Why is human Culture in such Decline?

[Oceaxer]

Why hath every Domain of cultural Activity?Literature, Poetry, Art, Musick, Film, Fashion, Architecture, &c.?been in Decline in proportion as Technology hath risen?

I think HITLER precipitated the decline of Western culture by launching World War the Second. May the name of that accursed man be efface'd and his memory obliterated!

[HUNTEDvsINVIS]

I don't think that the standards of the arts have dropped significantly, I think that the open-ended nature of today's technology just allows too many wasted works to flood the markets. What I mean is that there are still brilliant individuals who produce good stuff but you just have to search a little harder to find it. The genuine geniuses, I believe, are still out there slaving away behind coffee cups with dark circles under their eyes, and will probably still only be famous after death. And, dear Muremaker, I'm afraid if you take a close look at the history of culture, it will seem splattered with blood... The emphasis on individuality somehow makes many more people think that they are special these days, which is technically a good thing, but the emphasis that has always been placed on genius has now erupted itself in the face of these new developments. Genius should probably not be about ego. One of the best that ever walked the earth ( Mozart ) always said that the soul of genius is love, love, love, that is all. The magnetic attraction of the word genius is damaging and superfluous, to genius as well as non-genius. Every department of life should be glorified before humanity will go easy on itself. To me, interacting with geniuses is more about sympathising with the sensitivity that lies there, about caressing the lonliness of that road.

[daybrown]

In addition, the hominids evolved in small groups, not urban masses. They are not good at dealing with it; they were never a mass herd species. And more of the places that men withdrew to that inspired genius, already now have someone else living there.

One of the effects of group think is the multiplication of mediocrity. One 0f the reasons I think so differently is that I early on realized I'd never be successful, and withdrew to live alone in the Ozark woods over 30 years ago. Where I could think my own thots.

[Unidian]

Human culture isn't in decline. Virtually every statistical indicator shows consistent progress in quality of life around the world. A much better question is why are we so convinced that human culture is in decline?

Addendum: Human culture still sucks in a lot of ways. My point is not that things are great, just that they are gradually going from awful to a bit less shitty, not the other way around (as so many people insist).

[Dan Rowden]

I think this is a judgement that is entirely dependent on he measures, standards and values by which we're making it. There is progress in some ways, decline in others and "more of the same" in still others.

[Philosophaster]

Why hath every Domain of cultural Activity?Literature, Poetry, Art, Musick, Film, Fashion, Architecture, &c.?been in Decline in proportion as Technology hath risen?

Most of the said Domains were in gradual Decline since the 18th Century. HITLER precipitated the decline of Western culture by launching World War the Second. May the name of that accursed man be efface'd and his memory obliterated!

For example, http://youtube.com/watch?v=uA3OnIYW5u4?why aren't there any films even of of such quality as this produc'd any more?

Films like that aren't made any more because film is now its own art form and no longer tries to slavishly imitate either theater or literature as it once did. As technology opened up new possibilities film threw off its old shackles and genuflection to its predecessors.

A similar thing has happened in music. Post-production is now capable of making a mediocre "first take" sound polished and professional, so inevitably you have people who know little about how to perform music, to say nothing of its history or theory, able to get studio time and put popular albums out. Of course, the same phenomenal increase in post-production power also opens up artistic possibilities that nobody could have imagined fifty years before. But if you mindlessly rush off to damn all of "modern art" and its techniques that sort of thing will pass you by.

[Unidian]

Yeah. It's too bad William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy didn't wait a few decades to make their infamous ill-fated albums. These studio wizards nowdays could have made them into Sinatra. I mean, Paris Hilton made a hit album. What more does anyone need to know?

[Philosophaster]

And Paris's "single" was a ripoff of a UB-40 song ("Kingston Town"), with the video for it being a ripoff of Chris Isaak's "Wicked Game" video.

But the kids who bought the song likely didn't know that, their musical memories not extending as far back as the '80s. Heh.

[Unidian]

I doubt it would matter, anyway. What's the problem with ripping other artists off, anyway? She's at the top and that's all that matters. Whatever it takes to get there is fair game.

Putting on my "typical American kid" hat for an unpleasant moment, I can't see any reason the ripping-off would make any difference to most of her target audience.

[Unidian]

And for the record, that particular part of human culture (at least in the West), is on the decline. Tons of quality of life indicators are going up steadily, as I mentioned earlier, but I must admit that in terms of having any values beyond immediate self-interest, we're going downhill.

[daybrown]

My Ozark hillblly friends tell me we are at that awkward time when it is too late for them to fix things, but still too early to drag the bastards out to be shot. However, I must say, that its been some years since I first hear it.

