Victor Davis Hanson's article on A Postmodern President elicited dozens of thoughtful and insightful responses. Here are my own thoughts:
When the referents for language become obscured or washed away in the public discourse, and people start believing that language is but a means to an end and cannot adequately describe reality (leading to demoralization, cynicism, action fetishes, and the “will to power” of collectivist movements), language is reality (leading often to utopianism, triumphalism, and the rise of the demagogue), then the civilization begins to cannibalize itself.
Civilizations are built on communication and organization, the intergenerational transmission of knowledge and history, and the allocation of resources, determined by law and justice, in order to nourish and sustain life.
When the language is decayed, communications and organization suffer, and the links of history, knowledge, tradition, and philosophy become severed.
This leads to an existential crisis in the youth generation, which may narcissisticly view itself as the culmination of all history (instead of an integral part of the story of humanity), resulting in hubris, the disregard of the limits of material reality (resource scarcity, e.g.), and human nature.
In other words, entropy in the language feeds a false sense of “freedom,” freedom from all constraints, including those of rationality, morality, and reality.
1 comment:
I agree with this point - "This leads to an existential crisis in the youth generation, which may narcissisticly view itself as the culmination of all history (instead of an integral part of the story of humanity), resulting in hubris, the disregard of the limits of material reality (resource scarcity, e.g.), and human nature."
But this is not the mere problem of youth, it seems to me we all share this problem. The attitude towards global warming ideas is a perfect example - forget about the argument on whether there is man-made warming occurring - what is the argument against controlling excessive pollution and growth? It is always economic, but economics is a man-made set of ideas, thus subject to human ego which can be construed as a negative force in the universe since frankly the Earth does not need humans to survive, but we need the Earth to survive. Alan Watts wrote extensively on this topic, referring to humans as "egos in bags of skin."
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