Eat bread and salt and speak the truth.

old Russian proverb Pitirim Sorokin Ideational cultures and Sensate cultures focusing on the inner life of human beings material modification of the external world intermediary-type culture between the Sensate and the Ideational compromise between faith and pure empiricism. golden ages: Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., and Europe during A.D. 1200-1350. Knowledge was not narrowed to one vista, he said, nor reduced to one source. Think Aeschylus, Thomas Aquinas. Sensate/scientific culture was in a state of fatigue When you have the excessive domination of a single system, he wrote, eventually it begins to exhibit signs of self-destruction. But this partial truth is mistaken for the whole truth the untruth evokes a strong reaction, creating a dynamic of change and disintegration. (Cf. Hegel, or even Aristotle: any reality contains its own negation within itself, producing its antithesis over time.) Cultures dominated by one-sided mentalities, said Sorokin, fall victim to their own narrow-mindedness. it may linger in its agony for decades I hear distinctly the requiem that the symphony of history is playing in its memory. Sorokins predictions for this end-game scenario (remember, hes writing this nearly seventy-five years ago) were as follows: 1. The boundary between true and false, and beautiful and ugly, will erode. Conscience will disappear in favor of special interest groups. Force and fraud will become the norm; might will become right, and brutality rampant. It will be a bellum omnium contra omnes, and the family will disintegrate as well. The home will become a mere overnight parking place. 2. Sensate values will be progressively destructive rather than constructive, representing in their totality a museum of sociocultural pathology.The Sensate mentality will increasingly interpret man and all values physicochemically, biologically, reflexologically, endocrinologically, behavioristically, economically[etc.].

3. Real creativity will die out. Instead, we shall get a multitude of mediocre pseudothinkers and vulgar groups and organizations. Our belief systems will turn into a strange chaotic stew of science, philosophy, and magical beliefs. Quantitative colossalism will substitute for qualitative refinement. What is biggest will be regarded as best. Instead of classics, we shall have best-sellers. Instead of genius, technique. Instead of real thought, Information. Instead of inner value, glittering externality. Instead of sages, smart alecs. The great cultural values of the past will be degraded; Michelangelos and Rembrandts will be decorating soap and razor blades, washing machines and whiskey bottles. 4. Freedom will become a myth. Inalienable rights will be alienated; Declarations of Rights either abolished or used only as beautiful screens for an unadulterated coercion. Governments will become more and more hoary, fraudulent, and tyrannical, giving bombs instead of bread; death instead of freedom; violence instead of law. Security will fade; the population will become weary and scared. Suicide, mental disease, and crime will grow. 5. The dies irae of transition will not be fun to live through, but the only way out of this mess, he wrote, is precisely through it. Under the conditions outlined above, the population will not be able to help opening its eyes [this will be a very delayed phase in the U.S., Im guessing] to the hollowness of the declining Sensate culture. As a result, it will increasingly forsake it and shift its allegiance to either Ideational or Idealistic values. Finally, we shall see the release of new creative forces, which will usher in a culture and a noble society built not upon the withered Sensate root but upon a healthier and more vigorous root of integralistic principle. In other words, we can expect the emergence and slow growth of the first components of a new sociocultural order.