As a script, my Matrix looks like a pot boiler, always on the edge, but somehow, never falling over. I myself have long been cautious. Not long after I read the hydrology report, I moved out of New Orleans. 31 years early. Altho I must say, that land I bought for 200$/acre now sells for ten times as much, whereas property in New Orleans now....

Watched Charlie Rice interview Alan Greenspan, and refer to comments Comptroller of the US, David Walker made, about the *necessity* to downsize entitlements and raise taxes, and noting that congress has done nothing whatever about it, despite warnings by both Greenspan & Walker. Greenspan merely nodded, and did not try to go on in his usual obscure way about a way forward.

There is no way forward. This sorta explains why JR Lowel's comment fits Bush:"He who is firmly seated in authority comes to think that security, and not progress, is the highest form of statecraft." The lack of progress in the arts is another symptom of the malaise Carter Spoke of. He knew there was a cancer growing in the culture, but Raygun promised a palliative, and really looked good after steps Carter had taken led to the fall of the USSR. But that remission is now history.

There is a perfect storm of reasons gathering, and you do not have time to read all the elements of the computer models that have come to my attention, much less that of so many others. Nothing we say here is going to change any of it. A lot of the reason is why it is happening.

Google "amish autism rate" for an eyefull. No official studies have been done, nor do I expect the system will provide the funding, but from what we can tell the rate for Amish kids runs around 1:15,000. One site says the rate for other boys is 1:97. There's some question about genetic resistance from a uniform gene pool. As there is in my neck of Ozarks as well, which is over 99% white. These farm families seem to have a rate about 1:4000. And that's just autism, Add in ADD, ADHD, ICD, & depression, and you start hitting double digits. But not in these white Ozarks- which include a lotta Cherokee blood.

Suggestions that the problems mite be caused by vaccinations are dismissed by academics and professionals, and that would be the end of it were it not for the revolving door to the transnational pharmaceuticals. And the way the Bush administration has tried to cut off the funding for research.

Then there's the commercial interests of agribusiness, fast food, candy, soda and all the other shit that is given to kids. The parents dont want to think about what their parents did to them, much less think of what they have done to their own kids with dietary deficit and contamination. Yet, track the increase in agribusiness petrochemicals from the 1960's, the classical era of American arts, with the decline in those arts ever since.

I was in high school when "Rock & Roll will live forever" first played on the radio. I thot how generationally jingoistic can we get? I had no idea. There are geezers my age still on stage with young women lining up to fuck them. Just blows my mind. I went to a rave last summer to make a business deal, and while I waited, was just mind blown at all the young women who came by to sit on my blanket and talk while we watched the boys (I would not call them men) act like they were still in middle school. It is just frightening, and I think the young women realize there's a problem.

We live in the Untied States of Denial. It aint only the kids that are nuts. If the adults were sane, something would have been done about the looming boomer retirement by now. Instead, the "conservative" Republicans have actually made the entitlement problems *worse*. Goldwater'd rise up out of his grave to bury Bush if he's paying attention to what's been going on.

More to the point really, is the upshot is either anarchy or tyranny. YMMV depending on where you live, or even if you get to keep on living. I always try to be polite online. You dont know who will have power, and despite what the fools on google think, *everything* sits on a hard drive someplace. Every asinine thing you ever posted may be held against you.

While whatever new powers emerge may not like what I've had to say, I'm not in a convenient location, and there are plenty of others with easier access for the goon squads and mobs.

[Unidian]

Carter was definitely the most underappreciated president in recent history.

But what's this about the "entitlement problem?" You do realize all of that is politically-motivated mythology, right? There is no "crisis" in Social Security or any other entitlement program.

[daybrown]

No crisis *yet*. Greenspan mentioned one example. It dont matter how much money you throw at medicare if there are not enuf nurses to carry out the doctor's orders. And there is a shortage already.

I saw a panel of nurses discuss this, and the human genome data was factored in, and one nurse spoke the truth. "If we want the talented girls to replace us, we will have to give birth to them ourselves."

Head Start is not going to get you there. Neither will Affirmative Action. One of my friends has made a lotta money in medical transcription because she is also an accomplished linguist, and understands Hindi/English. Will the nurse at your bedside?

Now, actually, as i have been arguing a while now (http://www.dc-pc,org/fertilty/fertilty.html), smart women could go thru the 5 month donation cycle at a fertility clinic, and produce 300 eggs. And do it again, 18 months later. I'd encourage all smart women to begin doing this ASAP. If they have problems later (and we know how much longer it takes to find a responsible husband these days), she can still use one of her own eggs with his sperm in case her own ovulation is unreliable by then.

