The Last Generation of the West and the Thin Strand of Civilization
By Victor Davis Hanson
PJMedia.com
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 [1], 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 [2], 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 [3]. 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 [4] (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 [5] 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 [6]. Only
what he despises [7] — 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 [8]. Too
many are bankrupt morally,
economically [9], 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 [10] 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 [11]. 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 [12] that
Ms. Kardashian and Ms. Hilton lack. Teens wearing
bobby socks and jeans have transmogrified to strange
creatures in our midst with head-to-toe
tattoos and piercings [13] 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 [14], who
Thomas Jefferson was [15], or
who fought whom over what [16] 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 [17].
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.