Supplemental Essay: Decadence in Western Culture

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Decadence in society today

Introduction

To recap: As I said above, Paglia, Barzun, and other commentators suggest that western culture is currently stuck in a long-term trend of social and cultural decadence. Decadence aligns with a sense that society seems at an impasse, for example when an idyllic past is seemingly replaced by a grim, dystopian present and future. 

 

A lot of that feeling of impasse is the result of anxiety generated by the freedoms enjoyed by western culture. Modern freedoms remove cultural guardrails and lead to anxiety. Anxiety, in turn, can express itself in two opposing trends: Ego expansion into sadomasochism or ego contraction into anomie. Decadence is the cultural expression of that process, resulting in two basic trends:

• Ego expansion results in decadent victims and rebels who clamor and complain of the unfairness of life; 

• Ego contraction results in decadent dropouts who disengage and retreat into an attitude of non-participation in life in order to still their anxiety.

 

In other words, the five-position spectrum for modern anxiety starts with this:

Masochism <- Conventional one-sided extraversion -> Anomie <- Conventional one-sided introversion -> Sadism

 

and changes to this:

Decadent victimhood <- Conventional one-sided extraversion -> Decadent disengagement <- Conventional one-sided introversion -> Decadent rebellion

 

These trends certainly seem to exist in contemporary western culture; so where do we go from here? Is western culture in an irreversible slide into fragmentation and social collapse, or can we bounce back from the modern attitude of cynicism and nihilism?

 

Types of decadence

According to Jacques Barzun, history demonstrates that there are both small decadences and big decadences. In small decadences, culture grinds to a halt temporarily while cynics and agents of change reject the old ways and clear the ground for new ideals and new growth. In big decadences, on the other hand, Barzun says that "not enough new ideas, no vitalizing hopes, emerge, and civilization falls apart in growing disorder, mounting frustration, and brainless destruction."[35]

 

Writing in 1989, Barzun says that people today are disillusioned with many of the cultural institutions that make up modern civilization--government, religion, morality, social intercourse, language, the arts, and public hope. He says, "There is no doubt that regarding the outer shell or container of civilization, which is the state, all our efforts tend against aggregation and toward disintegration." So the question then becomes "whether the events we are witnessing are preparing another open and level ground for a reawakened animal faith and the creation of undreamed-of new things, or whether on the contrary our sullen doings have reached repetition in futility."[36] Barzun inventories the state of western culture's main institutions and finds them either in a state of retreat or actively working to tear down the icons and ideas of previous times.[37]

 

Collectivism vs individualism

Looking at the question through the lens of the collectivism-versus-individualism dichotomy that I discussed at the start of this supplemental essay: If western society is tending toward "disintegration," then it could probably benefit from a bit more collectivism with the aim of building more consensus around some core social values; the result would be a degree of "recollectivization" of an increasingly fragmented culture. On the other hand we also obviously value our freedoms, independence, and individuality, and we wouldn't want to lose those things entirely in the process of building social consensus. So the key would be to avoid extremes and try to find some kind of middle path.

 

Taking the two sides separately:

 

Collectivism

Collectivism can be a good thing. As I mentioned at the start of this supplemental essay, traditionally humanity lived in collective tribal and village settings. In modern times government tends to play a collectivist role, using the tools of mass communication.

 

But the experience of the world wars shows that too much assimilation and collectivization can lead to mass movements and a compliant population, which can then become a dangerous tool in the hands of demagogues. It can lead to a state of affairs where millions lay down their lives for a political cause or national flag without questioning what their sacrifice is gaining them.

 

Even in the present there are times when the government and its proxies try to use the tools of mass communication and marketing to push a centralized message or value that they think would benefit the population and lead to a greater degree of social cohesion. But excessive centralization and oversight can lead to excesses or abuses, resulting in renewed public cynicism and loss of trust.

 

Abuses occur when government engages in social engineering by micromanaging the media, corporate, and academic sectors, which are happy to curry government support and funding by providing justification and enforcement for the government's values. The media, corporate, and academic sectors turn into gatekeepers for government social policy and become clogged with administrators monitoring speech and interactions between workers or between students as well as up and down hierarchies, etc. At that point it all starts turning into a zero-sum game: As one government-backed value becomes ubiquitous, competing ideas and narratives are swept aside or even declared illegal.

