I'm worried our society worries about issues it shouldn't worry about
While this gentleman and I are almost on opposite sides of the political spectrum, I can relate to some of the points he makes. This is a rather long article, but I highly reccomend it..... ESPECIALLY if you, like Spackler and your humble servant, are somewhat left of center.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007760
posted by Centerline @ 10:22 AM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
Wow. I agree with 95% of what this guy says. He's all over the place, but his fundamental premise is difficult to argue with.
I wonder if this is what happened to the Romans? Did they stop having kids and all of the "barbarians" just effectively moved in?
I think the Romans were a litle over-extended for their times.....
I have also read a study from the Heritage Foundation that takes on the issue from the China and India perspective. Both of these countries are facing a very similar, and yet much more worrisome problem with their declining birthrates. Europe, for all of its faults, is a continent that still has substantial assets - whereas China and India are very poor. And they're growing old very quickly. How'd you like to be one of the 20 million Chinese supporting 1 billion old people?
You are absolutely right with your title, Centerline. We do worry about too much, and this article is a perfect example. While it is an interesting read, there is absolutely nothing new here. I have been reading for umpteen years about the decline and impending fall of western civilization due to a whole litany of alarming reasons that include declining birth rates, uncontrolled migration, creeping socialism, that dastardly multi-culturalism, and faltering morality and the wholesale abandonment of God and faith. Usually I find these pieces in one of the hard-core conservative religio-traditionalist magazines that claim it as their birthright to defend the besieged "God, family, country" triumvirate from a legion of perceived non-traditionalist ills that are affecting our society. (I confess to subscribing to more than a few of these publications in an effort to temper my overall worldview). Mark Steyn just happens to be one of the few alarmists adept enough at wrapping this many doom factors into one article and giving it all a catchy title: "Post-Christian Hyperrationalism". I love that phrase, it rolls off the tongue very nicely. I must debut it in mixed company at my next cocktail party.
What I have learned is that most of these angst-ridden cries of dismay are invariably posited by some writer pushing a vision of status quo ideal (or status a priori) that in reality never existed. They are not unlike those ratings seeking, bookselling talking heads on cable news that admonish us every holiday season to "put the Christ back in Christmas" and make it more like that happy Rockwellian vision of 1940s sugarplum Christmas that we all recall so wistfully from back when everyone was a regular church-attending Protestant, we all cheerily wished each other Merry Christmas in the streets without fear of offending other faiths because there were no other faiths, and you could smoke cigarettes inside the office at the company Christmas party after you had molested some young female intern in the copy room without fear of official sanction. Gosh, if only the world could be like it was back in happier, simpler times! Hell, if we could roll back the clock to any point in time why not go all the way back to that most joyful of times, the twelfth century? Oh what happy times those were!
Ahhh yes, the the Dark Ages, when kings were king and the earth was flat (and "The Rack" ensured that no one spoke otherwise). Yessir, there's nothing like spending a lazy Sunday afternoon at a witch burning with your kids before going home to soak your bubonic plague boils over a warm bowl of stewed rat meat. Tomorrow morning its back to the salt mines. So what's a little ignorance and pervasive religious intolerance? At least they knew how to celebrate Christmas!
Well, Christmas was never quite like those wistful Rockwell renderings, and while the 1940s may have been simpler they were not much happier...not if you were, for example, a black man. (Rockwell didn't paint many black folk) Or if you didn't have the acutely acquired taste for being drafted off into mortal combat in the second global armed conflict in just twenty years. There is a dark side to giving ourselves in to the natural human inclination to invest excessive psychic capital in some misguided perception of the ideal. My teachers in grade school had a term for this - they referred to it as daydreaming. The dark side of daydreaming is that it distracts us from more important imperatives such as dealing with reality.
So is Western Civilization falling? No, its changing. And what else is new? It has never stopped changing. The mass movement of poorer people and their cultures into more prosperous societies, and the social upheaval that results, is the over-arching story of human societal evolution from Day One. This is a process that happens in fits and starts, but is always happening. And if our civilization has never been static, when then, was the ideal?
I don't know whether the Founding Fathers would be thrilled or appalled at the crazy patchwork quilt of peoples, cultures, institutions and systems that make up the United States of America as we know it today, but I do know one thing - they wouldn't recognize much of it. They wouldn't recognize the people, they wouldn't recognize the culture, and they wouldn't recognize the institutions, especially not the one they themselves created - the federal government. Based on this simple premise one could write bibles on the decline and fall of the real United States and how the present incarnation is just some hollow, geographic stand-in for what Jefferson, Washington, et al established.
When did this happen? When was the fall? Was it in the early 1800s with Ely Whitney's standardization of manufacturing and the industrial revolution he helped launch? Was it in the 1820s with the establishment of a private central banking system? Or in the 1860s with the undisputed supremacy of federal over state rule? In the 1880's with the expansion of the railroads and the opening of the west to migration? Or perhaps it was at the turn of the last century with the unprecedented immigration of Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans and other non-English Europeans. Egads, could it be that the United States of the Forefathers ceased to be a country of properly emancipated English gentlemen farmers scarcely removed from their Limey cousins across the pond and instead became some hodge-podge bastardized mut of a nation cloven from a hundred disparate European sects working together in factories!? I suspect there were plenty of handwringing newspaper op-eds written about this disturbing development. Yet they were then still all Europeans. Look at us a hundred years. The white man is fast becoming a minority and we have found new things to be dismayed about.
