The Death of Decency

"Our world is morally upside down. We preserve nature but abort babies. We have developed technology to build strong, solid houses, but we have weak, sick homes. We are smarter, but no wiser, and we know more but understand less. We go faster, but we get nowhere. We have conquered space, but our habits have conquered us. We rescue the whales, but neglect and abuse our own children. At the root of it all is materialism."

"That Americans inhabit a less contemplative and judicious society than they did just four decades ago is arguable only to the ever-expanding group of infotainment marketers who stand to profit from the videoization of everything. The greater accessibility of information through computers and the internet serves to foster the illusion that the ability to retrieve words and numbers with the click of a mouse also confers the capacity to judge whether those words and numbers represent truth, lies, or something in between. These effects are especially deleterious in a culture with an endemic predilection for technological answers to non technological questions and an endemic suspicion of anything that smack of intellectual elitism."

The above quotes are written by a fundamentalist evangelical and a secular humanist, respectively. They are rare in their insight, and in the fact that they tell the same truth, however the two authors may despise each others' worldview. Above all though, such coherent and articulate critiques are the exception in our coarse and vulgar culture today.

As a historian, I'm not one to fall prey to willfully ignorant romanticizing of the past, but there are certain things that were better back in the day. Primary among these things are the ways we communicate with each other, and the type of communications we expect from our leaders.

It's not that politicians haven't always sniped at and insulted each other. But they used to do it with class. Winston Churchill was a pro at the cleverly crafted dis. Here are some classics:

"With a few more brains, sir, you could be a halfwit"

"Sir, you never open your mouth without subtracting from the sum of human intelligence."

And, of course: "In the morning, madam, I will no longer be drunk, but you will still be ugly."

Now, we have the immortal words of Dick Cheney: "Go fuck yourself."

The above is just a lighthearted example of the larger point: if we don't even expect our leaders to speak like intelligent human beings who care about language and ideas, why we would expect it from anyone else?

Boy George has, of course, elicited heaps of scorn from eggheads everywhere for his torturous syntax. What I think is much more relevant than his blunders, though, are the things he means to say. Primary among these is the use of the word "folks".

Mr. Bush will speak of everyone, everywhere, as folks. He will refer to the folks at FEMA, or the folks in New Orleans, or the folks in Baghdad, or the folks at NASA. In some ways, this is.....well, its folksy. In other ways, though, its rather disconcerting. The idea that the people raped by the hurricane are indistinguishable from the people tasked to save them? No offense, but I don't want "folks" running our government.

Consider:

Friends, Romans, folks

Of the folks, for the folks, by the folks

We shall bear witness that these folks shall not have fallen in vain

How wrong do those phrases sound? Pretty wrong, no? This idea that the president of the United States is just one of the folks is not populism; it is abdication of responsibility. It is as if an elementary school teacher thought of himself as just another member of the class. Who would that benefit?

It is this leveling-off tendency, this suspicion of intellectuals (only "liberal" intellectuals, of course), this hostility towards science and provable facts, that has permeated everything we are exposed to. Both the Bible-thumpers and the Bible-haters have much to complain about.

If there is any "ism" that will dominate American thought in the future, as expressed by our pop culture, it is nihilism. The rejection of the knowable, of the preferable, of the very idea of morality, is proudly evincing itself all around us.

Let me put it this way: some women may have once dressed in manners that uncouth and ribald men may have called "slutty". Now, some women dress in form-fitting shirts that have "SLUT" or "PORNSTAR" printed proudly across the chest. It was once scandalous to show a husband and wife sharing a single bed on TV. Now, it would be scandalous for any two adults on TV to be a monogamous married couple.

Since I'm still a bit too young to be a cranky old man (although 29 is the new 79) I really do think I'm onto something here. I think our culture is sick, and I think we polish the brass on the Titanic with fairy tales about our manifest goodness and delusions of grandeur.

But what is it that we really export to the world? Is it democracy? Or is it Girls Gone Wild? Is if free trade? Or is it Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Is it erudite and measured debates among free and informed citizens? Or is it an endless parade of blowhards screaming at each other about fags and flags? Is it Christianity? Or is it bottomless materialism? Is it freedom? Or is it nihilistic hedonism? Sometimes I think I'd hate us too.