 

For example, modern western feminism began with the Suffragettes who lobbied for equal constitutional and legal rights around 1905-1928. Subsequent "waves" of feminism over the last 50 years have worked on dismantling various social structures and attitudes that supported patriarchal attitudes and privileged men over women. 

 

However, as I described in the "Sexuality versus Spirituality" section, this process has gone so far that some analysts say that the younger generations of boys and men are underperforming relative to girls and women. (See the book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling by Richard Reeves, published 2022.) The problem is that femininity and masculinity are dichotomous opposites; when government is enlisted to back one side or the other, then it can turn into a zero-sum game. Boosting the role of women in society can turn into a process of undermining the social and support structures for men in society. 

 

To sum up: Government works in favor of healthy collectivism, and it's reasonable for government to step in and address inequities that arise in societies. But government isn't a surgical scalpel; it's more of a blunt instrument. As I said above, excessive centralization and oversight can lead to excesses or abuses, resulting in renewed public cynicism and loss of trust. When government puts its thumb on the scale in favor of one group, the result can be devastating for other groups. As I'll argue below, government should aim for a healthy balance of groups with diverse and conflicting views, as opposed to choosing winners and losers and playing zero-sum games.

 

Individualism

Freedoms, independence, and individuality are clearly good things; they are the battle cry that western culture has rallied around since the world wars. However, taken to the extreme they can lead to anarchy. I have said repeatedly in this blog that freedom can result in anxiety and unhappiness. In the chase for individuality and personal values and meaning, social groups can fragment and individuals can lose their connection to the larger mass of humanity.

 

For example, the hippie culture of the 1960s in the US arose out of post-war prosperity, which led to a burst of social experimentation. At first there were communities and movements to explore alternative lifestyles such as communes (for example, the "back-to-the-land" movement), counterculture communities (for example, Haight-Ashbury), academic groups to explore psychedelics (Timothy Leary's Harvard Project), social groups (Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters), cultural events (Woodstock), etc. But freedom has no natural endpoint; in a matriarchal environment of freedom, change, and chaos, the patriarchal influences of order and structure appear as daemonic. When larger communities attempted to set rules for communal living, they fragmented over rules and regulations and subdivided into ever smaller sub-cultures; the sub-cultures then spun out of control and dissipated in turn. The result was atomization, burnout, and a slide into hedonism and mass consumption of drugs for pure recreation and escapism. The results ranged from murder at the Altamont Free Concert in 1969 to tens of millions of deaths from the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and beyond.[38]

 

In her book Sex, Art, and American Culture Camille Paglia sums it up as follows: "The Sixties attempted a return to nature that ended in disaster. The gentle nude bathing and playful sliding in the mud at Woodstock were a short-lived Rousseauist dream. My generation, inspired by the Dionysian titanism of rock, attempted something more radical than anything since the French Revolution. We asked: why should I obey this law? and why shouldn't I act on every sexual impulse? The result was a descent into barbarism. We painfully discovered that a just society cannot, in fact, function if everyone does his own thing."[39]

 

When taken too far, freedom, independence, and individuality can have disastrous consequences for society.

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Chasing identity

Perhaps the worst of all possible worlds occurs when the government--normally a force for collectivism--sets itself the task of championing freedom, independence, and individuality. The result can be a society that quickly fragments and implodes.

 

The end of the Cold War and a new wave of prosperity in the 1980s led to renewed social experimentation in the 1990s and beyond. The advent of the internet allowed people from all over the world to congregate on-line based on shared interests; but this also allowed for groups to "silo" themselves into autonomous islands based on those interests. And much like the hippies of the 1960s, the "siloed" groups fragmented and reformed based on increasingly esoteric interests.

 

For example, gay rights rightfully found a new level of acceptance and support in the 1990s after the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s ebbed. But with the advent of the internet, the acceptance of gay rights resulted in new attitudes toward sexual freedom and led to the creation of a myriad of different genders, sexual orientations, sexual identities, fetishes, etc.

