#the decline of western civilisation

[disappointingyet]

The Decline Of Western Civilisation

Director Penelope Spheeris Stars Claude Bessy, Exene, Darby Crash, Ron Reyes, Nicole USA 1981 Language English 1hr 40mins Colour/Black & white

The classic LA punk doc

I feel it’s rare to have a (theatrically released) documentary that is much less well-known than its sequel. But The Decline Of Western Civilisation II: The Metal Years had famous people in it, some much-quoted funny moments and set up director Penelope Spheeris up to make the massive hit comedy Wayne’s World. The first Decline, on the other hand, is bleaker, occasionally funny in a very dark way and put Spheeris on the way to directing the grim (and fairly obscure) squatland drama Suburbia. And at the time none of these people were celebrities and even subsequently, the only person here who has nudged fame is Pat Smear, the guitar player from Germs, who was a touring member of Nirvana in their last days and is currently a Foo Fighter. 

But make no mistake, The Decline Of Western Civilisation is an extraordinary music documentary. Filmed in late 1979 and early 1980, it drops us right into the middle of punk in Los Angeles. There’s no voiceover – although we do occasionally hear Spheeris asking questions – so the description and analysis comes from bands, fans, managers, club owners, bouncers and the staff of Slash magazine.*  

In what I think was an accident of timing, Spheeris caught a pivotal moment. The early punk scene in Los Angeles had been open-minded and stylistically diverse. Here we see the codifying of hardcore punk and the amped-up aggression of bands like Black Flag, Circle Jerks and Fear and their audiences. Fear, in particular, incite their gobbing crowd with a steady stream of homophobic derision.

The contrast is with Catholic Discipline, led by Slash editor Claude Bessy (aka Kickboy Face), whose guitar player Phranc was a trilby-sporting lesbian. (And Catholic Discipline are shown playing at venue we learn had banned the hardcore bands by this point.) Their crowd looks like a relatively sophisticated bunch who have put a lot of time into their outfits. But they also, it should be said, seem a lot less into the occasion than the kids at the Circle Jerks show. 

There wasn’t (it seems) even the language to describe what was going on those crowds. Everyone refers to pogoing, but these kids aren’t jumping up and down on the spot, they are smashing into each other and creating a vortex of bodies, and clambering up onto stage and getting shoved off. It seems the terms slam dancing (moshing was an even later coinage as I remember it) and stage diving were not yet in common use. 

So how does Spheeris put us in this world? We get a lot of footage of the bands on stage, which might be hard work for some viewers. But because Spheeris and her camera crew are interested in the scene as a whole, there’s always something anthropologically interesting to note**, even if you can’t tell where one Fear song begins and the next one ends. 

And then there are the interviews. This the opposite of the uniform talking-head approach, although the great access Spheeris had helps. Interviews with kids from the scene are face-on in a stark room with a bare light bulb hanging down, shot in black & white and tinted blue. Venue owner Brendan Mullen is filmed on a cliff high above Los Angeles. Nicole, the long-suffering manager of Germs, talks in close-up with her clothes merging into the black background. 

Germs lead singer Darby Crash, by contrast, is filmed cooking eggs and bacon in a grubby kitchen – this is probably the film’s most notorious segment, as his mate blithely recounts stumbling across the body of a workman at her parents’ house. Spheeris [unseen]: “Didn’t you feel bad that the guy was dead?” Michelle: “No, not at all. Because I hate painters." During the X interview, singer John Doe is tattooing LA music scene character Top Jimmy's arm while the band’s other singer, Exene, talks through her collection of fundamentalist Christian pamphlets that she’s collected on the streets of LA.

All of which is to say that faced with my key question about movie docs – is this actually a movie? (rather than TV or – these days – YouTube content) – the answer is about as emphatic a ‘yes’ as is possible. This is a visually fascinating bit of film-making, regardless of what’s being said. But the what’s being said is interesting, too. Both the letters from readers to Slash magazine and some of the things the kids filmed under the light bulb say are (to a 2023 viewer) evidence that it wasn’t the internet that created all manner of unpleasantness – it was always there, and (in the case of the readers’ letters), people used to bother to actually write and post trolling nonsense (I was going to say and pay for postage, but I’m guessing a lot of these were kids using stamps from their mom’s desk.)

