The Degeneracy of Western Civilization: What Ideas can we Salvage from the Past? by Collin

The Degeneracy of Western Civilization: What Ideas can we Salvage from the Past? by Collin - February 2016 Scholarship Essay

When considering a historical figure to invite to dinner, it would be who of any modern person to consider which predecessor would have the most to say about the issues our civilization is currently dealing with. Throughout the course of human history there have been many individuals involved in providing the bedrock of wisdom and knowledge, but perhaps none so much as the philosopher Plato. Plato devoted much of his life to the practice of what he termed ‘eudaimonia’ (fulfillment); he came to realise that very often people are unable to lead a good life, not because they are necessarily immoral, but because they do not take the time to question their own ideas. As a result, many bad ideas that are actually deleterious to human well-being are echoed by society, and become what the ancient Greeks called ‘doxa’ which roughly translates to ‘popular opinion’.
Plato would be appalled by the amount of doxa that gets passed around in the modern world. Certain ideas about life, morality, and ethics that surround the modern man would seem utterly unconscionable to him: particularly the amount sanctity our society holds for emotion and feelings. Plato once compared human emotion to a sled drawn by a team of wild horses, in order to articulate the chaos and danger that arises when too much faith is put into sentimentality. Instead Plato insisted that one must always be willing to subject their ideas to rigorous scrutiny, no matter how uncomfortable or jarring it might seem, because in the end this will always be preferable to acting on a whim.
Today our society is so deracinated that we have allowed hurt feelings to take precedent over liberty, logic, and reason. A growing trend among western academia is the creation of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings’, guardrails against ideas that do not echo the listener's preconceptions about life. The result of this is a generation of people militantly opposed to freedom of speech, who will fight vehemently for their right to self-infantilize, and unabashedly censor any criticism. Anything contrary to their belief system is labeled as ‘offensive’, eerily similar to how the Church used to label ideas as sinful during the dark ages. At some point one must consider what Plato, a man who devoted his life to the practice of challenging prejudices, would think of his intellectual inheritors who would like nothing more than to silence anyone who dares question their sophomoric ideology. The modern world could learn much from such a man.