A Heap Of Broken Images: Social media and the architecture of anomie

[Phil Rockstroh]

A Heap Of Broken Images: Social media and the architecture of anomie
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/071310a.html

In an age, when nature is besieged and the political landscape blighted, and one stands, stoop shouldered and wincing into the howling wasteland of epic-scale idiocy extant in the era, a solitary person can feel lost ... marooned inside an increasingly isolated sense of self. Whether urban, suburban, or rural dwelling, the sense of alienation, for an individual, is profound ... as discernible to the eye as the constellations of foreclosure signs stippling overgrown front lawns across the land ... as hidden as the abandoned dreams within.

The fraying ligature of the landscape of the United States reveals an inner geography of alienation and anomie. Living on the island of Manhattan, I daily negotiate an urban layout of practical, but identity-decimating grids -- a cityscape of harsh, inhuman right angles ... a geography that renders street encounters abrupt, curt and intrusive.

After a time, one begins, by reflex, to buffer oneself against such intrusions, withdrawing inward ... becoming a self-enclosed, walking fortress, shielding oneself from the degradations of these impersonal affronts (that feel altogether personal) -- with I-Pods, Blackberries, and other vestments attendant to the muttered prayers of the self-absorbed.

While above the street -- corporate towers -- that are steel and concrete kingdoms of blind, willful ascension -- blot the skyline ... these structures flee upward, as if to escape the implications of life lived at street level and sharing in the consequences of decisions made within their sterile, insular sanctums of power and cupidity.

This is architecture as blind hubris: creations made by the hands of mortal men ... yet failing to have any connection to the ground, these buildings crowd out the real estate of the sacred. Moreover, their manic skyward thrust leaves them, and those imprisoned within, bereft of roots that reach down into the renewing loam of the earth, to where mortal vanity is delivered to dust and desperate hopes rot and transubstantiate into the compost that nourishes new life.

And blooms of renewal, I suspect, will not be found online as well. The electronic sheen of social media sites is no substitute for communal fabric. There is no animal musk nor angelic apprehensions to en-soul the flesh and tease wisdom out of obdurate will ... No matter how many restless shades want to friend you on FaceBook nor ghostly texts descend upon you in an unholy Pentecost of Tweets, online exchanges will continue to leave you restless, hollow, and yearning for the colors and cacophony of an authentic agora.

The adolescent purgatory of FaceBook -- with its castings into the Eternal Now of instant praise, acceptance, and rejection -- reflects, magnifies, and acerbates the perpetual adolescence of the contemporary culture of the United States, intensifying its shallow longings and displaced panics, its narcissistic rage and obsession with the superficial. It devours libido, by providing a pixilated facsimile of the primal dance of human endeavor, leaving one's heart churning in thwarted yearning, locked an evanescent embrace with electronic phantoms, as one, paradoxically, attempts to live out unfulfilled desires by means of hollow communion with the soul-negating source of his alienation.

One can never get enough of what one doesn't need. Ergo, the compulsions and panic of millions of hungry ghosts will hold an ongoing, hollow mass online, in a futile campaign to regain form, gain direction, and walk in meaning and beauty among the things of the world, but instead will remain imprisoned within the very system that condemned them to this fate.

And this is the place, we, as a culture, will remain, for a time. This electronic inferno will be our vale and mountaintop, our sanctuary and leviathan. We will stare baffled into its vastness, stupefied and lost within its proliferate array of depersonalizing distractions and seductions. The more we try to lose ourselves in it, by surrendering to its shimmering surface attractions, the more tightly we will become bound in the bondage of self.

Naturally, living in the grinding maw of such monsters of alienation will engulf one with ennui and angst. Moreover, the judgment of anyone claiming not to be afflicted should be regarded as suspect.

Possessed by this mode of being: we languish in a zoo of our own making where we gaze, without comprehension, at the confines of our enclosure, chew our paws, pace the cage, and are restless for mealtime. Like an animal in a cage, we are no longer what we were meant to be ... we have forgotten what it is to be alive. With the exception of superficial form, we begin to lose our affinity to what makes us recognizable as a human being and as an animal -- for we have become simply a sad thing that waits for lunch. And I defy any caged clock-watcher in a cubicle to defy that point.

