This story of man’s passage from religious or philosophical transcendentalism has been told many times, and, since it has usually been told as a story of progress, it is extremely difficult today to get people in any number to see contrary implications. Yet to establish the fact of decadence is the most pressing duty of our time because, until we have demonstrated that cultural decline is a historical fact–which can be established–and that modern man has about squandered his estate, we cannot combat those who have fallen prey to hysterical optimism. . . Loss is perceived most clearly at the beginning; after habit becomes implanted, one beholds the anomalous situation of apathy mounting as the moral crisis depends. It is when teh first faint warnings come that one has the best chance to save himself; and this, I suspect, explains why medieval thinkers where extremely agitated over questions which seem to us today without point or relevance. If one goes on, the monitory voices fade out, and it is not impossible for him to reach a state in which his entire moral orientation is lost. Thus in the face of the enormous brutality of our age we seem unable to make appropriate response to perversions of truth and acts of bestiality. Multiplying instances show compliance in the presence of contradiction which denies the heritage of Greece, and a callousness to suffering which denies the spirit of Christianity. . . We approach a condition in which we shall be amoral without the capacity to perceive it and degraded without means to measure our descent. Weaver, Richard M., Ideas Have Consequences, p. 9.