This is one of those movies I’ve known about for decades, but only finally now got a chance to see. And yet somehow it went way past my expectations – this is one of the great rock documentaries.

(In the UK, all three TDOWC movies are currently available to stream for free – legally! – on Plex.)

*OK, so maybe worth saying I know a certain amount about this stuff – for instance, I’ve read We’ve Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story Of LA Punk so I had a lot of context that the more casual viewer wouldn’t. But I still think it would be an absorbing watch if you don’t know anything (you don’t have to have read a book to realise that Darby Crash was very bad news).

**For instance, at this point at least, both in terms of the bands and their audience, this was less all-white than you might imagine/despite the bile spewed by a couple of the interviewees. (Not as far as I know shown in this film, but definitely already a key figure was Spot, RIP.) This is part of my 'Every girl should be given an electric guitar on her 16th birthday' series of reviews

[arcenciel-par-une-larme]

I quite often come across such entitled idiots as LAS in public transport, with some of them subjecting us to noisy Tiktoks or headache-inducing trap "music" for the entirety of the 40-minute train ride. I have been tempted COUNTLESS times to deliberately sit across or near them and start blasting gregorian hymns on my phone in retaliation, and the only reason I refrain therefrom is because I do not want to be vindictive.

Do you know how many times I have hiked up a mountain or driven to the beach, only to be met with someone blaring shitty top 40 music from their portable speaker, because Heaven forbid you go one hour without noise?

Exactly. Everything is a dictatorship of NOISE. You are not allowed to escape modernity and the city.

my unpopular opinion is that i hate tiktok because now people just publicly watch loud ass videos in public spaces with no regard for anyone else. 100% it was not this bad with youtube, it’s such a different thing with tiktok. put on headphones. you are grown.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Our language, our music and our manners are increasingly raucous, self-centred, and offensive, as though beauty and good taste have no real place in our lives. One word is written large on all these ugly things, and that word is ‘me.’

- Sir Roger Scruton

[sword-swallower-pin]

We've not even got the casting for the biopics yet but I can already foretell that the iPhone face is gonna be so bad.

Like society has spent the last 40 years systematically breeding out the genes required to make a face like Ringo Starr's (a great tragedy and one of the major signs of the decline of Western civilisation in my opinion) so I think sadly we are beyond the point of getting actors that actually look like them. They're either gonna have to give up and get some twinks in or do some weird Bradly Cooper-esque prosthetics work and I don't know which one I'd prefer

[thoughtportal]

A devastating population collapse that decimated stone age farming communities across northern Europe 5,000 years ago may have been driven by an outbreak of the plague, according to research.

The cause of the calamity, known as the Neolithic collapse, has long been a matter of debate.

Studies based on DNA from human bones and teeth excavated from ancient burial tombs in Scandinavia – seven from an area in Sweden called Falbygden, one from coastal Sweden close to Gothenburg and one from Denmark – now suggest that disease played a central role.

The remains of 108 people – 62 males, 45 females and one undetermined – were studied. Eighteen of them, or 17%, were infected with plague at the time of death.

The researchers were able to chart the family tree of 38 people from Falbygden across six generations, spanning about 120 years. Twelve of them, or 32%, were infected with plague. Genomic findings indicated that their community experienced three distinct waves of an early form of plague.

The researchers reconstructed full genomes of the different strains of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis responsible for these waves. They determined that the last one may have been more virulent than the others, and they identified traits indicating the disease could have spread from person to person to cause an epidemic.

“We learned that the Neolithic plague is an ancestor to all later plague forms,��� said Frederik Seersholm, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and lead author of the research, published in the journal Science.

A later form of this same pathogen caused the Justinian Plague of the sixth century AD and the 14th-century Black Death that ravaged Europe, north Africa and the Middle East. Because the strains circulating during the Neolithic decline were much earlier versions, the plague may have produced different symptoms than those in the epidemics millennia later.

The study demonstrated that the plague was abundant and widespread in the area examined.

Martin Sikora, who is also a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author of the report, said: “This high prevalence of plague indicates that plague epidemics played a substantial role in the Neolithic decline in this region.