 

Academia supported these developments by developing DEI programs (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs) based on affirmative action, intersectionality theories, gender and sexual orientation theories, etc. Intersectionality theories and DEI programs claimed to provide a scientific foundation for additional "siloing" of US society into identity groups based on perceived privilege versus victimization. 

 

Due to the close ties between government and academia and the perception of scientific validity, government increasingly embraced DEI programs and drew media and corporate America into the fold as well. Government acknowledged and recognized the claims of ever-smaller groups of aggrieved identities, promulgated rules on how to address those groups, hire them, provide services for them, etc. 

 

But as frequently happens, the process started turning into a zero-sum game: Competing ideas and narratives were swept aside or even banned. Traditional narratives about larger commonalities that previously united the country were increasingly suppressed. Religion, morals, science, etc. were only deemed valid insofar as they supported the narratives of small identity groups. Experts hunkered down and only pronounced within small niches, afraid of tackling larger issues that might result in conflict with the orthodoxy of the moment or step on the toes of an identity group.

 

Camille Paglia was a college professor and saw how this process corrupted academia. In her book Provocations she says, “Universities are always talking about diversity, by which they mean more women, more blacks, more Hispanics--but they never mean intellectual diversity. [...] It is our responsibility as teachers to articulate the other side--there should never be a party line in a classroom. Too few teachers these days try to ensure that the classroom is a neutral arena of discourse. In fact, many professors claim that it's their obligation to change the world. They'll say things like, 'Yes, I'm trying to change minds,' or 'The purpose of the university is to effect change in society.' Humanities professors all over the country have been saying that openly for at least 25 years. Well, I don't agree with that at all. A professor is there to help students use the mind in a detached, objective way to analyze society and culture. The moment you attempt to convert, you've sold out and become a missionary or ideologue.”[40]

 

The result is elitism and dependence on authority. Paglia herself is a 1960s-vintage anti-establishment left-winger; she asks, "Why has the Democratic party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics, and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills)... Affluent middle-class Democrats now seem to be complacently servile toward authority and automatically believe everything party leaders tell them. Why? Is it because the new professional class is a glossy product of generically institutionalized learning? Independent thought and logical analysis of argument are no longer taught. Elite education in the U.S. has become a frenetic assembly line of competitive college application to schools where ideological brainwashing is so pandemic that it's invisible. The top schools, from the Ivy League on down, promote 'critical thinking,' which sounds good but is in fact just a style of rote regurgitation of hackneyed approved terms (‘racism, sexism, homophobia') when confronted with any social issue. The Democratic brain has been marinating so long in those clichés that it's positively pickled."[41]

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Academia and government aren't wrong to protect the rights of small vulnerable groups. However, the new progressive frameworks are problematic. Modern social issues and the "soft sciences" aren't amenable to prognostication and exploitation in the same manner as the "hard sciences." Intersectionality, gender theory, DEI, etc. reek of "scientism" in that they provide overly simplistic scientific interpretations of complex social problems. Historian Jacques Barzun warns against using scientism to turn everything into overly simplified mechanistic, clockwork systems. He says, "Scientism is the fallacy of believing that the method of science must be used on all forms of experience and, given time, will settle every issue." Barzun cites the example of Karl Marx, who tried to turn politics into a science: "Infatuated with the kudos of science, he persuaded himself and his millions of followers in and out of the Soviet Union that he had at last formulated the mechanics of history and could predict the future scientifically."[42]

 

The eradication of traditional narratives and social support structures and their replacement with the questionable "scientism" of intersectionality, gender theory, DEI, and so on increasingly left many people rudderless and unsure where they fit in. To the extent that whole communities didn't fit neatly into the intersectionality and DEI frameworks or were in fact penalized by them, society started generating increasing numbers of decadent rebels, victims, and dropouts. 

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In her book Provocations Camille Paglia sums it up as follows:  "Sixties leftism, despite its claims of inclusiveness, disintegrated into the separatism of identity politics, with ghettoizing reclassifications and hypersensitive divisions by race, gender, and sexual orientation. The Sixties code of 'do your own thing' encouraged individualism but produced fragmentation."[43]

 

It continues into the present: No longer able to identify with or enunciate any narratives that they might have in common with others, the younger generations today often speak of evaluating the "authenticity" of public figures as their guide. They make "authenticity" sound like some kind of north star guiding them through life, but it often amounts to little more than gut instinct and personal sympathy. For many, "authenticity" means playing the victim and expressing outrage. 

