The Daily Mail, The Decline of Christmas and The Decline of the West

By Tim Haydon.

 

The ‘Mail’ and ‘Mail on Sunday’ have been agonising about the  increasingly materialistic outlook of the British people.  First, Dominic  Sandbrook wrote an article suggesting that we are now all Scrooges, in that we are individualistic and think of nothing but ourselves and material possessions. Then the Mail on Sunday published an article by Simon Heffer bemoaning that 16,000 shops would open on Christmas Day and demanding that ‘The Church must tackle this orgy of materialism’. If it didn’t, the Mail suggested, others would fill the spiritual vacuum. (No doubt Islam was in mind).

Whilst correctly identifying the problem, the Mail offered no reasons as to why we have arrived at this point, or any real way forward other than calling upon a Church which has shown itself incapable of do anything about it in the past;  which indeed has contributed to it. So here is an attempt to perform that function:

Pitirim Sorokin and why have we become Guzzling, Selfish, Self-Centred and Shallow

So why are the British people now the way they are? And can anything truly be done about it? If there is one man who has a truly persuasive answer, it is Pitirim Sorokin. Who you may ask.  But Sorokin was once prominent in his field – sociology, history and their philosophies. Now, although he figures in Routledge’s ‘Fifty Key Sociologists,’ he is pretty much forgotten, as really he might havebeen  expected, given his view of how thought would proceed. He shouldn’t be though. If there is any theorist of the broad sweep of civilisations whose name can be uttered in the same breath as Oswald Spengler it is Pitirim Sorokin.

Sorokin’s Remarkable Life:  Sentenced to Death – Twice

Unlike the comfortable left-liberals and neo-Cons who control our lives, Sorokin, who died in 1968, just when the cultural marxist revolution was taking off in the West, drew on extremely disconcerting life experiences when forming his views. He had indeed a most remarkable life.  The son of an itinerant peasant ikon painter in pre-revolutionary Northern Russia, by dint of his sheer brilliance he somehow managed to attend the Psycho-Neurological Research Institute in St Petersburg where Pavlov was conducting his experiments on salivating dogs. He was politically active and was sentenced to death by the Czarist authorities, but was released. Subsequently, he became a member of the short-lived Kerensky government and was sentenced to death by the Communists.  He was released by order of Lenin and was allowed to go to the USA where he became founding Chairman of Harvard University Sociology Department.

Talcott Parsons, Modernism, David Cameron and Progressivism

Sorokin’s colleague and rival at Harvard was Talcott Parsons, the father of modernism, the current of ideas in which David Cameron and the Tory modernisers now swim. Parsons is now the more influential thinker. It is thought that this is perhaps because, unlike the forceful, abrasive and robustly free-thinking Sorokin, the more people-friendly Parsons was able to form a ‘school’ of disciples. Also, and probably more importantly, Sorokin is forgotten in his own university where he spent the last four decades of his life  because, as O J Brown put it, ‘his emphasis on values and his contempt for corruption are politically unfashionable and therefore not the least bit viable there’ (Regression and Renewal. The Prophecies  of Pitirim Sorokin’. Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture vol 16, No 1 . Jan 1992, p28)

Sorokin’s scathing View of ‘Progressivism’

Sorokin was pretty scathing about modernism and progressivism. The idea that improvement in mankind’s living conditions and happiness (’progress’) is guaranteed for the immediate and long term future was, he said, the ‘cloud cuckoo land of the after dinner imagination’.  It was ‘created in its present specific form in the second half of the nineteenth century and is one of the fascinating soap bubbles with which contented Victorian  Europe liked to amuse itself.’ (Social and Cultural  Dynamics 1937 -41, reprint 1962, Vol 3 pp 535-6). So much then for leftism and  neo-cons.

Sorokin and Materialism

Sorokin recognised, long before others did, that Western culture was becoming obsessed with materialism. This means not just wanting material comforts and satisfactions of the senses but that these are all that matters. There is no other meaning to life than the gratification of the physiological desires. The universe, the world, ourselves, are all just material, just ‘stuff’, the results of the necessary linking up of atoms. There is nothing beyond that.  Sorokin argued that a host of consequences for the sort of society we live in followed from dominant beliefs as to what constituted reality:  the spiritual or the material.

The Cultural Consequences of Beliefs about Reality

Unlike Spengler, Sorokin was not a prophet of irreversible decline. He did not think of civilisations as organisms, doomed to a ‘biological’ life history of birth, growth, decline and death. Rather, based upon intensive study of the history of civilisations by the teams of philosophers, historians, art historians, sociologists and others which he set up, Sorokin identified phases between which civilisations oscillate,  driven by forces internal to themselves. This is congenial to the views of those who think that cultures are the products of the peoples who produce them, since the people change the culture rather than the other way around:

Ideational  mentality which sees spiritual truth and values as virtually the only ones worthy of the name.  The good is what the spiritual dimension requires. It is the infallible truth revealed through its mouthpieces:  the prophets, mystics and founders of religion.  Its truth is disclosed in a supersensory way through mystic experience, direct revelation, divine intuition and inspiration. A culture in its Ideational phase is willing to sacrifice pleasures and immediate goals for the sake of its high principles.