“Indeed, it seems plausible that the decline seen in other parts of Europe was also in some way affected by plague. We do already have evidence for plague in other megalithic sites in different parts of northern Europe. And seeing how prevalent it was in Scandinavia, I would expect a similar picture to emerge once we study these other megaliths with the same resolution.”

The Neolithic or new stone age involved the adoption of farming and animal domestication in place of a roving hunter-gatherer lifestyle. The Neolithic population crash in northern Europe occurred from about 3300BC to 2900BC. By that time, cities and sophisticated civilisations had already arisen in places such as Egypt and Mesopotamia.

The populations of Scandinavia and north-western Europe ultimately disappeared entirely, replaced by people known as the Yamnaya who migrated from a steppe region spanning parts of present-day Ukraine. They are the ancestors of modern northern Europeans.

“Up until now, multiple scenarios have been suggested that might explain the Neolithic decline: war or simple competition with steppe-related populations who became prevalent after the Neolithic decline; an agricultural crisis leading to widespread famine; and various diseases, including plague,” Seersholm said. “The challenge was that only a single plague genome had been identified before, and it was not known whether the disease was able to spread within a population of humans.“

The DNA evidence also offered insight into the social dynamics of these communities, showing that men often had children with multiple women and that the women were brought in from neighbouring communities. The women appeared to be monogamous.

“Multiple reproductive partners could mean several wives. It could also mean men were allowed to find a new partner if they became widowers or they had mistresses,” Seersholm said. {read}

[zerogate]

Byzantium doesn’t fit well in our picture of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, because those categories were created to marginalize Byzantium. We have been taught that Byzantium was the left-over of the fallen Roman empire, slowly declining into insignificance. A decline lasting 1,123 years! Think about it! The reality is that Byzantium was the Roman Empire until the West, having seceded from it, erased it from history. “Byzantium in the tenth century resembled the Roman empire of the fourth century more than it resembled any contemporary western medieval state.” Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages are therefore provincial constructs that are irrelevant from a Byzantine perspective — as they are, of course, from a Eurasian perspective (what does “China in the Middle Ages”, or “India in the Middle Ages” mean?).

Even our Western notion of “medieval Christianity” is seriously biased, Kaldellis argues: “‘medieval Christianity’ is understood to be of western and central Europe, even though the majority of Christians during the medieval period lived in the east, in the Slavic, Byzantine, and Muslim-ruled lands, and farther east than that too.” Not to mention that, until the 8th century, the bishop of Rome was appointed by Constantinople.

Byzantine revisionism also means getting the Byzantine side of the story of its long struggle with the West, acknowledging that the victor’s narrative is deceptive, as it always is. We have been told that the crusades were the generous response of the West to the Byzantines’ plea for help. And if, by some historian’s indiscretion, we hear about the crusaders’ sack of Constantinople in 1204, he at least explains that “the Venetians made them do it”, or that it was a regrettable case of friendly fire caused by the fog of war. Byzantine revisionism clears that fog away. “There was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade,” wrote Steven Runciman.

It is hard to exaggerate the harm done to European civilisation by the sack of Constantinople. The treasures of the City, the books and works of art preserved from distant centuries, were all dispersed and most destroyed. The Empire, the great Eastern bulwark of Christendom, was broken as a power. Its highly centralised organisation was ruined. Provinces, to save themselves, were forced into devolution. The conquests of the Ottoman were made possible by the Crusaders’ crime.

Anthony Kaldellis puts it in the correct perspective:

It was in fact an act of aggression by one civilization against another, in the sense that both the aggressor and the victim were acutely aware of their ethnic, religious, political, and cultural differences, and the extreme violence that accompanied the destruction of Constantinople was driven by the self-awareness on the part of many crusaders of those differences.

It is good that John-Paul II publicly apologized for the fourth crusade 800 years later, but it doesn’t change the fact that his predecessor Innocent III had responded to the news of the conquest of the city with joy and thanksgiving, and immediately tried to mobilize a fresh round of soldiers, clerics and settlers to secure the new Latin empire. In a sermon given in Rome and repackaged as a letter to the clergy accompanying the crusaders, “Innocent describes the capture of Constantinople as an act of God, who humbles the proud, renders obedient the disobedient, and makes Catholic the schismatic. Innocent argues that the Greek failure to affirm the filioque (a Trinitarian error), is akin to the Jewish error of not recognizing Christ’s divinity. And, as such, the pontiff suggests that both Greek error and their downfall were predicted in Revelation.”

