To be fair to Murray, something I’m clearly reluctant to do, I’ll quote him at length. His basic pitch is that, these days, people don’t believe in God, live too long, and don’t have to work hard enough:
“In a world where people of all ages die often and unexpectedly, there’s a palpable urgency to getting on with whatever you’re going to do with your life. If you don’t leave your mark now, you may never get the chance. If you live in a world where you’re sure you’re going to live until at least eighty, do you have the same compulsion to leave your mark now? Or do you figure that there’s still plenty of time left, and you’ll get to it pretty soon? To what extent does enjoying life—since you can be sure there’s going to be so much to enjoy—start to take precedence over maniacal efforts to leave a mark?
I raise the issue because it fits so neatly with the problems associated with increased secularism and the increased material security provided by the advanced welfare state. In a world when death can come at any time, there is also a clear and present motivation to think about spiritual matters even when you are young. Who knows when you’re going to meet your Maker? It could easily be tomorrow. If you’re going to live to be at least eighty, it’s a lot easier not to think about the prospect of non-existence. The world before the welfare state didn’t give you the option of just passing the time pleasantly. Your main resources for living a comfortable life—or even for surviving at all—were hard work and family (especially, having children to support you in your old age). In the advanced welfare state, neither of those is necessary. The state will make sure you have a job, and one that doesn’t require you to work too hard, and will support you in your old age.
Put all three conditions together—no urgency to make your mark, no promptings to think about your place in the cosmos, no difficulty in living a comfortable life—and what you seem to get, based on the experience of Western and Northern Europe, is what I have elsewhere called the Europe Syndrome.”
Well, let me here and now make reference to the Murray Syndrome—essence of balderdash fermented at American Enterprise Institute banquets honoring war criminals and retired adulterers and then double distilled into pseudo-sociological fin de siècle tomes even more tedious than last century’s fin de siècle classic The Education of Henry Adams, for we are once more indicted for abandoning the Blessed Virgin in favor of the dynamo, which I, for one, consider a decent trade.
To make his thesis even half way plausible, Murray simply has to silently saw off the last piece of his old title, the part about the sciences. If you’re in the habit of reading “layman’s guide to the sciences” books, as I am, you will learn that the last half of the twentieth century was the golden age of mathematics. It was also the golden age of geology, and the golden age of biology, and the golden age of astronomy as well. It wasn’t quite the golden age of physics, because relativity and quantum mechanics, both in the first half of the century made an unbeatable combination. As for chemistry, if the second half wasn’t the golden age, it probably ought to have been.
The point is, the sciences, god bless them, are cumulative, unlike the humanities, and in the second half of the twentieth century they accumulated like never before. And, with the massive decline in global tensions experienced after the collapse of communism—a decline that terrifies Murray and his gangsta pals at the Institute—the first half of the twenty-first century is bound to eclipse the second half of the twentieth century as it eclipsed the first.
Murray has a large and valid point about the sorry state of the arts today, and for the past fifty years. He even has a few intelligent things to say about the matter when he isn’t bitching and whining about “atheists.”† But to write off what is easily the greatest and most profound civilization the world has ever seen, simply because, for the time being, it lacks the singular baubles that amused a prior age, is an act of singularly trivial pique.
Afterwords
Don’t get the $350 bottle of wine joke? Go here.
*What about Future tenses, I-VIII? I’m blissfully ignorant on that one, and intend to remain so.
†Murray himself is an atheist, of course. He doesn’t believe in a personal God, one that intervenes and shapes human history, who doles out rewards and punishments. He just won’t admit it. He calls that his virtue, I guess.
