by Victor Davis Hanson in
PJ Media
Had the Greeks lost at Salamis, Western civilization might easily have
been strangled in its adolescence. Had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union, the
European democracies would have probably remained overwhelmed. And had the
Japanese just sidestepped the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, as they gobbled up
the orphaned Pacific colonies of a defunct Western Europe, the Pacific World as
we know it now might be a far different, far darker place.
I am not engaging in pop
counterfactual history, as much as reminding us of how thin the thread
of civilization sometimes hangs, both in its beginning and full maturity.
Something analogous is happening currently in the 21st-century West.
But the old alarmist scenarios — a nuclear exchange, global warming and the
melting of the polar ice caps, a new lethal AIDS-like virus — should not be our
worry.
Rather our way of life is changing not with a bang, but with a whimper,
insidiously and self-inflicted, rather than abruptly and from foreign stimuli.
Most of the problem is cultural. Unfortunately it was predicted by a host of
pessimistic anti-democratic philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Hegel and Spengler. I’ve
always hoped that these gloom-and-doomers were wrong about the Western
paradigm, but some days it becomes harder.
Over 90 million Americans who could work are not
working (the “non-institutionalized” over 16). What we take for granted —
our electrical power, fuel, building materials, food, health care, and
communications — all hinge on just 144 million getting up in the morning to
produce what about 160-170 million others (the sick, the young, and the retired
who need assistance along with the 90 million idle) consume.
Every three working Americans provide sustenance for two who are not
ill, enfeebled, or too young. The former help the disabled, the latter take
resources from them. The gang-banger has only disdain for the geek at the mall
— until one Saturday night his liver is shredded by gang gunfire and suddenly
he whimpers (who is now the real wimp?) that he needs such a Stanford-trained
nerd to do sophisticated surgery to get him back in one piece to the
carjackings, muggings, assaults, and knockout games — or lawsuits follow!
Given that the number of non-working is growing (an additional 10
million were idled in the Obama “recovery” alone), it is likely to keep
growing. At some point, we will hit a 50/50 ratio of idle versus active. Then
things will get interesting. The percentage of workers’ pay deducted to pay for
the non-working will soar even higher. So will the present redistributive
schemes and the borrowing from the unborn.
We forget that the obligations of the working to care for the
70-80 million who genuinely cannot work become more difficult, when the 90
million who can work for all sorts of reasons won’t. Note the theme of this
essay: the more in humane fashion we provide unemployment insurance, food
stamps, subsidized housing, legal advice, health care and disability insurance,
the more the recipients find it all inadequate, inherent proof of unfairness
and inequality, and always not enough.
Much of the Modern University Output Coarsens American Life
We will hear even more shrillness about “fairness” and “equality.”
The more government support, all the more will grow the sense of being shorted.
When someone idle receives a free iPhone, he doesn’t thank government for its
magnanimity. More likely, he damns it for allowing someone else the ability to
purchase an updated, superior model. I have talked to several students about
their iPhones; so far not one has said, “Wow, I have more computer and
communications power in my palm than a
multi-millionaire had just 15 years ago.” Mostly they wished they had
an updated version like someone better off.
An indebted and crippled U.S. has so far survived the second
decade of the 21st century largely due to some ingenious engineers
and audacious workers who revolutionized the gas and oil industry, at a time
when wind and solar merely amused us, when our enemies considered us ripe for
perpetual petro-blackmail, and when our wherewithal to pay for more imported
energy was increasingly questionable.
A very few people are saving very many. But how thin the strand of
civilization hangs — given that the forces of our modern Lotus Eaters (every
bit as dangerous in their postmodern imaginations as the Cyclopes are in their
premodern savagery) have stopped the Keystone Pipeline, stopped most federal
leasing of new gas and oil finds, and are trying to regulate fracking and
horizontal drilling out of existence where it might be most vital to the U.S. —
as in the Monterey Shale formation in California.
How ironic is the Sierra Club Bay Area grandee who finds light
when he flips on his office switch, and would find no light were his utopian
ideas about wind, solar, and biomass to come to
full fruition. Only what he
despises — radioactive uranium, messy drilling rigs, and unnatural dams —
for now continue to bring him what he must have. Again, the theme: the more the
green activists empty reservoirs to save a bait fish, or stop fracking, or
prevent salvage logging, the angrier they sigh that it is not enough and the
more they must count on someone ignoring them to provide them with what they
must have.
The universities were the great backbone of the West, from the
Academy and Lyceum to medieval Pisa and Oxbridge to the great 18th-
and 19th-century founding of American campuses. Not necessarily any longer. Too
many are bankrupt morally, economically,
politically, and culturally.
