Decline of Wisdom

The Decline of Wisdom by Gabriel Marcel, 56 pages

The Decline of Wisdom is a short analysis of the nature of modern industrial civilization, beginning with the disappearance of a spiritual heritage, which he explains cannot be described as property (and is certainly not a manufactured product), but is rather a voice - or, better, voices - calling down through the centuries.  What is required to hear those calls are ears willing to hear, or hearts open to gift.  Only in a spiritual heritage can wisdom take root - wisdom, which involves hierarchy and discipline, which are anathema to egalitarianism and its politics of envy and resentment.  Only wisdom can give direction to a technical mastery of the world, only wisdom can offer common ground to seemingly incommensurable worldviews.

Writing in the years following the Second World War, it is natural for Marcel to view the totalitarian states of the twentieth century as the exemplars of modernity, and understandable that he then conceives modernity as reducing modern man to units of production.  From a twenty-first century vantage point, consumption seems to have replaced production, with effects he could hardly have foreseen.  Particularly interesting is his awareness that in a pragmatic era art was endangered, hardly suspecting that once art was subordinated to fashion it would be easily commodified, resulting in the triumph of the trivial.  Yet his diagnosis of the fragmentation of modern society remains trenchant, and his belief that cultural renewal must begin with the humble and the personal remains the only sane prescription.