[...]

Byzantine revisionism is controversial because it challenges not only the image that Westerners have of Byzantium, but also the image that Westerners have of the West. We are the civilization of the crusades, that have destroyed Byzantium, and have since tried to destroy all civilizations that stood in the way of our hegemony. We should know, at least, that this is the way Russia and much of the world is seeing us. As I have argued in “A Byzantine view of Russia and Europe,” we cannot understand Russia without doing some Byzantine revisionism, because Russia is Byzantium redivivus in many ways.

[...]

The best contribution of Anthony Kaldellis to Byzantine studies is the new light he shines on the true nature of Byzantine civilization, by first pealing off layers of Western prejudice, polemic, and deceit, but also by reading through Byzantium’s own imperial propaganda.

For example, Kaldellis argues that Christianity, although essential to Byzantine identity, was not as central and exclusive in everyday life as we have been led to believe, by reading too many ecclesiastical authors. Even during the reigns of Justin and Justinian, reputed to be an era of intolerant Christian orthodoxy, many officials and intellectuals showed not even nominal Christian faith: such is the case of the historian Procopius, who speaks of “Christians” as if excluding himself from that group, and regards as “insanely stupid to investigate the nature of God and ask what sort it is.” As I have argued elsewhere, the very name given by Justinian to his architectural masterpiece—the world’s greatest building for one thousand years—testifies to his high regard for Hellenism: Hagia Sophia, or Holy Wisdom, is the goddess of philosophers, not theologians.

-- Laurent Guyénot, Byzantine Revisionism Unlocks World History

[transgenderer]

The Sarasvati River (IAST: Sárasvatī-nadī́) is a mythologized and deified ancient river first mentioned in the Rigveda[1] and later in Vedic and post-Vedic texts. It played an important role in the Vedic religion, appearing in all but the fourth book of the Rigveda.

As a physical river in the oldest texts of the Rigveda, it is described as a "great and holy river in north-western India,"[2] but in the middle and late Rigvedic books, it is described as a small river ending in "a terminal lake (samudra)."[3][b] As the goddess Sarasvati, the other referent for the term "Sarasvati" which developed into an independent identity in post-Vedic times.[4] The river is also described as a powerful river and mighty flood.[5] The Sarasvati is also considered by Hindus to exist in a metaphysical form, in which it formed a confluence with the sacred rivers Ganges and Yamuna, at the Triveni Sangam.[6]

Rigvedic and later Vedic texts have been used to propose identification with present-day rivers, or ancient riverbeds. The Nadistuti hymn in the Rigveda (10.75) mentions the Sarasvati between the Yamuna in the east and the Sutlej in the west, while RV 7.95.1-2, describes the Sarasvati as flowing to the samudra, a word now usually translated as 'ocean',[c] but which could also mean "lake."[3][8][9][10][d] Later Vedic texts such as the Tandya Brahmana and the Jaiminiya Brahmana, as well as the Mahabharata, mention that the Sarasvati dried up in a desert.

Since the late 19th century, numerous scholars have proposed to identify the Sarasvati with the Ghaggar-Hakra River system, which flows through modern-day northwestern-India and eastern-Pakistan, between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, and ends in the Thar desert. Recent geophysical research shows that the supposed downstream Ghaggar-Hakra paleochannel is actually a paleochannel of the Sutlej, which flowed into the Nara river, a delta channel of the Indus River. Around 10,000-8,000 years ago, this channel was abandoned when the Sutlej diverted its course, leaving the Ghaggar-Hakra as a system of monsoon-fed rivers which did not reach the sea.[11][12][13][14]

The Indus Valley Civilisation prospered when the monsoons that fed the rivers diminished around 5,000 years ago.[11][13][14][e] and ISRO has observed that major Indus Valley civilization sites at Kalibangan (Rajasthan), Banawali and Rakhigarhi (Haryana), Dholavira and Lothal (Gujarat) lay along this course.[15][web 1] When the monsoons that fed the rivers further diminished, the Hakra dried-up some 4,000 years ago, becoming an intermittent river, and the urban Harappan civilisation declined, becoming localized in smaller agricultural communities.[11][f][13][12][14]

