Dying Civility and the Rise of Wickedness

As we head into another weekend, I am bringing back a post from last spring.  This is a reflection upon two articles in the Wall Street Journal concerning our changing culture in the West.  I think there is much that we should ponder as we reflect upon the changing shape of our culture. 

How do we present the unchanging, holy truth of God in this rapidly changing world?  The first step is to hold both to unchanging truth as well as to a growing understanding of our changing world.  Denying change is not helpful!

Yesterday I opened the WSJ app on my iPhone to discover two opinion pieces that fit well together.  The first was by Peggy Noonan entitled, "America's Crisis of Character." (April 20, 2012)  The second was by Theodore Dalrymple entitled, "The Ugly Brutishness of Modern Britain." (April 19, 2012)  Both articles got me thinking.  ( I do apologize for the formatting.  It is not you, it is me!)

Before I begin, please understand that I am not some right-wing nut job whose purpose is some political agenda.  While I do agree with Winston Churchill's assessment, "If you are not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative at 40 you have no brain," this is not meant to be a political rant.

Most strong cultures fall not because of outside military intervention.  Instead, they fall because their insides rot out from internal decay.  Then, when faced with a military or economic threat that they would have easily defeated before, they crumble and fall.  Please understand this is not a political warning, but what I take to be a fact of history.  I know that their are many "causes" that lead to any eventual event.  Yet painting with broad brush strokes, I believe internal moral and structural weakness is always one of the biggest "causes" of major cultural collapse.

I will begin with some observations from Noonan.  As she perceptively writes, 

"Now I'd go a step beyond that (Worries about economic issues). I think more and more people are worried about the American character—who we are and what kind of adults we are raising.  Every story that has broken through the past few weeks has been about who we are as a people. And they are all disturbing.

A tourist is beaten in Baltimore. Young people surround him and laugh. He's pummeled, stripped and robbed. No one helps. They're too busy taping it on their smartphones. That's how we heard their laughter. The video is on YouTube along with the latest McDonald's beat-down and the latest store surveillance tapes of flash mobs. Groups of teenagers swarm into stores, rob everything they can, and run out. The phenomenon is on the rise across the country. Police now have a nickname for it: "flash robs."That's just the young, you say. Juvenile delinquency is as old as history.

Let's turn to adults.

Also starring on YouTube this week was the sobbing woman. She's the poor traveler who began to cry great heaving sobs when a Transportation Security Administration agent at the Madison, Wis., airport either patted her down or felt her up, depending on your viewpoint and experience. Jim Hoft of TheGatewayPundit.com recorded it, and like all the rest of the videos it hurts to watch. When the TSA agent—an adult, a middle aged woman—was done, she just walked away, leaving the passenger alone and uncomforted, like a tourist in Baltimore.

In isolation, these stories may sound like the usual sins and scandals, but in the aggregate they seem like something more disturbing, more laden with implication, don't they? And again, these are only from the past week.

The leveling or deterioration of public behavior has got to be worrying people who have enough years on them to judge with some perspective.

Something seems to be going terribly wrong.

Maybe we have to stop and think about this."

Indeed, we should stop and think about these things.  Why are we seeing nuns now packing concealed weapons in Bangor, Maine?  Why are we no longer shocked by outrageous behavior?

Here is where the second article is so helpful.  Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of a physician named Anthony Daniels.  He is discussing the growing lack of civility in modern Britain.  His concern is that British society is increasingly dominated by the aggressive and wicked.  He notices that there is no longer any cultural "stomach" for confronting evil and malicious people.  As he begins with a true story of a 13 year old fellow rider on a bus who throws food at a friend making a mess.  When Daniels confronts him and asks him to pick up the mess, the young teen snarls for him to "Shut the f--- up!"  As Daniels observed,

"Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, in England, come- obscenities.  No one at the bus stop dared say, much less do, anything.  For increasingly, the English are a people who know neither inner nor outer restraint.  They turn to aggression, if not to violence, the moment they are thwarted, even in trifles.  And those who are neither aggressive nor violent are by no means sure that the law will take their side in the event of a fracas.  It is better, or easier, for them to pretend not to notice anything, even if it means living in constant fear."

Wow.  Is that not where we are heading in America?  Is that not where we are in many inner cities?  What has happened?  How did we get to this place?  Daniels maintains, and I almost completely agree with him,

"In other words, practically no behavior is now beyond the pale for the British state.  Sadly, the freedom to behave badly is almost the only freedom valued by, or left to, young Britons.

What has caused this collapse of civility in Britain, which was, within living memory, a civil country?  In my view, it is a demotic version of egalitarianism, allied with multiculturalism.

Even middle-class people now behave in an increasingly uncouth and rough fashion in Britain because they think that by doing so they are expressing their solidarity with the lower reaches of their society.  Imitation, they think, is the highest form of sympathy.  This, of course, is an implicit insult to many of the poor, for poverty and unmannerliness are by no means the same thing.

Multiculturalism is damaging because it denies that, when it comes to culture, there is a better and a worse, a higher and a lower- only a difference.  The word culture is used here in its anthropological sense, that is to mean the totality of behavior that is not directly biological.

Hence any conduct- lying scantily clad in a pool of vomit, for example- is part of a culture, and since all cultures, ex hypothesis, are of equal worth, no one has the moral right to criticize, much less forbid, any kind of behavior.  And if I have to accept your culture, you have to accept mine.  If you don't like it- tough.  Unfortunately, the lowest level of culture is the easiest to reach and, again ex hypothesis, there is no reason to aim higher.

Incivility in Britain thus has a militant or ideological edge to it.  The uncivil British are not uncivilized by default- they actively hate and repudiate civilization."

Again, here is something to actively ponder!  In America we are not quite to this point- at least not in most of our culture.  Yet, is this not what we are teaching our young?  Is this not what we have learned with the recent you-tube sensations that Noonan mentions?  Is this not what is being taught in the "best  colleges" that refuse to teach Western Civilization?

I, for one, am tired of giving into this race to the bottom of culture.  What can we do to change this cultural tide?