The Decline of the West

"The greatest (and yet mostly unremarked) sociological change in America over the past 50 years is the collapse of membership in mainline Protestant churches — from around 50 percent of Americans in 1965 to under 10 percent today. This collapse removed a central support of American identity. Though others were welcomed, on and off, we understood that we lived in essentially a Protestant nation. The dominant churches were the cultural Mississippi pouring through the center of the nation’s self-understanding. When that well-spring dried up, the old culture died in the hard-baked mud. As the theological foundations decayed, so did the cultural institutions built on those foundations, including the novel.


"...From the 18th century through the 20th, authors produced fiction unlike anything the world had read. They did so because the civilization needed them to. Rewarded them for doing so, too. Of the authors who have published novels since the early 1990s, none is mandatory reading. This lack of cultural centrality is not necessarily the authors’ fault — we just don’t read novels the way we used to. The great ambitions have dwindled, and the engine of the art form sputters on the last fumes of its old fuel. Modernity’s metaphysical crisis was not solved — by the novel or anything else. Consequently, we are overtaken by a second crisis, one debilitating for art, as the culture loses its horizons and its sense of purpose."

These two paragraphs are from a great article on the decline of the American novel, by the curiously named Joseph Bottum, in the US edition of the Spectator (not to be confused with the American Spectator, which is also a very good magazine). 

The novel is a form in decline because of films, television and the internet. So is poetry and the theatre. But there is more to the story than just creative destruction wreaked by the internet.

I see that others are noticing that we are living in a civilisation in many ways in decline. 

This goes back long before the internet and television cannot be blamed either. In fact there have been no great men or women in any  of the arts, philosophy, economics, psychology or other domains since roughly the middle of the twentieth century. Who is there, outside hard sciences and technology, that is a big historical figure to compare with  Freud, Jung, Keynes, Joyce, Lawrence, Picasso, Miro or Chagall - add to taste? 

Fortunately, we have also been spared evil geniuses like Lenin and Hitler, though the influence of these two is still immeasurable, in the latter's case via usually maladroit and often misconceived attempts to be as different from him as possible.