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Is Western Civ Strong Or Fragile?
There is an odd inconsistency between how virtuous we see our culture and how fragile many believe it to be. How can Western Civilization be the historic apex of human existence and finds itself under a dozen Swords of Damocles – from threats inside and out? I believe the reasoning behind this view is that, in a vacuum, human nature appears to be pretty awful. But when reminiscing on a debate with Stephen Balch from Texas Tech’s Institute for the Study of Western Civilization, Bryan Caplan points out the popular notion of dire circumstances conflicts with the evidence.
First, from the Institute’s website:
Western civilization has remade the world. Most of the West’s inhabitants live lives of which their ancestors could only dream: doubly long, rich in diet, teeming with comforts and diversions, and, most of all, endowed with the gift of liberty–not just for a privileged few, but for the many.
But Caplan recounts a different feel to Balch’s overall evaluation of Western Civ:
During our exchange, however, Balch rarely discussed the wonders of Western civilization. Instead, he emphasized its fragility. Every twenty years we breed a new generation of barbarians called children. To preserve our society, we have to teach each wave of juvenile barbarians to appreciate the Western civilization that makes everything possible.
Fortunately, the fragility thesis is flat wrong. There is absolutely no reason to think that Western civilization is more fragile than Asian civilization, Islamic civilization, or any other prominent rivals. At minimum, Western civilization can and does perpetuate itself the standard way: sheer conformity and status quo bias.
But saying that Western civilization is no more fragile than other cultures is a gross understatement. The truth is that Western civilization is taking over the globe. In virtually any fair fight, it steadily triumphs. Why? Because, as fans of Western civ ought to know, Western civ is better. Given a choice, young people choose Western consumerism, gender norms, and entertainment. Anti-Western governments from Beijing to Tehran know this this to be true: Without draconian censorship and social regulation, “Westoxification” will win.
A big part of the West’s strength, I hasten to add, is its openness to awesomeness. When it encounters competing cultures, it gleefully identifies competitors’ best traits – then adopts them as its own. By the time Western culture commands the globe, it will have appropriated the best features of Asian and Islamic culture.
My guess is that human nature is not so simple. It is as varied and complicated as all aspects of the individual. Just as it only takes occasional geniuses to greatly further human knowledge, it only takes the occasional soul, blessed with innate moral virtue, to greatly further morality, from Aristotle to Adam Smith and beyond.
But as we know, it doesn’t necessarily require geniuses to make progress. While there are enough naturally bad people to ruin things in some circumstances — especially when they gain influence — this does not mean someone of average innate morality cannot contribute to the greater whole or choose better morality when it is presented to him. It takes someone of incredibly low mental intelligence and/or willpower to be a net drain on society. I get the sense that “moral intelligence” works in much the same way. That is, on net, there is an upward pressure on collective morality, just as there is upward pressure on human technological advancement, even though the vast majority is not exceptional.
This means existential crisis is not necessarily the proper response to highly visible setbacks. As Caplan says, Western Civilization is a hearty weed, and we own it to ourselves to embrace our awesomeness!
Published in Culture
The best thing to happen to Western Civilization in the past 500 years is the invention of gutenberg.org.
I wager that more people read the classics now thanks to that one site than in the past century.
Western Civ is strong, but still outnumbered.
I would argue that the secularization of western civilization is a destruction of what constitutes western civ. The very nature of spreading across the globe creates an exchange with other cultures, which in turn creates a feedback loop so that western civilzation is altered in the process of spreading. That exchange requires a fundemental alteration of western religious principles on the basis of tolerence. Tolerence pushes us to secularize and therefore undermine what our heritage, and therefore bring about its own collapse by redefining what western culture is.
I don’t know if that makes syntactical sense, but I hope I got my point across.
“Every twenty years we breed a new generation of barbarians called children.”
Here’s the problem in the West that is unique to today, we stopped doing that first part. Essentially every western country is below replacement. To paraphrase Steyn, “the future belongs to those who show up.” Libraries have been written on why Rome fell but, I wonder, if at the heart of Rome’s problems was simple declining demographics
Caplan sounds like a child. People who read at least a bit of history are scared because Western civ, without any competitors, almost committed suicide a few times in the last century. Would he have dared to say so blithely how much better Western civ is had he found himself in the midst of those slaughters? How about the fact that Western civ has facilitated a new style of tyranny in Asia? Would he be proud of how competitive Western civ is when elsewhere people talking up equality destroy human beings as if they were insects? He sounds like he’s saying, sure, monstrous things happen, but you can still enjoy your Starbucks pumpkin / latte / frappuccino!
