Cultural Disintegration
I’d like to make the case that I think we are seeing the end
of civilization as we knew it twenty years ago in the United States of America. I think there are three indicators to this
unfortunate reality and I would like to share some thoughts on each of them for
your consideration.
The indicators are
these:
Language/communication
Media
Morality
The Moral Shift
Thirty years ago in the United States, cultural commentators
began to say that we were seeing the “breakdown of the nuclear family.” Now, we don’t even know what the nuclear
family is! Perhaps if you asked kids in
high school what that term means, they think it is people who live with the
fear of nuclear warfare! (Yes, we
unfortunately have that concern too.)
But by “nuclear family” we are referring to a family unit that was
comprised of a Mother, a Father, and any children under their roof. The identifiers for nuclear family were: eating a common meal together daily, going to
worship on the weekend, typically a father being the bread-winner, and the
mother being at home caring for the kids … at least until they were of school
age. The kids were told: “Dad has his job; Mom has her job (taking
care of YOU!); and your job is to do well in school. If you give the teacher any static in school,
we will give YOU static on your backside at home.” There was an order to life and it tended to
produce orderly results.
Now, all that has exploded.
Families eat on-the-run which can account for the proliferation of fast
food joints across the country. Some of
that is because in the Land of Available Prosperity, you are either working to
get “stuff,” or you are trying to enjoy the very “stuff” you worked so hard to
achieve – be they vacations, participation in sports and lessons of various
types (horseback riding, pottery classes), etc.. Our very eating habits betray the cultural
shift. For those who rely on fast-food
(like me!) to make it through the week that is too busy to include real
cooking, our bodies begin to look like what we eat: fat.
For those who manage to eat healthfully, so much of their time and money
is sucked up in that enterprise. It
takes some effort to shop and eat the right way – and to a certain degree, we
are coming to see that as a luxury of the more solidly middle & upper class
echelons.
To the point: blue collar workers and the under and
unemployed struggle to eat correctly due to deficiencies in both economics and
education, and the demographic of Overweight America is lodged more obviously
in their arena. Who ever knew that the
What and How of eating was so critical to the health and relationships in our
culture?! In addition, people seem so
preoccupied with every other thing of life – work or leisure, eating or
dieting, survival or illness, etc. – that their spirituality has all but
swirled the drain.
It seems that less than 60% of people who identify with a
religion actually show up for
services on the weekend. (data gleaned from observing local churches’
quantity of registrations vs. actual persons in the bench.) The figure is probably alterable relative to
which religion we are assessing, as while Catholic and mainline Protestant
Church attendance is down, evangelical Protestant churches are up – arguably,
it could also be a shift of where
those Catholics and Mainliners are going besides staying home. As for the general drop off in attendance, we
should ask: What are some of the reasons
this happened? As one segment of the
intelligentsia created a false dichotomy between religion and science, anyone
who wanted to be thought of as “smart or educated” probably felt they couldn’t
show up in a house of worship…. As if people of faith are necessarily cultural
ignoramuses.
Or maybe it was those
problematic ten commandments – if they had been ten suggestions, would they
have lasted as long before the pseudo-cultural-liberators demanded they be torn
off the walls of our courthouses and schools?!
Yet if you look at every single one of those ten commandments, they seem
to be the basis for the survival of a moral and thoughtful human
community. Could their damning by so
many be the very reason that we as a
civilization are imploding?
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