The Decline of Hedonism

Abstract

The breakdown of a cultural pattern furnishes one of history’s most fascinating spectacles, since it offers the possibility of a study in reverse of the process of culture-formation. Basically the phenomenon is perhaps a neural one, a decrease of energy which brings forth a search for new reaction channels, a wavering between patterns of the past and a hesitant probing for new possibilities, of bitter group-antagonism and of the latter-day attempts of some, formerly disfranchised, groups to make themselves the carriers of the pattern which is entering upon its decline. As such, it is a period of overly sharp consciousness, of a last coming back into focus of the pattern with its full implications, leading to — what could be called — a cultural guilt-feeling and the frequently weird attempts to overcome this sense of the complete inadequacy of the habitual patterns, which begin to appear as strange conglomerations of ideas and symbols, without any visible or logical relation to the starkness of reality, suddenly all the more shocking when it appears without its customary rationalizations and its covering symbolic screen.