The Idea of Decline in Western History – Arthur Herman………
Explores one question…..what is behind the ever-popular narrative of decline?
Decade after decade, leading intellects explain the world is going to hell, progress is a lie, bad people, ideas and institutions are to blame for irreversible degradation of all that is good.
Overwhelming real-world evidence to contrary matters not to calamitists
2 forms of lament….
Historical Pessimists – Burckhardt, Spengler, Henry Adams, Toynbee, Paul Kennedy and a much more frightening cultural pessimism (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Foucault, Marcuse, Chomsky and many contemporary Greens)
“The historical pessimist sees civilization’s virtues under attack from malign and destructive forces that it cannot overcome. Cultural pessimism claims that those forces form the civilizing process from the start. The historical pessimist worries that his own society is about to destroy itself, the cultural pessimist concludes that it needs to be destroyed.”
Eco-pessimists
Romanticism and its decay narrative traced to Rousseau and French Revolution