Identification of a mighty physical Rigvedic Sarasvati with the Ghaggar-Hakra system is therefore problematic, since the Gagghar-Hakra had dried up well before the time of the composition of the Rigveda.[16][17][f][13][12][14] In the words of Wilke and Moebus, the Sarasvati had been reduced to a "small, sorry trickle in the desert" by the time that the Vedic people migrated into north-west India.[18] Rigvedic references to a physical river also indicate that the Sarasvati "had already lost its main source of water supply and must have ended in a terminal lake (samudra) approximately 3000 years ago,"[3][b] "depicting the present-day situation, with the Sarasvatī having lost most of its water."[19][b][20] Also, Rigvedic descriptions of the Sarasvati do not fit the actual course of the Gagghar-Hakra.[21][22]

The identification with the Ghaggar-Hakra system took on new significance in the early 21st century,[24] with some Hindutva proponents suggesting an earlier dating of the Rigveda; renaming the Indus Valley Civilisation as the "Sarasvati culture", the "Sarasvati Civilization", the "Indus-Sarasvati Civilization" or the "Sindhu-Sarasvati Civilization,"[25][26][27] suggesting that the Indus Valley and Vedic cultures can be equated;[28] and rejecting the Indo-Aryan migrations theory, which postulates an extended period of migrations of Indo-European speaking people into the Indian subcontinent between ca. 1900 BCE and 1400 BCE.[h][i]

hey whats up with this. the rigvedas having a lost river and the indian subcontinent having a lost river is so tempting but the timelines dont match up? i guess rivers just dry up (or change course) a lot so it could be any dried up river?

[arcenciel-par-une-larme]

They will invent every conceivable excuse to justify their irrational hatred of children and/or childrearing.

You're going to bring children into this world?! Sadist

This is the kind of mindset that’s killing the developed world.

[radfemverity]

Reactionary rightwing men have never valued “facts over feelings” like they claim. It doesn’t matter how much data you have to disprove their malignant and pathological lie that womens voting patterns are the primary cause for multiculturalism coming to the West, they will continue to say it anyway.

Because it has never been about facts. It is about them finding any ‘valid reason’ to take sadistic glee in womens pain.

When a rightwing man comments the ‘You literally voted for this’ meme under a white woman recalling her experiences of harassment/abuse by non-white men, he is saying “You deserve it. I know nothing about you, your political beliefs or your history, but I see you are a woman, and therefore you must be responsible for the presence of any men who harm you. In fact, you are responsible for the ‘decline’ of Western civilisation in its entirety. So you deserve it bitch.”

Rightwing white women, for the love of God stop feeding the beast. And by this I do NOT mean ‘stop speaking about your bad experiences with non-white men’, I mean change your audience. Confide in other women. Because your XY political colleagues are laughing at how fucking easy you make their job of 1) selling the lie to white women that white men will protect them from non-white men, and 2) pushing overtly racist agendas, the first victims of which will be women of colour, who bear the brunt of their own men’s misogyny and violence as it is.

And I’m saying all of this as a white woman who was rightwing, and in these chauvinistic anti-multiculturalism/anti-immigration circles for years. This is firsthand experience. This is my old crowd. They hate you. You are useful idiots to their spite-fuelled cause. You have more in common with any other white woman or woman of colour than you have with them.

[austin-meowers]

a list of hyperfixations i have had over the years

current/ lifelong

winnie the pooh

vampires

obsolete technology

halloween

cryptids

retrofuturism/ googie architecture/ raygun gothic/ atompunk

late 90s/early 2000s fashion (y2k, mcbling, scemo, streetwear)

my chemical romance

nirvana (band)

minecraft

0-5

thomas the tank engine

cars (the movie)

hello kitty

6-10

pirates of the caribbean (especially lego)

pirates in general

american girl dolls (catalogues specifically)

hippie subculture/ 1960s-70s fashion and culture

adventure time

11-13

harry potter (books)

cults/ serial killers (i was fascinated by their psychology i did not idolize them)

monster high dolls

napolean dynamite (movie)

"day in my life" vids on youtube ( i was obsessed with figuring out how to be "normal")

emergency preparedness (evacuation routes, first aid kits, etc)

the simpsons

14-16

dan and phil

supernatural (show)

early 90s fashion (grunge)

history of punk (decline of western civilisation)

futurama

the sopranos

17-19

1950s american idealism (american dream, nuclear families, car culture)

tourism industry in beach towns

record stores (specifically a few local ones)

the big lebowski (movie)

bobs burgers

[arcenciel-par-une-larme]

Those cases used to be treated with an abortion...

