Speaking of violence, this weekend saw the arrival of Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) to Australia. I didn’t go, but by all reports it was a brutal affair. Contestants battle it out in an octagon cage with more rules than the sport once had, but not enough to avoid the feel of a barely restrained, vicious brawl.

Kicking, kneeing, and choke-holds are part of the show, as is fighters
pouncing on opponents who have gone down, to bash them more. There is
no shortage of the promised blood on the canvas.

Sydney Morning Herald journalist Peter Fitzsimons, himself a former international rugby player and no shrinking violet, could barely contain his distaste for the event. ‘… it looks like we might have moved into an age when tens of thousands of people no longer want cups of tea. They want buckets of blood,’ he wrote.

It does feel like a different era. I’ve always enjoyed watching the battles of fiercely contested sport. Even boxing, at its highest level, carries something of the noble pursuit in my mind. The folklore around Ali and Foreman’s ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ still gives me goose bumps.

But in its various permutations this cage fighting, looks more Colosseum than MCG. And the reaction of the people in the stands is what interests me the most. Curiosity might make it hard to turn away when we see a car crash, but what might we say about an impulse to revel in the carnage?

Perhaps I’m being alarmist and melodramatic. To suggest that the arrival of UFC is a harbinger of the West going to hell in a hand basket might be taking things too far. But I can’t help thinking of the great historian Arnold Toynbee and his description of the common characteristics of great civilisations on their last legs. Rarely are they overrun, according to Toynbee, but rather they commit a kind of cultural suicide. Falling to a sense of abandon and lawlessness, once great peoples become adrift, unable to anchor themselves in any universal ground of justice, truth or reason.

One of a number of characteristics Toynbee identifies is escapism and retreat into distraction and entertainment. Presumably that becomes more extreme the further down that path you progress. He talks about an indiscriminate acceptance of anything and everything – “an act of self-surrender to the melting pot … in Religion and Literature and Language and Art as well as … Manners and Customs.”

As I watched footage of jubilant fans leaving the arena sated from the experience of socially acceptable lavish violence, I couldn’t help thinking of a culture pushing further into a void; of something rotten in its spirit. An implosion.

Or am I missing something?