Self–denial, asceticism and martyrdom are natural behaviours from the Ideational point of view. Because of this, Ideational culture disciplines and encourages self-discipline in people. While, in such societies, religion is the focal point of life, people in this phase do not, Sorokin said flee from the world necessarily, but try to transform it in accordance with Ideational or spiritual values.  We can see the physical legacy of this in the pyramids, those great tombs and instruments of the divine Pharaohs, in the great medieval cathedrals, monasteries and churches of the West and in art.

Sensate mentality. Where Ideational Man spiritualises the external, even the inorganic world, seeing reflections and signs of the divine everywhere in nature and the workings of the world, Sensate Man inevitably ‘mechanises and materialises even the spiritual, immaterial self’. (Cultural  Dynamics Vol 4 p87).  Sensate Culture views reality as only that which is presented to the sense organs.  It does not seek or believe in any supersensory [spiritual] reality. Thus, ‘from the point of view of Sensate truth, the Christian truth of faith, revelation and God – indeed the whole Christian religion and movement – could not appear other than as an absurdity and superstition’ (The Crisis of our Age  1941  p 84).

‘[M]aterial  values become paramount, beginning with omnipotent wealth and ending with all the values that satisfy man’s physiological needs and material comfort. Sensory utility and pleasure ..become the sole criteria of what is good and bad’ (Crisis pp 96-7) .

For Sensate Man, the purpose of life can only be the fulfilment of physical needs.  And where, as already said, an Ideational culture strives to assist Man in controlling himself, a Sensate mentality leads to man’s control of the external world – exemplified in empirical science and political tyrannies

Whilst rejecting the divine, Sensate man dresses his material needs and desires with the accoutrements of religion, instead of the reverse. In other words he invents substitute, secular religions. This is evident in politics.  Thus we have the Cult of Equality which has its heresies, such as the idea that the sexes are opposite and complementary rather than interchangeable.

Because a Sensate culture is pragmatic, nothing is permanent  (‘Change!’ ipso facto means ‘Progress!’ means ‘Good!’).  Sensate man is enthusiastically monarchist under a monarchy, an ardent communist under a communist regime and, if instead of communism or Cultural Marxism or a theocracy comes to power, he ‘adapts’  himself to this as well.

Healthy Cultures are Integrated Cultures

Idealistic Cultures. Sorokin was careful to note that there has never been either a Sensate society or an Ideational society in its pure form. All societies are, to some extent, mixed. When the tendencies are in balance, he called this state ‘Idealistic’, a condition which has produced some of the most noble and sublime works of Man.  In ancient Greek history, the Idealistic interlude saw such great figures as Phidias, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Pindar.  But in their Ideational and Sensate phases, cultures lean heavily either towards the spiritual or the material. All these phases last for hundreds of years during which time a unique and wholly integrated cultural outlook, or ‘supersystem’ comes to dominate the arts, literature, music, philosophy, law, religion, the sciences, government and so on.

The Major Shifts in Western Civilisation

In Sorokin’s scheme there have been three major shifts since the ancient Greeks as evidenced in the arts of those respective periods:

1.       From Ideational to Sensate between the ages of Homer, around 900 BC, and that of Alexander the Great, with an Idealistic interval exemplified in the glories of 5^th Century Athens

2.       From Sensate back to Ideational after the fourth century of the Christian era.

3.       From Ideational to Sensate, once again with an idealistic interval (The Protestant Reformation).

The Dying Sensate Culture of the West.  Western Man between Epochs

Western Civilisation is nearing the end of a Sensate phase which has lasted for some 5 or 6 centuries. Writing in the 1930’s with the First ‘Great’ War still casting its shadow and the Second looming, we are, Sorokin said, caught between two great epochs

‘…the dying  Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational culture of our creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking and acting at the end of a brilliant six hundred –year-long Sensate day, The oblique rays of the sun still illuminate the passing epoch. But the light is fading, and in the deepening shadows it becomes more and more difficult to see clearly and to orient ourselves in the confusions of the twilight. The night of the transitory period begins to loom before us and the coming generations…’ (Cultural Dynamics p87)

Western Man in Transition

Since modern society is in transition, standing between the end of one epoch and the beginning of another, the very foundation and structure of our value system is decomposing. Sensate society is disintegrating. The spirit of contemporary art, music and literature, Sorokin wrote (70 or so years ago, remember), ‘centres on the police morgue, the criminals’s hide-out and the sex organs, operating mainly at the level of social sewers’ ( Crisis  p27)  since there are no longer any ideals to inspire it.