Who can learn about previous high points of civilization & how they ended without going through politics worried, to say the least?
The assumption that what is best in man is simply going to win does not seem warranted to me. Whoever believes that, of course, never need worry. If barbarism returns, of course, such a person would be forced to reconsider or to follow that philistine faith into applauding barbarians, possibly saying, I have seen the future, & it works!
The more civilized people become, the harder it is to keep civilization going, I’d say. The enormous power & prosperity should not be compared to anything except the tasks at hand. Are our powers commensurate with our difficulties? Have we good reason to believe world war is a thing of the past?
Steve Balch is right.
And if you doubt Wester Civilization’s fragility, look at what is unfolding in the U.K., where individual liberty is dying by inches. Much of the West has lost its cultural confidence.
When I think of the entire length and breadth of Western Civilization, it seems to me that Anglo ideals of individual liberty have been an anomaly rather than a keystone.
Its worse than a lack of confidence, the west doesn’t even believe it has a moral right to exist.
But Balch has also identified the very thing that makes Western Civilization fragile. The Higher Man, for lack of a better term, is not Man’s natural state, and as Balch points out, every generation has to be trained anew. But what if that next generation is not trained in such a way? What if the generation in power discards those principles? And who would it be to hit that nail on the head? Yep:
I contend that Western Civ has moved away from training it’s youth in the essentials of Western Civilization. Indeed, a large and growing segment of our population has no idea what those essentials are, nor why Western Civ cannot stand without them. Western civilization is built on the ideal of individual liberty – and individual responsibility – which absolutely require an agreed-upon set of standards – morals. The other civilizations do not. Every civilization that has lacked such a basis ends up, inevitably, in some variety of dictatorship or despotism – not to suggest there’s a difference. What if that “awesomeness” is sold to the next generation as the vile product of colonialism? That it’s the result of unfair practices and corruption? That to accept this greater achievement of Western Civilization is to abandon the cause of creating a better man? That we should be ashamed of these accomplishments? Who do we think we are, to think that we’re better than anybody else?
Ah, yes, I remember a book from my youth. Do you? Lord of the Flies.Western Civilization is more fragile, simply because it is farther removed from the natural state of man than other civilizations, and the battle to keep it there is a bigger challenge – one I think our age has abandoned.
You’re swimming against the tide, Mike H. Thank you.
It’s hard to weigh the entire scope of the globe across centuries and accurately determine where all the trends will end up taking us. I know that bad news gets a lot more coverage than good news. If a hundred people are slaughtered in a massacre somewhere, that’s going to get a lot more news coverage than a million lives being saved by a vaccination program. A dam that supplies hundreds of thousands of people with water, eliminating or tempering the usual flood and drought cycle is not news, but a church being blown up is.
How many people believe we’ve got a cancer epidemic? We don’t. How many people think the odds of their children being kidnapped is way worse than it was a couple generations ago? The opposite is true. When the savages defeat the civilized it makes worldwide headlines. It’s just not big news when the literacy rate increases for a whole continent, or half a billion people are lifted out of poverty.
If someone would have asked me a couple of years ago I would have said the 20th century must surely have been the bloodiest in history. How could it not be, with World Wars 1 & 2, and the massive purges in China and the Soviet Union? But the people who compile the numbers say that your odds of dieing of violence in the 20th century were less than any previous century in history.
Of course, it does depend on how you define “civilization.” If you believe that Western Civilization means Christianity – and not just people who call themselves Christians but who actually go to church and read the bible, then yes we’re on a downhill slide. If to you Western Civilization means things like freedom, economic opportunity, and peace; I think the world is slowly becoming a more civilized place.
I think Western Civilization peaked around the first world war and has been steadily declining ever since.
The lack of confidence in a brighter future that we lack today started declining then.
My sense is that any population group who adopts our values is eventually consumed by decadence and consumerism. It is just so much fun.