Restless and agitated in our confinement, we sink further into anomie ... into the benumbing embrace of comfort zones (over-eating, anti-depressants, consumerism as emotional distraction, addiction to electronic media) where we chose safety over the truth of our being. In these cages of inauthenticity, our heart's longings and human needs are held in stasis by the perfunctory persona we cultivated for approval and acceptance; there, consigned to a barren region of mind where one is rewarded for docility and duplicity, one languishes, bereft of eros and pothos ... unconsciously self-convicted and sentenced for the crime of being a serial betrayer of one's essential self.

So much of the criteria of the modern condition has atomized us, stripped us, collectively, of ritual, purpose and meaning, and placed us in the midst of what T.S. Eliot expressed in prosody as a "heap of broken images."

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow 
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,  
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only 
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, 
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, 
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only 
There is shadow under this red rock,  
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock), 
And I will show you something different from either 
Your shadow at morning striding behind you 
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; 
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
--From: The Waste Land

There is danger, of course, in such places -- but there is also the possibility of renewal.

Personal and historical traumas leave a legacy of bewilderment. And being bewildered i.e., being in a psychic wilderness, lost, having wandered or been cast past the known horizon of experience ... is to be in position to engage the novel, be in the thrall of unfolding mystery, and wander in a soul-suffused landscape of the sublime.

A state of alienation is right where we should be: To be able to adapt to a culture dedicated to little more than finding efficient means of exploiting the hours of the greater public's lives for the benefit of a greedy few ... would be a tragedy. Living within this culture should bring on despair ... It is a leviathan that has devoured your existence. Do you think you can renovate the belly of the beast ... set up a time-share with Jonah and Pinocchio there ... and live in comfort?

Should not one stagger and stammer in mortification when shown a handful of dust?

Moreover, the solution we are offered -- making ourselves a dwelling within a prison of consumer kitsch -- should and does only bring on more anomie. Eliot wrote the following regarding a psyche attempting to adapt to a dying culture:

<...> Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
--From: The Journey of the Magi,

One of the notions, as Rilke might put it, that is "brooding like a seed" in my psyche has been the distinction James Hillman makes between civilization and culture. Hillman avers that, and I agree, civilization is a dead thing -- an edifice of crumbling marble enshrined in an eros-devoid museum of the mind where we do little more than give empty, obligatory homage to a fossilized tableaux ... our forced reverence is but a perfunctory prayer muttered before the iconography of a dead religion; in contrast, culture is a living, breathing phenomenon of the collective mind, heart, and soul of the people within it. Its logos inhabits the very air of existence, permeating it like the sound of birdsong, and cricket and cicada stridulation throughout a high summer night.

Moreover, he avers that culture is akin to a madhouse; in fact, the solution lies in the back ward of the asylum, the area where are housed the hopeless cases. In other words, like Dante ... proceed to the place you most fear looking upon, embrace it, and hear its awful keening and heart-opening agonies. There is the location of rebirth, the last circle of hell ... retreating to a comfort zone will simply leave the situation is stasis.

So the question arises: How does one enter the soul-making shabbiness of the human condition, even though, as always, we are powerless against the trajectory of history and lost within the mad proliferation of culture -- and, as Bob Dylan limned in lyric regarding the alienation this situation evokes, " no direction home?"

Try this: embrace the bracing pain of your alienation: make a home in being lost. Gaze with wonder of upon the sacred scenery of your bewilderment ... Wandering in the wilderness is a holy state.

Wendell Berry believes such ventures to be one of the true vocations of the soul:

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
--Wendell Berry

In other words, in times such as ours, when we embrace our alienation then we will be welcomed home ... to share a common shelter with the multitudes who are also lost.


Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: [email protected]. Visit Phil's website http://philrockstroh.com/ And at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. While the OP is certainly well and beautifully written,

I would offer that the piece is somewhat based on the fallacy that the human condition was at some other time more harmonious, connected and satisfied.

The Op writes,
"One can never get enough of what one doesn't need. Ergo, the compulsions and panic of millions of hungry ghosts will hold an ongoing, hollow mass online, in a futile campaign to regain form, gain direction, and walk in meaning and beauty among the things of the world, but instead will remain imprisoned within the very system that condemned them to this fate."

It may certainly be true that modern civilization does alienate individuals and that we have built up a structure that perpetuates and exacerbates the feelings of alienation, but to offer that humanity is struggling mightily to "regain form etc." assumes that humanity at some other time had a more desirable form and direction. I think history shows that to be mostly false. While previous generations did not have Facebook and the trappings of modern society, humanity still had problems, misery and alienation. Thomas Hobbes description of the human condition in Leviathan as "And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" is reflected in the OP even though it was written in the 1600s. In short, humanity has always struggled with these issues and Facebook is simply the modern face to an age-old aspect of the human condition.

