[sociology_today] The Crisis of our Age

The following excerpt is from the book "The Crisis of our Age" by sociology professor P.A. Sorokin (1889-1968). I scanned it because I find it pertinent as a critique of era, although he wrote it more than 70 years ago. Thing have gone from bad to worse.

TRAGIC DUALISM, CHAOTIC SYNCRETISM, QUANTITATIVE COLOSSALISM, AND DIMINISHING CREATIVENESS OF THE CONTEMPORARY SENSATE CULTURE

I. THE CULTURE OF MAN'S GLORIFICATION AND DEGRADATION

When any socio-cultural system enters the stage of its disintegration, the following four symptoms of the disintegration appear and grow in it: first, the inner self-contradictions of an irreconcilable dualism in such a culture; second, its formlessness - a chaotic syncretism of undigested elements taken from different cultures; third, a quantitative colossalism - mere size and quantity at the cost of quality; and fourth, a progressive exhaustion of its creativeness in the field of great and perennial values. In addition to all the signs of disintegration discussed previously, these four symptoms of disintegration have already emerged and are rampant in this contemporary sensate culture of ours.

Our culture in its present sensate phase is full of irreconcilable contradictions. It proclaims equality of all human beings; and it practices an enormous number of intellectual, moral, mental, economic, political, and other inequalities. It proclaims "the equality of opportunity" in theory; in practice it provides practically none. It proclaims "government of the people, for the people, and by the people"; in practice it tends to be more and more an oligarchy or a plutocracy or a dictatorship of this or that faction. It stimulates an expansion of wishes and wants, and it inhibits their satisfaction. It proclaims social security and a decent minimum of living conditions for everyone, even as it is progressively destroying security for all and showing itself incapable of eliminating unemployment or of giving decent conditions to the masses. It strives to achieve the maximum of happiness for the maximum number of human beings, but it increasingly fails in that purpose. It advertises the elimination of group hatreds, while in fact it increasingly seethes with group antagonism of every kind - racial, national, state, religious, class and others. The unprecedented explosion of internal disturbances and wars of the twentieth century is an incontrovertible evidence of that failure. Our culture condemns egotisms of all kinds and boasts of the socialization and humanization of everything and everybody; in reality, it displays unbridled greed, cruelty, and egotism of individuals as well as of groups, beginning with innumerable lobbying and pressure groups and continuing throughout economic, political, occupational, religious, state, family, and other groups. And so on, and so on.

Without attempting to enumerate all the self-contradictions of this culture of ours, let us take, instead, what appears to be its central self-contradiction. This consists in the fact that 'our culture simultaneously is a culture of man's glorification and of man's degradation'. On the one hand, it boundlessly glorifies man and extols man-made culture and society. On the other, it utterly degrades the human being and all his cultural and social values. We live in an age which exalts man as the supreme end, and, at the same time, an age which vilifies man and his cultural values endlessly. The "World of Tomorrow" in the New York World's Fair is a flat symbol of one aspect of this tragic dualism; the catastrophe of the present war is a sign of the other.

Never before has man displayed such a genius for scientific discoveries and technological inventions. No previous period can rival the power of contemporary man in the modification of cosmic and biological conditions to suit his needs. At no time before has man been the molder of his own destiny to such an extent as he is now. We live, indeed, in an age of the greatest triumph of human genius.

No wonder, therefore, that we are proud of man. It is not strange that our culture has be come homo-centric, humanitarian, and humanistic 'par excellence'. Man is its glorious center. It makes him "the measure of all things." It exalts him as the hero and the greatest value, not by virtue of his creation by God in God's own image, but in his own right, by virtue of man's own marvelous achievements. It substitutes the religion of humanity for the religions of superhuman deities. It professes a firm belief. in the possibility of limitless progress based on man's ability to control his own destiny, to eradicate all social and cultural evils, and to create an even better and finer world, free from war and bloody strife, from crime, poverty, insanity, stupidity, and vulgarity. In all these respects we live, indeed, in an era of a truly great glorification of man and his culture.

Unfortunately, this dazzling facade is not the only aspect of our cultural and social edifice. Like the mythical double-faced Janus, it has another - and more sinister - face, the face of a great degradation and de-humanization of man; of debasement, distortion, and desecration of all social and cultural values. If the dazzling facade glorifies man as a divine hero, the second face strips him of anything divine and heroic. If one face of our culture shows it as a creative flame of human genius rising higher and higher - 'per aspera ad astra' - to the eternal world of absolute values, its second face sneers at such a self-delusion and drags it down to the level of a mere reflexological ant hill, to the mere "adjustment mechanism" of human ants and bees.