These people are a cult, and abortion is their one holy sacrament.

Quiet part out loud 👀

[trainsinanime]

Opinions about architecture are so weird. On the one hand, you will see the ugliest building in your life, and someone will tell you how all that raw exposed concrete that has weathered terrible is actually socialist praxis. And on the other hand, you have the insane people who go, "the western world is in intellectual and moral decline because buildings don't have enough gizmos and thingamabobs anymore".

Guys, it's not that deep, it's just an ugly building! It was built cheaply in the 1960s by people who thought the Athens Charter was a good idea, out of the same material as a soviet ore loading facility, and more likely than not poorly maintained. Of course it's gonna suck. But that's not a moral failing. At the same time, the way the building proudly shows how cheaply it was made is not a moral victory either.

Obviously, those sides are not the same, the creepy guys who see decline of "western civilisation" in everything are just clearly wrong. And on an intellectual level, I really want to agree with the people who see beauty in everything, particularly the things that most people ignore or scoff at. That's an admirable quality! But then they show me an outstanding example of mid-century brutalist architecture, and it looks like a 1960s highway overpass with two windows.

[ultramaga]

"US mimics Japan’s fertility crisis — and you can blame virginal men"

Feminists: Men are scum! Motherhood is Smotherhood! Castrate children in the name of Trans Supremacy! Men: We can't help but notice the population is declining. Feminists: This all your fault!

Feminism lies to women. It tells them they can always have kids later. Reality says otherwise. Leftism lies to everyone. It tells them that kids are trans, and if they aren't castrated, they will kill themselves. Humanity only exists because Leftism was always bullshit. If humans killed themselves if they couldn't get castration, they would have vanished in the dawn of time. It just wouldn't have been possible for millions of years of hominids to survive and reproduce if they were innately suicidal if they couldn't be desexed like dogs.

We exist because Feminism and Leftism are false, and it is the embrace of those poisons that is driving Western Civilisation into the grave. The countries where women have children are the countries which despise Feminism, and do not castrate their own offspring. Feminism, and Leftism even more so, are suicide cults. They doom themselves, but they damn the hosts they latch upon.

Look at the Barbie movie, where the rejection of Motherhood is shown as this huge social improvement akin to the invention of tools. Where the pregnant Barbie is a social outcast. Or "Wendy and Pan", where instead of Wendy wanting her own family, like in the original, the updated version has her living childless and alone as the perfect ideal. Over and over, Feminists push for barrenness. Do not get pregnant, if you do, kill it immediately, don't worry, you can always have kids later, if you don't you'll be better off anyway, the State will look after you, you can trust the State... Meanwhile, the Canadian Health System, faced with the burden of childless elderly people, has begun pushing the Soylent Green Solution, and countries like Australia are following in turn. Even when families are shown in movies and TV, they have fewer and fewer kids. The replacement value - the number of kids a woman needs to have on average in times of peace - is two point one. That means more than two, on average, per woman. Which means women need to have three if they can, for the culture not to vanish. How many do you see in media?

One, maybe two. It's not sustainable. Recently Feminists were outraged over a McDonalds ad. Why?

Because it showed parenthood in a positive light. It showed a man, a woman and a child all being happy together. There wasn't even a scheduled visit to the vet planned for the child to get it desexed. Outrage!!

The people pushing childlessness onto us are miserable people, and they hate the happiness of others because it exposes their misery, and it is only by sabotaging the joy of parents, the joy of relationships, can they make us as miserable as they are, and then and only then do they feel joy.

