A Civilization in Decline

by: tim dunkin | published: 06 02, 2013

A few days ago, I happened to stumble across a link on another website that led me to this article which proposes that human intelligence (at least in the Western world) is lower than it was in the Victorian Era. Looking at modern day America, I can find little that would argue with this proposition – after all, ours is the voting public that not only elected, but then re-elected, Barack Obama. That alone ought to be considered as empirical evidence for such a decline. Yet, it strikes me that the declension of modern America is not related to mere intellect or raw g-power alone. There are many factors that have worked – and still are at work – to reduce the American people, and Westerners in general, to a mere shadow of the greatness of our forefathers who forged nations, explored the far reaches of the globe, built the edifice of modern science and technology, and founded and propagated the most advanced and powerful civilization the world has yet seen. 

The decline of the West is systematic and endemic. It involves not just raw intellectual capacities, but also deterioration of our moral character, courage, and good sense. In many ways, these are interrelated – the decline of one means the fall of the others. As I observe the direction in which the West is moving, I can’t help but sense a disturbing demoralization, a loss of drive, initiative, and the will to thrive and grow that seemed to characterize earlier generations in our civilization, the end result of decades of decadence and malfeasance. If I may be permitted a quote from Horace, I believe he spoke to our generation as much as to his own, 

“Time corrupts all. What has it not made worse?
Our grandfathers sired feebler children; theirs
Were weaker still – ourselves; and now our curse
Must be to breed even more degenerate heirs.” (Odes\, Book III, No. 6)

How did we get to where we’re at?<

Fundamentally, recent generations changed the way they viewed the individual person, and in doing so, also altered the way they understood the relationship between the individual and the government.

One of the hallmarks of what we would call “modern” Western civilization that arose during the Renaissance and the Reformation was the increased interest in, and therefore emphasis on, the individual. For most of human history, even in proto-Western cultures like Greece and Rome, the individual was not of much account, aside perhaps for the relative handful of famous (or infamous) people whose names are known in the history books. As the West broke out of the mold imposed upon it during the middle ages, however, a greater interest in the individual arose, and found expression in art, literature, philosophy, and politics. It is not coincident that this interest in the individual led to many of the things that set off the West from the rest – a concern for individual rights, a breakdown of the church-state unions and increasing religious toleration and then liberty, the rise of truly representative government, and so forth. In each case, we see the emancipation of the individual from strictures imposed, not by natural law or morality, but by the collectivist ideal that seeks to subordinate the individual completely to the community. In the West, a balance was struck between the demands of society as a collective, and the rights and responsibilities of the individual person and his family – between the res publica and the res privata of Cicero, an ideal expressed in Rome at its height, but never fully realized. While it was recognized that each individual owed legitimate duties to the society in which he lived (indeed, this is the crux of Locke’s commonwealthianism), there was nevertheless a large portion of his life into which society – and the governments it institutes – had no business intruding.

The rise of the welfare state, as a result of socialist agitations in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, upset that balance completely. Consequently, the individual no longer had to look to himself, his family, his religion for strength, but could throw off his responsibilities and place them on the backs of all his fellow citizens. This is an enfeebling state of affairs. A man who will not take responsibility for himself, who will not sink or swim on his own as a result of the consequences of his actions and decisions, is a man who barely (if at all) rises above the level of a slave whose master feeds and cares for him. An able-bodied man who makes the body of other men in his polity care for him, who picks their pockets because his own laziness or poor decision-making keeps him from filling his own, is a social degenerate. Yet, it is exactly this that Western governments have been encouraging, in many cases for over a century. The individual is now being subsumed back into the collective – from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. As Hazlitt noted,

“The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community.”

Every time some blunder-headed fool blames “the rich” for all his woes or demands that somebody “contribute” more than he’s already having taken from him, you see a morally degenerate collectivist who hates those who have done more than himself. You see envy and greed talking. Instead of recognizing the right of each individual to better himself, and thereby better the society he lives in as a natural consequence of this, the collectivist wants the individual to be stamped down and submerged into the morass of the collective.

Concomitant with this is that the foundational desires of Western man have changed. It used to be that the desire was for liberty. Even if Western man has not always and in all places had the same definition of this term as we have today, it nevertheless has been his desire. Revolutions have been fought to secure it. State churches have been disestablished to obtain it. Constitutions have been written – and copied – to maintain it. Terrible wars have been fought to restore it to those who had it taken away from them. 

But today’s Western man? Too many look to the welfare check to keep them solvent, and the police state to keep them safe. Without a sense of responsibility, there is also no sense of self-respect. It doesn’t end there, though. Too many expect the government to solve their every problem – and government encourages this, while at the same time actively discouraging those who would solve their own problems. Government hates people who would defend themselves from criminals instead of becoming victims in need of police protection. Government despises those who simply want to be left in peace to enjoy their lives and property instead of “needing” to be needled, hectored, and badgered by a host of regulatory minutiae designed to save us from ourselves. We cannot be trusted to simply settle our differences like adults outside of judicial intervention. America is a nation that has to provide printed instructions with a pair of socks, just in case someone decides to sue the manufacturer. 

There are consequences to this enfeeblement. We in the West have no more grand dreams, no more bigger-than-life projects that challenge and expand our capabilities and horizons. Just look at what we used to build. Gustav Eiffel built a tower in 1889, just to show off the cultural and technological capabilities of his native France. We built Hoover Dam out of almost 3.5 million cubic meters of concrete and 582 miles of steel cooling pipe. Now we can barely build a tree house in our back yards without going through mountains of red tape to get a permit. The really tall buildings today are being built in Dubai and Shanghai. China’s Three Gorges Dam is the new engineering marvel of the modern age. Meanwhile, our people seem to only dream of being able to fulfill their immediate (and often base) desires. Americans care more about their vacation time and cable TV than they do dreaming big dreams. Europeans seem like they’re rather go to the nudie beaches in the Riviera than plan and build and learn and excel.

