We have ceased to be shocked by the breakdown in moral inhibitions

“Our entire civilization today – we’ve all gone under one idea: interest or need. And we are taught the greatest thing alive is to satisfy one’s needs and interests. Actually, our way of living revolved around one principle: self-interest. Self-interest. There is nothing else but self-interest. If love is only self-interest, then love is a fake, a pretense.”
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, 409

"We have shaped our lives around the practical, the utilitarian, devoid of dreams and vision, higher concerns and enthusiasms....Reduced to a matter of expediency, the entire image of man becomes flat. The sickness of our technological civilization has at last reached our consciousness, although the depths of that sickness have yet to be plumbed."
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, 229



We are callous to catastrophes
"Modern man may be characterized as a being who is callous to catastrophes. A victim of enforced brutalization, his sensibility is being increasingly reduced; his sense of horror is on the wane. The distinction between right and wrong is becoming blurred. All that is left to us is our being horrified at the loss of our sense of horror."
God in Search of Man, 369

“Technical civilization is man’s conquest of space. It is a triumph frequently achieved by sacrificing an essential ingredient of existence, namely, time. In technical civilization, we expend time to gain space. To enhance our power in the world of space is our main objective….”
“Technical civilization is the product of labor, of man’s exertion of power for the sake of gain, for the sake of producing goods. It begins when man, dissatisfied with what is available in nature, becomes engaged in a struggle with the forces of nature in order to enhance his safety and to increase his comfort.” 27
“How proud we often are of our victories in the war with nature, proud of the multitude of instruments we have succeeded in inventing, of the abundance of commodities we have been able to produce.”
The Sabbath, 27

Most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions
“We live in an age when most of us have ceased to be shocked by the increasing breakdown in moral inhibitions. The decay of conscience fills the air with a pungent smell. Good and evil, which were once as distinguishable as day and night, have become a blurred mist. But that mist is man-made.” 152
“Now we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in the temples! How thoroughly distorted! Now we behold how it gradually withdraws, abandoning one people after another, departing from their souls, despising their wisdom. The taste for goodness has all but gone from the earth.” 152
Decline of the holy and growth of the profane. “We have trifled with the name of God. We have taken ideals in vain, preached and eluded Him, praised and defied Him. Now we reap the fruits of failure. Through centuries His voice cried in the wilderness. How skillfully it was trapped and imprisoned in the temples! How thoroughly distorted! Now we behold how it gradually withdraws, abandoning one people after another, departing from their souls, despising their wisdom. The taste for goodness has all but gone from the earth.”
Abraham Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, 152
[Reading selection available]

Each person is out for themselves

Each person is out for themselves
“You know what is disorder – living in the way we live is total disorder. As things are, each man is out for himself, there is no cooperation, there is no love, there is complete callousness as to what happens in Vietnam or in China, or at your next door neighbor’s.”
The Awakening of Intelligence, 212

Our lives are empty because we are focused on the external
“Because we play with causes and effects and never go beyond them, except verbally, our lives are empty, without much significance. It is for this reason that we have become slaves to political excitement and to religious sentimentalism.”
Commentaries on Living, First Series, 31

The domination of sensation and comfort are corroding
“Line and form become extraordinarily important to those who are in bondage to the sensate; then beauty is sensation, goodness a feeling, and truth a matter of intellection. When sensations dominate, comfort becomes essential, not only to the body, but also to the psyche; and comfort, especially that of the mind, is corroding, leading to illusion.”
Commentaries on Living, First Series, 13