I do think the OP is beautifully written and completely correct about the evidence of our modern, technologically advanced structures that keep us alienated and unhappy.

[Joe Chi Minh]

8. I disagree. Hunter-gatherers are finely tuned, spiritually/psychically. Indeed, endemic mystics.

The deepest truths are personal - scant wonder since the Holy Trinity of divine persons, is the ultimate reality.

Atheists are wont to ask, "Why would an all-powerful God bother with an individual, his problems and so on?" Yet the fact that God does so, seems so implausible, once can sympathise with the atheists' unbelief in this regard. Yet our true nature is in the infinitely dynamic and creative, divine life, the Spirit of God. "Oh, Lord you made us for yourself, and our hearts will find no rest until they rest in thee." They certanly won't do so looking up at cold, angular skyscrapers of steel, glass and chrome.

Just as love binds, integrates, makes sense, hate fractures, shatters, splinters, leads to chaos. It wasn't for nothing that your historian, Barbara Tuchman, remarked that war is the unfolding of miscalculations. Charity, love of neighbour, the lubricant of reason is in short supply. Not necessarily among the troops on the ground, who actually fight for each other.

[puebloknot]

22. I've just touched on your assertion that the "olden times" did not offer up ...

... an idealilzed human society on the Earth. But I think the writer is alluding to the kind of thing that is strong in my memory as a teenaged "army brat," living in Germany after WWII, and seeing people who were living in gardening shacks bothering to go out and attend concerts in still-damaged music halls, and walking arm-in-arm in the countryside on Sunday afternoons, as their only, but very valuable, means of feeling connected to others.

In every generation, there has been a need to find the seed of our common humanity in spite of what political/religious/industrial and technological controlling forces try to do to us. Our humanity just keeps raising its bruised little noggin. Let it continue to be so.

I'm aware that I am using a modern technological "miracle" which allows me to discuss the merits of a simpler way of being in the world. "Conundrum" comes to mind! In addition, a line from "Sophie's Choice" has arrived: "She could talk about it, but she could not do it." We who want a better world can talk about it, but finding a way to do it is the challenge. But I maintain that talking is a starting point.

[grasswire]

2. this might be meant to be poetry

.....but it doesn't work so well as an essay. It's pretentious writing. "Benumbing"? Gah! His point could be made in one paragraph of clear, elegant writing.

Signed, crotchety old editor.

[puebloknot]

4. But some of us like to revel in more than the "one paragraph ...

... of clear, elegant writing."

"A difference of opinion is what makes horse races." ~~ Mark Twain

Signed, appreciative old editor

[Phil Rockstroh]

5. crotchety old editor

whose senex possession, see Jung, is causing the belief that your personal style (writhed, brittle, dry as the dust on your tongue) is the only way to write prose ... as mandated by the One True God of Writing Styles, as given to you, of course, on the mountaintop of your shit-dust fantasies, and has made you omniscient and avenging prophet of all prose styling.

Keep your rotting, one-sided opinions to yourself ... I can smell your "crotchety" rot from here. This is not the seasoning of age you're experiencing -- but putrefaction. Old fools often mistake it wisdom.

[The_Commonist]

6. Who is this Phil Rockstroh fellow...

...and why is he insulting old-timers here on DU?

I thought the OP was completely unreadable, but I wasn't gonna bother to say anything until I saw the author insult someone who did not like the writing.

Dude... the OP is completely unreadable!

[Phil Rockstroh]

7. Commonist

Aren't you precious. So above the fray -- but forced into the breach against your will -- to protect the honor of the aged.

No one insulted all old-timers at DU. Just one braying jackass.

As far as what is readable and unreadable ... that is subjective, of course, but this piece might take, given your shallow, whiny reply, a little more concentration than you seem to possess.

[The_Commonist]

9. Oh my goodness! I have been SO told!

You have mortally wounded me, oh superior one!

Dude, you're just another boring New York "auto-didactic, gasbag monologist" who fancies himself a "poet, lyricist and philosopher bard" in love with the sound of your own voice. Guys like you are a dime a dozen in this city. You come to this discussion forum in order to drive traffic to your blog, and when someone doesn't particularly care for your brand of "wit," you insult them and everyone else. You show up here an average of once a month, and when someone doesn't bow at your feet, you have to lash out at them. We've seen it a brazillion times around these parts.

