The customary reply to those who pathetically complain that things are getting worse is that people have always felt that way. By implication, all such feelings are spurious. A friendly gesture and a tap on the shoulder punctuates the delivery of this ancient remedy. An occasional philistine will be compelled to illustrate this “argument” with a couple of tattered quotations from times past. The more seasoned the source, the better. Those who complained end up by shaking their heads and smiling crookedly, doubtful about this elegant flight of reasoning but reassured in their own incapacity to fathom all the evidence. Thus it comes to pass that no-one even notices that the very logic of the implicit argument is faulty, for it is entirely possible, on its own grounds, that things are in fact getting worse, and that this is the actual reason why people have complained about the world in the past as well. The argument at best affirms this perception by radicalizing it. Such radicalization is too radical, of course, and it consequently cannot but immobilize and defuse every attempt to address the perceived condition here and now. It is therefore necessary to complain against this logical fallacy as soon as it is committed, no matter how distressing it may be to contemplate it after so many centuries of palpable progress.

Addendum (June 5, 2001)

Sadly, this is what Alain Besançon does in the otherwise compelling introduction to The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm.[1] He reflects on his own experience at the Paris Biennial:

I walked through rooms capriciously strewn with debris, little piles of sand, roaring machines. On the walls were charred objects, the macabre remains of some death camp, obstetrical tools to turn your stomach, a neon tube in a corner. I could strike up a song on the death of art, take the side of the haggard guard, sitting overwhelmed in his own corner of the room. But let us be cautious. The theme of the decadence of art is as old as art itself.[2]

Predictably, here he cites Plato and Baudelaire, the obligatory if involuntary accomplices to the fallacy. To his credit, Besançon begins this paragraph by saying that this is the experience everyone has had. More important, he concludes it by acknowledging that the lament, which has arrived on our doorstep having rolled from age to age, might be for good this time. It indeed might be.

Footnotes

1. Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2000 (first published in 1994).

2. Op. cit., p. 8.