“Eat bread and salt and speak the truth.”—old Russian
proverb
I suddenly remembered, the other day, that it had been ages
since I dipped into the work of Pitirim Sorokin, the Russian sociologist who
immigrated to the United States and founded the Department of Sociology at
Harvard, where he taught for nearly thirty years. His four-volume Social and Cultural Dynamics was written
over 1937-41, and rereading it at this late date, one has to marvel at the
prescience of the man. Much of what he predicted regarding the cycles of
civilization is coming true in our time.
Sorokin distinguished between what he called Ideational
cultures and Sensate cultures. The former, he wrote, are spiritual in nature,
focusing on the inner life of human beings. The latter, on the other hand—of
which the West for the last five hundred years is a classic example—are
preoccupied with the material modification of the external world by means of
science and technology, and are the opposite of the Ideational ones. The Sensate culture of the last five
centuries, he claimed, is now in crisis; in its dying phase.
(Sorokin also posited the existence of an intermediary-type
culture between the Sensate and the Ideational, which he called Idealistic, and
which is a compromise between faith and pure empiricism. What we find here is a
harmonious synthesis among reason, faith, and the senses as sources of knowing.
Sad to say, the West has seen only two such periods in its long history, ones
that might well be termed golden ages: Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries
B.C., and Europe during A.D. 1200-1350.
Knowledge was not narrowed to one vista, he said, nor reduced to one
source. Think Aeschylus, Thomas Aquinas.)
So Sorokin believed that present-day Sensate/scientific
culture was in a state of fatigue; that it had run its course. When you have
the excessive domination of a single system, he wrote, eventually it begins to
exhibit signs of self-destruction. The
pendulum starts to swing in the other direction because each type of culture
contains only part of the truth, and is thus an untruth. But this partial truth is mistaken for the
whole truth, and becomes the basis for culture and social life—which is the
untruth of the situation. The false part of the culture tends to grow, and eventually,
the whole thing goes out of kilter. In other words, the untruth evokes a strong
reaction, creating a dynamic of change and disintegration. (Cf. Hegel, or even
Aristotle: any reality contains its own negation within itself, producing its
antithesis over time.) Cultures dominated by one-sided mentalities, said
Sorokin, fall victim to their own narrow-mindedness. He goes on:
“The great crisis of Sensate culture is here in all its
stark reality. Before our very eyes this culture is committing suicide. If it
does not die in our lifetime, it can hardly recover from the exhaustion of its
creative forces and from the wounds of self-destruction. Half-alive and
half-dead, it may linger in its agony for decades; but its spring and summer
are definitely over….I hear distinctly the requiem
that the symphony of history is playing in its memory.”
Sorokin’s predictions for this end-game scenario (remember,
he’s writing this nearly seventy-five years ago) were as follows:
1. The boundary between true and false, and beautiful and ugly,
will erode. Conscience will disappear in
favor of special interest groups. Force and fraud will become the norm; might
will become right, and brutality rampant. It will be a bellum omnium contra omnes, and the family will disintegrate as well.
“The home will become a mere overnight parking place.”
2. Sensate values “will be progressively destructive rather
than constructive, representing in their totality a museum of sociocultural
pathology….The Sensate mentality will increasingly interpret man and all values
‘physicochemically,’ ‘biologically,’ ‘reflexologically,’ ‘endocrinologically,’
‘behavioristically,’ ‘economically’…[etc.].”
3. Real creativity will die out. Instead, we shall get a
multitude of mediocre pseudo-thinkers and vulgar groups and organizations. Our
belief systems will turn into a strange chaotic stew of science, philosophy,
and magical beliefs. “Quantitative
colossalism will substitute for qualitative refinement.” What is biggest will
be regarded as best. Instead of classics, we shall have best-sellers. Instead
of genius, technique. Instead of real thought, Information. Instead of inner
value, glittering externality. Instead
of sages, smart alecs. The great cultural values of the past will be degraded;
“Michelangelos and Rembrandts will be decorating soap and razor blades, washing
machines and whiskey bottles.”
4. Freedom will become a myth. “Inalienable rights will be
alienated; Declarations of Rights either abolished or used only as beautiful
screens for an unadulterated coercion. Governments will become more and more
hoary, fraudulent, and tyrannical, giving bombs instead of bread; death instead
of freedom; violence instead of law.” Security will fade; the population will
become weary and scared. “Suicide,
mental disease, and crime will grow.”
5. The dies irae
of transition will not be fun to live through, but the only way out of this
mess, he wrote, is precisely through it. Under the conditions outlined above,
the “population will not be able to help opening its eyes [this will be a very
delayed phase in the U.S., I’m guessing] to the hollowness of the declining
Sensate culture…. As a result, it will increasingly forsake it and shift its
allegiance to either Ideational or Idealistic values.” Finally, we shall see
the release of new creative forces, which “will usher in a culture and a noble
society built not upon the withered Sensate root but upon a healthier and more
vigorous root of integralistic principle.” In other words, we can expect “the
emergence and slow growth of the first components of a new sociocultural
order.”
Hey, one can only hope.
