More damage from Marx, I suppose, and his fanciful cavalcade of dialectic progress. The "forces of history" and all that -- I wonder, why hasn't Marx ever been called for promoting teleology?
Social historians of the United States note how much colonial mores and values differed from those which gave birth to the religious reformism of the 1830's and 1840's, whose handy label I forget at the moment. Was it "the great reawakening"?
Likewise, there is a course taught at the University of Houston that emphasizes the differences in thinking (and in values) promoted by visual media -- primarily the movies, and later on TV -- from the usual word-based and audio-based thinking of the nineteenth century. I guess you could call it gestalt thinking versus rationalism, or something like that. Someone who's studied these topics formally could supply the vocabulary.
Most posters here are familiar with the modern reaction -- and I like now to emphasize its reactiveness to the destructiveness of the Great War -- and the change in mores, styles, and standards of behavior that took place 80 years ago, and were basically incumbent up to, and arguably past, the Counterculture challenge of a generation ago.
Discussion?
Thinking has always been primarily image driven. It was precisely because they had clear images of the dynamics of human interaction, that the Founding Fathers had such a profound grasp of what worked and did not work in the human condition. What has changed, today, is that Leftists in control of most of the visual media, have been able to create false and exaggerated images, that compete with the data bank of experience, with which most of us operate. Thus Hollywood and Television have had an enormous and very socially deleterious influence, because of their bias.
I have addressed this situation at some length in The Persuasive Use Of Images. The subject is of immense importance, if we are to turn the tide, and reclaim Western values and the American heritage from those who are sytematically destroying both.
William Flax