T.H. White pauses toward the end of The Once and Future King, his great epic about Arthurian England, to argue the Dark Ages were hardly as dark as they're made out. Certainly, he agrees, the Dark Agers had big problems, like famine, serfdom, and the Black Death, but hadn't we moderns also had to deal with world wars, the Spanish Flu, and the sudden collapse of empires?
In “these dark ages,” he writes, “there was so much decency in the world that the Catholic Church could impose a peace to all [the] fighting -- which it called The Truce of God -- and which lasted from Wednesday to Monday, as well as during the whole of Advent and Lent.”
Up until the moment the Soviet Empire imploded with a whimper in 1991, many Western intelligence analysts were insisting the USSR would remain entirely viable for years to come; but not the Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik. Decades earlier, in his essay “Will the Soviet Union survive Until 1984?,” Amalrik already predicted the collapse of the Soviet Empire; to occur in or even before George Orwell's fateful year.
His foresight, he said, was “based not on scholarly research but only on observation.” His essay was not some academic paper, but rather an eyewitness report on prison conditions by an inmate on the state of the penal system holding him captive. He took stock of what was happening around him, choosing to believe what his eyes were telling him. For Kremlinologists, he said, “this discussion should have the same interest that a fish would have for an ichthyologist if it suddenly began to talk.”
One of the telltale signs of the Soviet imperium's decline he noted was the high incidence of gratuitous acts of anti-social behaviour by ordinary people; for example, the rampant petty thievery. A person passing by an open window snatches a transistor radio perched on the ledge, and quickly runs off. It's a knee-jerk response by a Soviet citizen feeling chronically short-changed by The System, no longer feeling bound by or loyal to the social contract.
If the Amalrik example of random theft gathered dust in my memory palace, it's because it coincided with a chat I had one morning during a spring thaw with a gregarious security guard assigned to a university lecture hall.
We were both outdoors enjoying the onset of milder weather. The guard gestured at the snow-covered embankment sloping down to the ice-choked river.
“You see there,” he said. “After the snow's melted, the clean-up crew will have to swing by and gather up the textbooks and other items that were thrown there during the winter.”
He reminded me of the security system the university bookstore employed. It forbade students from bringing their own textbooks in with them while shopping for school supplies; instead the students were made to temporarily pigeonhole their books and materials on the shelves provided outside the doors, where they became easy pickings for other students.
This was, apparently, a typical release-valve for dejected students struggling to cope with the stresses of college life: Randomly grab a text belonging to someone else and, when the moment's right, experience the “satisfaction” of discarding it in a snowdrift. Which goes to show, were reminders needed, our capitalist society was not without its own signs of social pathology.
Several books have been published in the past few years tracking the decline of Western civilization including Jane Jacobs's Dark Age Ahead, as well as documenting the decline of the American Empire, like Morris Berman's Dark Ages America, to list two good examples.
Jacobs has sourced the decay evident around us to several causes: The break-up of the family unit, the pursuit of the singles' lifestyle, the mania for owning things trumping the nurturing of family ties; the fetish for credentials in higher education; the giving of control over scientific discoveries and innovation to self-serving politics and economics; leaders beholden to special interests, rather than to the public good; and our trash culture, with its throwaway habits and backyard dumpsters.
The contemporary music video is a genre where one may find, neatly compacted into a four-minute segment, an eye-opening peep-show into where youth culture is at, with its celebration of leprous values. Take, for instance, songbird Ke$ha's recent opus Take It Off. Here is dumpster-diving at its finest. The plot line is simple:
Party Central is the parking lot by a motel strip in a desert town. After nightfall, goaded by a feral nihilism, freakish youths gather for a wild party. In the words of the song, “it's a dirty free for all” that builds to an orgiastic climax. Along the way, trash cans are rolled and whiskey bottles smashed and garbage strewn about, until at last the desired priapic state of mind is attained in an inhibition-free zone where chaos reigns supreme.
Morris Berman in his book Dark Ages America devotes a chapter to the study of the efficient arrangement of the service industry. It is, Berman concludes, organized in a way as to minimize any or all likelihood of serendipity. It's a process from which the chance of an interesting or instructive event occurring has been reduced or eliminated for the sake of expediency.
Are the # denizens from Party Central that appear in Ke$ha's music-video unconsciously voicing an inchoate dissent against such an over structured state of affairs? Is their frenzy a misguided quest for spontaneity? Or is some far more sinister force is at work here. Consider this recent news story:
That of an unnamed 16-year-old girl, said to have been drugged with a date rape drug and then repeatedly sexually assaulted by five to seven men in a field outside a rave near Pitt Meadows, B.C. Police allege a 16-year-old boy documented the rape with 20 still photos, together with graphic videos, and posted them all on the social networking site, Facebook.com. He may yet face charges for purveying child pornography. Note that after being removed from Facebook, the sordid pictures of the victim being victimized have resurfaced on the Internet.
In his Life of Tiberius, the Roman historian Suetonius recalls how the old emperor in his dotage on the isle of Capri devoted much time and considerable resources to sustain his flagging passions by wandering further afield into the hinterland of sexual depravity.
In one erotic scenario, a group of boys was instructed to behave like a school of fish and, while the deviant emperor went about his daily ablutions in his Olympic-size pool, to swarm his august person and “nibble” on his spindly limbs.
If an extradition treaty were to exist with the year 35 AD and the present, and were some time machine able to fast-forward one of emperor's boy-fish to the year 2010 AD, what cautionary message -- what dire forewarning -- would he bring with him, into the future, to the people of a moribund civilization running on empty?
Orest Slepokura is a retired schoolteacher, after 30-odd years spent teaching, much of that in Alberta; but also in and around Montreal, as well as in a Native community on James Bay, over in London, England, and Toulon, France. A lifelong reader, Orest continues using much of my time reading books, journals, and newspapers.
