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Hard Times Create Strong Men…
I saw this on Facebook this morning. I thought it might be oversimplified or exaggerated — I went to ask a Roman what he thought, but I couldn’t find any. So I’ll ask my friends on Ricochet — do you think this is true? If so, is it inevitable? How can this be avoided?
Published in General
The migration west would be an excellent example of non-government hard times building strong men, but I think war is a pretty consistent mode to work off of in context of history.
Rome’s Pax was the decadent period that was followed by invasion and sacking.
And I was younger then. So by definition, it was a better time than the present.
This idea of better times and such needs to be understood as cyclical.
The height of Rome was more secure and more wealthy than Europe’s middle ages. Would you rather… Roman baths or black plague?
While some things were lost (plumbing), not all things were lost and some new things were discovered. Engineering saw its heyday in Rome, but science and mathematics saw huge developments in medieval europe.
The 50s may indeed have been better in some respects, not necessarily all. The question is are the things that are better now going to preserve us into the future? Or would what was lost from the 50s (more moral uprightness) better see us through the future?
Scientific advancement did not save Rome. Perhaps that isn’t what saves civilizations. And the end of a civilization does not necessarily mean and end to technology. Perhaps a pause, some loss, and then rebuilding once new civilization has found its unstable footing.
I think what you mean is the end of a nation doesn’t mean the end of civilization.
If America falters and follows the path of England (which is my bet) it matters very little to the 95% of the world’s population that does not live in America.
Some other nation will inevitably pick up the mantle of capitalism, rule of law, and individual liberty we are so rapidly shedding. And perhaps that nation will learn some of the lessons available from our decline. But probably not. They are likely to follow a similar path.
As Schumpeter predicted “the actual and prospective performance of the capitalist system is such…that its very success undermines the social institutions which protect it, and “inevitably” creates conditions in which it will not be able to live…”
Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth shows that the phenomenon transcends culture.
Who first wrote, “there is no such thing as peacetime. There are only interwar periods.”?
“I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” – John Adams.
As far as I know, there is no record of Adams’ prediction on what his great-grandchildren would be studying.
Whenever someone brings up the decline of the British Empire, I can’t help but wonder: Do many people think the world would be a better place if Britain had maintained her empire? If she’d chosen to use military force to stomp down the independence movements in her colonies after World War II rather than letting them go peacefully?
I think there’s more gained in how England handled the independence of their territories. What those territories do with it is their own business.
The thing I find more problematic about England’s modern state is its inability to protect itself.
I know there are those that don’t care for the argument of national identity, but I think the European migration will begin to look more like invasion and war before all is said and done.
If you are so complacent that you give your country away, then yes, there will be incredible loss and hard times.
I said what I meant. England, Germany, and Gaul were predominately Roman forts surrounded by barbarian tribes. With the collapse of Rome, it took a good while for things to reach a civilized place again.
< devil’s advocate mode = on >
Being an island, throughout its history Britain has rarely had to “protect itself”, and in many (most?) of those instances it actually failed to do so. Large parts of it fell to the Romans, the Saxons, and the Vikings before the Normans (who were also, really, Vikings) finally finished the job.
It got lucky against the Spanish Armada (or, it was rescued by divine intervention), and it’s arguable that Britain was incapable of defending itself in World War II without assistance.
Most of the United Kingdom’s military activities have been expeditionary. The evidence that it’s ever been particularly capable of defending itself is actually fairly paltry.
< devil’s advocate more = off >
It probably would have been better for the overwhelmning majority of the citizens of its former colonies.
But I was thinking more of the decline of England than the decline of its empire.
Fair point, I guess being one myself it might make me assume it is targeted at my generation, also the picture of the weak men is clearly one of today’s younger generation, so maybe that does it too. Lastly I had just finished listening to a podcast remark on that guy who took his parents to court for kicking him out of their house so millennials were on my mind.
The thing is I don’t think the parents of Boomers were any better on Social Security than their children are. They were just fortunate enough not to live long enough to see the scheme run its course.
Didn’t keep them from fighting, though.
The Welsh are still distinguished because of the fight they gave the Normans.
Or the commies.
The older I get, the better I was.
