The Crisis of our Age

[M Winther]

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. Things 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 become 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 often 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/