Natural selection will do the rest.
Or Anti-Fragile?
While I think it’s possible to be too sanguine about Western Civ, I find it really impossible to argue with this.
Western countries have to put up fences to keep foreigners out of their countries; others have to put up fences in order to keep their own people in.
That doesn’t tell you everything, but it does tell you a lot.
Put another way, there’s no known instance of a Floridian getting eaten by sharks while trying to escape to Cuba in an innertube.
I would say that capitalism is winning. But other pillars of Western Civ, such as free speech, healthy families, and our Judeo-Christian heritage; they seem to be waning. In their place, we have a growing form of nihilism called “diversity.”
There is a strong argument to be made that the Christianization of Rome prolonged its life substantially as indigenous Romans (and their absorbed subject populaces) had a tendency towards smaller families, relying on infanticide to cull the unwanted. Christian families, however, were larger and more self-sustaining. Rome certainly faced a crisis of existence from the mid 200s through the early 300s, by which time Christianity had firmly taken hold, and this cultural shift has been argued by many as giving the empire another century it might not have had.
Rome’s ultimate decline (and I restrict this to the Western half) came about in no small part due to endless internecine succession fights and shoddy economics, all leading to an abandoning of its border controls at a time of massive external immigration pressures. This was coupled to economic and population (and eventually political) shifts to the East. Had there been more political stability it is likely that the West would have survived the test (indeed, as late as the 450s-early 460s the West was pulling itself back together, until yet more army-led coups lost all of the gains).
The difference is that the intellectual class in Asia and the Islamosphere has not decided that their societies are a uniquely evil force in world history. This has happened in the West. Even in a place like Japan, which has some very significant things to be sorry for still in living memory, the idea that these episodes somehow invalidate Japanese civilization in toto is is never even considered.
The West is the only civilization in which a politician can hold his country’s history in contempt and somehow still get elected.
Were there many instances of Romans trying to escape to Visigoth territory?
Yes, but they didn’t have innertubes.
I’m with Mike and Randy on this. Now and then it is good to remind ourselves of how truly terrible many things used to be, and allow ourselves to see and name not just this or that catepillar-infested tree, but the whole flourishing forest.
You want healthy families? I was four years old when the Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws. Nowadays, ten percent of American marriages are interracial, a statistic that doesn’t even take into account the number of people who have shacked up with folk their grandparents would not have shared a drinking fountain with. Thanks to intermarriage, three of the last four presidents had close relatives of a different race. (Well okay, so did Thomas Jefferson, but we’re talking about acknowledged relatives…) Not only are the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners sitting down at the table of brotherhood together, they’re doing it at their family reunion.
And yes—it is a fine thing that a majority-white country has elected (and then re-elected) a black president . No other country has succeeded in this, and what makes it glorious is that it wasn’t a fluke. In fact, it was all-but-inevitable. Before Barry there was not just Shirley Chisolm and Jesse Jackson but also Colin, Condi, Clarence Thomas and Alan Keyes…and whether you approve or disapprove of any of these people or the president for that matter, the fact remains that they represent something pretty glorious. As Senator John McCain, Republican presidential candidate and the adoptive father of a Bangladeshi orphan, said in his concession speech, “America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of [the past]. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African American to the presidency of the United States. Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth.”
I’m with McCain—America is the greatest nation on earth. That we have come as far as we have in my lifetime—I was about three at the time of Selma—is a triumph of Western Civilization at its best. Not just the capitalism-and-McDonald’s best, but the best that found expression in phrases like: “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free but all are one in Christ Jesus” and “we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” Or even “I know in my heart that man is good. That what is right will always eventually triumph. And there’s purpose and worth to each and every life.” (RR)
I think this is exactly right. Technology and capitalism continue to improve our material state, but the acceptance of a real grounding for morals is fading and I think we’re running on the fumes of what was once a full tank.
Imagine asking the typical Westerner 200 years ago where our ethics come from. Then 100 years ago. And now. The U.S. is still somewhat of an outlier when it comes to religion, but we’re doing our best to catch up with Europe. (I don’t think you need to be religious to accept a transcendental basis for morality, but that is certainly the most common pairing.)