Whither the fall, and was it really better before? Civilizations never fall, they change. The only thing that falls are our poorly perceived notions of the world and the way we would like it to be. And those only fall when reality knocks them down.
Two hundred years hence they may all be praying to an Evangelical New-Age Allah of Scientology in a gerrymandered pseudo-language comprised of a pidgin English and Mexican spanish that none of us would understand. They will call themselves America and will write reams in this pseudo MexiSpenglish about the fall of western civilization. And those that come after will look back upon them wistfully and say that it was good.
One personal anecdote that I find quite humorous: I recently read a lucidly articulated op-ed piece on the decline and fall of Western Civilization in general, and the US and Europe specifically. Similar in some respects to the article you linked above. The writer argued ad hominem that this all coincided with the rise of godless socialism and the rejection of faith in our society, the teaching of evolution and the ejection of God from society, culture and our classrooms. He neatly tied declining birth rates, increasing disease vectors, multi-culturalism (damn that multi-culturalism!), feminism, the waning influence of the Catholic Church, the spread of alternative faiths (Islam, Hinduism, etc) and a whole host of other perceived societal ills into a condemnation of our rejection of God and Christian mores and compared our impending doom to the the oft-refernced decline of the Roman empire. Except that he spent all that energy dancing around one annoying little fact: the Roman decline and fall happens to have coincided with its acceptance after the fourth century of a certain monotheistic religion as the de-facto state sanctioned faith. Those godless, or rather many pagan godded, Romans did just fine during their prime for hundreds of years before Constantine declared Christianity the one true faith of Rome. But once he did, all hell broke loose.
Some good thought here and I don't have time to put a lot of time into my words.
The whole article reminds me of the Carosel of Progress at Disney. Everyone talks how now is the best time or how the sky is falling but society just moves on.
However, I think that eventually there will be some type of cataclysmic event (I predict this year!) and our civilization will fall....an asteroid hits, some nut job gets a bomb, an alien visits something.
All the rest of this is the tide coming in an out with slight changes to the beach. However, one day there will be a hurricane and the landscape will be altered. That could lead to the 'fall' of society.
I agree with Nym that a cataclysmic event is more likely to lead to rapid changes in our civilization (a "fall") than slow changes that are part of a natural evolution. (I myself am hoping some little green men take one small step onto the lawn at The Mall in D.C.) One way or the other the world is going to be very different by the end of this century than things are now. Yes, we may all be worshipping Allah in Spanish, but why worry about it? We will all be long gone by then. So lets look at the bright side: there is a significant benefit to dying after all! We'll all be dead before the world becomes something we don't want to live anymore.
-I
On the subject of birthrate in China you bring up a valid point, Centerline. The Europeans are in a better position to hold out with low birth rates while maintaining standards of living through cheap imported labor than the Chinese are. But the Chinese have a vast pool of cheap internal labor to sustain economic expansion for some time while the Europeans are already having to import vast amounts of labor. And whereas most of the decline in birthrate in Europe and other developed economies comes from the well documented human tendency to procreate less as standards of living increase, the decline in birthrate in China has been occurring since before the expansion of capitalism in that economy. U suspect that much of it could be attributable to an active government policy that discourages having more than one child per couple. I have previously read qualitative as well as anecdotal evidence that it is still a cultural imperative in China to have more than one child (especially if the first is a girl), and that a change in governmental social policy would see an attendant rise in birthrates in China. Lest we forget, those Asians are a horny bunch.
-I
Maybe I did not read the same article as our erudite iconoclast, or maybe I chose to focus on different parts of the article.
However, I did not take away that the author was wistfully reminiscing about cozy days gone by in good ole' western civilization. Fundamentally, he was pointing out that western civilization is facing some fundamental demographic issues that we have not faced in the past.
Yes, I'm sure that there was a lot of teeth gnashing going on in the 19th century when the U.S. was being "overrun" by Irish, Germans, and Italians. Similarly, communism held us all hostage for 75 years. Obviously, those worries were unfounded, and we are fine today.
However, just because people at those times were wrong about those things does not automatically mean that this particular prediction is wrong as well.
First, communism did NOT take over because we aggressively stopped it. Had Europe been completely overrun by communism, we would still be dealing with that problem today. Second, immigration issues in the past were not a problem for a couple of reasons, in my opinion. First, those people SHARED many more values with us than they did not share. They did not realize it then, but we can see that now. Second, it was impossible for those recent citizens to grab power rapidly because of the discriminatory nature of the political system then. Hell, even with all of those Catholic immigrants, we did not elect a Catholic president until 1960.
Now, today, I think Europe is headed for a big mess because, in my opinion, both of the points are not true today for them. (Also, note that I say Europe here because I do not think the U.S. has the same issues.) First, Muslims HAVE shown themselves consistently intolerant of other religions/political systems. And, unlike Catholics in the 19th century, they have shown the persistent desire to blow themselves and everyone else up to get their way. I do not believe that radical Islamists share similar values to us. Second, given the progress (and, yes I do think it's progress) that we have made against discrimination today, it will not take over 100 years for Muslims to have a chance to wrestle power away in a European country politically. They will gain that power much more quickly, probably long before they have had the opportunity to merge their cultures into the existing one in a completely peaceful way. A bigger problem will be if they decide they need to use force to grab power instead of following a peaceful path.
Again, as the article points out, we are talking about the continent that two world wars were fought over in the last century. I don't know whether it's the end of western civilization, but do you really think this guy is in left field when he says that Europe, as we know it, is in deep shit over the long haul? That's all he is really saying.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home