And yes, of course readability IS subjective. I personally found your little piece here to be yawn-worthy. No big deal. So did someone else. Naturally, with your bloated ego, that's the reader's fault, not yours. So then you have to throw around words like "shallow" and "whiny" in order to pump up your ego even more. I can only imagine how you'll respond to this bit!

Your blog is boring, your life is boring and I suspect that you only have 46 Facebook friends because nobody wants to be around you. I know I wouldn't...

[Phil Rockstroh]

13. Commonist, cease your tedious trolling

"My life is boring." How are you in a position to know that? You manage to combine over-the-top fantasy and tedious projections ... I don't think it me that's boring.

PS. I don't want to stop your torrent of tedious fantasy (actually, I do) but I was published on DU in 2005 before it became on open forum. Now that you have been disabused of that puerile fantasy (or should be) will you shut-up and stop trolling.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/05/08/20_fumes.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/05/06/29_bubble.html

[The_Commonist]

20. You were published on DU in 2005 before it became on open forum?

I don't know what that means.
I first came to DU in early 2001, via the Top 10 Conservative Idiots.

Speaking of idiots...

[Phil Rockstroh]

23. Yes, speaking of idiots

That just the problem: when you don't know what something means or are ignorant about an event, you assume it is the source of the idiocy -- not your own lack of knowledge or difficulty in comprehension. That is a defining trait of idiots, and many conservatives as well -- and, it seems, your sub-cretinous ass.

Yes, not an open forum ... DU editors accepted (or rejected) submissions that they posted on the front page. But you the missed the point, yet again ... are you staring at a shining object and getting distracted?

I was countering your idiot assertion: that I had just arrived at DU, possessed of a terrible New York attitude, and started attacking the elderly ... but, of course, in true idiot fashion, you missed the point and instead informed me of how you arrived at DU ... Was it short, yellow bus, by chance?

[The_Commonist]

24. I see, so what you are saying is that...

...you were never interested in being a part of the community here, you waited until there was mechanism to get your writings onto the front page so that you could get the widest possible audience without doing the work of building credibility. That's exactly what I meant when I said guys like you are a dime a dozen. You want instant credibility and success, based on nothing more than your ability to turn a phrase.

I suppose what I find most amusing in all of this, is that you describe yourself as a gasbag, and then when you are essentially called on it, you get all defensive. Own up to it, man! You use the technique of blaming the reader for being too stupid to understand what you are saying, rather than take the feedback that maybe your wit is not for everybody. A "crotchety old editor," who has been an active member of this community since practically the beginning, essentially tried to convey to you that "brevity is the soul of wit," and you chose to respond by basically telling her that her old, dried up pussy stinks? Not a good way to build readership!

Yes, there is plenty of room on DU for gasbag monologists who are not interested in participating in the life of the community. That's part of the beauty of this place. But you must be prepared to get called on your shit. And turning it around and calling people names is not the best way to get them on your side. I called you names on this thread, and you know what? I am going to apologize to you for that, because it's not cool. It's not what people who are on the same side of things do to each other. So here goes:

Phil, I apologize for calling you an idiot. It is against the rules here, and it's not cool.

However, I still think your original post was unreadable.

I will now give you the last word...

[Phil Rockstroh]

25. No last

word ... only to restate the obvious, for the slow and witless:

You have a true virtuosity for missing the point -- as well as for blundering into self-negating paradox:

"The soul of wit" (fortune cookie cliche it had become) -- you stammer -- after you have committed paragraph after paragraph of your tedious, witless palaver to pixel ... that kind of lack of self-awareness is most likely the cause of why you find a slightly more complex example of prose then you are accustomed to ... unreadable -- when, in fact, you cannot be reached because you have bound your mind so tightly in habitual self-reference.

BTW: I had no knowledge of the sex of the dried-up old editor, prior to your last self-righteous pronouncement (furthermore, from what part of your cut-off, besieged psyche crawled the fantasy of my referring to hers or anyone's vaginal vapors, I don't know nor have a desire to go near ... Yuck ... My retort was not gender specific; the rest is your gruesome imaginings).