MOREOVER, I would recommend a moonshot scale program to offer egg implantation to young women who are not talented enuf to compete in the global market; pay them for motherhood. Their maternal instincts will be adequate even if their IQ is low. Its not that hard to raise *smart* kids. And just as we see smart career women now going to fertility clinics to choose among thousands of Y chromosomes that are vastly more promising than the local stud muffin pool, so also offer these services to poor women.

Given the tastes of rich lechers, I'd recommend that they only bother with giving birth to smart trophy blondes. We had one in the SCOTUS getting some part of the *billions* she inherited for making the last few years of some old bastard happy. And dont you know, that part of that kind of money would be sent back to take damn good care of momma. No matter what momma's race is.

We could turn welfare queens from a liability into an asset. For one thing, the crime rate that begins at puberty would drop to zero, and the costs of that alone would defray the extra costs of fertility clinics.

Its been fun to throw this at white racists. Now, a lot more smart white girls would be born, but we all know they wont have anything to do with that buncha jackasses. It would also cause problems for dudes like Sharpton. Is he going to deny that Black women cannot use fertility clinics, that its only for rich white women? Yet, each women is presented with the conception choices on a case by case basis.

So- how many Black women are going to choose a black sperm donor? <snurk> In fact, when we look back at the 19th century reports of fabulously wealthy robber barons, we see their largess to the black nannies who raised them. Its a message every black woman will understand. If she wants to be well off after her kids are grown, that is far more likely if they are all trophy blondes.

The profits from export are just tremendous. It would also solve the immigration problem with Moslems and Hispanics, when their women figure out that citizenship is automatic, the pay is regular, and they no longer would havta put up with the abuse of machismo. Those dudes would be trying to pack their women back to the old country as fast as they could manage it.

All we need is an NGO to provide the fertility clinic services. I know some women in my neck of Ozark woods who know how to run the welfare system to get the pregnant women setup with a place to live. The state already has "Our Kids First" healthcare, started by former gov. Clinton. The schools, as I've said in other posts here, still *work*.

A place here would be well beyond the range of stalkers and insane x-mates. I spoze there are similar networks of caseworkers in other states, and I know of a kind of underground railroad setup by dykes and Gays in TN that can arrange safe places for women at risk of violence. But they wont want to be wasting resources trying to raise the sons of stupid crazy bastards.

[Ataraxia]

You write some weird ass posts daybrown.I like 'em.

Barry Goldwater rising from the dead to smite Dubya.Now that I'd pay to see. :)

[daybrown]

<You write some weird ass posts daybrown.I like 'em.>
I have fun posting, thanx. Like a commedian, I see a wealth of material out there.

But another point to add to the thread, is that revolutions are chaotic, people die, but that can clear the way for a new system to operate at a higher level of consciousness. Since the late bronze age, we've had 5000 years of increasingly organized warfare by ever more powerful warrior classes. That is coming to an end, so all the arts which were designed to pander to their sensibilities are in decline as well.

For instance, archeology has discovered cities that existed outside the hegemony of the Roman, Persian, & Chinese empires. In Europe, timber frame. In the East, adobe. But either way, the houses were comfortable because nobody was wasting energy building stone monuments for kings to put their names on. There's a lack of 'history', cause they didnt care who ran city hall, and since war was bad for business, they didnt do much of that either.

http://www.silk-road.com/newsletter/vol ... _bloom.php makes mention of the collaborative effort with the Chinese to put 100,000 texts and artifacts online. I think a lotta that stuff has never even been read much less translated. So much of what I've seen are inventories, business letters, land deeds, and personal letters. Charming in detail, but lacks the monu-mentality of empire from which History is made.

if the sage gets to take off his silk robes and move to a country villa to raise strawberries, History may think less of him, but he know he's lots happier. But by the same token, the dissolution of organization will produce starvation and kill a lotta people who were too stupid to make it as rational sentient beings.

[Iolaus]

Since the late bronze age, we've had 5000 years of increasingly organized warfare by ever more powerful warrior classes. That is coming to an end, so all the arts which were designed to pander to their sensibilities are in decline as well.

Would that it were true, daybrown, but what is your evidence?

[daybrown]

JP Mallory, "In Search of the Indo-Europeans" realized that the science of logistics had not been worked out well enuf before the literacy of the late bronze age to manage large armies.

As for weapons, lets start with nukes, the ultimate. Ever since Tojo's buddies realized that the bunker their own rectal orifices was in was not deep enuf for a nuke, no military elite in a great power center has wanted to challenge any other great power center. Without nukes, we would have had WWIII and WWIV by now.

