Thoughts on when it went completely off the rails
Hopefully, the subject matters to you, even as distractions come to look important
I have wanted to try and expel that quite un-Christian worship of the individual simply as such which is so rampant in modern thought side by side with our collectivism, for one error begets the opposite error and, far from neutralising, they aggravate each other.
— C.S. Lewis
It’s time to revisit one of the most frequently recurring themes here at Precipice: the question of how we came to inhabit such a desperately lonely, fragmented, flavorless, humanity-devoid society. Let’s be candid: forget common values; we have no common assumption about the contours of reality.
Last August, my inquiry took the long view in a post entitled “Five Hundred Years of Abandoning Our Essence.” Two months earlier, I zeroed in on the year 1968 in the post “On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift.” Last month, I examined the limits of the usefulness of a focus on the local as a remedy for our societal crisis in the essay entitled “Place.”
This topic has driven much of my book reading this year.
In the spring, I read Robert Nisbet’s Community and Power , originally published in 1953 under the title - which I greatly prefer - The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics and Order of Freedom, and revised in 1962. It’s often framed as a precursor to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Nisbet, in mid-century, was already seeing the state supplant the civic bonds, norms and institutions that had provided Americans with a sense of a common good.
I’m currently reading Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. It was written by a team of UC Berkeley sociologists and originally published in 1988. Subsequent editions came out in 1996 and 2008, each with a new preface crafted to reflect societal changes that had occurred in the interim. I think all the authors are still alive. I’d like to see what the preface to a 2023 edition would have to say. While there’s much that’s enduring about their 1988 observations about how the realms of work, marriage, citizenship and other aspects of American life have changed, the changes wrought by technology and an even more pronounced emphasis on the self in the last fifteen years have been at least as transformative as anything they cite in the work itself or any of the subsequent prefaces.
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.
For the sake of my - anyone’s - physical, mental and spiritual health, holding steadfast to what can be remembered of a minimally recognizable America / West, and availing myself - ourselves - of what has been written and spoken that did at one time provide a foundation, is as crucial as daily food intake.
Never mind what Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Megan Rapinoe, the Murdoch family, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Republican Party or the Democrat Party are up to.
There is an important thing happening that must be attended to.