We are constantly instigated to pleasure, to fancy, to romantic sensuality
We don’t seem to pay much attention to the future. You see on television endless entertainment from morning until late in the night. The children are entertained. The commercials all sustain the feeling that you are being entertained. And this is happening practically all over the world. What will be the future of these children? There is the entertainment of sport, with thousands of people watching a few people in an arena and shouting themselves hoarse. Seeing all this in different parts of the world, watching the mind being occupied with amusement, entertainment, sport, if one is in any way concerned one must inevitably ask what the future is. More of the same in different forms? A variety of amusements?⠀
When the entertainment industry takes over, as it is gradually doing now, when the young people, the students, the children, are constantly instigated to pleasure, to fancy, to romantic sensuality, the words restraint and austerity are pushed away, never even given a thought. You probably won’t even listen to what the implications of austerity are. When you have been brought up from childhood to amuse yourself and to escape from yourself through entertainment, and when most of the psychologists say that you must express everything you feel and that any form of holding back or restraint is detrimental, leading to various forms of neuroticism, you naturally enter more and more into the world of sport, amusement, entertainment, all helping you to escape from what you are.
J. Krishnamurti, The Real Crisis⠀

We are too numb even to hate what is hateful

"Our age now hovers on the verge of that abyss: part of our society has already plunged into it; and the condition of man therefore calls for radical improvement…What our civilization needs today, as a condition for increasing human maturity and for inner renewal, is the cultivation of an exquisite sensitivity and an incomparable tenderness…Unnamable horrors have paraded before us and worse evils threaten because we have been unable to wipe the blank stare of indifference from our stony tearless faces. We are too numb even to hate what is hateful."
The Conduct of Life, Beyond Moral Ambiguities, pages 148-151 [4 pages]

Western civilization has produced the sterile, loveless world of the machine
"The social breakdown of our time…Philosophically, this breakdown has disclosed itself in the cult of general nihilism, a cult which rejects the reality of those fundamental discriminations between good and bad, between higher and lower, that are the very bases of human conduct…" Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life, page 149
"Love, conscious and unconscious, is the daily food of all living creatures: the means of living, the proof of their capacity to live, the ultimate blessing of their life. The final criticism of Western civilization, as it has developed these last four centuries, is that it has produced the sterile, loveless world of the machine: hostile to life…" Lewis Mumford, The Conduct of Life, 288
"Our age now hovers on the verge of that abyss: part of our society has already plunged into it; and the condition of man therefore calls for radical improvement…" 148. "What our civilization needs today, as a condition for increasing human maturity and for inner renewal, is the cultivation of an exquisite sensitivity and an incomparable tenderness....Unnamable horrors have paraded before us and worse evils threaten because we have been unable to wipe the blank stare of indifference from our stony tearless faces. We are too numb even to hate what is hateful." 153 'Beyond Moral Ambiguities,' in The Conduct of Life, pages 148-151 [4 pages] [Is this really Mumford?]
"The invisible breakdown in our civilization is more insidious, and possibly even more destructive: the erosion of values, the dissipation of humane purposes, the denials of any distinction between good and bad, right or wrong, the reversion to sub-human levels of conduct...." The Conduct of Life, 148
“Now that the binding ties of habit, custom, and moral code have been lossened, an increasing portion of the human race is going out of its mind.” The Pentagon of Power, 368
"Politically, our moral breakdown has taken precisely the turn predicted by Henry Adams fifty years ago, and by Oswald Spengler, with even more brutal realism, after WWI."
The Conduct of Life, 149

Cultivation of an exquisite sensitivity and an incomparable tenderness
☆ "Our age now hovers on the verge of that abyss: part of our society has already plunged into it; and the condition of man therefore calls for radical improvement…" 148. "What our civilization needs today, as a condition for increasing human maturity and for inner renewal, is the cultivation of an exquisite sensitivity and an incomparable tenderness…Unnamable horrors have paraded before us and worse evils threaten because we have been unable to wipe the blank stare of indifference from our stony tearless faces. We are too numb even to hate what is hateful." 153
Maybe 'Stripping for Action,' in The Conduct of Life, pages 268-271 [3 1/2 pages]
"A world governed by military corporations and single parties…becomes possible when the majority no longer, through orderly means, exercises the initiative in continuously re-forming and re-directing institutions to serve human purposes." 268
We must counterbalance every fresh complexity, every mechanical refinement…
"Life belongs to the free-living and mobile creatures, not to the encrusted ones; and to restore the initiative to life and participate in its renewal, we must counterbalance every fresh complexity, every mechanical refinement, every increase in quantitative goods or quantitative knowledge, every advance in manipulative technique, every threat of superabundance or surfeit, with stricter habits of evaluation, rejection, choice. To achieve that capacity we must consciously resist every kind of automatism…" 270
[7 1/2 pages (so far)]
'Beyond Moral Ambiguities,' in The Conduct of Life, pages 148-151 [4 pages]

