It is amazing to stand back and reflect on what appears to be the synergistic and simlutaneous destruction of so much of our cultural capital at the same time. The erosion of the nuclear family going on in the West is something that is perhaps without precedent - an overturning in just a few decades of the norm for millennia in almost every society. The effects of that are hard to predict, but if you believe in the Burke/Hayek concept of the implicit wisdom of tradition they can't be good. The race to the bottom in popular culture, which glorifies, with the tolerance and even encouragement of our massive entertainment industry, some of these trends. The slow creation of the gigantic bureaucratic nanny state, which has taken over many of the functions that properly belong to individuals, families and communities and encourages people to demand instead of to create. Throw it all together and you get this kind of "48 hours from anarchy" environment that was lurking behind the scenes, invisible to all of us, in New Orleans just before the storm moved into the Gulf.
It is true that this is a massive force of nature, for which no one could be completely prepared. But it is not true that truck convoys had to be shot at when they bring in relief supplies, that short-term political calculations mean that no serious evacuation plan was in place, that an orgy of looting and takeover by criminals has to begin before the rain has even stopped. The Kobe earthquake didn't look like this, nor did the massive earhquakes in Turkey, Armenia or Iran. Nor did the even more devastating tsunami.
It's just one city in a big country with a lot of history behind it, so in a fe years perhaps we will have turned out to have overreacted. But the whole episode has the stink of decline and decadence about it. We do seem to be eating our cultural seed corn, and this appears to be a warning flare telling us of that.
Book mark.
Well stated!