He/she simply showed their ass -- and I gave it a swift kick. Remember, they threw the first punch and were counter-punched ... Man, you whiny, purer-than-thou bores can perform some self-dazzling acts of passive-aggressive jujitsu ... Only trouble is: you tie yourself up so badly in doing so, that you are no help in a real fight -- and that is why the mass of the country thinks liberal are ineffective and self-righteous clowns.

Grow a pair and some wit, boy -- the times call for it.

[puebloknot]

11. WTF is wrong with me? I could read it, did read it, enjoyed reading it!

Sound bytes rot the brain. Reading is becoming an endangered art.

You'd think the writer had strayed into "Pleasantville," where Outlanders are suspect (and in danger if they don't watch their prose)!

[ccinamon]

10. thank you...I've tried to read 4 times now and

I can't get thru the first paragraph! It's written to use the biggest, flowery words in the most convoluted way possible....reading shouldn't be an exercise in decryption or translation and this "essay" needs both!

[Phil Rockstroh]

14. ccinaman

Reading is many things, including being challenging ... but your needing "decryption or translation" says little of the piece -- and much about your shallowness.

BTW: Words are living things that sometimes flower and are sometimes big ... unlike your dead, little mind.

[tblue37]

17. I too find purple prose to be boring. nt

[Phil Rockstroh]

19. Purple prose

The term is hackneyed ... and overused by the low attention span crowd to describe, in their limited way, writing that is out of their limited range.

Moreover, I've noticed this: That people who, as a rule, claim to be bored are themselves the problem ... they are boring.

[puebloknot]

3. A word feast! Thank you on this day when sun shines in my window ...

... and I must spend much of it before a glowing computer monitor.

Krishnamurti said this: "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." Yet he, too, was lost and alone in his own "pathless land," I think.

You are wary of Facebook. Perhaps I am a bit older than you because I have long berated the garage door opener as a destroyer of communal embrace of others -- and eight people breaking bread around a dining room table as the antidote to the isolation that results from being able to garage our cars and take ourselves into our own space without having to so much as say "Hello" to any quixotic creature who might be standing outside in open space, ready to greet us.

Thinking again, however, few of us can live where we do not hear the fall of our neighbor's axe, and walls and doors and fences, and the garage door closer give us the closest thing to solitude we can manage when living in the midst of the Madding Crowd.

And "intentional communities" are the oxymoron passing as the organic coming together of people who share various excitements such as reading and gardening and music which were the genuine stuff of community in the past. Not that some are not based on that premise, but too much closeness makes one begin to despair of finding those lurking somewhere in the Six Degrees who are really ours, who really want the same world we want.

I think it is a question of balance. The instant communication of electronic media may stand in as temporary salvation for someone in despair, who finds a friendly "voice" out there in Internet Land. As a substitute for the human voice, the personal touch, electronic love is ersatz love -- and the theme of your OP today, I think.

I live by this literary quote, and long to see our country adapt its theme as our way of being in the world now: "It is never too late to be what you might have been." ~~ George Eliot

A votre sante!

Judy Barrett
Santa Fe, New Mexico

[puebloknot]

12. For your next visit, maybe you can borrow Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak!

If they can't see you, they can't pelt you with sticks and stones! But don't write your next OP with disappearing ink!

[Phil Rockstroh]

15. snake heads

In Greek myth, Perseus used a cloak of the invisibility to escape the gaze of the Medusa ... I think being challenged, as opposed to being spoon fed, gives some folks in these parts a head full of angry snakes.

[puebloknot]

16. Just so! Do keep challenging. Your readership might grow from one ...

... to many! :) And that, by definition, would be a community!

[Phil Rockstroh]

18. Deeper

Since communal engagement has been usurped by corporate occupation of almost all public space, we must challenge ourselves ... This planet, overburdened by our shallowness, will become a hostile place for us, if we refuse to look within, deep, and challenge ourselves. The same stupid human tricks will not do. Social networks go wide, but they don't go deep -- and depth is what is needed now -- not more shiny surfaces.

[puebloknot]

21. Already, we live in a "Farenheit 451" society, where depth is difficult ...

... to find since home schooling and religious indoctrination, as well as corporate meddling in our public schools, have produced a population that looks askance at the "elitist" habit of reading books. Attention spans, if any, are reduced to what can be taken in, in less than a minute.

My own act of resistance against the tide of mediocrity and despair that threatens to engulf us is a book/knitting club that meets periodically to discuss a book that requires a little concentration to read and comprehend, along with the tactile joys of knitting and sharing "scratch" food items. No Cliff Notes, no canned/packaged foods are allowed. Spitting in the ocean, I know, but personally satisfying.

