholic doctrine. The direct relationship between the individual and God, with all the personal-level reckoning and redemption that entailed, supplanted the assumption that ritual and adherence to institutional obligations were the keys to being absolved for one’s transgressions. The Reformation paved the way for the Great Awakening, which imbued culture with a fervor that had far-reaching consequences. All of the American colonies’ original great universities were founded as Christian centers of learning, for instance.
What the Reformation set in motion, though, was the process of continual splintering, which moved Christianity ever further away from an identity as a unified bride of Christ. The lineage back to the Lord placing his hand on Peter’s shoulder became ever harder to trace.
The Enlightenment gave us Bacon’s empiricism, Descartes’s rationalism, the thoughts of Locke and Montesquieu on how government should be organized, and Adam Smith’s invisible hand. It gave us scientific academies and societies that birthed fields of theoretical inquiry into the natural world (chemistry, physics, biology) as well as applied modes (engineering). The pace of invention accelerated and didn’t slow down until quite recently.
On the other hand, it gave us Voltaire and Rousseau, who invited us to consider that holy scripture was not so sacrosanct after all, and that man in his natural state - that is, before being corrupted by the societies he organized - was innately good.
This latter strain of thought set the table for Romanticism, which, while practiced by some of the most gifted artists in history, espoused the primacy of individual experience and the feelings evoked by one’s engagement with the natural world. Part of that natural world is, of course, sex, and the Romantics, Shelly in particular, asserted that the constraints of marriage hampered an authentic experience of that realm of human interaction.
The unbridled inventiveness bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment led to the Industrial Revolution, which made possible degrees of safety, comfort and convenience for much of humankind that had never been known. This was not universally enjoyed at first, though. Hordes of people eager for a life beyond agrarian servitude clustered in ever-larger cities, creating conditions of poor sanitation and a complete lack of the solitude for which the human soul yearns.
It also led to a perception among those masses flocking to urban hives that those employing them were somehow guarantors of their security and future prospects. The rise of the labor movement, while opening society’s eyes to undeniable instances of exploitation, led to an overall sense of diminished agency among what came to be called the blue-collar class. Generations passed along the worldview that obtaining a union card and hanging in there at an industrial facility until retirement, with its package of benefits, was the key to the best life one could expect.
Meanwhile, figures such as Marx, Nietzche, Freud and Dewey steered the preponderance of Western thought further away from consideration of a transcendent order. The sum total of their contributions was a sense that the human being was on his own when it came to ordering the world in a more favorable way. They mostly said that the effort would need to be made collectively as well.
In their wake came progressivism. Thorstein Veblen, Richard T. Ely, Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson and the like perceived the necessity of an expert class that would orchestrate industrialized, urbanized society for the greatest good of the most people. This in turn spawned New Deal architects such as Rexford Tugwell and Frances Perkins who gave that notion concrete application.
The New Left sprang from a disillusionment so great that its major figures, such as William Appleman Williams and Eugene Genovese, saw no moral distinction worth making between what Marx had wrought in the Soviet Union, Cuba and North Vietnam, and what the above-mentioned thinkers had wrought in the United States and Western Europe.
Much artistic expression began to reflect this disillusionment as well. Granted, there was the warm humanity of Great-American-Songbook popular music, the razor-sharp wit of comedic stage productions, and family-and-patriotism-themed Hollywood fare, but much of literature and visual art presented a vision of a world being rapidly drained of meaning.
Then came the Great Upheaval.
I’d also steer your attention to a post from February of last year titled “Humankind didn’t Spring Forth Two Weeks Ago.”
I present the foregoing at this time because of two recent news items: the rabid Jew-hatred at Columbia University that has now spread to campuses across the nation, and the Uri Berliner essay-resignation from NPR-subsequent revelations about NPR chief Katherine Maher chain of events.
While I’m referring you to other things to read, I recommend Dan McLaughlin’s piece today at National Review. His point is that Columbia president Nemat Shafik cannot actually be thought of as president if she cannot put the kibosh on the pro-Hamas encampment. Those Jew-haters are actually in charge.
On the other matter, I think Frank Furedi does a nice job of spelling out the implications in a Spiked essay titled “The Cult of ‘My Truth’”:
It’s never a good sign when a society’s cultural elites start to see facts as an inconvenience. When leading figures in the media describe the truth as an obstacle to ‘getting things done’, you know you’re in serious trouble.