[bilgeau-blog]

Postemotional Society - Nick Sheffield

Stjepan G. Mestrovic

Sage Publications: London 1999

We currently live in an age of crocodile tears and manufactured emotion. This is a society of synthetic feeling where we have all become progressively indifferent to the suffering of others. How else, charges Mestrovic, are we to understand the West's indifference to the practice of genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia? The globalisation of the media and communications and the commodification of mass suffering means that we can no longer claim that we did not know. Civilisation in the Western world has come to mean the ability to exhibit refined manners while exhibiting a cool indifference to televised murder. The postemotional society values 'being nice' over the collective ability to be able to act on our emotions and to intervene to help others. Hence the capacity to be able to feel real deep emotions in an age which endlessly simulates sentiment through news bulletins, talk shows and soap operas is being progressively undermined. The display of feeling is short lived, useless, aesthetic and luxurious and rarely becomes connected to a sense of justice and a genuine concern for humanity.

Despite Mestrovic's overriding concern with the war in the Balkan's, the best illustration of his argument comes from an intriguing discussion of death. Unlike many traditional societies (and it is part of Mestrovic's thesis that society is becoming progressively worse) our collective rituals in respect of human mortality have become emptied of anything other than the most superficial sentiments. Death has become MacDonaldised with the modern funeral emphasising speed and efficiency. The emotional out-pourings that are needed to collectively reaffirm society of its common bonds have been replaced by the media spectacle of death and the standardisation of feeling. The postemotional society then is one of mass manipulation, fragmentation and cynicism.

Mestrovic gives a diversity of examples to support the thesis of postemotionalism. They range from the decline of dating, fast divorces, the disappearance of the Parisian cafe and the fact that lecturers no longer flirt with their students. What all these examples point towards is a society where emotions are progressively socially regulated. Postemotionalism disallows the possibility of emotions becoming chaotic and are increasingly subject to 'politically correct' forms of regulation. This cleaned up universe then leaves as little room for flirting as it does for our desire to intervene in humanitarian disasters.

This is undoubtedly a richly provocative book. Mestrovic asks some disturbing questions (particularly in respect of the West's moral indifference in respect of the Balkans) and his book sits well with other contemporary theories from Foucault to Ritzer and from Adorno to Baudrillard who have sought to warn us about some of the de-humanising effects of instrumental reason. However, this work is less than convincing in many of the conclusions that it seeks to draw, and offers a picture of modern societies that I take to be irredeemably flawed. Here I shall confine myself to only three objections (although there are others). The first is that the book seems to advocate a certain masculine logic when it comes to analysing the emotions. Emotions that do not directly lead to immediate forms of action are labelled as useless. This is not only a very instrumental view, but also takes as its touchstone an idealised masculine subject who has banished uncertainty and is able to confidently act in the world. The values of introspection, ambivalence and doubt are quickly dismissed as a form of cruelty that is indifferent to the needs of others. Secondly, we might also question the rampant moral pessimism of this book. The end of the cold war, collapse of communism, the rise of new social movements and the development of new and more global media are all potentially more 'progressive' phenomenon than Mestrovic thinks. He might equally have argued that emotions are becoming democratised and that ideas of respectful recognition are pushing a more concerted agenda within Western societies. Such a view might have lead Mestrovic to have offered a more complex analysis of modern society. Finally, while many of the examples are thought provoking, I did not come across a single one where it might not have been interpreted in a different way. This raises the question as to what is to count as evidence in such a sweeping account? How, without more 'empirical' support, can Mestrovic be so certain of the range of emotional reactions that ordinary people had to questions like Bosnia? The fact that Mestrovic rarely considers counter examples, questions of cultural variability, or arguments that might challenge his view, means that his book often reads as an enraged polemic. This only adds to the impression that the book's central arguments are not only over stated, but severely limited.

Nick Stevenson University of Sheffield

https://www.socresonline.org.uk/4/3/mestrovic.html

[arcenciel-par-une-larme]

"So what's your favourite composer?"

"Herbert Howells, of course! His Evening Canticles in G minor are an exquis-"

"*GASP*! YOU'RE A NAZI!! YOU'RE A NAZIIIIII!!!!!!!! Don't you know that Herbert Howells is a dogwhistle for Heil Hitler?? HELP! HE'S A NEONAZI! INSURRECTION! HANDMAID'S TALE!! TEN STAGES OF GENOCIDE!!!!"

Twitter sure is a website.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Απείρους τε είναι κόσμους και γενητούς και φθαρτούς.

- Democritus

There are countless worlds both born and perishable.