***

“Here, where we are standing, they lived, and walked, and talked, and slept, and carried on their business. Here they stabled their horses and feasted, and from here they rode out to fight or to drove out to trade. They were a powerful people, and rich, and great builders. They built to last, for they thought their city would last forever.”

“But what has become of them all?” asked the Mole.

“Who can tell?” said the Badger. “People come, they stay for a while, they flourish, they build – and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I’ve been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be.”

“Well, and when they went at last, those people?”

“When they went, the strong winds and persistent rains took the matter in hand, patiently, ceaselessly, year after year. Perhaps we badgers too, in our small way, helped a little – who knows? It was all down, down, down, gradually – ruin and levelling and disappearance. Then it was all up, up, up, gradually, as seeds grew to saplings, and saplings to forest trees, and bramble and fern came creeping in to help.”

***

Kenneth Grahame for the Uncivilised reading list!

This, from one who has seen the view from the summit.

I entirely agree with your post – I have also thought this way for a while now. To borrow from William Blake, we are currently far too single-visioned; we need to work towards a more truthful, four-fold vision of reality instead.

And I’m not a religious fundamentalist either, or an enemy of reason, whatever that means, but I do think that as a society we need to pay serious and immediate attention to what could be called ’spirit’.

In this, I have been heavily influenced by Theodore Roszak among others, especially The Voice of the Earth and Where the Wasteland Ends. I’d like to discuss either of those with anyone else out there. (Though I admit now I’m highly biased – I think Roszak is a brilliant intellectual shot in the arm.)

Elizabeth

didn’t Sartre say that anybody who claimed that their idea had never before been thought was either lying or it (the idea) must be completely rubbish… i like that take on it… so much so i wrote a poem about it:

thought

this thought is mine is it not?
this thought that
I created, that I alone
imagined

owned by this mind
is this thought,
rightfully mine
is this thought,
to be thought by
no-other without my express permission,
as this thought is mine

a single consciousness attached
to no-one
to no-thing
created this thought,
detached from all other thoughts
ever thought
is this mind, and
this thought is mine is it not?

i think that your own belief that we are coming to the end of this phase of civilisation explains perfectly how it is time to stop looking for ‘the new’ and remember ‘the old’ and by that i mean ‘the really really old’ isn’t that now so old it’s the new ‘new’?
cheers!

I believe the real cause of decadence is spiritual decline. No, I’m not a religious fundamentalist or even (willingly) religious; I’m speaking of a widespread unwillingness to search out deeper meaning, a disrespect for and disconnect from the natural world of which we are a part.

It is this very disconnect which has led to the forthcoming environmental apocalypse, and which allows the masses to pretend that either there is no problem, or that we can fix it.

A spiritual wasteland leads to selfishness, greed, agression, brutality, and inhumanity. If we are so heartless that we can brutalise our own species, what hope is there for hard-to-love species like vampire bats, great white sharks and dung beatles?

Civilisation is a hideous beast that we created because of our own fear of the natural world; it’s the original sin. Like so many fictional monsters, it is going to turn back and devour its makers. Homo sapiens may or may not survive what’s coming. If we do, the surviving community will mostly comprise individuals and groups who foresaw the darkness and prepared themselves.

Even Hypochondriacs get sick eventually. All times are decadent to some extent in some place. This being predominantly a global monoculture when we reached decadence it was all over.

Decadence proceeds from the feeling that everything’s been done and all we can do is mourn that, copy it, or party like it’s 1999. The danger is when that attitude is carried forward after the crash that follows decadence like the Spring. If people continue to look backward this way it perpetuates a Dark Age. A time when all people think they can do is look back in awe at the previous “Golden Age,” either the active time before the Decadence or even the decadence itself.

The door is always open, at the individual level at least, to break out of this. Life does not have to be a game, and certainly not a game where the previous generations have already tied up all the great plays. If we are willing to do what it takes to see our own moment as our defining time then we can lose our squeamishness and our expectation of ease, and get down to the un-cool and hard work of forging lives for ourselves and finding and developing meaning within that life.

We are choked today by institutions that perpetuate fossilized thinking and “Decadent,” “Ancien Regime,” “Fin de Siecle” Angst and Ennui. Our Crises of Expertise and Leadership both stem from this dead weight of fossilized experience. At this point much of what they run on has been chewed and re-chewed to the point no self-respecting cow would bother to chew it again!

The trouble with focusing on the decadence of one’s time is that this effort displaces the real work of not looking back, either in awe or scorn, and facing our own moment squarely. The poets of the Roman Decadence spent their time bemoaning – between binges. Meanwhile the Celts and Hermans were not only sharpening their swords, but getting ready for an outpouring of cultural dynamism.

It is however extremely difficult to know where to go to create something genuinely new and of our time.

It’s the mind at work: our thinking is under siege; almost paralysed by the weight of the past. We no longer stand on the shoulders of giants; we are crushed by them.

Even the idea of doing something new is a sullen one. More contrivance.

We live in a bubbling farrago of dull ideas, yet are told that as a society we are more creative, exciting, and imaginative than in times past. I don’t see it. The decadence you speak of is wholly reflective of our present cultural state – and even decadence now has not the allure it once had.

Consciousness is a play – trapped in a theatre – and left to play out as a tragedy.