We do not like to parade this sinister face of our culture; it is not exhibited at any World's Fair; and yet it is as certain as any solid fact can be. Even more, in the course of time, as we have seen, it is appearing more and more frequently, and progressively tends to overshadow the sunny aspect of our cultural world. A mere glance at the main compartments of our culture will be sufficient to show this fact.

To begin with, take 'contemporary science' and ask how it defines man. The current answers are, as we have seen, that man is a variety of electron-proton complex; or an animal closely related to the ape or monkey; or a reflex mechanism; or a variety of stimulus-response relationships; or a psychoanalytical bag filled either by libido or basic physiological drives; or a mechanism controlled mainly by digestive and economic needs. Such are the current physico-chemical, biological, and psycho-social conceptions of man. No doubt man is all these things. But do any or all of these conceptions completely explain the essential nature of man? Do they touch his most fundamental properties which make him a creature unique in the world? Most of the definitions which pretend to be especially scientific rarely, if ever, raise such questions. They pass them by.

We are so accustomed to such views that we of ten fail to see the utter depreciation of man and his culture implied in them. Instead of depicting man as a child of God, and a bearer of the highest values in this empirical world, and for this reason sacred, they strip him of anything divine and great and reduce him to a mere inorganic or organic complex. Thus is contemporary science permeated by the tragic dualism discussed earlier. With one hand it creates all the real values that increase man's 'summum bonum'; with the other it invents cannon and bombers, poisonous gas and tanks, that kill man and destroy his culture.

Like science 'contemporary philosophy' has also contributed its share to the degradation of man and his culture: first, in the form of the growth of mechanistic materialism for the last few centuries; second, in the debasement of the truth itself either to a mere matter of convenience (Mach, Poincare, Petzold, Richard Avenarius, K. Pearson, William James, John Dewey, and other representatives of positivism, neo-positivism, pragmatism, operationalism, instrumentalism, logical positivism, and other similar philosophical movements) or to a mere fictional and arbitrary "convention" (the philosophies of 'als ob' or "as if"); or to a mere "ideology," "derivation," or "rationalization" as a by-product of economic, sensual, or other drives and residues (Marxianism, Paretianism, Freudianism); and third, in making the organs of the senses the main and often the only criterion of truth. Materialism identifies man and cultural values with matter; for this reason it cannot help stripping man and his values of any exceptional and unique position in the world. Truth reduced to a mere convenience or convention destroys itself. In the maze of contradictory conveniences and conventions, thousands of contradictory "truths" appear, each as valid as the others. For this reason the very difference between the true and the false disappears.

With the degradation of truth, man is debased from the sublime seeker after truth as an absolute value to that of the hypocrite who uses "truth" as a beautiful smoke screen for the justification of his impulses and lust, profit and greed. In so far as modern philosophy propagated these conceptions, it has its own poisonous aspect and contributes to the depreciation of man and of truth itself.

If we turn to contemporary fine arts, they display the same dualism, with the same contradictory consequences for man as well as for an itself. Its sunny side is well known and needs no comment. Its ominous aspect manifests itself, as we have seen, first, in debasing the socio-cultural value of an to a mere means of sensual enjoyment in the terms of "wine, women and laxatives"; and second, in its pathological exhibitionism of the negative aspects of man and of culture.

If we are to believe contemporary art in its representation, we can hardly have any respect or admiration for man and his culture. To this extent, contemporary art is an art of man's debasement and vilification. In being so, it debases itself and prepares its own downfall as a great cultural value.

Finally, a similar dualism is exhibited by contemporary 'ethics and law'. These consist, on the one hand, of the system of Christian ethics created in the past and inherited by us, and on the other, of the more modern utilitarian and hedonistic rules of conduct. We have seen that these modern systems have sown the seeds of the degradation of man, as well as of moral values themselves.

Similar dualism pervades our minds, our conduct, and our social relationships. We aspire for happiness; and prepare wretchedness for ourselves. The more we try to improve our well-being, the more we lose our peace of mind, without which no happiness is possible. Instead of being serene, at peace with God, the world and his fellow men, contemporary man is a boiling pot of desires that are at war with one another, and with those of his fellows. He is torn between them, cannot control them, and is in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction and restlessness. We aspire for the maximum of material comfort; and we condone privation and misery. We eulogize love, and cultivate hatred. We proclaim man sacred, and slaughter him pitilessly. We proclaim peace, and wage war. We believe in cooperation and solidarity, and multiply competition, rivalry, antagonism, and conflicts. We stand for order, and plot revolutions. We boast of the guaranteed rights of man, of the sanctity of constitutions and covenants; and we deprive man of all rights and break all constitutions and pacts. And so on, endlessly. The tragic dualism of our culture is indisputable and is widening from day to day. Its soul is hopelessly split. It is a house divided against itself. The dark Demon in it is at relentless war with its Good Genius. And the Demon of Destruction has been progressively rising over its creative Angel. Hence the spread of the sinister blackout of our culture.

