Age of Decay?

I have this idea that's not fully formed, but goes like this:

Maybe we're just in an age of especial decay this last century or so, and really, this whole trajectory is not that bad. This is what i mean: Maybe some of the bad things that anti-civ/primitivist people criticize are not inherently the problem, but the problem is the debased form we see now.

Like the Weston A Price folks talk about the benefits of raw dairy. Now, maybe the paleo/vegan arguments against dairy are rooted in the debased dairy of modern industrial society.

Maybe more broadly the idea that fat makes you fat is just symptomatic of hydrogenated fats, and other industrial fats, which are bad for you, and not the same as good, healthful fats like coconut and animal fats,

Also- one of my teachers a year ago discussed the idea that writing was this empowering thing for Frederick Douglass and others in his age, and that literacy was connected to taking action in one's life. Maybe the critique of media is more about the critique of industrial era media that obfuscates, rather than informs. Maybe media does not 'mediate' in the worst senses of the word necessarily.

Same for the critique of language- maybe it's more a critique of the debased and disenchanted language of postmodernism, where everything is reduced to language, and nothing really matters (indoor philosophy stuff), that is worthy of criticism, rather than language inherently.

This seems to go well with the idea of balance and attempts not to overstate one's case, and bend teh stick too far in the other direction.

But the converse is also compelleing, and probably what I tend toward. That maybe the debasement has always been here, and I'm romanticizing the supposed elevated forms of teh past. Maybe Zerzan and others are right when they point out simply that the emptiness of this culture, of this trajectory is finally being laid bare for more of us to see.

Maybe media, as the word implies, does necessarily mediate in the negative sense of distancing us from life. Maybe the means by which it did so were less sophisticated a century or two ago, and thus authenticity existed alongside the abstracted world more fully then, but the basic thrust was toward what we have now from the beginning.

Maybe it's not just the 'Green Revolution,' but agriculture itself which is the catastrophe in teh colloquial as well as biological sense.

Maybe, raw or pasteurized, cow milk is meant for baby cows, not adult humans, and pasteurization just exacerbates its ill-effects.



My own current thinking is somewhere mixed along these gradients, but I wanted to get down some of these ideas that I'm toying with.