I have been thinking about the 'sensate society' since I was a young man, though I didn't have the words for it back then. Nor did I know that others had thought much about it.

Materialism, the consumer society, existentialism, the loss of faith - these were all swirling around at the time and were often reinforced by my readings at university and beyond. I lapped up the plays of Sartre and Camus, delighted in the the writing of the absurdists (and later the Dadaists) , though a part of me must have known even then about the logical consequences of such theories. Disintegration, madness or a surrender to hedonism were all possible destinations.

My charismatic modern history lecturer (Dr P. Edwards), a specialist in the 16th century, gave us Luther's perspective at that time - 'Man can only sin', though I am at a loss as to where the quotation comes from. It is not that he agreed with Luther mind, but it gave us free-thinking undergrads an entry into the zeitgeist of the Reformation. But I digress.

The 'sensate society' was coined by Russian scholar Pitirim Sorokin way back in the 1940's. In essence, Sorokin posited that societies move through three cycles, and leaping ahead to the last phase, we find the sensate society, a civilisation based on the material, but centrally, also based on feelings and  sensations. There is no room for the spiritual and decline becomes inevitable. Practically, this will lead to the emergence of a different set of values and practises that will essentially degrade and perhaps destroy that society. The guard rails have disappeared and there in nothing to hold things together.

It is my estimation that things have become far worse than when I was at university. This is not old fogey syndrome but the collective observations of many. When you dismantle the practises, institutions and beliefs that built the sub and superstructures of a successful society, then what is to hold it up. This is not to say that there are not positives, such as righting historical wrongs, ending forms of discrimination or indeed the progress of science and medicine. These are good things on the whole.

Yeats wrote in The Second Coming,

'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,'

I hope it isn't so but I have thought that it might be for a very long time.