We cannot abandon our history

Selection affords possibility. This is a very broad principle that has a lot of applications and implications for our world. In general, selection means making one possible decision out of many at a certain point in time. These choices that are taken at every step decide which doors are able to be opened and, ultimately, where it is possible to get to.

These choices also inform how you are different from others. If another person makes a different decision at any step of their life from you, they will diverge from you. At this point, the possibilities afforded to them will diverge. The skills that they gain will diverge; and, ultimately, the experiences that they have will diverge.

This matters. It matters where we're able to get to in our lives; it matters how I am different from other people. I don't want to lose the skills and experiences that I have developed over my whole life. Likewise, it matters how our societies are different from other societies and how we don't want to lose the thousands of years of cultural selection and development that our ancestors have built up for us.

Going a bit further, we can see how selection is an art and not merely some arbitrary process where every choice has equal value. When crafting a musical piece, for example, out of all the possible notes, you must decide which the first should be. This initial choice then affords the possibilities of what can sound good next. There are, for sure, bad choices that can be made at each of these steps. You can pick something that sounds too cheesy, something that doesn't work at all. And, likewise, there are subtle yet great decisions, and combinations of decisions, that can create possibilities of getting to places that can completely take your breath away.

We saw some of the heights that can be reached with this in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries. Taking Bach, in particular, the places he was able to consistently get to still amaze me and have amazed the entire world since his time. Pieces like The Art of Fugue and St. John Passion will be remembered and cared for for much longer than much else that exists in this world.

It is important to remember here that Bach wasn't just a genius in a vacuum. He was brought up in a particular place and at a particular time. He was only able to reach the heights he did because of the possibilities that were afforded to him and his particular environment. He built upon the tradition that was given to him, and he developed it. He didn't just abandon it in hubris or pride.

Over the course of the 20th century, especially in America, we have not pursued the same way as Bach. We have not developed upon what was given to us, but instead have thrown away most of our connections to the ancient cultures that have taken shape through choices over thousands of years and brought us to this point.

Most European Americans forgot where they came from. Italians abandoned their Italian identity; Germans abandoned their German identity; and Anglos, in large part, abandoned their identity as well. From our traditional music, to our traditional religion, to the way we spoke, to our architecture, there was a mass abandonment of the particular well-cared-for practices that had been passed down for generations.

And this wasn't a development upon our cultures, such as how Bach's masterpieces were a development of the Baroque era, but rather it was a replacement of our culture, and it came largely through the advent of mass media. Over just a few decades, radio, film, magazines, and then television made their way into almost every American home; by 1960, almost 90% of American homes had a television. For the first time in human history, a small number of networks, studios, and advertisers could speak to an entire nation directly, bypassing the large, distributed subsidiarian intermediary structures that used to mediate the dissemination of information and culture. The music people listened to, the stories their kids grew up with, and what they thought a good life looked like stopped coming from their parish, their family, and their town, and started coming from New York and Hollywood. In this manner, the millennia-long localized selection, developed organically all across the West, was uprooted and replaced with mass homogenization via top-down mechanisms of control.

The people creating this were very open about the influence they intended to have and the world they envisioned creating. Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion (1922), argued that the common interests of a people "can be managed only by a specialized class whose personal interests reach beyond the locality." This class had new tools at its disposal; "as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication," he wrote, "the practice of democracy has turned a corner. A revolution is taking place, infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power." Edward Bernays opened his book Propaganda (1928) with this: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." Bernays was involved in at least three presidential administrations (Wilson, Coolidge, and Hoover), directed campaigns for companies like the American Tobacco Company and the United Fruit Company, and was involved in the overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. Lippmann served as secretary of Wilson's secret Inquiry, which drafted much of the Fourteen Points, wrote propaganda leaflets as an Army intelligence officer in the First World War, and, for over three decades, shaped national opinion through his syndicated column, Today and Tomorrow.

In 1929, Charles Kettering, the head of research at General Motors, wrote that "the key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction." That is, the goal wasn't to give people what they needed, but to keep them always wanting more. By 1955, the retail analyst Victor Lebow said it outright: "Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions, in consumption." In effect, there was a quite successful attempt to replace the binding mythos of American society from being largely ecumenically Christian, to being Consumerist. There is no more fundamental shift in society than replacing its binding mythos; and there is no greater change in mythos than replacing a religion fundamentally based off of sacrificial agapic love and suffering, with a religion based off of self-oriented consumptive love and comfort.

After World War II, this new American Consumerism spread throughout Europe through advertising, film, music, television, and consumer goods. As this commercialized culture spread, places with distinct histories increasingly began to resemble one another, with the same bland glass boxes, chain restaurants, billboards, and shopping centers sprouting up everywhere.

I'm barely scratching the surface here, but if you want to see how deep this goes, Adam Curtis's documentary The Century of the Self goes through how Bernays and those after him learned to shape our desires, and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death shows how we weren't conquered by force, as Orwell feared, but by our own entertainment, as Huxley foresaw.

On a personal note, I found the change in architecture during this time period to be some of the most revealing about the fruits of this change in culture. Architecture, that is, the crafting of the space around us, is one of the most important arts to recover in the building of the new world. More will follow on this in a later meditation.

There is a mass awakening going on right now among young people to do with remembering what was lost. Previous generations abandoned large parts of our traditions which took a millennium of work to achieve. It is now the job of the young to recover what was lost so that we may build a better world for ourselves and for our descendants.

In order to do so, we must take our lives seriously. These ancient patterns that our ancestors discovered and embodied lay dormant within us. We must choose to bring those again into the world and to develop them further.

Every action we take matters; every decision we will make will either afford us greater possibilities that bring us closer to the heights of what is possible or the decisions we make will just continue to destroy us. We will either build a beautiful world or get lost smoking weed and playing video games as our enemies hammer nails into our coffins.

Contrary to Fukuyama, I don't believe that we're in the end of history. To the contrary, we are clearly at the start of something. It is the decisions that we make in our lifetimes that will shape the next era of Western civilization.

It is a time of great potential, but also a time of great danger. We need to be as innocent as doves and as wise as serpents. In these times, live in hope, my friends. Resurrection awaits.