“This cultural nihilism, which began as a reaction against regimentation, has become in turn a mode of counter-regimentation, with its ritualized destruction and its denial of all the cultural processes that have sublimated man’s irrational impulses and released his constructive energies.” “In every country today a large part of the population, literate or subliterate, indoctrinated by the mass media, reinforced by the more fashionable leaders in schools, colleges, and museums, accepts this madhouse ‘art,’ not only as a valid expression of our meaningless and purposeless life—as in one sense it actually is—but as the only acceptable existential approach to reality….The mark of authentic experience, accordingly, is the systematic elimination of the good, the true, the beautiful, in both their past and their possible future forms. Along with this goes an aggressive attack on whatever is healthy, balanced, sane, rational, disciplined, purposeful.”
The Conduct of Life, 366

We are miserable, greedy, and depraved

“They took the bread and milk and meat from the people of their fields; they gave it to feed, and retain here in their service, this fermenting mass of unhappy human beings, — news-mongers, novel-mongers, picture-mongers, poison-drink-mongers, lust and death-mongers; the whole smoking mass of it one vast dead-marine storeshop, — accumulation of wreck of the Dead Sea, with every activity in it, a form of putrefaction.” The Genius of John Ruskin, 402



“Believe it or not, as you may, there has not been so low a level of thought reached by any race, since they grew to be male and female out of star-fish, or chickweed, or whatever else they have been made from, by natural selection, — according to modern science.” 363

“There is one fixed idea in the mind of every European progressive politician, at this time; namely, that by a certain application of Financial Art, and by the erection of a certain quantity of new buildings on a colossal scale, it will be possible for society hereafter to pass its entire life in eating, smoking, harlotry, and talk; without doing anything whatever with its hands or feet of a laborious character.... England “educates a mercenary population, ready to produce any quantity of bad articles to anybody’s order; population which every hour that passes over them makes acceleratingly avaricious, immoral, and insane.” The Genius of John Ruskin, 399

“The entire mass of this London population do nothing whatever either to feed or clothe themselves; and their vile life preventing them from all rational entertainment, they are compelled to seek some pastime in a vile literature, the demand for which again occupies another enormous class, who do nothing to feed or dress themselves; finally, the vain disputes of this vicious population give employment to the vast industry of the lawyers and their clerks, who similarly do nothing to fee or dress themselves.” 400

“They took the bread and milk and meat from the people of their fields; they gave it to feed, and retain here in their service, this fermenting mass of unhappy human beings, -- news-mongers, novel-mongers, picture-mongers, poison-drink-mongers, lust and death-mongers; the whole smoking mass of it one vast dead-marine storeshop, -- accumulation of wreck of the Dead Sea, with every activity in it, a form of putrefaction.” 402

“In the continual pursuit of pleasure, men lose both cheerfulness and charity” 209

The Genius of John Ruskin. ‘The white-thorn blossom.

