On our changeable planet, mountains erode as they rise. Wind, water, ice, and gravity do their work to diminish all peaks. As they wear away, mountains yield sediments that blow, wash, ride, and fall into basins, where they accumulate as thickening deposits. Erosion has its counter in deposition. The stuff that wears away becomes the stuff that builds new geologic features like deltas, alluvial fans, and aprons beneath coastal waters. And because Earth is a dynamic planet undergoing tectonic crustal shifting, deposits of sediments can succumb to crushing forces that raise new mountains, as, for example, the Himalayas rise in response to India’s northward movement, forcing the ancient Tethys Sea’s deposits upward.
If every generation thinks the world is going to perdition, why hasn’t it? Is there a renewal analogous to these erosion-deposition-orogeny processes we see in our planet?
There’s little doubt that as people age, they find reason to concern themselves with the “way things are going.” No civilization remains untouched by time. What might have been considered sacred in one decade can easily be profane in the next. Those who feel attached to a past will eventually find themselves descrying its erosion or loss. Typically, they see decay of traditional values in the arts, particularly in the form of parody and satire. And, of course, as all humans seem to do, they look for identifiable forces to blame.
In a work called The Law of Civilization and Decay, Brooks Adams concludes that the wealthy eventually become perpetrators of a cultural downfall that threatens their own civilization. He writes, “…patrons of art are no longer even conscious of shame at profaning the most sacred of ideals” (p. 383).* Adams is pessimistic about civilization, mostly blaming its inevitable degradation on the wealthy and their centralization of power. To make his point, he recounts the negative effects of the involvement of the wealthy in moral decay from Roman times to the nineteenth century. In the rise of wealth he sees the erosion of the very civilization that produced wealth.
So, as Adams sees it, a plunge into the depths of depravity is inevitable as soon as the wealthy in any civilization decide that “anything goes” in art, architecture, and the sundry forms of literature. I wonder what he would think if he were to see a modern standup comedian? How would he have interpreted Lenny Bruce and his subsequent imitators? Given that standups produce nothing other than humor, would he claim that they are the product of leisure gone wild?
Regardless of the pervasive feeling among the old that the young and people in the arts have few or no values—that is, no similar values—generations persist one after another, all falling into the cycle of complaining about the diminution or loss of what was once sacred. Yet, somehow, we survive, re-establish old values or establish new ones that undergo the same process of favor followed by disfavor, parody, and satire. Erosion followed by deposition followed by uplift…
To frame one group as the primary reason for an entire civilization’s downfall places more negative credit on the wealthy than they probably deserve, but Adams might have a point if he includes lifestyle. Wealth breeds leisure, leisure breeds boredom, and boredom breeds folly, desperation, and often irreverence that attacks old values and even contemporary humans with ideological differences. With wealth comes a desire for the fads of the likeminded. Desperation for something that spikes interest and desire relies more on destroying the old for something perceived as the “new.” And even though there’s little that is really “new,” in leisure there lies a laziness that rationalizes profanation as avant-garde.
The cycle of establishing and de-establishing values is here to stay. You might not live to see its next full occurrence, but you can assure yourself that it will continue seemingly ad infinitum—or, in human terms, indefinitely. Someone in the next generation, maybe late in life, will wish people still had your values. That like-minded person and sympathetic contemporaries will see the inevitable erosion of the past.
Knowing this, you might be able to recognize the stage of the cycle in which you find yourself today. Don’t despair if you see only erosion. Mountains of values similar to your own will rise again.
*Adams, Brooks. The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History. New York. The Macmillan Company, 1897. In his preface, Brooks writes, “…when a highly centralized society disintegrates, under the pressure of economic competition, it is because the energy of the race has been exhausted. Consequently, the survivors of such a community lack the power necessary for renewed concentration, and must probably remain inert until supplied with fresh energetic material by the infusion of barbarian blood” (xi).
Isn’t that just the thought of many elderly people in any generation? The young are “barbarians” without “values.”
If every generation thinks the world is going to perdition, why hasn’t it? Is there a renewal analogous to these erosion-deposition-orogeny processes we see in our planet?
There’s little doubt that as people age, they find reason to concern themselves with the “way things are going.” No civilization remains untouched by time. What might have been considered sacred in one decade can easily be profane in the next. Those who feel attached to a past will eventually find themselves descrying its erosion or loss. Typically, they see decay of traditional values in the arts, particularly in the form of parody and satire. And, of course, as all humans seem to do, they look for identifiable forces to blame.
In a work called The Law of Civilization and Decay, Brooks Adams concludes that the wealthy eventually become perpetrators of a cultural downfall that threatens their own civilization. He writes, “…patrons of art are no longer even conscious of shame at profaning the most sacred of ideals” (p. 383).* Adams is pessimistic about civilization, mostly blaming its inevitable degradation on the wealthy and their centralization of power. To make his point, he recounts the negative effects of the involvement of the wealthy in moral decay from Roman times to the nineteenth century. In the rise of wealth he sees the erosion of the very civilization that produced wealth.
So, as Adams sees it, a plunge into the depths of depravity is inevitable as soon as the wealthy in any civilization decide that “anything goes” in art, architecture, and the sundry forms of literature. I wonder what he would think if he were to see a modern standup comedian? How would he have interpreted Lenny Bruce and his subsequent imitators? Given that standups produce nothing other than humor, would he claim that they are the product of leisure gone wild?
Regardless of the pervasive feeling among the old that the young and people in the arts have few or no values—that is, no similar values—generations persist one after another, all falling into the cycle of complaining about the diminution or loss of what was once sacred. Yet, somehow, we survive, re-establish old values or establish new ones that undergo the same process of favor followed by disfavor, parody, and satire. Erosion followed by deposition followed by uplift…
To frame one group as the primary reason for an entire civilization’s downfall places more negative credit on the wealthy than they probably deserve, but Adams might have a point if he includes lifestyle. Wealth breeds leisure, leisure breeds boredom, and boredom breeds folly, desperation, and often irreverence that attacks old values and even contemporary humans with ideological differences. With wealth comes a desire for the fads of the likeminded. Desperation for something that spikes interest and desire relies more on destroying the old for something perceived as the “new.” And even though there’s little that is really “new,” in leisure there lies a laziness that rationalizes profanation as avant-garde.
The cycle of establishing and de-establishing values is here to stay. You might not live to see its next full occurrence, but you can assure yourself that it will continue seemingly ad infinitum—or, in human terms, indefinitely. Someone in the next generation, maybe late in life, will wish people still had your values. That like-minded person and sympathetic contemporaries will see the inevitable erosion of the past.
Knowing this, you might be able to recognize the stage of the cycle in which you find yourself today. Don’t despair if you see only erosion. Mountains of values similar to your own will rise again.
*Adams, Brooks. The Law of Civilization and Decay: An Essay on History. New York. The Macmillan Company, 1897. In his preface, Brooks writes, “…when a highly centralized society disintegrates, under the pressure of economic competition, it is because the energy of the race has been exhausted. Consequently, the survivors of such a community lack the power necessary for renewed concentration, and must probably remain inert until supplied with fresh energetic material by the infusion of barbarian blood” (xi).
Isn’t that just the thought of many elderly people in any generation? The young are “barbarians” without “values.”
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