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 21
st-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.
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 21
st
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 18
th- and 19
th-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
-oe
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.
(Artwork created using multiple Shutterstock.com [18] images.)
