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Quote of the Day: The Fragility of Cultural Memory
“Civilization hangs suspended from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their fall collapses the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding.” — Jacob Neusner
Nearly every day I lament, as do others, the cultural and spiritual losses of our country. Those many pillars that have been passed on by our own parents—religion, morality, patriotism, loyalty, democratic principles—are being degraded by the newer generation. Did we fail to pass on these important values? Are these values so fragile that in one or two generations they begin to disappear, wounded and ignored?
Did people not attend Independence Day parades? Did parents not discuss democracy? Did they discuss values at all?
Or have we been betrayed by those who were supposed to be the other guardians of our culture: the universities, liberal religions, secularism, politicians, utopians, and others, who think they can create a better world, seemingly out of unrealistic hopes and dreams?
Unfortunately, the sources of these problems are legion, hard to pinpoint and resolve.
Yet I do see glimmers of hope, and you can be sure that the MSM will not willingly promote them.:
- More and more parents are homeschooling to instill religious values in their children.
- Parents are pushing back on schools whose teachers refuse to make schoolchildren a priority.
- Charter schools are getting the accolades they deserve.
- People are pushing back on twitter storms and refusing to apologize.
- Corporations are refusing to cave in to the Leftist propaganda.
Remember: glimmers of hope can become seeds.
Where are you seeing those signs that lay a path for a brighter future?
Published in Group Writing
The stories and novels that become popular tend to be conservative – conservative not in the political sense but in celebrating the middle-class virtues that lead to personal and community success. The Harry Potter series is wildly popular and overtly conservative. The hero is brave, kind, honest, tenacious, and self-reliant. The villains are clearly evil. There is also a mind-numbed and mind-numbing bureaucracy that refuses to face the coming evil until it’s too late. Moreover, a bureaucrat becomes head mistress of Hogwarts and proceeds to crush every spark of joy out of the students with an ever growing list of regulations.
All so true, @richardfulmer. And the sentence I put in bold: it might be that they don’t make a distinction between good and evil, or that don’t know how. It’s frightening to think about. Thanks.
The youth always grow to learn eventually. In some generation, it will be too late. I believe it has been harder for generations raised on television with two parents working. The parents had to trust schools and teachers much more than they should have when the teachers were heavily unionized and radicalized. Maybe people are catching on to what has been happening. Maybe the next generation will be better civilized.
This is the Quote of the Day. If you have a quotation you would like to share, our sign-up sheet awaits.
Also, if you happen to be inclined, there is also the Group Writing Project. This month, the theme is a very powerful one: If I was a —, I would —.
If you haven’t written much on Ricochet, perhaps it’s time? Usually both projects get us away from politics, and many of these wind up on the Main Feed.
Susan, you’ve struck upon the real challenge we face — and found a great quotation to highlight it.
Ronald Reagan used to say “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” In contrast, Adam Smith famously observed that “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” suggesting that a nation — particularly a great nation — can absorb a lot of damage and continue to function and even prosper. They were both right: a nation can survive a lot of damage. But it can also be set on an ineluctable path to self-destruction if it truly loses its essential principles, though the collapse may take a long time as the nation consumes its accumulated social and economic capital.
It isn’t over yet. Keep talking, keep teaching.
And you do so as well, @henryracette. We are two people who refuse to give up hope and we’ll both keep trying to spread hope around. Thanks.
Susan, this is a very old problem. From Judges 2:
Of course, even before this, in the time of Moses, the Israelites had worshiped the golden calf.
God instructed the Israelites to drive out the other peoples, not to intermarry with them, and not to allow their evil ways to be a bad influence. The Israelites ignored these commands, and suffered the consequences.
I do worry that the ideas of traditional liberalism prevent the transmission of values. I regularly read comments, here and elsewhere, that we need to teach “critical thinking” to young people. To me, this seems based on a naive idea that, left to their own devices, people will naturally adopt a proper system of morality and politics. I see no evidence that this is true, and much evidence to the contrary.
I suspect that the decision to drive religion out of the schools, and out of the public square, is the primary contributor to our social breakdown. This happened in the 1950s and 1960s.
I agree with your analysis, @arizonapatriot. But the consequences may be even more severe than the 60’s. It’s hard to be optimistic, but I try!
Jerry, great comment. I think that, were we to try to name a single prime mover in cultural breakdown, I would choose television. Until television, novelty was… novel. We have a natural wariness of new things, a cautiousness that counter-balanced our natural fascination with the exotic and kept us from casually embracing radical departures from tested ideas. That wariness survived until television began pumping novelty into every living room in America and breaking down our fears, inuring us to change.
But then, so much has changed. Widespread prosperity, women entering the workforce, the idea that everyone should go to college, the shift away from farming and manufacturing, and, critically, the dumbing down of primary education and the end of honest teaching about America and her history.
I would choose the federal government’s progressive / paternalistic policies that drove family breakdown. In @westernchauvinist‘s post, American Squalor, I quoted a passage from Amity Shlaes book, Great Society, about Pruitt-Igoe, the St. Louis housing project built on top of what used to be thriving neighborhoods:
I’ve become a broken record on this, but look at all of the government policies that create and sustain poverty:
I’m more on Richard’s side on this issue than Hank’s, but I don’t think that the federal policies are the prime mover. There was something behind the adoption of those unwise policies, and it was a socialist/Leftist ideology. Probably neo-Marxist. But what caused many of our fellow Americans to accept such a neo-Marxist ideology?