 

As a result, young people spill out across the internet and latch on to random influencers and podcasters who seem sympathetic. It's not a very sound foundation for society; it leaves the younger generations at the mercy of ideologues, frauds, manipulators, and demagogues, who know how to appeal to the desire for "authenticity" and sympathies of gullible young people. Some of the biggest podcasters and influencers on the internet in terms of audience size are conspiracy theorists: They claim to seek the answers to all of life's mysteries and problems, but in reality they are just feeding on their audience's fear, bigotry, and outrage. As the old joke goes: "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made."

 

Remedies for decadence

Jacques Barzun: Decadence in bureaucracy and administration

I said that decadence aligns with a sense that society seems at an impasse. In The Culture We Deserve historian Jacques Barzun looks at the problem in terms of western culture and its institutions: They are stuck in place and ineffectual. He says, "What is dying out is the individualism and high art of the Renaissance, the fervor of the Reformation, the hopes of liberalism, the zest of the free and patriotic nation-state." By way of a remedy he suggests, "What is wanted is an open conspiracy of genuine Young Turks who will turn their backs on analysis and criticism and reinvent--say--the idea of the university, and show what it can do; who, seeing that bureaucracy is inevitable, will rethink the art of administration and make it work. And when the energies of reconstruction revivify the landscape, the fine arts will spontaneously mirror the change, show a new face, and the public, enheartened, will rejoice in the new life."[44]

 

New technologies are constantly coming on-line; the world is already very different from when Barzun wrote The Culture We Deserve in 1989. The internet, artificial intelligence, advances in space exploration, etc. are revolutionizing existing institutions and opening new frontiers for development. So perhaps Barzun's ideas will be facilitated by technological advances.

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Camille Paglia: Decadence in modern academia

Camille Paglia was a college professor, and she has written quite a bit about the causes and effects of decadence in modern academia. Across the years she has highlighted a number of problems with academia ranging from adoption of French post-structuralism and the careerism and bureaucracy of academics to the sheltered attitudes of modern students who demand that college administrators protect them from any idea or action by others that might make them uncomfortable. The following are a couple ideas taken from her book Provocations that focus on education and the courses of study offered at colleges and universities. She mentions three problems in particular:

 

1) Abandonment of historical surveys and classics courses: Back in the 1960s and 1970s students complained about coursework that focused on the history of western culture and the writings of "dead white males"; they said it had no relevance to modern times. In the name of relevance and "presentism," those courses were largely discarded and the result was "a relaxing of academic methods and demands and a proliferation of courses oriented toward the present. Popular culture has entered the classroom as teaching tool as well as subject."[45] On the downside, it also meant that students began graduating without any awareness of the history and formative ideas behind western culture.

 

2) Multiculturalism & siloing of departments: In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement and labor activism for migrant workers prompted colleges to adopt multiculturalism as a way to explore other cultures. But that meant separating out the cultures and creating separate departments for each, which encouraged "siloing" of the fields: "[N]ew highly politicized departments and programs were created virtually overnight--without the incremental construction of foundation and superstructure that had gone, for example, into the long development of the modern English department. The end result was a further balkanization in university structure, with each area governed as an autonomous fiefdom and with its ideological discourse frozen at the moment of that unit's creation."[46]

 

The new departments brought with them a leftist frame of reference, given their origin in the civil rights and labor movements. Paglia says, "Administrators wanted these programs and fast--to demonstrate the institution's 'relevance' and to head off outside criticism or protest that could hamper college applications and the influx of desirable tuition dollars. Basically, administrators threw money at these programs and let them find their own way. [...] I maintain, from my dismayed observation at the time, that these new add-on programs were rarely if ever founded on authentic scholarly principles; they were public relations gestures meant to stifle criticism of a bigoted past."[47]

 

