An Era of Emoting, and the Death of the West
by Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch:
A culture based only on feelings and sensations is a doomed culture:
Civilisations used to be based in good measure on reason and mental and moral clarity, on rationality and common sense. Sadly most of that has been swept away in the West and we now mainly live on one thing: emotions. How we feel tends to determine everything. The sensual has outstripped the intellectual. We are now a sensate culture.
Catholic Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979), once put it this way: “We live in a sensate age. We are no longer governed by Faith, we are no longer governed by reason. We are governed by feelings.” Or as he put it in his autobiography, Treasure in Clay, released a year after his death:
“The reason why chastity is on the decline is that we live in a sensate culture. In the Middle Ages there was an Age of Faith, then came the Age of Reason in the eighteenth century; now we are living in the Age of Feeling.” Yes he got that right. And others have said similar sorts of things.
Back in 1996 the American Protestant theologian Harold O. J. Brown (1933-2007), penned his valuable volume, The Sensate Culture: Western Civilization Between Chaos and Transformation (Word). He in turn drew heavily upon the important work of Russian/American scholar Pitirim Sorokin (1889-1968).
The Harvard sociology professor penned a number of very important works, including the 1941 book, The Crisis of Our Culture and his 1956 The American Sex Revolution. The former book was based on his 4-volume Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937–1941).
The great value of Brown’s volume is to remind us of the vital truths that Sorokin had written about, but are now largely forgotten about. In 250 pages Brown takes us through his thoughts and looks at how American culture is faring. Since his book is still available, my main interest here is to offer some meaty quotes from it in the hopes of getting you interested enough in reading this volume for yourself.
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