It’s complicated. I think that it was a breakdown in traditional faith, both religious faith and faith in American values, is the root cause. Traditional American values were rooted in Protestantism, though I think that faithful Catholics and perhaps faithful Jews can accommodate themselves to these values.
This traditional faith used to be taught in the schools, as I understand it, though this was before my time. It was driven out of the schools, principally by SCOTUS decisions in the 1950s and early 1960s.
So, that’s how you’re going to play it, eh?
Okay. Me and the boys will be coming around to have a little talk with you. We’ll straighten you out.
[ Are vague yet barely-veiled, highly improbable, noir-inspired threats a CoC violation on Ricochet? It’s time we find out. ]
Happens in the PIT quite often.
It’s impossible to be religious and a Marxist. Although many Jews tried it, even in the early 1900’s. Jews in Eastern Europe, even religious ones, must have ignored the Marxist disdain for religion. What it got them was an early grave. Over the years, it’s been easier for Jews to be Marxists because they’re secular. Jews also desired equality back then, given how often they were betrayed by their home countries. Their support of Marxism did not get them what they desired. But they’re still trying–although I wonder how many Jews, secular or religious, still support Marxism.
I’m going with both Hank and Richard on this.
WesternChauvinist has also written on how Marxist revolutionaries pushed their way into the Catholic church by way of seminaries – which are gateways to priesthood. Control the seminary, you control the priesthood.
Vox Day calls this convergence and it has happened in hollywood and in publishing, too. By controlling the cultural gateways, you can subvert the culture.
The culture death has seeded our lackadaisical view of culture, making it easier for policies to get passed. Why should we care about marriage? So what if a policy encourages single motherhood? There’s nothing wrong with single moms. In fact, they are heroes! There is something wrong with letting children starve. So why should I oppose welfare for kids? Republicans are evil, trying to legislate morality. They need to butt out.
It isn’t that if pressed, the average American would have seen something truly wrong with marriage, it’s just they lacked will to maintain it because culture had given them characters, stories, and moral justification not to have it carry as much weight.
That’s true, but there was also a technocratic “we know what’s best” mindset at work as well the old hammer-and-nail problem. LBJ was the quintessential politician who saw everything and every solution in political terms.
The people driving the Great Society gave thought to bottom up, grass roots efforts but only in terms of politics – their “bottom up” initiatives entailed training and bankrolling community activists. That is, they trained people to do things like organize sit-ins at city halls around the country to demand that the local politicians do something. Syracuse University even used federal grant money to hire Saul Alinsky to help train community activists (Great Society, pp 152-153)!
Yes. So very true. But without the values foundation, there was nothing to give them a virtuous framework.
And P.S. to add weight to Hank’s assessment, I’ve been netflixing a lot of teen shows from 90s and early 00s that I missed because I wasn’t allowed.
Dawson’s Creek, 90210, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and several others were quite popular at that time. These shows on the surface just seem silly, but introduce Pacey justifying an affair with his teacher or the blatant occult/perversion of Christianity [and the portrayal of Christians in these shows], you can see their influence on my generation.
Doting parents and government have assumed the role of ameliorating all pain, and have thereby cut the tie between actions and consequences. As the consequences of self-destructive actions (such as dropping out of school, having children out of wedlock, and drug and alcohol abuse) are increasingly borne by others, the incidence of such behavior will rise. At the same time, as the rewards for hard work, perseverance, and integrity fall, such virtues can be expected to fade.
Bring it on!
I’m pretty sure that if you and your boys came around to straighten out me and my boys, we’d end up arguing over who pays for the beer and who pays for the cheesesteaks. :)
It is my good fortune that the second-best cheesesteak joint in Tucson just opened a new location about 2 blocks from my house. The original location is right across the street from my office.
Jerry, I lived in Tucson for a year about thirty years ago. Loved the town. I’m sure it’s grown a lot since then.
Culture for a couple of generations is coming more and more from devices and less and less from family and family-centric institutions. This is being exploited by those who have promoted it — the media, post-modernist academics, and collectivists who would have been happy if all children were birthed asexually and raised by the State.
I’ve heard that a lot from people I’ve met on my bicycle rides, of all things. I don’t agree, though. I am old enough to remember the days you speak of, and I’d say the rot had already set in long before that. Those decisions you speak of were symptoms, not causes.
Your quote from the Book of Judges is closer to the mark. But then, I learned those stories when I was a wee tyke and have used them to interpret events ever since.
The public schools have let Islam in, so we’ve got that going for us.
And
And
I tend to think the problem is more stuff, material wealth and prosperity, and the prevalence choices. ‘Blessed are the poor’ became ‘it’s harder for a rich man to enter heaven’.
We know that Dearborn has been catering to the Muslims for quite a while. The update, however, is very discouraging. Still, thanks for the information @ontheleftcoast.