The "siloing" of academic departments resulted in the graduation of students with niche specialties and no consciousness of the larger flow of history and culture: "Today's campus political correctness can ultimately be traced to the way those new programs, including African-American and Native American studies, were so hastily constructed in the 1970s, a process that not only compromised professional training in those fields over time but also isolated them in their own worlds and thus ultimately lessened their wider cultural impact. [...] The ideology of those new programs and departments, predicated on victimology, has scarcely budged since the 1970s. This is a classic case of the deadening institutionalization and fossilization of once genuinely revolutionary ideas."[48]

 

3) Popular culture: As I said above, the abandonment of historical surveys and classics courses was accompanied by the introduction of popular culture into the classroom. Paglia says that popular culture, TV, and the internet have won. But they only provide staccato images with quick editing and jumps between images and subjects. There is no continuity or context, no history, no larger understanding of art. It's just passive observation of material to shock or titillate. "Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. [...] The new generation, raised on TV and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture."[49] Paglia says that students increasingly "cannot sense context and thus become passive to the world, which they do not see as an arena for action."[50]

 

To sum up: All of these issues--abandonment of history courses, siloing of academic disciplines, passive consumption of culture--lead to decadent withdrawal into a bubble of passive perception. When people have no context or history with which to understand the world around them, they disengage and become passive consumers. As Paglia said, they don't see the world as "an arena for action." But that leads to the problems I mentioned earlier: Sadomasochism and rebellion, or anomie and disengagement. Paglia says, "America is presently suffering from an effete, cynical pseudointellectuality in the universities, a manic rotation of superficial news cycles in the media, and a generalized hypochondria in the professional middle class, as shown by its preoccupation with stress-related ailments and disorders, buffered by tranquilizers. From a distance, this affluent society, with its avalanche of high-tech toys, must look as if it can barely survive the anxieties of freedom."[51]

 

Paglia suggests remedies for these problems. Paglia says that colleges should recreate a framework of context and history for our culture by embracing multidisciplinary studies: The aim is to foster engagement, agency, and ownership of the culture in graduating students. Thus:

 

1) Multidisciplinary studies to remedy siloing and lack of context: Paglia says, "[E]ducators must first turn away from the sprawling cafeteria menu of over-specialized electives and return to broad survey courses based in world history and culture, proceeding chronologically from antiquity to modernism. Students desperately need a historical framework to understand both past and present."[52]

 

2) Teach archaeology to make multiculturalism more multidisciplinary: Concerning multiculturalism, Paglia says that the desire to learn about other cultures is praiseworthy, but the subject should be taught in a multidisciplinary fashion, not in siloed college departments. For example, she says that multiculturalism can be taught in the context of archeology, which is used to explore the historical roots of culture. "First, archaeology gives perspective, a vivid sense of the sweep of history--too often lacking in today's dumbed-down curriculum. Second, archaeology shows the fragility of culture. It illustrates how even the most powerful of nations succumbed to chaos and catastrophe or to the slow obliteration of nature and time. [...] Third, archaeology introduces the young to the scientific method, presented in the guise of a mystery story. Greek philosophy and logic, revived at the Renaissance and refined in the seventeenth century, produced the archaeological technique of controlled excavation, measurement, documentation, identification, and categorization. Modern archaeology is one of the finest fruits of the Western Enlightenment."[53]

 

3) Teach iconography to make popular culture more multidisciplinary: Popular culture has its positive features. Paglia says, "Creative energy is flowing instead into animation, video games, and cyber-tech, where the young are pioneers. [...] Caricature is our ruling mode."[54] So the goal should be to give popular culture more context and encourage engagement instead of passive consumption. Paglia calls for popular culture to be taught in the form of "iconography"--images taught in the context of art history. Paglia says, "Education must strengthen and discipline the process of visual attention. Today's young have a modest, flexible, chameleonlike ability to handle or deflect the overwhelming pressure of sensory stimuli, but perhaps at a cost to their sense of personal identity. [...] Iconography requires the observational skills and fine attention to detail of literary New Criticism but sets the work into a larger social context [...] The point is not just to show pictures but to seek a commentary that honors both aesthetics and history."[55]

 

To sum up: A multidisciplinary approach recreates a framework of context and history for western culture with the aim of fostering engagement, agency, and ownership of the culture.