2. CULTURE OF CHAOTIC SYNCRETISM

An emergence of a chaotic syncretism in a given integrated culture is another general symptom of its disintegration. The classical example is given by the overripe sensate culture of Greece and Rome. In that stage it became, in the words of Tacitus, "the common sink into which everything infamous and abominable flows like a torrent from all quarters of the world." All these currents were undigested and unintegrated into one unity. The result was that the overripe sensate Greco-Roman culture turned indeed into a "common sink" or a dumping place for the most divergent elements of the most different cultures.

The reason for such a syncretism as a sign of the dis-integration is evident. Any great cultural supersystem is, as we have seen, a unity integrated into one consistent whole by meaningful and causal ties. Such an integrated unity were ideational and idealistic mediaeval cultures, permeated by Christianity; such a unity has also been our sensate supersystem in the centuries of its emergence and growth. It had its sensate values strong and not ground into dust. It enriched itself by the elements of many cultures, whether Greco-Roman or Arabic, Byzantine or Egyptian, Oriental or native American. But it ingested from all these cultures only such values as did not contradict its soul, and these ingested elements it modified and digested. The irreconcilable and indigestible elements of other cultures it rejected. In this sense it was, like any great culture, highly selective and discriminatory. At the present moment it is in a very different situation. Its values have been, as we have seen, atomized and ground into dust. Further on, created by its own genius, the new means of communication and contact put it into the closest interaction with practically all the cultures of all mankind. Their elements in all their astounding variety began to flow into it increasingly. Indian tobacco-smoking, Turkish baths, coffee- and tea-drinking, polo-playing, pyjama-wearing, drug-addiction, and Oriental religious philosophy, all took root in our culture. Elements of the cultures of the Australian bushmen, of Melanesian and Eskimo tribes, as well as of all historical peoples of the present and of the past - Egyptian and Hindu, Chinese and Mayan, Greek and Roman, Turkish and Persian, infiltrated the sensate culture of the West and did so in ever-increasing currents. Like an organism, any culture at the period of its virility and strength can digest a great many foreign elements. Bur even for the strongest organism there is a limit to this digestion, and this limit becomes progressively narrower with the advancement of age and the decline of health. Similarly, there is a limit to the digestion of heterogeneous elements by any cultural system, and this limit narrows with the advance of the culture to its overripe phase. When the limit is passed, an increasingly richer stream of heterogeneous elements brought into such a culture will remain less and less digested. More and more they will distort the style, the soul, and the body of the host culture and finally will help its disintegration. That result is exactly what we observe now in contemporary Western culture. Its richness and variety are astounding. Everything and anything can be found in it. We can find all the existing and imaginable styles in the fine arts, from the primitive and archaic up to the ultramodern and classic. All the mores, manners, moral rules, taboos, customs, codes, ethical systems, codes of law, of all the peoples and tribes are here, living side by side. All the religious systems, indeed all manner of magical beliefs, are present in it. Our network of communication puts us in contact with them all; and all of them find somehow their devotees and apostles among us. So also with all philosophies. Again, all the scientific theories of the most different type, of the past and of the present, are in our possession and have their agents and followers. And so also with our social institutions: from the family to political regimes of all kinds, modeled along the most different patterns, they are functioning among us. Finally, in our fashions and fads of dress, courting, witticisms, up to the fashions in any field of culture, we run within a couple of decades from one possible extremity to another, from an imitative "archaic and primitive and caveman" fashion to that of classic, romantic, Gothic and baroque, vertical and horizontal, "monastic" and "whoopee," "peaceful" and "military," and so on, in endless variety of all forms and patterns. The area of the Western culture and the area of our minds that reflect it are turned into a "World's Fair" where anything can be found, where the most heterogeneous values incessantly parade one after another. Western culture has ceased to be a selective organism. Instead, it has become a vast cultural dumping place where everything is dumped, without any restriction. It has lost its own physiognomy, its own soul, and its discriminative ability.

This all-pervading syncretism is reflected in our mentality, in our beliefs, ideas, tastes, aspirations, and convictions. The mind of contemporary man is likewise a dumping place of the most fantastic and diverse bits of the most fragmentary ideas, beliefs, tastes, and scraps of information. From Communism to Catholicism, from Beethoven or Bach to the most peppy jazz and the cat-calls of crooning; from the fashion of the latest movie or best-seller to the most opposite fashion of another movie or best-seller - all coexist somehow in it, jumbled side by side, without any consistency of ideas, or beliefs, or tastes, or styles. Today the cultural best-seller is 'The Life of Christ'; tomorrow, 'Trader Horn'; the next day, 'Gone With the Wind'; then a psychoanalytical biography of Napoleon; then some concoction of archaism with classicism; of eroticism with sanctity; of the 'Four Square Gospel' with 'Why We Behave Like Human Beings'; of the gospel of Communism with that of Theosophy, crowned with all the disjointed variety of our "Information, Please," and other intellectual chewing gums.