Coupled with this is the marked frivolity of Western civilization today. There is little in the way of seriousness – not in thought, not in religion, not in principles. Ours is an age in which Jon Stewart and the Daily Show are taken seriously as sources of information; where Wikipedia is the gold standard for knowledge; where the average person cannot comfortably read more than three paragraphs (congratulations to you if you’ve gotten this far in this essay!) without their attention span giving out. This is a consequence of the other things we’ve seen above. Who needs to think for themselves, when the government and the media (increasingly the same thing) will do it for you? When television is designed to break programs up into five minute segments, who is going to have the mental fortitude to plow through a 500 page book on some historical or philosophical subject? When you have no grand dreams to occupy your thoughts, then any and every little old thing will do so instead. 

One result of this is that the public education system, from kindergarten to graduate school, is failing in its duty to actually educate its charges. In many places, schools are just long-term holding pens to keep the kids off the streets until they can no longer legally be held. In many others, schools simply teach political correctness and the social theories du jour. We wonder why kids can’t read well, can barely do math, are woefully ignorant of seemingly obvious facts about science or history. Is it any wonder, when the education establishment is often staffed by people who think math is sexist and that history is just the story of crusty old racist white men that nobody needs to listen to anymore?

What a far cry from where education used to be back when children knew more Greek and Latin than most adults do today. When Western civilization was robust and vigorous, it was also well-educated. It was exceedingly common in the British Parliament of the Victorian Era for an argument to be clenched or an analogy be forcefully drawn by appeal to some obscure passage from Virgil, Ovid, or Thucydides – yet obscure as it was, every man there knew it, and every other man who was following the debate in the papers afterward would also. Back then, education – real education, not merely having a piece of paper that proved your ability to show up to most class periods for four (or more) years – was a key component in the character of a great and good man. Today, this type of education is treated disdainfully as “old-fashioned.” There was a rhyme about Benjamin Jowett, a British scholar and polymath of the 19^th century, that went as follows,

“Here come I, my name is Jowett.
All there is to know I know it.
I am Master of this College,
What I don't know isn't knowledge!”

Surprising to the modern reader, however, is that this ditty composed by his undergraduate students at Balliol was not intended to be insulting, as many moderns would be tempted to interpret it. Indeed, it really and truly was intended as a tribute to Jowett’s tremendous erudition and his ability to work with and create powerful ideas. Can anyone imagine the run of modern Americans or Europeans honoring someone with Jowett’s breadth of knowledge and ability today? Can anyone imagine most modern Americans or Europeans even knowing what Jowett would be talking about on any given subject?

Going right along with this is the willingness of many in our civilization to believe in any fool thing, so long as an “expert” tells them to. This is the reason why, despite having been disproven time and again in recent years, most people, if asked, would still profess to be absolutely sure that man-made global warming is both reality and a grave, life-threatening danger. People believe all kinds of things just because the news media talking heads tell it to them. For instance, many people think violent crime is increasing in America, and it’s because we don’t have enough gun control – when in actuality violent crime is decreasing, and the decrease correlates well with the loosening of gun laws. People believe all kinds of things that are frankly untrue. But the problem isn’t just that people believe wrongly, but that they do so because someone simply told them to, and they don’t take the time or use the energy to find out for themselves what really is and isn’t. 

This frivolity, this enfeeblement, this loss of nerve and courage – they all come together into a confluence of cultural movements that disable us from even being able to defend ourselves. 

I’m sure many people ask themselves, “How can these Muslim terrorists get away with what they do?” Why does Dzhokhar Tsarnaev have a fan club that is calling for his release? Why hasn’t Nidal Malik Hasan been shaved and put on trial yet, much less executed? Why are British police treating the people who are angry about the Islamist murder of Drummer Lee Rigby as if they were the real danger, instead of other Islamofascists like his murderer? Why were Swedish riot police rounding up and arresting Swedes who were trying to defend their homes and property instead of the Islamist rioters who were literally burning the cities of Sweden down around them?

How far has a civilization degenerated when large chunks of its people no longer have the will to oppose the mortal enemies who are actively seeking to kill them and who have said as much time and time again? I can’t help but think that if these things were going on even 50 years ago, our Western countries would have been emptying the banlieus and self-segregated Islamic ghettos and sending the terrorists and their supporters back home to their countries of origin. Of course, 50 years ago, we would not have been fool enough to let them into our countries in the first place. But now, our nations grant refuges to millions of aliens who do not intend to assimilate, but instead who merely want to draw welfare checks paid for by our own people while many of them plot their next terror attack in mosques down the street from our homes, or who at least give spiritual and monetary support to the terrorists. 

So what do we do? That is a good question, and it’s one that I’m not sure I can answer satisfactorily. Yet, we can take heart in is the fact that the criticisms leveled above do not apply uniformly to every Westerner. There are many of us who still see something worth saving in our civilization, and who have not given ourselves over to cultural suicide. One thing is certain – those of us who are still willing to fight for our Western heritage are going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting in the years and decades to come. From the education of our children to the preservation of our liberties – by armed force if necessary – we have to be prepared for what lies ahead. We will need to be the torchbearers as the future of the West grows darker and darker.       

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