It Will Take Ambition To Counter Our Culture’s DecadenceBY: SAMUEL D. SAMSON
JANUARY 28, 2022
In the early days of 2022, little captured the attention of the American public more than the Netflix film “Don’t Look Up.” The film recently broke Netflix’s record for most viewing hours in a single week.
The plot follows the journey of a washed-up astronomer (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his graduate assistant (Jennifer Lawrence), who discover a massive comet projected to destroy the Earth in six months. Yet in their quest to warn the world they find a largely apathetic public, leaders and citizens all too focused on trivial distractions to care about the impending doom. The most significant — and socially relevant — commentary of the film: everyone is looking down.
Indeed, the destruction of the planet is caused by the catastrophic failure of every social institution to respond with appropriate haste — be it the government, big business, media, or even activism. People are simply too consumed by immediate goods to care about the threat.
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Here in the real world, we are not too far off. The modern West is itself a culture looking down — it focuses with near exclusivity on goods and services immediate and presently gratifying. Our culture is dominated by passions, of pursuit for the sake of good feelings and satisfaction.
Activity is reduced to binge streaming, social media scrolling, face stuffing, and chronic porn watching. Passive consumption is both mode and motivation.
Even supposed “innovations” are pursued for the sake of increased consumption. Forget the interstate highway system, the Concorde, and the moon landing — “real” progress means a flashier Marvel movie, more effective birth control, and a faster Amazon home delivery system for groceries and products.
What emerges is a stagnant, passive society, built on consumption rather than creation. It is a status of decadence, as described in Ross Douthat’s “The Decadent Society,” where “the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of ‘sustainable decadence,’ a civilizational languor.” With consumption as the end, there is simply little interest in pursuing anything beyond the attainment of immediate sense goods.
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Source:
https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/28/it-will-take-ambition-to-counter-our-cultures-decadence/
