CUT-FLOWER CIVILIZATIONS

Do you know what a cut-flower culture is? If you’ve ever cut flowers from your garden and placed them in a vase, you can understand the concept. Your flowers, removed from the soil that gave them life, are doomed. They will look beautiful for a few days, but soon they will wither and die.

Civilizations are often like this. They too can thrive only in certain soils. They grow, slowly and painfully, on the foundation of certain religious and philosophical precepts. From these fundamental principles develop mental predispositions, which foster habits- or what we might call customs. These customs drive science, commerce, innovation, technology, family formation, and a host of other practices that define what we call civilization.

Remove a civilization from its soil and its roots, and it will die. Like the flowers in your vase, it will live for a while. It may even seem to thrive. Without the nourishment that gave it life, though, it is doomed.

What about America?

America now is such a cut-flower civilization. Our leaders and most of our people have forgotten the principles that made America possible. Our political, academic, press, and entertainment elites often treat these principles with open contempt.

We still exhibit signs of life. Our military is strong and highly lethal. Our economy hasn’t collapsed. We still seem able to innovate. The crime rate has plummeted in the last 25 years. We seem to be more prosperous than ever before.

We are a cut-flower culture nonetheless. The signs of cultural rot are all around us. The crime rate is inching upward again. Young people take much longer to marry and settle down than before. The rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancy is a national scandal, and among blacks it’s a catastrophe. The entertainment industry revels in obscenity and violence. Public schools barely function at all, despite massive funding increases.

Where Do We Go from Here?

Some people have taken hope from Mr. Trump’s Presidency. He vigorously reaffirms our national identity, they say. He plans to build up the military. He wants to restore our economic strength.

There is only so much he will do, though. There is only so much any politician can do. Reversing our national malaise will take much more than repealing recent federal policies. To recover its health, a cut-flower civilization must be planted again in the soil which gave it life. For us, this means reviving the Rome-Athens-Jerusalem axis. We need Roman law, the Greek idea that the individual is a universe of consciousness, and ethics based on the Hebrew prophetic tradition.

Full recovery of our cultural health requires reclaiming our ancient heritage.

(The enclosed image is a pastel painting by Odilon Redon. He was a French symbolist artist of the late nineteenth century.)