Decay of the Megapolis

As we have seen Late civilisation is marked by depopulation, after a period of overpopulation has resulted in the decay of the cities. These occurrences fulfil a pattern of culture-pathology.

Konrad Lorenz, saw in the overpopulation of the cities one of the “deadly sins” of “civilised man” resulting in the unique ability of the human organism to “suffocate itself”. The noblest traits defining what it is to be human are the first to perish, Lorenz stated. The more people are obliged to live closer together the more antagonism increased among them.

“When there is daily and hourly contact with fellow humans who are not our friends, we continually try to be polite and friendly, our state of mind becomes unbearable. The general unfriendliness, evident in all large cities, is clearly proportional to the density of human masses in certain places. For example, in large railway stations and at the bus terminal in New York City, it reaches a frightening intensity”.  15“Crowded together in our huge modern cites”, wrote Lorenz, “in the phantasmorgia of human faces, superimposed on each other and blurred, we no longer see the face of our neighbor”. “Neighborly love”, or what we might here extrapolate as a sense of kinship, “becomes so diluted by a surfeit of neigbors that, in the end, not a trace of it is left”. Lorenz makes the very pertinent comment that “we are not so constituted that we can love all mankind, however right and ethical the exhortation to do so may be”. 16The more we are exhorted to “brotherly love” for all “humanity” the less our humanity becomes. “Emotional entropy” ensues, as we try to find substitute kinship bonds among the nebulous city masses. The greater the crowding the more the individual becomes emotionally detached; the more “urgent the need not to get involved”. “…[T]hus today in the largest cities, robbery, murder and rape take place in broad daylight, and in crowded streets, without the intervention of any passer-by”. 17Lorenz regarded as “a dangerous madness” efforts to create by “conditioning” “a new kind of human being”, 18that “madness” being the ultimate objective of the presently dominate ideologies in the West and China. 

Lorenz regarded “the fast-spreading alienation from nature” of the man of Late civilisation as a symptom of “the increasing aesthetic and ethical vulgarity that characterizes civilized man”. Detachment from nature, from the awe of nature, which in traditional societies, as we have seen, is an awe and connexion with the cosmos, results in this “aesthetic vulgarity”. Culture as an expression of the neurotic city-dweller rather than as symbolic of the healthy organic rhythms of a young culture, becomes a grotesquery of what we call “modern art”, and more broadly aesthetics in general, whether as architecture, music or fashion. Lorenz wrote of this epoch: 

“How can one expect a sense of reverential awe for anything in the young when all they see around them is man-made and the cheapest and ugliest of its kind. For the city-dweller even the view of the sky is obscured by sky scrapers and chemical clouding of the atmosphere. No wonder the progress of civilization goes hand in hand with the deplorable disfigurement of town and country’. 19

Lorenz used an organic analogy to explain the process:

“If we compare the older centre of any European town with its modern periphery, or compare this periphery, this cultural horror, eating its way into the surrounding countryside, with the still unspoiled villages, and then compare a histological picture of any normal body tissue with that of a malignant tumor, we find astonishing analogies”. 20Lorenz explains that the cell of the malignant tumour differs from the normal body cell in that it lacks the genetic information required to fulfil is function as a useful member of the “body’s cell community”. The malignant cell multiplies “ruthlessly”, “so that the tumor tissue infiltrates the still healthy neighoring tissue and destroys it”. He compares the “structurally poor tumor tissues” with the modern suburb of “monotonous houses” “designed by architects without much art, without much thought, and in the haste of competition”. 21As Spengler said, “money wills in Late civilisation”, and here in Lorenz’s analogy of modern, utilitarian architecture, resulting is “aesthetic vulgarity”, money dictates style, because of “commercial consideration”, mass production, and “mass dwellings”, “unworthy of the name ‘houses’”, but “at best batteries for ‘utility people’”, as units that are “anonymous and interchangeable”. 22 Yet in the cramped conditions of multi-story apartments, alienation increases as an effort to maintain individuality.23 The equilibrium between individual identity and social kinship does not exist. Importantly, Lorenz concludes from this:

“Aesthetic and ethical feeling appear to be closely related, and people who are obliged to live under the conditions described above obviously suffer from an atrophy of both. It seems that both the beauty of nature and the beauty of cultural surroundings created by man are necessary to keep people mentally healthy. The complete blindness to everything beautiful, so common in these times, is a mental illness that must be taken seriously for the simple reason that it goes hand in hand with insensitivity to the ethically wrong”. 24This lack of aesthetic sensibility allows the man of Late civilisation to have such disregard for ecology. Again “money will”, as Spengler said. Here ethics are atrophied. “Cold calculation dictates” Lorenz perceptively observed. The “overwhelming majority” only value whatever brings “commercial gain”. “Utilitarianism, with its destructive influence, may be defined as mistaking the means for the end. Money is a means…” As Lorenz states, few today would understand that “money by itself does not represent any value”. 25 Here Lorenz, the zoologist, has discovered a great truth that few economists can conceive, but striking at the root of the money-system of Late civilisation, where money becomes a commodity, when in youthful cultures usury is outlawed and regarded as a hell-spawned sin.26

From: The Decline and Fall of Civilisations

by Dr Kerry R Bolton