Our new religion is self-interest

“The industrial religion had its basis in a new social character. Its center was fear of and submission to powerful male authorities, cultivation of the sense of guilt for disobedience, dissolution of the bonds of human solidarity by the supremacy of self-interest and mutual antagonism. The ‘sacred’ in industrial religion was work, property, profit, power.” Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be, 119
“The power of corporations, the apathy and powerlessness of the large mass of the population, the inadequacy of political leadership almost all countries, the threat of nuclear war, the ecological dangers, not to speak of such phenomena as weather changes that alone could produce famines in large parts of the world, is there a reasonable chance for salvation?”
To Have Or To Be, 160

Most people in our culture are greedy (Eric Fromm)
“Most people in our culture – and in similar periods of history – are greedy: greedy for more food, drink, sex, possessions, power, and fame. Their greed may refer more to one than to another of these objects; what all people have in common is that they are insatiable and hence never satisfied. Greed is one of the strongest non-instinctive passions in man, and it is clearly a symptom of physical dysfunctioning, of inner emptiness and a lack of a center within oneself. It is a pathological manifestation of the failure to develop fully, as well as one of the fundamental sins in Buddhist, Jewish, and Christian ethics.”
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 235

Modern culture operates by basic and base stimuli such as sex, greed, and narcissism
“Contemporary life in industrial societies operates almost entirely with such simple stimuli. What is stimulated are such drives as sexual desire, greed, sadism, destructiveness, narcissism; these stimuli are mediated through movies, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and the commodity market.”
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 270

“Consensus succeeds in transforming the fantasy into reality, since for most people reality is constituted by the general consensus and not based on reason or critical examination.”
The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 230.

We are headed for misery, chaos, and tyranny due to growing depravity in

“American popular culture is in a free fall, with the bottom not yet in sight. This is what the liberal view of human nature has brought us to. The idea that men are naturally rational, moral creatures without the need for strong external restraints has been exploded by experience. There is an eager and growing market for depravity, and profitable industries devoted to supplying it. Much of such resistance as there is comes from people living on the moral capital accumulated by prior generations. That capital may be expected to dwindle further—cultures do not unravel everywhere all at once. Unless there is a vigorous counterattack, which must, I think, resort to legal as well as moral sanctions, the prospects are for a chaotic and unhappy society, followed, perhaps, by an authoritarian and unhappy society.” 139

“We are living through a cultural collapse, and major corporations are presiding over that collapse and grabbing everything they can on the way down...Popular entertainment sells sex, pornography, violence, vulgarity, attacks on traditional forms of authority, and outright perversion more copiously and more insistently than ever before in our history.” Robert Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, 126
First few pages, at least, of chapter 7, ‘The collapse of popular culture,’ are good.

Radical freedom of expression advocates equate the best with the worst (Bork)
“There is apparently nothing that a flummery of professors will not testify has ‘serious value.’ When Cincinnati prosecuted the museum that displayed Mapplethorpe’s photographs, the jury deferred to defense witnesses who said the pictures were art and hence could not be obscene. Cincinnati was widely ridiculed and portrayed as benighted for even attempting to punish obscenity. One typical cartoon showed a furtive figure stepping out of an alley in the city to offer ‘feelthy pictures’ to a surprised passerby. The picture was a reproduction of a Michelangelo. It is typical of our collapse of standards that Mapplethorpe’s grotesqueries can be compared even in a cartoon to Michelangelo’s art.” Robert Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, 146
Possibly pages 145-147, or more. Quite good.

Immorality is no longer definable or defensible
“Today’s Court majority would have difficulty understanding Chaplinsky’s statement that an utterance could inflict an injury to morality. Morality itself has become relativized in our constitutional jurisprudence, so that the Court no longer has the vocabulary to say that something is immoral and, for that reason, may be banned by the legislature.” 149

'Modern Liberalism'--a political view. Chapter in Gomorrah. "Large chunks of the moral life of the US, major features of its culture, have disappeared altogether, & more are in the process of extinction. These are being, or have already been, replaced by new modes of conduct...." (page12) A good chapter may (but I have not yet read the others, which have more of an emphasis on moral issues) be 3, which summarizes the philosophical roots & innate problems, including "moral anarchy".
"The defining characteristics of modern liberalism are radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than of opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification)." 5
"A minority of fanatical disposition can effectively control an institution." 38 "Sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other." 63.

Slouching Towards Gomorrah