I am an older woman (they say, but they are somewhat mistaken), and about ten years ago I was looking into the display window, from the street, of an antique shop in Santa Fe. There I saw an *icebox* and a Singer treadle sewing machine, along with various kitchen implements displayed as "antiques," but which I remembered seeing my grandmother using when I was a very small child (during WWII). I was swept with nostalgia, as well as almost a longing for that simpler way of life, and an intuitive sense that it may all come to that in time -- a reversion to a simpler way of being on the planet.

I admire many of the inventions of modern times. I simply do not admire the use to which they are too often put. I live just down the road from Los Alamos. I am a soldier's daughter. I have spent a lot of time in my life mulling over the events which produced the bomb, the role of our military in stopping Hitler (before importing Wehrner Von Braun to our shores to continue his projects on our peaceful white sands).

Can it be said that eschewing modern technology for a dreamy, more bucolic and thefore presumably more enligtened time is the answer to our problems? I wish it were so, but the ignorance we see now is simply the great-grandchild of generations of those who were suspicious of "book learning" and got their "knowledge" from what came out of the preacher's/priest's mouth every Sunday, down through time. How do you sell/give depth to those who think it is the Devil's work? The reception you've had here is a good example of that. Don't get too intellectually and/or poetically "uppity" because you'll make other people feel inferior, and there's nothing for it but to shun you for your effort.

Cheers, I think!

Judy Barrett
Santa Fe, NM

[DonCoquixote]

26. Nothing wrong with being a poet, but.

Like many, you seem to fall into the trap of making a demon out technology.

"This is architecture as blind hubris: creations made by the hands of mortal men ... yet failing to have any connection to the ground, these buildings crowd out the real estate of the sacred. Moreover, their manic skyward thrust leaves them, and those imprisoned within, bereft of roots that reach down into the renewing loam of the earth, to where mortal vanity is delivered to dust and desperate hopes rot and transubstantiate into the compost that nourishes new life."

On the contrary, many people in those apartments do have a sense of community and life. It's not for nothing that some of New York's strongest cultural achievements come from the tenements: the places where Jazz grew up and Hip-Hop was born. Many of those folks in el barrio do have a strong sense of the sacred, but then again, that is because they do not need an architect to connect them to the ground.

It is not that the modern culture cannot use a bit of humanizing, but it is very easy to say "The modern era is hopeless", without realizing that every modern era has been hopeless. From Elizabethan England to Ancient Greece to even more Ancient China, the artists were ALWAYS talking about how their era were out of balance, and about how something was better in some far off golden age that never was! It's another eternal theme, right up there with "what's the matter with these kids today?" The key is, not to wish for some utopia, but to look right here, right now, at what is worth keeping, worth saving. Then, oddly enough, when you stop wishing the world would be as you wish it, you will find you actually have more control of the world, because you can actually engage it, instead of suffering from it.

And I disagree with this:
"civilization is a dead thing -- an edifice of crumbling marble enshrined in an eros-devoid museum of the mind where we do little more than give empty, obligatory homage to a fossilized tableaux."

Civilization is always fragile, always crumbling, but never dead. It is the shell of culture that culture keeps shedding off, but culture will always remake it anew. It is why a lot of revolutions end up becoming the same old thing after a while, because we have patterns built in us that will repeat. However, the key is to remake civilizations, to make the new skin better than the old; when people try to discard the idea of civilization, they simply open the door to chaos, and not the fun kind, but when where nobody has any power over anything, especially themselves. It is not the Hunter-gatherer society that allows someone to learn to read, invent new medicines, or develop styles of art. It is Civilization that allows culture to actually develop, ripen, and ferment.

Yes, this technological age seems like too much civilization, but in reality, it is ugly because we have NOT developed a global culture and global civilization to make us deal with each other in a kinder, fairer way. The people making bombs and rockets and toxins and junk bonds are people who are trying to regain some bit of tribal past, whether it is some messed up version of Islam that Mohammed (PBUH) would never sign on to, or some White Christian city on a hill that never was. If you abandon the challenge to make a civilization, and just say "oh, why can't we just give up on civilization and be like those hunter gatherer types", then all you do is ensure that humans throw away the exact tool they need to keep their baser fears and desires in check, which means, as in the dark ages, the worst in humanity will take over.