“Anyway, it is tragic but interesting to contemplate how transplanting living cultures into the soil of modernity so often results in the culture and its people withering and dying. Why is that? I don’t think there is a material explanation for it, at least not one that is satisfactory.”
Rod Dreher, in the comments to this brief Front Porch Republic post.
Given the aridity of modernity, the way it manifestly does not care for humanity—whether individuals or congregations of people—how does it consistently win out over traditional cultures? What about it is appealing or powerful enough that people let it erode the cultural soil that sustained them for so long?
Is it that the razzle-dazzle of stuff and “freedom” and all the other crap modernity pitches is superior to the old ways—that is, when those old ways have become fossilized by a generation or two that never understood them to begin with? When the older generation no longer believes what was promised and no longer lives as if those promises were ever true…
If that’s the case, how about this: I think we are in that fossilization phase with modernity, whose promises remain unfulfilled and have been found out as utterly false.