Aging & Wisdom Quote by Christopher Dawson

A “slump” is a deliberately deflationary word for what Christopher Dawson is really diagnosing: not a temporary dip in good manners, but a civilizational recession. As a Catholic historian writing in the shadow of two world wars, mass propaganda, and the bureaucratic tightening of modern states, Dawson treats “humanist values” less as a nice curriculum and more as the cultural glue that once made Europe intelligible to itself. The line’s power comes from its quiet panic. He doesn’t shout about apocalypse; he uses the language of economic downturns, implying that moral and intellectual life can be depressed by forces as impersonal as markets: institutions, incentives, machines, ideologies.

The subtext is a critique of modernity’s replacements for the human scale. “The present age” reads like a raised eyebrow at the 20th century’s self-congratulation: all that progress, all that expertise, and yet a thinning of the person into a unit to be administered, mobilized, or “re-educated.” Dawson is also sharpening a polemic within the educated class. Humanism, for him, is not mere secular refinement; it’s an inheritance tethered to a religious vision of the human person. When that tether frays, what rushes in is technocracy, nationalism, or utopian politics - systems that promise meaning while flattening individuality.

Intent matters here: Dawson isn’t nostalgic for Latin declensions. He’s warning that when a culture loses the habits of humane judgment - moral imagination, historical memory, limits on power - it becomes dangerously easy to rationalize cruelty as efficiency and to sell dehumanization as necessity.