It doesn’t take much to see that we’re headed in a disturbing direction. The latest being Lady Gaga’s recent concert where she had a someone vomit on her as an expression of so-called “art.” People seem bored with “life as usual,” and that’s why news and entertainment is often based on extremes: Extreme Makeover, Survivor, superhero movies, Biggest Loser, etc. We’re spending ourselves silly as indebtedness (personal and governmental) is at an all-time high. The sex-slave trade is probably the worst example of a society gone decade-this industry dehumanizes people as “objects.” There is a rise in violence, as prisons are at capacity.
#The decline of western civilization free
People want to be free to “love who they wish,” pleasure seeking is loudly applauded, and is profitable, for example, for companies producing pornography (it’s a multibillion dollar industry). Today there is a deep desire to abandon rules in personal lifestyles, as well. Andy Warhol said, “Art is what you can get away with.” People began to celebrate the ordinary, mediocre and average. It was expressed in artwork in the 1900s through abstraction, and a loss of excellence. Atrocities never before committed to the extent Hitler did horrified people. Science didn’t stop the senseless loss of life. Modernity, with all its promises to solve the world’s problems, failed. Social Darwinism played out in wars – could we “engineer” better societies?Īfter the devastation of World War I, a sense of lawlessness ensued and violence erupted in communities more frequently. When Darwin published his Origin of Species, expanding the idea of Evolution, there is no way he could have foreseen how his theory would be applied by some in what is called “Social Darwinism.” If there is no meaning in life, and no apparent lawgiver, then to whom are we ultimately accountable? Truth is viewed as no longer static. This is a form of ‘abstraction’, which in due course, pointed to lawlessness and meaninglessness. This reduced life to parts, calculations, methods, criticisms, and experimentation. Scientism, or the belief that science would ultimately answer all questions, became a type of “new religion.” They focused on the immediate, and tended to disregard the eternal. They made great advances in mathematics and physics. These natural philosophers began to discover that nature was regular or uniform, something testable and observable. Critical of the church, rational thinkers used reasoning over the soul (heart). In the mid 1600s, a shift occurred from religion as the establisher of truth, to science as the truth tellers in the modern era. Instead of finding honor in contributing to the world around them, many sought after individual gain, not always considering the effect that their actions may have on those around them. The preference of the individual became highly valued. After some time, this contributed to the formation of democracies.Įstablishing democracies in Western Civilization gave people a chance to pursue what they believed to be right, and this was largely led by Puritans in the United States. Kings didn’t have much of a desire to relate to their constituents, and lived luxurious lives while the regular folk were often impoverished. Eventually, common man saw the monarchy as being too much like the Church in its overarching control. Now instead of a church-led society, the monarch took more authority and nationalism spread. This led to many different sects of religious thought, splintering the once universal Church. The printing press spread the news into the hands of the people much faster than Luther could have imagined. Luther’s “protests” resulted in throwing off old church rules that oppressed, as citizens eagerly absorbed the revelatory information. The Church had become too powerful, and this led to corruption. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses challenged the authority of the Catholic Church in the 1500s, and rightly so.
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