These are the words of Katherine Maher, the new CEO of America’s National Public Radio (NPR). During a TED talk in 2021, when Maher was still CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia, she announced that ‘our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done’. ‘That is not to say that the truth doesn’t exist’, she added, ‘or to say that the truth isn’t important… [but] one reason we have such glorious chronicles to the human experience and all forms of culture is because we acknowledge there are many different truths’.
This was concerning enough when Maher was in charge of the leading online encyclopaedia. It is even more so now that she is the head of NPR, home to some of America’s most popular radio shows. For Maher, it seems that truth and facts are an obstacle to promoting the elite’s woke agenda. Indeed, she recently suspended long-time NPR editor Uri Berliner for writing an essay denouncing the station’s turn towards identity politics. This then prompted him to resign.
The idea that there are ‘many different truths’ is not a new one. Just look at the rise of that odious phrase, ‘my truth’. Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle was famously praised by Oprah Winfrey in that infamous 2021 interview for speaking ‘her truth’. As it turned out, Meghan’s ‘truths’ had a tendency to differ from other people’s recollections. Ultimately, it didn’t matter if what she said was technically, objectively true. Her claims were true in the eye of the believer. Today, that’s apparently good enough for our cultural elites.
The 1619 Project is propaganda masquerading as history, unapologetically abandoning facts and evidence. Not that this seems to matter to its academic apologists. In one review of the book, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, Cornell University historian Sandra Greene admits that 1619 includes ‘factual errors’ and ‘several chapters [that] simplify to the point of distortion’. She nonetheless praises it as a ‘necessary book’.
Writing in the same vein, Leslie M Harris, professor of history at Northwestern University, said that she helped to fact-check the 1619 Project and found it made ‘avoidable mistakes’. Her advice, Harris writes, was ignored by the New York Times. Still, she nevertheless believes that the ‘attacks from [the project’s] critics are much more dangerous’ than its inaccuracies.
So we have students - and the most radical among the students - running the show at a major educational institution, and a person who was, in terms of position, to Wikipedia what Mortimer Adler had been to the Encyclopedia Britannica proclaiming that truth is personal. The difference is that Adler counted Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and John Locke among his heroes. Seeing as how Maher has no use for objective truth, it’s hard to imagine that she’d have any heroes.
In both cases - campus Jew-hating radicals and the zeitgeist at NPR- we see zealots motivated by what they are convinced is right.
But how do they formulate a metric for determining what is right? What is their guide for contemplating what makes a human life worth living?
They are, as Tom Wolfe put it in an essay called “Great Relearning,” starting from zero:
The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero. At one point Ken Kesey organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people in the communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning . . . the laws of hygiene … by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.
This process, namely the relearning —following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero—seems to me to be the leitmotif of our current interlude, here in the dying years of the twentieth century.
“Start from zero” was the slogan of the Bauhaus School. The story of how the Bauhaus, a tiny artists’ movement in Germany in the 1920s, swept aside the architectural styles of the past and created the glass-box face of the modern American city is a familiar one, and I won’t retell it. But I should mention the soaring spiritual exuberance with which the movement began, the passionate conviction of the Bauhaus’s leader, Walter Gropius, that by starting from zero in architecture and design man could free himself from the dead hand of the past. By the late 1970s, however, architects themselves were beginning to complain of the dead hand of the Bauhaus: the flat roofs, which leaked from rain and collapsed from snow, the tiny bare beige office cubicles, which made workers feel like component parts, the glass walls, which let in too much heat, too much cold, too much glare, and no air at all. The relearning is now underway in earnest. The architects are busy rummaging about in what the artist Richard Merkin calls the Big Closet. Inside the Big Closet, in promiscuous heaps, are the abandoned styles of the past. The current favorite rediscoveries: Classical, Secession, and Moderne (Art Deco). Relearning on the wing, the architects are off on a binge of eclecticism comparable to the Victorian period’s a century ago.