When there are no Absolute Moral Standards there is Crime and there is Chaos

Principles of law and of ethics crumble before our eyes, throwing everyone from the hooded thug on the inner city housing estate to the highest placed in the land into confusion as to what is and what is not right or wrong

There is growing lack of ability to distinguish between those things that hold society together and make it secure and those that contribute to its dissolution. Thus immigration of huge numbers of aliens is encouraged whilst the courts are obsessed with the ‘rights’ of criminals and of ‘asylum seekers’, even when the rights of ordinary citizen to live unmolested and at peace are treated with contempt and trodden underfoot. Meantime crime escalates to new heights while the ‘authorities’ manipulate the statistics in lying attempts to disguise the fact.

Society’s moral tone has declined so precipitously that what was unthinkable in 1880 became commonplace in 1930, and what was unthinkable in 1930 became commonplace in 1960, and what was unthinkable in 1960 has become not just commonplace but legally enforced in 2013.

Man Degraded to the Level of an Animal

Perhaps even worse, Man himself is degraded as a mere animal organism, on a par with other animals (Witness the Animal Rights Movement which degrades Man as it elevates animals) with ‘a reflex mechanism, a variety of stimulus response relationships, or a psychoanalytical bag filled with physiological libido’.

 ‘Diversity’ as the Symptom of Decay

Since healthy cultures are integrated cultures, Sorokin identifies one of the chief symptoms of late Sensate culture as syncretism. By this he means the blending of beliefs, philosophies, ideals and standards from a practically limitless variety of disparate sources. Cultures, art, architecture, music, literature, philosophy, ethics, morals, government and religion are all interrelated with one another. Useful elements may be drawn from foreign cultures, so long as they do not contradict the unity of the host culture, and so long as they are modified and digested, so as to become wholly a part of that unity.  A case in point is Hindu-Arabic numerals which Western culture could adopt and adapt for itself because it was still a healthy creative culture whose core was strong. Other foreign elements which intrinsically contradicted Western or British Culture were rejected because  a healthy culture is highly selective.

Our Culture is Weak and Unable to Discriminate between Good and Dangerous Alien Influences.

However our culture is now unable to discriminate between the useful and the dangerous. (One thinks here of Islam, inter alia). As the flood of undigested, foreign elements becomes greater and greater, the host culture becomes more and more distorted and sickly and more and more unable to protect itself. Thus the host culture undergoes disintegration, at times slowly and at others, more rapidly. We may observe all this in London, a ‘World City’ as Jack Straw, the New Labour Foreign Secretary triumphantly described it, where the variety of undigested, alien elements is utterly astonishing.  Diversity or ‘enrichment’ on this scale is not ‘strength’ which we must celebrate, as is demanded of us by our rulers, but as Sorokin saw, it is rather a symptom of weaknesss and final decay.

The Lessons of the Greco-Roman World

Drawing on the experience of previous cultures and ages, Sorokin notes similarities between them and our own:

‘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 of these currents were undigested and unintegrated into a 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’ ( Crisis p 248).  Sorokin could here be describing the multiculturalism of the West   and of Britain in particular, many decades before it flowered.

The Inner Harmony of our Culture is in disarray

The pervasive syncretism of our age, Sorokin thinks, means simply that the natural, inner harmony of Western culture has broken down. It is no longer confident and self-reliant. It no longer believes, as it once did,  in its own worth.  It has lost its form. The cultural outlook that dominated the globe only 100 years ago is in its death throes.

Sorokin’s Chillingly Accurate Predictions

Sorokin predicted in the 1930’s that values would continue to be undermined, would become more and more influenced by relativistic thinking, would lose their binding power and would be ‘ground to dust’. Distinctions between right and wrong, true and false, beautiful and ugly and positive and negative would disappear in the chaotic and opaque world of crumbling Sensate culture.

Criticisms of Sorokin and Sorokin Vindicated

Sorokin’s methodology as a social scientist and an historian was attacked in his lifetime. More or less inevitably, it was claimed by his critics that he manipulated the research results of the teams of philosophers, art historians, sociologists and others he assembled for his work so that they conformed to his theories. But who, looking around today and remembering that he was often writing the best part of three-quarters of a century ago, can reasonably say that he was wrong in what he foresaw?  On the contrary, whilst his timing of trends was somewhat awry at times, he was amazingly, chillingly accurate. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

What of the Future?

According to Sorokin, since we are in a period of transition between a this-worldly and a more other-worldly orientation. What lies ahead is a more idealistic/ideational culture. This likelihood is not deterministic.  The trend away from the Sensate will be as a result of a general revulsion for its vacuity and a search for meaning in life beyond immediate satisfactions.  Comfortable meaninglessness does not bring happiness and release as its cheerleaders trumpet, but untold misery.

Nor is it necessarily towards Christianity. On present trends, it could conceivably be towards Islam, which is experiencing an ideational reaction to  its own drift to the Sensate and is therefore more confident and so attractive to some.

It is up to us individually, exercising our free will, to make the decisions necessary to ensure that future trends go in the ways the Divine prefers.  As Sorokin says in the closing words of ‘The Crisis of Our Age’;

‘Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini’