This reminded me of something Jacques Barzun said. He wrote near the end of his life an excellent, popular history book called From Dawn to Decadence; 500 Years of Western Cultural History. The format is unusual. One can open any page and just start reading to learn so much on so many subjects at a given point in history. It isn't politically correct.
I couldn't find the quote I was looking for, but it is about how the discovery of the New World (and the round Earth) changed absolutely everything in Western culture, almost overnight by pulling the rug out from under people's beliefs. He said something along the lines of it taking an event like Martians landing on the White House lawn, and holding a press conference with POTUS for the world to bring about such a paradigm shift today.
en.wikipedia.org
Here are some things he said in '99 from an interview about that book:
On Decadence
Q: What meaning of decadence
do you want readers to understand?
A: I want them first to believe what I say when I call it a falling off, which is a literal translation into English of the Latin derivative. Given that, the notion of what has fallen away must occur to the reader, and then, presumably, he has the material in this last chapter of the book and at various other points along the way. Loss of nerve, loss of intention, contradictory intention, that is, self-contradiction in the working of an institution, confusion, disarray, lack of originality, desperate means of looking “new” when actually very little is offered. Devotion to the words
anti- and
post- and so on—to somehow cover the facts that they feel need a new justification or rationalization. All these things must go under the idea of falling away from the path, or the efficiency, or the novelty. And as I say a couple of times, it ought to be looked on with calm and the knowledge that the worse it gets, the closer we are to renovation. …
Have you not noticed in the press, and I mean newspapers, many diverse references by many different people to what, now that we understand each other, would be called
decadence in that particular realm or activity of modern life? … Morals, government, the press itself, which has been very self-critical lately, the several arts—so that one might say that putting all these testimonies together, we would have a collective statement that we’re in decadence.
A Sense of History
Q: What kind of sense of history, or appetite for history, would you like for readers to have, now and in years to come?
A: I think a good starting point for the ideal reader would be a lively interest in art and social thought, coupled with an interest in what is going on now in those two realms. So that with knowledge of past art and all the theories of government and society and philosophy and religion that such a person would have, curiosity would be aroused by the present situation in seeing how the past—other than what he knows—has led to the present state of affairs.
Q: You often use the word sympathy
. Could you elaborate on that idea, about the sympathy that a historian must have?
A: You can’t understand anything unless you put yourself in the situation that you’re describing, or in the mind of the person who is prominent in the situation. That is, hostility gets you nowhere, because it only hits upon points of agreement or disagreement with your own system of ideas.
jermwarfare.com