The symptoms are terrifying: one trillion dollars in student debt
(many of these loans accruing at higher than average interest rates and even
before students have graduated); a small
Eloi class of rarefied elites who teach little and write in runes that no
one can decipher; a large Morlock class of part-timers and oppressed
lecturers who subsidize the fat and waste of the tenured and administrative
classes; graduates who are arrogant but ignorant, nursed on –studies ideology
without the liberal arts foundations to back up their zeal; and a BA/BS brand
that no longer ensures better-paying jobs, if any jobs at all.
In sum, apart from the sciences and medicine, most of the
university coarsens rather than enlightens American life.
The current campus is unsustainable and we are beginning to see
its decline, as online courses and for-profit tech schools usurp its students.
The liberal arts are not nurtured and protected for another generation in the
university. Instead, their umbilical cords have become cut with the cleaver of
race/class/gender no-nothingism. Again the theme: the more bloated, exploitive,
and costly the university, the more it lashes out it that it is short-changed,
the victim of philistine budget cuts, and the last bastion of civilized life.
Civilization Seems to Be Losing
Popular culture is likewise anti-civilizational. Does
anyone believe that Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, and Lady Gaga are updates to Glenn
Miller, jazz, Bob Dylan and the Beatles? Even in the bimbo mode, Marilyn
Monroe had an aura that Ms. Kardashian and Ms. Hilton lack. Teens
wearing bobby socks and jeans have transmogrified to strange creatures in our
midst with head-to -oe tattoos
and piercings as if we copied Papua New Guinea rather than it us. Why the
superficial skin-deep desire to revert to the premodern? When I walk in some
American malls and soak in the fashion, I am reminded of National Geographic
tribal photos of the 1950s.
Again the theme: the more we borrow to provide iPads to our
supposedly deprived youth, the more in theory they can access in a nano-second
the treasures of their culture and heritage, and in fact the more likely it is
that they have no clue what
Gettysburg was, who Thomas Jefferson
was, or who fought
whom over what in World War II. Our managers in education, terrified of
confronting the causes of ignorance, believed that the faster youths could
transmit nothingness, the more likely they might stumble onto somethingness.
The fourth-century Greeks at the end pasted silver over their
worthless bronze coins — “reds” being the protruding noses and hair of the
portraiture that first appeared bronze-like, as the silver patina rubbed off.
The bastardization of the currency fostered many books on Roman decline. More
worthless money for more people was a sign of “crisis” — analogous to our own
quantitative easing and $17 trillion in debt.
Once more the theme here is not just that we are insolvent, but
that we are so insolvent that it is now a thought-crime to talk of dissolution,
bankruptness, and irresponsible spending — all damned as symptoms of “callousness”
to the poor, proof of “social injustice”, and “obsessions” with deficits. The
medicine of austerity always becomes worse than the disease of profligacy.
What do I mean about the “thinning strand of civilization”?
A shrinking percentage of our population feeds us, finds our
energy, protects us, and builds things we count on. They get up each morning to
do these things, in part in quest for the good life, in part out of a sense of
social obligation and basic humanity, in part because they know they will die
if idle and thrive only when busy, and in part simply because “they like it.”
We can stack the deck against them with ever higher taxes, ever
more regulations, ever more obligations to others, and they may well continue.
But not if we also damn them as the “1%” and call them the agents of inequality
and the fat cats who did not build what they built or who profited when they
should not have.
You cannot expect the military to protect us, and then continually
order it to reflect every aspect of postmodern American sensitivity in a risky
premodern world. Filing a lawsuit to divert a river’s water to the sea during a
drought is a lot easier and cleaner than welding together well-casings at sea.
Last week, an off-duty armed correctional officer in Fresno intervened in a
wild carjacking, shooting and killing the gang-member killer and thus limiting
his carnage to one death and two woundings rather than five or six killings —
at the very moment Harvey Weinstein — of guns-blazing Kill Bill and Pulp
Fiction fame and profits — promised
to destroy the NRA. These contrasts say everything about the
premodern, the postmodern and the innocent who pay the tab in-between.
Each day when I drive to work I try to look at the surrounding
communities, and count how many are working and how many of the able-bodied are
not. I listen to the car radio and tally up how many stories, both in their
subject matter and method of presentation, seem to preserve civilization, or
how many seem to tear it down. I try to assess how many drivers stay between
the lines, how many weave while texting or zoom in and out of traffic at 90mph
or honk and flip off drivers.
Today, as the reader can note from the tone of this apocalyptic
essay, civilization seemed to be losing.
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