Carnival and cultural suicide

THE EDITOR: "As they had their pasture, they became satisfied, and being satisfied their hearts became proud; they forgot me" (Hosea 13:6).

The anonymous views of a naturalised American many years ago were that the humanist religion had taken things that we always knew were wrong and called them right and it was believed that those in the US Congress were afraid to offend – they might lose votes.

In his
magnum opus The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon detailed how this great empire was destroyed from within.

He pointed out five attributes that marked how Rome at the end had grown weak and gradually lost its civic virtue.

First, a mounting love of show and luxury; second, a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor; third, an obsession with sex; fourth, freakishness in the arts, masquerading as originality; fifth, an increased desire to live off the state.

Even the noted historian Arnold Toynbee, who studied 21 civilisations, found that societies in disintegration suffer a kind of "schism of the soul." They commit a kind of "cultural suicide." Also, people stop believing in morality and yield to their impulse at the expense of their creativity.

And this seems to be a pattern in history where civilisations begin with a strong foundation of law and order. This foundation enables them to grow and become prosperous, but then over time they decline and decay from what Toynbee called "cultural suicide."

All of this we have been experiencing in this country for many years with the decline in religious congregations, the drafting of secular laws and creation of secular institutions and, not forgetting, the impact of this on education.

RONALD BHOLA

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