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Religion

Paglia takes much the same approach with regard to religion. An atheist herself, she nonetheless feels that an understanding of religion is required in order to appreciate western culture and arts. She says that each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, is "a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe."[56]

 

She expands on that thought as follows: "All art began as religion, an enterprise born in fear to map and propitiate the mysterious powers of the universe. Religions are complex symbol-systems that use ancient techniques of the oral tradition, such as paradox and metaphor, to convey basic truths about human existence. Today's shallow literary theorists, mired in their own subjectivity, deny there are any universals, but all human beings must confront eternal forces of time, fate, and mortality, which have always been the preoccupation of great art. The sayings of Buddha and the parables of Jesus have universal resonance and should be regarded as foundational to world literature."[57]

 

But Paglia feels that religion has become politicized to the point that there's no longer any common understanding of the subject. She says, "Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West's foundational texts, is dangerously wanting among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the U.S. over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy."[58]

 

Paglia points out that religion has largely been banished from the art world: "With the triumph of avant-garde modernism by the mid-twentieth century, few ambitious young artists would dare to show religious work. Though museum collections are rich with religious masterpieces from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century, major American museums and urban art galleries ignore contemporary religious art--thus ensuring, thanks to the absence of strong practitioners, that it remains at the level of kitsch. And the art world itself has suffered: with deeper themes excised, it slid into a shallow, jokey postmodernism that reduced art to ideology and treated art works as vehicles of approved social messages."[59]

 

Discussion about religion has largely devolved into a political debate: "The Sixties were the breeding ground for the depressingly formulaic political and cultural pattern of the last thirty-five years--a rigid polarization of liberals and conservatives, with each group striking predictable postures and mouthing sanctimonious platitudes. Gradations of political thought have been lost."[60] The result:

 

• "There is vicious mutual recrimination, with believers caricatured as paranoid, apocalyptic crusaders who view America's global mission as divinely inspired, while liberals are portrayed as narcissistic hedonists and godless elitists, relics of the unpatriotic, permissive 1960s."[61] 

• "Conservative Christians deplore the left-wing bias of the mainstream media and the saturation of popular culture by sex and violence and are promoting strategies such as faith-based home-schooling to protect children from the chaotic moral relativism of a secular society."[62] But social fragmentation is already tearing apart western culture; religious self-isolation and withdrawal from community just adds to the problem.

• "Liberals in turn condemn the meddling by Christian fundamentalists in politics, notably in regard to abortion and gay civil rights or the Mideast, where biblical assumptions, it is claimed, have shaped U.S. policy."[63] Liberals "equate believers with the glum morality police or dismiss them as a naïve, unwashed hoi polloi in fly-over country."[64] But liberal zealotry brings its own problems: "[P]rogressive politics has too often become a sterile instrument of government manipulation, as if social-welfare agencies and federal programs could bring salvation."[65]

 

By way of a remedy, Paglia again argues in favor of a multidisciplinary, multicultural approach: "Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat. But [...] I have been calling for nearly two decades for massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum."[66]

 

Paglia argues that "true multiculturalism would make scholarly study of comparative religion the core curriculum of university humanities programs everywhere. No society or civilization can be understood without reference to its religious roots. Every student should graduate with a basic familiarity with the history, sacred texts, codes, rituals, and shrines of the major world religions--Hinduism, Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Islam."[67]

 

Paglia says, "To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion." She continues:

• "Conservatives [...] need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts. [...] If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school--which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy."

• "Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms."

• Paglia concludes, "Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art--whether in marriage or divorce--can reinvigorate American culture."[68]

 

Paglia says, "By juxtaposing multiple belief systems, comparative religion is the true multiculturalism, demonstrating the range and complexity of human societies through history."[69] Obviously, this isn't about forcing beliefs on anyone. Rather, a grounding in world religions helps the student define his own values and find his own place in the world. In this manner comparative religion studies can serve as a "recollectivization" or renewed connection with the community and a way to learn about social narratives and boundaries via a comparative study of the social impact of different religious canons. As Paglia says, "Teaching religion as culture rather than as morality also gives students the intellectual freedom to find the ethical principles at the heart of every religion."[70]

