The Rise and Fall of Western Civilisation

I think I've been saying that since '05 here on the board, but alas...

I'm beginning to be worried about the Chinese agenda in Pakistan now, esp. after our recent fuckup and Zardari's ill health may boot us out of that country, a booting long overdue, but just keeping an eye on the next disaster, ie, that china wants to re-establish it's little peoples republic there to use as a puppet state to attack India.

Our hopeless war against Iran meanwhile, majorly about them being the only major industrial nation on earth to not sign on to the WTO, which would mean a victory would in theory lead them to world economic domination, except for the minor detail that Russia seems to be in the process of backing out, which kinda makes the whole thing pointless.


Byte,

I agree with those, though I think there are others: there was some massive slavery in the agrarian serfdom world, and also, the indutrial revolution and weapons, to add to that, but I have to add communism, the russian revolution, as leading to Mao's China in large part, and that in turn being responsible for a lot of our conflicts.

Essentially, though, yeah, nonsense of the 20th c. has been causing a lot of trouble for us now as a result of reasons completely irrelevant today, such as trying to stop the influence of austria in central and eastern europe.

That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.

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there was some massive slavery in the agrarian serfdom world

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True, in the European nations it was really a lateral move between serfs working on rented land to wage slaves in Occupational Safety and Hazards Hell.

But in America I think that's accurate. Blacks were slaves before, and they became wage slaves after the civil war, and whites also became wage slaves.

I honestly think WW2 lead to the spread of stalinist communism (which is way screwed up), so I still trace that to the Treaty of Versailles. Russia did pull itself up a bit by the time of WW2, but I think they couldn't have become the superpower they did if Britain and France and Germany weren't also breaking each other. And Russia becoming a superpower led to the other revolutions.

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Originally posted by Magonsdaughter:
So worth no comment then.

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What do you want us to say? America sucks? Yeah. It started sucking probably in the mid-fifties? Well, I would say the turning point is about around 1913, when the income tax and the Fed Reserve was introduced, but then we'd just bicker about that and lose the forest for the trees.

Western civilization has come to an end? Yeah.

I see civilizations going through cycles, like Sisyphus' rock. They rise, then they inevitably fall. Why do they fall? Well, the entire RWED is our arguments and debates about why they rise and why they fall. Your reasons are never going to be the same as mine.

I don't know what other comment you're looking for, except maybe people who agree with you.

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Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth. -- Lucy Parsons (1853-1942, labor activist and anarcho-communist)

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Gad, you're touchy. Who said it was just about America anyway?

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Here is a bit of the attached article.

I wondered whether people actually believed that western civilisation is on the decline, as the article claims, or whether we have always kind of bumbled along with highs and lows and wil continue to do so for another milleneum.

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The rise of porn,the neutering of democracy and the spread of junk culture. Can we just agree society peaked in the 60s?

It's mid-afternoon on a Monday. The waiter has just brought over a cheese platter and is tempting us with a list of liqueurs.

"You only live once," smiles Pria Viswalingam.

In a posh eatery in Sydney's CBD, the former SBS TV host is discussing his new film about the ills of modern life. Called Decadence: The Decline of the Western World, it explores the rise of porn, the demise of egalitarianism and the spread of junk culture. It examines the neutering of democracy and the unstoppable growth of mercantilism. It touches on the collapse of faith and the fracturing of families.

Then it weaves all those threads and more into one argument: that western civilisation peaked in the 1960s, and is now sliding into the abyss.

"This here is decadence," says Viswalingam, looking around at all the businessmen lingering over long, indulgent lunches.

After spending five years and visiting 10 countries to make his film, he pinpoints 1969 as the peak of western civilisation.

"The west as we know it today begins with the Magna Carta in 1215," says Viswalingam, who wrote, produced and appears in the documentary. "Then came the Renaissance, the Reformation, the founding of America and the Enlightenment, before the west peaked with the social revolutions of the 1960s.

"In 1969, the Russians and the Americans took us beyond our earthly bounds, the My Lai Massacre shattered the image of us as the good guys and then there was all the sheer exuberance and peace, love and rock and roll of Woodstock before the Rolling Stones 'end of the '60s' concert at Altamont. Decadence depicts the west's decline ever since."

Viswalingam is a former SBS TV presenter whose credits include Fork in the Road and Class. Having devoted a career to analysing culture and society, he says the symptoms of decay and decadence are unmistakeable.
Filmmaker Pria Viswalingam

Those symptoms include soaring suicide rates and the west's addiction to anti-depressants. They include rampant individualism, emptying churches and disintegrating families. And they include the west's obsessive devotion to money as the only true measure of worth. In the west today, humanities are maligned while MBAs are coveted.

"Treadmill consumption, growing income disparity, b-grade leadership, they're obvious signs of a culture adrift," he says.

Thing is, he's not alone. Another voice among the swelling chorus of cultural doomsayers belongs to author Alexander McCall Smith, who came to the Opera House in October to present a talk entitled Society is Broken

"People have been talking about the 'broken society' for some time now," Smith wrote in a complementary article. "[The British] riots demonstrated just how broken. The broken society is a consequence partly of social change and cultural change.

"The social change is familiar: the destruction of the family as the fundamental social unit would be fine if we had replaced it with something. We have not. [And] it’s a culture in which we seem to have abandoned many of the values on which we based our civilisation.

"We don’t know what we believe in and are busy bringing up children who share our confusion ... We have created a strange culture perpetuated by television and other media that rejoices in and celebrates dysfunction, violence and anti-social behaviour."

So pervasive is the sense of cultural bankruptcy that a new school of thought has emerged. Dubbed "declinology", it has seen the publication of books including Dambisa Moyo's How the West Was Lost, Walter Laqu

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