Yah, but saying the best days were those after someone stopped beating you is absurd even if you remember them the most for their contrast. That is the thing the standards are not objective but highly subjective. Why are the 90’s not viewed as even better. We had won the Cold War without the loss of blood and were riding high on the birth of the new economy. Plus the 90’s were much better for people of all stripes, where as the 50’s were not so great for African Americans who had to put up with the incongruity of having defeated a regime based on scientific racism only to be subject to US segregation. That all boiled up and over by the 60’s. The nineties has all the prosperity and optimism of the fifties but none of the terrible racist undertones that would come up to the forefront in the following decade. Plus the fifties had the growing prospect of the Cold War, where as the 90’s we were blissfully ignorant of the terror to come (not a good thing, but a more plesant thing).
I think nostalgia always boils down to youth and a longing for it. No matter how objectively bad the political and economic situation of your youth you remember you were young. Reminds me of a joke
Two old men in Moscow are sitting in a park reminiscing, and a younger gentleman joins them. At some point the topic of politics comes up and one of the older men asserts, ” My life was so much better in Stalin’s day”. The young man objects. But the second old gentleman says he agrees. The younger man starts to list all the problems: purges, starvation, war, and the gulags. “Yes” the oldest gentleman agrees, but he retorts “My wife was so much more attractive back then.”
I contend that the two go hand-in-hand.
Well, the difference there is that they already paid into Social Security for their entire lives.
How “civilized” could they have been if they were merely Roman forts?
I think that the birth of America was a result of either incredible luck or divine intervention. The rebirth of such a place, in this environment, I find far from inevitable.
The natural state of a race as vicious as humans is repression and misery. The liberty and happiness of America is a historical fluke. Could it possibly happen again? I wouldn’t bet on it.
A bunch of very powerful political leaders would have to get together and decide that they don’t want power. It happened once, under extraordinary circumstances. I just can’t imagine that happening again.
Could be. I think some country is bound to pick up the mantle. There is too much prosperity there for the mere asking.
What made America great is inherently replicable. It is like Jonah’s miracle, we can spend our lives debating why it arose when and where it did, but once discovered, the knowledge is too valuable to ignore.
America was lucky insofar that it was governed by an empire that was too broke to keep it. Without the Seven Years War, Britain a) might have had the resources to put down the colonial rebellion, and b) wouldn’t have needed to raise taxes to punitive levels in the first place.
Which brings me back to my condundrum: The beginning of the end for Britain’s ability to project military strength began in 1776. One could (hypothetically) sorta kinda argue that to complain about Britain’s current state is to complain that the wrong side won the War of Independence.
I dunno.
a) A whole lot of land virtually free for the taking and not enough people to give it to could be described as pretty good times.
b) There was a whack-ton of government intervention in the settlement of the West. It wasn’t NGOs that got the Indians off the land.
But then a lot of people decide that they are painters, poets, musicians, etc, who have little if any talent for those fields.
Of course, some of them go back to studying politics…
Afternoon MJP, Altar, A S2,
The decline of the cohesion in England is curious, the differences in American society might make comparisons too difficult. In 1900, the largest city in the world, London had a minuscule crime rate, 4% illegitimacy rate, and high participation in work, and essentially everyone bought into the system. Even when men and women lived outside the norms they sincerely worked to look as if they were within the norms. However before WWI the Bloomsbury folks had renounced their eminent parents root and branch, and after WWI they entire system was so damaged that the position that “neither God nor, country were worth dying for”, was the winning position at an Oxford debate. For many societies a war in which there is an existential threat is often the source for great social cohesion, for England the Great War was almost the final blow. The futility of WWI for both England and France, with the death of many of the young men who would have been future leaders, may have had a negative effect on society, even though they were on the winning side. The Bloomsbury group’s rejection of their successful parents and their values reminds me of the Boomer rejection of their parents. In that Boomer world where one has the luxury to imagine that all you have comes without effort, one can assume that one could easily build a better world. And that your world wouldn’t be run by a bunch of hypocrites like your parents. Struggle might not be essential for social cohesion, but luxury might be the most corrosive condition a culture will face.
Probably best that he didn’t know.
FIFY
You might be right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams_II
[Citation needed.]