I just finished reading an article in Fast Company about another risky yet seemingly brilliant move by Netflix. They are going to host their own late night talk show that will both stream live and yet also be available for watching later when you might want. The host is someone unfamiliar to me Chelsea Handler. In the article, it was made quite clear that part of what has brought this woman success is her willingness to be crude, bawdy and rude (maybe more demeaning than rude?) to others.
Her “comedy” is of course, just one in a long line of debauchery elements that are easy to see when one looks around at our culture. While certainly not everyone is rude or demeaning, such attitude and actions are very prevalent, whether watching TV, reading comments on social media or just wandering around town. Ms. Handler may actually be a fine and even sweet person…and another successful woman in life would be a good thing…but as Fast Company presents her, what I read is someone who has gained fame through crudeness and rudeness. Or, as I think of it, the decline of civilization.
If you’ve read much of what I write, I think deeply about culture and understanding the journey that our culture in the USA is traveling. My study of history helps me see the path from which this society has come and can, to some degree, note the direction it is heading. My voice is not alone in thinking the trajectory is not good. In fact, I believe that our current 2016 election is fully centered on this feeling, from both the right and the left, that the trajectory of the country is not good.
We can do better. To do so, we can learn from how Rome faced and defeated Carthage. G.K. Chesterton’s view of the Punic War, the conflict between the major powers of the Western World starting in 264 BC, was a battle between a civilized people who were generally good (Rome) and a barbaric people who enshrined a religion that willingly sacrificed its own children to its god (Carthage).
Writing in The Everlasting Man, Chesterton notes that as the war progressed, it appeared as if Rome was defeated. 
In my teaching about culture and generations, I have explained how we are marching clearly towards the Great Crisis. In the previous 500 years when such came, the generation of young adults at that time, what Strauss and Howe call the “Hero archetype generation,” rise to meet the challenge. They survive the cold of Valley Forge, the march across the fields of Gettysburg and they suffer collectively in the limits of the Great Depression. Looking around at today though, at a culture grown fat and lazy on excess, with many of our new celebrities, role models for the culture, being so called for presenting “bawdy, transgressive humor,” I believe many of our current young adults Hero Generation would simply refuse. They would not stand as Rome, holding to honor and courage.
In fact, one could propose that we are in fact more like Carthage than Rome. We certainly have eagerly shown the willingness to kill our own children, whether with the physical death of abortion or the slower death of a choked childhood through sexual abuse, malnourishment or robbed dreams. We are not like Rome…or at least there is a current, determined attempt to reshape us into the image of Carthage. Listen to how Chesterton describes Rome and its culture and compares it to Carthage:
Why do men entertain this queer idea that what is sordid must always overthrow what is magnanimous; that there is some dim connection between brains and brutality, or that it does not matter if a man is dull so long as he is mean? Why do they vaguely think of all chivalry as sentiment and sentiment as weakness? They do it because they are, like all men, primarily inspired by religion….And it is their faith that the only ultimate thing is fear….[Carthage] fell…by disbelieving in the soul, it comes to disbelieving in the mind. being too practical to be moral, it denies what every practical soldier calls the morale of an army. It fancies that money will fight when men will no longer fight…Their religion was a religion of despair, even when their practical fortunes were hopeful. How could they understand that the Romans could hope even when their fortunes were hopeless?…For Carthage fell because she was faithful to her own philosophy and had followed out to its logical conclusion her own vision of the universe. Moloch had eaten his children.
Chesterton isn’t saying Rome was Christian, but it was more human, more embracing of hope than Carthage. For Chesterton, and I would concur, the victory by Rome preserved Western Civilization from going down a dark path. Two centuries later, God would intervene in a powerful through the birth of Jesus, and finding himself in a world ruled by Rome was better than a world ruled by Carthage.
Maybe Chelsea Handler is a nice enough person. But her success, and that of many others like her, suggest that somehow, somewhere along the way, we lost honor and instead gained entitlement. We became a people who finds enjoyment in a rude or crude mannerism. We lost touch with the idea that the best of us is the quiet determination to use diligent effort for the betterment of others around us. As we head toward Memorial Day, I hope you will center your thoughts on being a person who brings hope and light to others, not despair and darkness.