You hit here on the danger facing Western Civ – the Cargo Cult mentality. We accept the goodies but don’t know how we got them, so we imitate the forms without understanding the mechanism. We pay lip service to “democracy” as if it is some magic formula, not understanding that “republicanism” is the real foundation – a division of powers and competition of interests (capitalism or free markets as applied to government powers), or worse yet we accede to the rule of experts and intellectuals, the short road to tyranny either of a demagogue or an impenetrable bureaucracy of the “enlightened”.
This has been tried by other civilizations already, where they adopt the visible trappings of our civilization as if those somehow will bring success, not knowing how critical the social framework is to making it all work (and when that social framework grows anyway, suppressing it because they cannot take dissent). China gets it half right with its pseudo push for capitalism while treating its citizens and families with barbarity, numerous African and South American nations have tried having “democracy” without economic or social freedoms, etc.
The danger here is that Americans have grown fond of the bureaucratic ruling classes, and are now losing both economic freedoms and social freedoms. There is hope for a renewal, but there is no guarantee that we’ll fix it.
I’ve never heard of any, Mis? Have you?
What a picture this conjures up!
I define Western Civilization as “people who have read at least one of Plato’s dialogues.”
;-)
Can you name a period in the history of Western Civilization when the opinion-leaders of the time actually believed that society in general was on a moral upswing?
It seems to me that the intellectuals of every generation since (at least) Socrates has believed that society’s moral health was in peril.
(The exceptions seem to be the occasional revolutionaries, right before they become disillusioned when reality smacks ’em in the face.)
If true, it might therefore be safe to conclude that this very belief is a cornerstone of Western thought, and that Western Civ will only collapse when people stop believing that it’s on the brink of collapse.
I LIKE your definition, Mis! It applies to me. :)
All the people I know, and Canadians generally, are very civilized. I used to worry that they have all become secular, but I do no longer. Secular people are also kindly, loving to others, even without any prompting. It does seem to be inherent in the human primate.
The younger generation I know are all working hard to acquire the knowledge necessary to keep our civilization going. Perhaps I am an optimist, but I see a bright future ahead for the world.
Compared with the world I grew up in, I have already died and come to Heaven!
Well, lately Canada has had much more sane and mature governance than America or Europe, but then we’ve been footing your defense bills…
Still, with the growing existential threats from Russia, ISIS, and China, perhaps Europe and America will rally ’round the flag again and wise up, after all, we’ve had to do it before.
Skipsul sums this up pretty well, nice job.
I would add we are as a nation selling ourselves into bondage, just take a look at the real deficit and the unfunded portion and ask which ‘moral’ principle we are using to sustain ourselves with?
The global GDP is approximately 50 trillion dollars and we have an unfunded liability and debt of over 100 trillion and we are ‘exporting’ what philosophy exactly?
The average American, as was pointed out, neither knows how the government works/functions nor cares about what the repercussions of its actions are.
It feels more like we are ‘sustaining’ the largest party in history and we just want it to never end and we don’t want to pay for it or the damages. BUT, the bill always comes due, the saddest part is we are willing to pass this on to the next generation for that we should be truly ashamed.
…and even then, we’re pretty certain the current pleasant societal paradigm is merely temporary.
All governments fall, and the parties waiting in the wings aren’t terribly appealing as defenders of Western Civ (especially the one led by the trustfunded substitute drama teacher who openly admires China’s ability to “get things done”).
Western Civilization survived the fall of Rome, the French Revolution, World War II, the collapse of the British Empire, and the Summer of Love.
Perhaps it can also survive the financial bondage of the United States.
It’s hard to over-state how close we came, though, when Rome collapsed – international trade fell to a trickle of what it had been, wars and piracy ran rampant, and western Europe divided into numerous competing powers. Rome was replaced in time by others, but they were protected by the bulwark of Byzantium and thus those others had the time to regrow. In many respects, Western Civ as we know it grew in the wake of Rome, carrying over some things but developing as a separate creature (the most significant carry-over was the Church, whose influence on this process would be difficult to overstate). Even so, in the wake of Byzantium’s demise the Turks came very close turning out the lights.
Rome’s ruin has no equal and few historical parallels. We cannot envision (though we can guess) what a US collapse would entail.