 

Mainstream culture as a tool for engagement

I would suggest that we can also look at mainstream culture in terms of how it engages (or fails to engage) the individual. Decadence is associated with both extreme one-sidedness and anomie: At the start of this supplemental essay I suggested that modern freedoms make it easy for people to either run to extremes (decadent victimhood or rebellion) or to give up and collapse into an attitude of non-participation (decadent disengagement). As I said above, the five-position spectrum for decadence is:

 

Decadent victimhood <- Conventional one-sided extraversion -> Decadent disengagement <- Conventional one-sided introversion -> Decadent rebellion

 

If society wishes to steer people away from decadence, then conventional extraversion and conventional introversion represent the healthy, non-decadent attitudes. They tend to embody common, socially-approved narratives; as such, they represent an investment in society, hence a "recollectivization" and an antidote to alienation of the individual and fragmentation of the community.

 

Conventional extraversion and conventional introversion each represent one side of a dichotomous pair, so they end up being in opposition. That state of opposition provides them with agenda and agency. (The same holds true for the two sides of any other dichotomous pair: conventional femininity versus conventional masculinity, conventional sexuality versus conventional spirituality, conventional collectivism versus conventional individualism, and so on.) Opposition of two sides of a dichotomous pair creates agenda and energy because one side is typically conscious and one side is unconscious. 

 

In his book On the Psychology of the Unconscious psychologist Carl Jung says that the unconscious or "shadow" portion of a dichotomy is a necessary part of the whole: "[T]here is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind. […] Seen from the one-sided point of view of the conscious attitude, the shadow is an inferior component of the personality and is consequently repressed through intensive resistance. But the repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible. The conscious mind is on top, the shadow underneath, and just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites."[71]

 

As I said in the Sensing chapter: When interacting and in the process of centroversion, the two opposite sides of a conventional dichotomous pair remain separate and maintain a degree of tension between themselves but also share energy. Camille Paglia says, "Identity thrives by conflict and opposition."[72] Centroversion is earned by meeting challenges, resolving tension and strife, and gaining new problem-solving skills. This represents a healthy preservation of personal agency and agenda while granting the other party the same in return.

 

So it is important to preserve and encourage competing agendas rather than endorsing one and shouldering out the other in a zero-sum approach. A balanced approach in this manner on the part of society and government would restore the "anchor" of healthy one-sidedness as an alternative to expansion into harmful extremes (decadent rebellion or victimhood) or collapse into anomie (decadent disengagement).

 

The internet

The internet could represent an example of a new technology with the power to engage the individual and lower the prevalence of harmful alienation and decadence in society. The internet represents a force for recollectivization. It provides immediacy, information, and practical resources. People can gather on social media and develop a quick consensus of sorts on breaking issues. It offers participation for dropouts and provides tools to boost the agency of rebels and victims.

 

Of course, it has its negatives. Much like the hippies of the 1960s, people can float around and get siloed into small, esoteric communities. And time spent on-line may come at the expense of socialization in real life. But the internet offers a vast range of possibilities. Healthy alternatives, large media platforms for general discussion of current events, and meet-up groups for socializing in real life exist on-line for those who want them.

 

The internet also provides a measure of immunity to social engineering by the government. As I described above, prior to the internet government could use its legal, fiscal, and funding powers to draw in media and corporations as gatekeepers and effectively freeze out voices that went against the mainstream narrative. But the scope of the internet allows for the creation of alternate channels even when government controls mainstream on-line social media sites. Podcasters and influencers have become alternative sources of information. 

 

The power of the internet became apparent after the 2024 elections. Coming off the COVID-19 mandates of 2021, which were used to justify centralized supervision of information disseminated over the mainstream media, the Biden administration had a fairly high degree of control over much of official media, academia, and the corporate world. In 2024 candidate Trump used alternative social media and podcasters and influencers to outflank candidate Harris; many analysts have said that Trump's use of the internet in this manner was a significant factor in his victory.