In politics the twentieth century’s great start from zero was one-party socialism, also known as Communism or Marxism-Leninism. Given that system’s bad reputation in the West today (even among the French intelligentsia), it is instructive to read John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World—before turning to Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The old strike hall poster of a Promethean worker in a blue shirt breaking his chains across his mighty chest was in truth the vision of ultimate human freedom the movement believed in at the outset. For intellectuals in the West the painful dawn began with the publication of the Gulag Archipelago in 1973. Solzhenitsyn insisted that the villain behind the Soviet concentration camp network was not Stalin or Lenin (who invented the term concentration camp) or even Marxism. It was instead the Soviets’ peculiarly twentieth-century notion that they could sweep aside not only the old social order but also its religious ethic, which had been millennia in the making (“common decency,” Orwell called it) and reinvent morality . . . here . . . now . . . “at the point of a gun,” in the famous phrase of the Maoists. Today the relearning has reached the point where even ruling circles in the Soviet Union and China have begun to wonder how best to convert Communism into something other than, in Susan Sontag’s phrase, Successful Fascism.
The great American contribution to the twentieth century’s start from zero was in the area of manners and mores, especially in what was rather primly called “the sexual revolution.” In every hamlet, even in the erstwhile Bible Belt, may be found the village brothel, no longer hidden in a house of blue lights or red lights or behind a green door but openly advertised by the side of the road with a thousand-watt back-lit plastic sign: TOTALLY ALL-NUDE GIRL SAUNA MASSAGE AND MARATHON ENCOUNTER SESSIONS INSIDE. Up until two years ago pornographic movie theaters were as ubiquitous as the Seven-Eleven, including outdoor drive-ins with screens six, seven, eight storeys high, the better to beam all the moistened folds and glistening nodes and stiffened giblets to a panting American countryside. Two years ago the pornographic theater began to be replaced by the pornographic videocassette, which could be brought into any home. Up on the shelf in the den, next to the set of The Encyclopedia Brittanica and the great books, one now finds the cassettes: Shanks Akimbo, That Thing with the Cup. My favorite moment in Jessica Hahn’s triumphal tour of Medialand this fall came when a ten-year-old girl, a student at a private school, wearing a buttercup blouse, a cardigan sweater, and her school uniform skirt, approached her outside a television studio with a stack of Playboy magazines featuring the famous Hahn nude form and asked her to autograph them. With the school’s blessing, she intended to take the signed copies back to the campus and hold a public auction. The proceeds would go to the poor.
But in the sexual revolution, too, the painful dawn has already arrived, and the relearning is imminent. All may be summed up in a single term, requiring no amplification: AIDS.
The Great Relearning—if anything so prosaic as remedial education can be called great—should be thought of not as the end of the twentieth century but the prelude to the twenty-first. There is no law of history that says a new century must start ten or twenty years beforehand, but two times in a row it has worked out that way. The nineteenth-century began with the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth. The twentieth century began with the formulation of Marxism, Freudianism, and Modernism in the late nineteenth. And now the twenty-first begins with the Great Relearning.
The twenty-first century, I predict, will confound the twentieth-century notion of the Future as something exciting, novel, unexpected, or radiant; as Progress, to use an old word. It is already clear that the large cities, thanks to the Relearning, will not even look new. Quite the opposite; the cities of 2007 will look more like the cities of 1927 than the cities of 1987. The twenty-first century will have a retrograde look and a retrograde mental atmosphere. People of the next century, snug in their Neo-Georgian apartment complexes, will gaze back with a ghastly awe upon our time. They will regard the twentieth as the century in which wars became so enormous they were known as World Wars, the century in which technology leapt forward so rapidly man developed the capacity to destroy the planet itself—but also the capacity to escape to the stars on space ships if it blew. But above all they will look back upon the twentieth as the century in which their forebears had the amazing confidence, the Promethean hubris, to defy the gods and try to push man’s power and freedom to limitless, god-like extremes. They will look back in awe . . . without the slightest temptation to emulate the daring of those who swept aside all rules and tried to start from zero. Instead, they will sink ever deeper into their NeoLouis bergeres, content to live in what will be known as the Somnolent Century or the Twentieth Century’s Hangover.
If the notion that the human being can define - indeed, invent - himself or herself continues to prevail, the most feral kind of defined self will be the one that holds sway. This will occur because self-defense in a state of lawlessness will return us to pre-human behavior such as traveling in packs and disregard for any kind of rules when it comes to such basics as obtaining food and a warm place to sleep. We’re already seeing some of the traveling-in-packs phenomenon with the degree to which militant identity politics has permeated everything.
To those who, rightly so, cry out for a return to civil order in our society, I would say that there is a task we need to deal with first: coming to some agreement regarding what is real and true. And, if it’s not too ambitious, maybe even what is good.