I have to say, I’m still reeling from the shock of learning that 48% of Americans are de facto creationists. It drives home a point I’ve been making all along, which is that action in the political sphere in a democracy is subsidiary to attitudes in the cultural sphere. If you want change in the political sphere, it has to begin with work in the cultural sphere.
Or put another way, cultural attitudes define the limits of what’s possible in the political sphere. That’s why social engineering projects never work. The so called enlightened elite cannot force the unenlightened to change their attitudes. They try it from time to time, and the results are the Terror in France or the kind of purges that followed the Russian revolution. And the changes never stick. The idealistic dream of a better society quickly devolves into nightmare.
Real change, if it is to be lasting and healthy, cannot be a top-down kind of thing. It has to work from the bottom up, and I guess that’s why I find that 48% number so daunting. It’s not the particular belief that bothers me so much as its implication that almost half of America is nuts, if by nuts you mean refusing to deal with reality, which in this instance is the fossil record. Biological evolution is not that hard a concept to grasp, It’s taught in all high schools, it shouldn’t be that offensive to religious-minded people, and yet 48% of Americans don’t buy it? With a culture this broken, is it any wonder that our politics is so intractable and discouraging? If so many people can just say they don’t believe in biological evolution, it’s as if there’s no basic framework that defines common ground for sane discussion.
I take solace in the idea that we can account for this phenomenon as the symptoms of a decadent socieity. As I’ve pointed out before, decadence isn’t a pejorative term, just a descriptive one. It describes the transitional time between an old thing dying and a new thing being born. The last major decadent period in the West was the 1300s while the culture was shifting from the late middle ages to the early modern. I don’t know that what we’re undergoing now is as major as that, but the twentieth century bears a lot of resemblance to the fourteenth. During a decadent period, there is no widely recognized legitimate cultural or spiritual authority, and anything goes. But it’s temporary. Perhaps we can only say No in such a climate–a No to the worst excesses of power and greed. Eventually there will be something to which we can say Yes, but it’s not there to work with yet.
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