Did Darwin Destroy Western Civilization?

Western civ has been acting suicidal for some time. It is vital to figure out why this is so, so it can be stopped. As of a few years ago, I thought I knew: it was the sense of futility brought on by the mass dyings of the First World War.

But in this centenary year, the First World War has been getting more attention, and I realize now I was wrong. The First World War, first, was not futile: Kaiser Willie's Germany was well on the way to Nazism already. And, second, the sense of civilizational death began before the war. Not just in Germany's racist notions, but in the arts: Marinetti's nihilist/fascist Futurist Manifesto appeared in 1909; Stravinsky's modernist Rites of Spring was first performed in 1913; Picasso had gone all cubist by 1907. The trauma that felled Europe must have come before the war. Virginia Woolf apparently felt it already in December 1910.

A facinating article in The New Criterion argues that it came with the aesthetic sensibility that gave us kitsch. Nazism, for example, was all kitsch; and kitsch is immoral art. Sounds right. Kitsch is not just aesthetically, but morally offensive: kitsch is art that lies. It denies the realities of the world in favour of an escapist vision that seems more pleasant: puppies with big velvet eyes, sad-faced clowns, smoke from happy chimneys, trees full of pink and blue flowers. This is, not coincidentally, the people's lot as presented by any totalitarian state.

Kitsch also denies real emotion in favour of sentimentality. And, as Carl Jung once said, awkwardly but accurately, sentimentality is a superstructure concealing brutality. Sentimentality masks a lack of real emotion. Hitler was great with animals and children.

And where did kitsch come from? Seems obvious: the movement called “aestheticism” at the turn of the century. This movement, originally in the high arts, wanted to divorce art from any other considerations: “art for art's sake.” So art had nothing to do with either morality or reality. Or real emotions.

By the way, that sounds a lot like New Age, doesn't it? It also sounds like most "religious" art, sadly: the plaster saints without a blemish.

Could all the horrible consequences of the 20th century, the slow and horrible suicide of Western civiloization, really have come from an artistic movement?

I think it could, and maybe it did. Art is that important.

But where did aestheticism in turn come from? Where did the urge come from to turn away from the real world, shut down our real emotions, and ignore morality? I think the timing fits: it was Darwin. Just as Darwin was the obvious and direct progenitor of the German Imperial/Nazi race theories. Darwin's view of the world was and still is too horrible to look at directly; yet people accepted it in their hearts as true. It is a world of devour or be devoured, where everything else is random.

Unfortunate for us all if Darwin was right.

In the meantime, for all our sakes, we need to reconnect religion with art, and art with religion.