Margarine of the Arts

“Based on his study of twenty-one world civilizations—ranging from ancient Rome to imperial China, from Babylon to the Aztecs—Toynbee found that societies in disintegration suffer a kind of ‘schism of the soul.’ They are seldom simply overrun by some other civilization. Rather, they commit a kind of cultural suicide. Disintegrating societies, he says, have several characteristics. They fall into a sense of abandon, ‘a state of mind that accepts antinomianism—consciously or unconsciously, in theory or in practice, as a substitute for creativeness” (Gene Edward Veith, Postmodern Times, p. 44).