"...and with times being what they are..." - the "crisis" of values in our age

the quote in the title comes from the Actor in Tom Stoppard's superb play, Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are Dead, right before going on a rant about how traditional values and appreciation of the art of drama has gone out of the world. yet it is a play set in Elizabethan times, when supposed values like family, honour and suchlike were much more important. at least that is the image that persists in the minds of many, and by extension it is true to any period of time preceding ours. a prevailing thought in our society is thatit has lost important core values and is much less liveable due to present conditions and people's behaviour.


except it's not.

allow me to break this down. what many people are complaining about is that "traditional" values like family, fidelty and all their little christian friends are going out of style, and instead we get decadence, consumerism, transglobal companies and little girls doing anal at 13. and I have not yet mentioned the evilest of evils, mass media and mass culture, which destroyers "proper" elitist culture while flooding our minds with a poop overflow.
well, dear moral guardians, you seem to be missing a pretty important point here.
these values (like "patriotism", which is really a fancy word for nationalistic chauvinism, "traditional gender roles" [goodbye male opression!] and all otehr merry friends of them) did not "disappear" in some myterious way like the dinosaurs. they were slowly, methodically destroyed as an abject and obvious failure. these were the values of the late 19th and early 20th century, which resulted in such glorious highlights of our civilization as mass genocide, international division, and vietnamese children having their flesh burned off by napalm while looking for food.

and allow me to mention another little thing.

consider what we now think of as an age of great artistic accomplishments as well as a huge advancement in many scientific fields: the renaissance. you know what the renaissance was? a motherfucking king-sized revolution against previous values, complete with disgusting feats, hordes of prostitutes and orgies even a japanese porn director would faint at simply by hearing about it. and let's not leave out the thing that it was against values held by an age in which a class, for which the whole time was a never-ending chain of rape, pillage, feasts and wars still had the face to hold moral authority, supported by a church rotten to its core, doing the exact opposite of its teachings. doesn't this whole "moral authority" theme ring a bell? seems pretty similar to many later times.

as for culture... well, that is just laughable. consider how many artists we know from previous times. okay, now think of how many musicians (yes, just musicians) you know from the 1970s. chances are, a somewhat equal number. yet, there were a lot more. if you are reading this blog, there is a high chance that you know the following things:

- during the performance of shakespeare's plays in the globe, half the people were fuck-drunk, munching on some food while talking to their neighbour (and you complain about cellphones going off in the theatre)

- mozart, händel, haydn, really, anyone up to beethoven was employed to compose popular, litenable music. really, the equivalent of nowadays music, and just as there is a huge steaming pile of crap musicinas now (hello, gaga!) there was a porportionately equally huge steaming pile of crap musicinas back then (hello, salieri, what were you going to steal again?)

- literature. literary theorists and academic people (although, i'm quite happy to note, less and less of them) look down on "popular" works of fiction because they, for some reason mustn't hold equal value to canonical works, as I explained elsewhere. yet, these canonical works are obviously known as they had huge success, and they WERE written with the idea of getting money out of them (hello, mr dickens, you can tell a story in half the pages - of course, in installment publication, the longer the better).

values of the past are not here becasue we're in a different age. people starting sex life earlier and earlier - well wow, just like in ancient rome or greek, cradles of our vaunted western civilization. families falling apart - maybe it's time for a new system to develop. information and globalisation overflow - that has been increasing since the big bang, there's really nothing suprising about it's developments.

just embrace where we are, and try to make the most out of it, instead of complaining about your made-up, grandmotherish crap.