I forget the original conversation, how I came to with this phrase. But it had something to do with the lowering of some plane, of some conceptual standard - akin to the flattening of the world economy, but more the intermixing of world cultures. Through the internet, the media and socio-economic development in general, terre-social mores become less isolated and therefore we could say totemic rituals become less pure, and taboos more likely to corrupt a given society - thus morphing it in such a way as to make culture globally more homogeneous.
This might appear to be advantageous for those of us too quick to judge others by our own success at acquiring, hording and consuming...
Thus we might say something like we've "climbed to higher moral ground"; or "that's beneath me." The deluge I speak of then is my reference to the mass of humanity that could be said to have been swept out and dragged under by this and ensuing turpitude and self-righteousness. The villages along the dammed Yellow river in China are especially symbolic of the shameful nature of this traumatized connection to our varied cultural pasts.