As for missiles and Jets, they are rococco; they still have the outward form, but their real utility is in decline as the opposition has learned to diffuse itself in mass populations. The Military Industrial complex is focused on expensive items that have the most profit, not those that would be the most effective. The kind of innovative minds that were called on to produce the A-bomb are not interested in working for the military, but the private sector where their loyalty is to the Almighty Dollar, not the Joint Chiefs.

For instance, the Bradley is fulla young guys who know how to work remote controls. So- why dont they fly drones with IR cameras ahead of the formation? An IUD that was buried the night before would have a different heat signature on the ground along the road, and stick out like a sore thumb. Why have they not figured this out? because all they have are yes men, not innovators.

Or- why do they want the legal right to use torture when it is so obsolete? FMRI brain scans, Electroencephalograms, and even Dr. Paul Ekman's techniques with the autonomic response some facial muscles have (really obvious with high speed video) would reveal attempts to deceive.

[Oceaxer]

Interesting responses. I am going to post more about this later.

[Jamesh]

Why hath every Domain of cultural Activity?Literature, Poetry, Art, Musick, Film, Fashion, Architecture, &c.?been in Decline in proportion as Technology hath risen?

So much has already been done before. In practical terms, rather than technical, no human endeavour can ever have infinite variety in terms of output. Technically everything produced is an original, even if the themes have been done a million times, but this is meaningless as when we view something artistic we have not seen before we always assess its value compared to what we have seen before – we categorise everything experienced into groups of likeness, where what is simply LIKE becomes THE SAME AS. If our ego has no emotional interest in this group of like and thus unoriginal things, then we will be bored and think the art is of low value, whereas someone like an art collector has an ego interest in this group of like items.

Emotions are like the colour differences in a rainbow - they can appear distinct but they also merge indistinctly into the next form of emotion, and so it is too for the cultural endeavours that these emotions produce – very little conceptual originality is evident (at least in percentage terms). While there may be an infinite number of original books that could be written – everyone’s own life story for example – the manner in which our brain categorises things means that we would think of 99% of these life stories as boring stuff we’d heard or seen before. The brain makes something non-finite, into a finite entity by limitation, by indexing things of key importance and ignoring the rest. This precludes the possibility infinite observable variety, but it does allow scope for the “game of expertise”, which is the act of studying and noticing subtle differences from one artist or artist’s piece to another (most art lovers enjoy playing this anally retentive knowledge game, even more so than the joy of finding conceptual newness in the art).

There is some true originality left, but it would exist in only 1% of artists of any art form, as compared to more like 10% in days gone by. Part of the problem here is one of sheer numbers – as populations become richer, society can afford more and more people undertaking non-immediately productive activities.

Another problem is that technology means we devour hundreds of times more new experiences than folk of the past. Art forms become boring because we have already seen something similar, we are accustomed to change, so even somewhat original material does not hold the same level of interest as it would if we had never seen anything like it before. I find the same thing just in travelling – even beautiful scenery, that would have impressed me no end as a young person, becomes mundane and of little real interest – because I’ve seen similar but more spectacular things on TV/movies or in photos over the years.


The creation of novel art might eventually die out due to the fact that it all will have been done before, but it won’t for reasons such as the following –

a) technology causes a different human environment – thus this different environment causes opportunities for different artistic outcomes

b) young or masculine people will continue to strive to make their mark via originality. Something that seems original and novel will only ever be so to a small degree, a song for instance might be only 2% different to anything previously made. Novelty will become valued for novelties sake – so artists just need to alter the 1% to be different over and over again – which is what the record companies and long term artists have been doing for years.

c) the brain categorises different experiences on a holistic basis, and that includes one’s emotional status at the time of the experience, as well as the knowledge that person has at any time – this means that we can view the same or much the same artistic item at different times in our life and still obtain a novel experience from that viewing.

Why is human Culture in such Decline?

Mass media means entertainment is no longer a self imagined and created craft or excerise but one of viewing the work of others. As a result the masses are never learning or are forgetting how to think laterally - our consumptive ways, promoted/instilled/propaganderised by business, apply to art and mental endeavour as well. I see the effects of this in the manner business and politics conducts itself these days - one can see the cultural decline in the type of decisions made by such folk, and the resulting propensity to lie and deceive without guilt, without masculinity.

[daybrown]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUDIoN-_Hxs
sometimes art is in new media.
Sometimes its been terrifying. Living in the Ozarks, when I heard the choppers, I remembered Wagner. For years, I lived under a training route without knowing it. And I was as far back as you could get.

Or, who can hear "The Blue Danube" and not remember the space dance? Do they play that docking now?

If you are old enuf, you remember when "Classic Rock" was on the radio with lotsa crap. They only play the good stuff, just like they only play Mozart, but not Solieri.

Nevertheless, there is cause for concern. The Chinese glyph for 'opportunity' includes that of 'danger'.