 

In much the same fashion, people alienated by mainstream ideology and content can always find routes around official channels on the internet, even if only to commune with other disaffected groups. Alternative media becomes a channel for recollectivization of the disaffected. And if enough people bail out of official media channels and participate in alternative media on the internet, it becomes a warning sign that perhaps society isn't addressing the concerns of a growing cohort of citizens.

 

One major negative of the internet (and of alternative media in particular) is the existence of frauds (conspiracy theorists, demagogues, grifters, and so on) and those who enable them. Up until recently the gatekeepers of social media handled frauds by banning them from large social media platforms and then simply ignoring them, with the aim of starving them of attention. 

 

But the frauds just move to alternative media and, unopposed there, rack up millions of followers over time. Eventually some of the larger podcasters and influencers notice the size of the audience of such frauds and begin to "enable" them: They host the toxic frauds in order to boost their own viewership by providing controversial fare, and they give the frauds a warm reception in order to curry favor with their large following, using the justification that they are "just asking a few questions" of a controversial figure. In this manner conspiracy theorists and demagogues are provided a back door to legitimacy and national exposure by wielding their large audiences strategically.

 

By way of a remedy, I would argue that mainstream media sites should engage toxic ideas and internet frauds earlier, when they first appear, rather than excluding them, ignoring them, and letting them gain large audiences on alternative channels. The internet effectively makes it impossible to gate-keep or cancel; as a result, mainstream media should engage frauds early and debate them in the open with the aim of confronting toxicity with truth. In other words, it's about presenting the public with a spectrum of ideas and letting a consensus develop. If done right, good ideas should crowd out bad ideas. Toxic influencers and their enablers will always be out there, but if they are called out on their bad ideas on a regular basis, it should shine a light on their rip-offs and cost them some audience, and perhaps at a minimum they can be convinced to discard some of the worst of their toxicity. 

 

People should be allowed to say pretty much anything they want. But they should also be called out and identified for who and what they are: They are either truth-tellers, or they are frauds and enablers: Conspiracy theorists, demagogues, grifters, and so on. And then let the public decide for themselves.

 

To sum up: The power of the internet to affect society is still a rather new idea. The Harris campaign was caught unaware by the power of the internet to sway election results as late as November 2024. Society is still learning how to engage with the internet and maximize the positives while minimizing the negatives.

 

Basically the internet signals the end of gatekeepers and simplistic social engineering via mass communication. But that should be a healthy development: As I said above, healthy one-sidedness is promoted by encouraging tension and competition between competing agendas rather than endorsing one agenda and shouldering out others in a zero-sum approach. The availability of multiple competing narratives has the potential to result in less alienation. Of course, the existence of multiple competing narratives requires more work in the form of debate and confrontation, but that's good: Toxic elements can be identified and called out, and competition between otherwise healthy narratives will ideally compel audiences to notice, get engaged, and take a position, leading to healthy one-sidedness and organic development of compromise and consensus.

 

The role of government

What then becomes the role of government when it loses control of the power to set social narratives? Naturally some functions and issues should be handled expeditiously by experts at the level of national government, such as foreign policy, monetary policy, etc. But domestic social policy typically has a direct impact on the daily lives of the citizenry, and it's probably for the good that government loses some power there. Mass communications are a powerful tool, and when government intercedes in social policy it risks disenfranchising everyone who disagrees with the outcome.

 

The internet now allows competing narratives--some good, some bad--to flourish alongside a given mainstream narrative, and the government (and its media and corporate gatekeepers) should facilitate that process rather than fighting it and trying to favor one narrative while ignoring and excluding others. Furthermore, if one takes a dichotomous view of life, then much of the time there is no one right narrative. Social policy issues are more about compromise, which means recognizing the legitimacy of competing narratives. When government allows narratives to compete on a level playing field, it encourages people to practice healthy conventional one-sidedness, to debate, and to participate in the development of the nation's values.

 

This, in turn, becomes a means of combatting modern alienation, decadence, and nihilism. Despite all its faults, most analysts acknowledge that the internet has the power to engage people. If the government can facilitate healthy conventional one-sidedness and debate rather than practice social engineering, then the result should be a healthy, participatory democracy with a range of narratives and voices coexisting and seeking compromise and consensus.

 

Link: Return to Thinking (T)

 

~Posted December 29, 2025

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