On the cusp of 2024, a snapshot of a desperately sick post-America

 I guess the task before me in this post is to prove that the title is not just sensationalistic clickbait. I know that New Year's Eve is particularly an occasion when we want to be in it's-going-to-be-fine mode. There's reflecting and partying and personal goal-setting to tend to.

But events confirm, in ever-more undeniable form, that the erosion of guardrails and foundations has reached a critical state:

I offer for your consideration two graphs from an article at The Conversation about an Allegheny College poll on how we - post-Americans - view the value of those guardrails and foundations:

and

 

There is no more important undertaking for the people of this country than to look into how we came to this state of affairs.

That's actually been the impetus behind LITD since 2012, and is baked into the mission statement at my Substack, Precipice:  

[The name] Precipice indicates that America, Western civilization and the world generally are close enough to a yawning abyss to see its terrifying vastness. It’s an abyss with cultural, political, economic and spiritual dimensions.

I so named it knowing the risk that it would come across like yet another Debbie Downer outlet in a world in which happiness is at a premium. But pointing out evidence of my premise is not the aim. The question before us is, on what grounds might we hope?

You won’t find pat answers. I consider myself a Christian - albeit a rather crummy one - but I don’t serve up platitudes, cliches about how since all is well in the eternal realm we needn’t fret about our current juncture, or attempts to recruit the uncommitted.

Rather, I invite you to join me on a journey, a search for genuinely solid ground, on which we can plant our feet and not feel perilously close to free fall. 

If our toes are truly gripping the edge of the precipice, is there time for such a search? 

I’d argue that there is no other sensible use of our time.

Peruse the archives and you'll see that I've zeroed in on various inflection points: the impact of Rouseau's state-of-nature framework, the Enlightenment veneration of rationality, the Romantic poets' turn the other way to the point of immersion in personal feelings, the thinkers behind the fin de siecle wave of Progressivism. I even did a post about turning 13 in the year 1968, titled "On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift."

I keep thinking about the money line from Kevin Williamson's December 16 Wall Street Journal column titled "You Asked For It, America."  He says, "Sometimes a country is doing so well it can afford a silly season. This is not that time and the US is not that country."

The devaluing of seriousness has serious consequences. In this instance, the consequence appears to be the completion of the squandering of our birthright. 

And here's a way to tell how badly infected you might be with this dismissing of seriousness: If you finish reading this and say, "That's exactly why we need to elect a majority of [pick one of the two major political parties]," you urgently need an antibiotic intervention. 

What we really need isn't remotely on the minds of most of us.