Viewed from this standpoint, our intellectual life is but an incessant dance of jitterbugs. Its spineless and disjointed syncretism pervades all our social and mental life. Our education consists mainly in pumping into the mind-area of students the most heterogeneous bits of information about everything. Our newspapers and magazines reflect the same syncretism elevated into a dogma of "all the news" sprinkled by the sensationalism of the yellow press. Our science changes its hypotheses every decade or year. Our ethics is a jungle of discordant norms and opposite values. Our religious belief is a wild concoction of a dozen various "Social Gospels," diversified by several beliefs of Christianity diluted by those of Marxianism, Democracy, and Theosophy, enriched by a dozen vulgarized philosophical ideas, corrected by several scientific theories, peacefully squatting side by side with the most atrocious magical superstitions. So also are our philosophies and Weltanschauung, our fine arts and tastes. With an equal enthusiasm we accept the Gregorian Chants and "The St. Louis Blues"; the Bible and the erotic novel; behaviorism and the Neo-Thomism; the 'Divine Comedy' and 'Paradise Lost', and 'Esquire' and 'The Grapes of Wrath'; psycho-analysis and the 'Confessions of St. Augustine'; jitterbugs and classical dance. And so on. All this lies side by side, undigested and unintegrated into any unity.

This jumble of diverse elements means that the soul of our sensate culture is broken down. It appears to have lost its self-confidence. It begins to doubt its own superiority and primogeniture. It ceases to be loyal to itself. It progressively fails to continue to be its own sculptor, to keep unimpaired the integrity and sameness of its style, that takes in only what agrees with it and rejects all that impairs it. Such a culture loses its individuality. It becomes formless, shapeless, styleless. As such, it becomes less and less distinguishable in the ocean of cultural phenomena as a striking and magnificent individuality. When it reaches this stage, its creative career is finished. From the creative actor of history, it passes into a museum of historical survivals. ('Dynamics', Vol. IV, chap. 5)

3· THE CULTURE OF QUANTITATIVE COLOSSALISM

A fairly uniform symptom of disintegration in any great supersystem of culture is the substitution of quantitative colossalism for a sublime quality; of glittering externality for inner value; of a show for a substance. So it was in the past, and so it is at present.
The Greece of the most creative period of the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C., compared with the later Hellenic world and the still later Roman world, gives us a classical example. In the Greece of this creative period its temples, including the Parthenon, were of very modest size; its statues and drawings were moderate also. Its music was simple and expressed itself with few instruments, whether of the great Terpander time or later on. Its literature, its Academies and Lyceums were modest in number, size, and production. Nothing was measured by the number of copies sold or by the size of valuable objects. The size of the Greek societies was small and limited. Everything great was great by its inner value, but not by quantity or external show. Sublime quality, not a quantitative colossalism, determined whether the value was great or mediocre, positive or negative.

When we pass to the Hellenic and later Roman periods, the picture changes. Sublime quality deteriorated. Its place Was taken by ever-bigger quantity, and the greater the colossalism of the quantity, the better it began to be thought.
[...]
Our sensate culture of today appears to be exactly in the same position. External glitter and quantitative colossalism already reign supreme in it. "The bigger the better" is its motto: hence our enormous skyscrapers, monuments, temples, school and college buildings, railroad stations, up to the monsters of Radio City and World's Fairs. Quantitative colossalism tends to become the criterion of any great value. The best business firms are those which are hugest. The society leaders are those who are richest. The greatest empires are those which are most monstrous. The largest theaters become the best. The best show is that which attracts most people. So also the best preachers, teachers, orators, professors, ministers, and what not. The greatest scholar is he who is paid the highest salary or has the largest audience. The greatest university is that which is largest. The masterpieces of literature or art, philosophy or science, religion or politics are the best sellers bought by millions. "The biggest firm," "the largest circulation," "the biggest market of second-hand tires in the world" is our highest recommendation. Anything which is not big quantitatively, but is merely the finest in quality, tends to pass unnoticed. The very standards of fine and vulgar, good and bad, masterful and clumsy, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong, wise and smart, tend to disappear as qualitative standards and tend to be replaced by quantitative criteria. Even in science "quantitative standards" drive out thought, inspiration, intuition, and deep qualitative analysis. Pliny's "Not being able to make our values beautiful, we make them huge," is as applicable to our culture as to the sensate culture of Rome. Now, as then, the quality of the values tends to be in inverse proportion to their quantitative colossalism and external glitter. (P.A. Sorokin, "The Crisis of our Age" (1941), pp.241-255.)

Mats Winther
http://home7.swipnet.se/~w-73784/