I've been spending most of my Russian lessons being regaled by my Russian teacher's horror at the way the "next generation" is turning out - most of which is the cliche horror of the older generation seeing three generations ahead and wondering if they'll survive without the "values" of their own generation - and fending off attacks and finding connections between the generations has put me in an interesting frame of mind:
The story of the next generation isn't centered around finding meaning in a world that is drowning in its own poisons - it's about the next generation progressing towards enlightenment when struggle and competition are hard to come by. I'm not talking about trying to find a job or struggling to pay rent or struggling to pay off debt, although those are micro-struggles in and of themselves. I'm talking about the struggles that previous generations had to deal with that turned them into such - dare I say? - hard-asses.
Famine, disease, starvation, abuse, subjugation, and enslavement - all of which forced a hardness, a toughness, a strictness of purpose and of action and of ideology that can't be preserved in the wishy-washy, fairytale, easiness of today's youth. I know my youth was too easy. I know the young lives of many are too easy, because we simply can't make it out on our own. Maybe there has come a time when we realize that we can't live the same way our parents lived because the world is much more different and stranger than their world, and the philosophy the world taught them to understand is only the merest glimpse of the philosophy we must apply to ourselves in order to brighten our own future.
So where does that leave us? It leaves us with the task of making ourselves better, making our practices better, and making the strictness with which we treat ourselves better - far better - than we've previously imagined. We must learn more about how to survive in this asphalt wasteland our parents have left us. We must learn more about how to go forward and etch out our own niches and make a place for ourselves in this granite world. We must learn to accept our blood and tears, and be grateful that we've experienced a life that requires giving ourselves completely. And if we are not giving ourselves completely and continuously progressing and evolving to fit our world as it is, then we must change how we are and what makes us who we are every day. We must prepare ourselves more and prepare our children more for the inevitable challenges that will come. Because if there's anything humanity is in need of in the near future, it's a weeding out. And I don't know about you, but I don't want to be left stranded without a paddle in an ocean of chaos when the time of reckoning is at hand.
The challenges that will come will be born of the weakness that have been rotting the world: the ease of communication, the easy access to food and sustenance, the easy access to transportation, etc. We are all dependent on and take for granted so much that is completely necessary to our survival. And because we take it for granted, we are completely unprepared for its absence. The deadly sentiment that causes us to feel that we "deserve" security or happiness or sustenance; the deadly sentiment that indulgence or self-expression or acceptance of adversity are higher values than self-denial, than morality, than an understanding without acceptance or personal judgment; the sentiment that disagreeing with a worldview means hating those who hold it; all of these are the seeds of self-destruction and the weaknesses of individuals that cannot understand themselves let along change themselves for the better.
There is a necessity for a meaningful cultural development that does not depend on the modus operandi of the strict and self-denying cultures of ages past. Eastern philosophy of mind and of spirit has value, but is only part of the picture. The moral structures of Christianity have extreme value, but the cultural contexts by which they have been implemented are outmoded and ineffectual in swaying a culture of affluence. So where am I to turn?
Subtlety of expression and of action, value placed in understanding nuances of minutest detail in a word or in a glance, the adherence to principles that define general laws of reality - and from them generate complexity of behavior. My model is somewhat reflected in the courtly societies described in Dune, where the merest twitch of an eye can signify dishonesty or fear, where fear in a non-peer might signify cause for fear and require an increase in alertness to the social situation at hand.
High culture being the generative complexity that results when groups of individuals incessantly practice the values and traditions of a culture in order to better express the foundational tenets the culture upholds. The higher the culture, the greater potential its proponents have for complex action and meaningful expression. A new and prevailing culture must have foundations that produce the possibility of complexity and deeply meaningful expression.
Each of the rich systems of culture have a couple of things in common - a sense of honor, a sense of duty, a sense of self-denial and self-discipline - but each diverge in their alliance or what their alliance embodies. China, Victorian England, Ancient Greece, Rome, Holy Rus etc. all had periods when a) the beauty and fulfillment of their prevailing philosophies bloomed into magnificent production, and b) the prevailing philosophies were taken to places that revealed the deep weaknesses in their execution.
... I'm going somewhere with this, but I will continue later.
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