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I am currently listening to A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr who makes much the same point (with some lengthy academic overkill) as the marvelous McCloskey trilogy which includes the brilliant Bourgeois Dignity: namely, that the spectacular economic and technological growth of the West was not the result of some impersonal historical forces nor the accidental emergence of a few unique leaders but a change in prevailing outlook, attitudes and culture that made an environment highly favorable for innovation.
Americans take for granted an intellectual, moral and cultural heritage that we are actively tossing away. This morning I encountered a depressing statistic showing that while adult New Yorkers are not all that enthused about their incoming Islamo-Marxist mayor, 61% of Gen Z in NYC supports his absurd agenda. The cognitive and social ingredients for self-confidence, self-reliance, optimism, and acceptance of risk have somehow been drained out of much of an entire younger generation, making them ripe for socialist predation and unhappiness.
China once had a technological edge on the world but centuries of Confucianism literally banned societal change, innovation and barred people from moving out of their social class. By the eleventh century, Baghdad, capital of the new Islamic empire, was the intellectual hub of the world with enormous growth in mathematics, medicine and science in general. A visiting space alien would have reported back to its home world that the first space travelers will almost certainly be speaking Arabic. But the teachings of Al Ghazali brought about a return to a stultifying religious container that crushed out the requisite free secular space for inquiry and innovation. So the Islamic world would instead become an intellectual and technological backwater.
At least Confucius and Al Ghazali had some coherent moral vision under which a (stagnant) society could operate. The modern enemies of freedom of inquiry, growth and innovation (e.g., Hamas, Tim Walz, AOC, Soros, Greta Thunberg) seem to want to foment dysfunction and destruction — no matter whether it is unleashing violent criminals, making the poor freeze to death in winter, moral confusion, regulating entrepreneurs out of business, creating division, false hope and despair. And our kids and grandkids are under a moral and cognitive assault.
Conservatives tend to see the culture war as a series of discrete issues (DEI, Transgender demands, etc.) when ultimately only a comprehensive reinstallation of the disposition and values that are indispensable for sanity and a full life in a functioning free society will suffice.
Discussion (29)
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Thankfully, that is a self selected group and doesn't represent all GenZ. Rikki Schlott had an excellent piece about this demographic. She calls them the "faux working class: those who are actually quite well off but feel otherwise." It is white college educated women that comprise this demographic, living in the most expensive city in the country. Not just GenZ but also other cohorts who want absolute freedom to make whatever destructive choices they wish and absolute indemnity from the consequences of these choices. They've been fed a message of hopelessness through their formative years and now they feel they are living it. Tik Tok confirms their worldview.
I don't know if conservative values will win out or not, but as we see with Turning Point USA and the uptick in young people returning to Christianity, those who try them find them much more worthwhile than what they've been sold. So I have hope that as higher education loses its grip, and the Mississippi miracle in lower education shows that we knew what we were talking about all along, that there will be a sizable counterforce to the faux working class.
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What's the voter turnout for people aged 13 to 28 (the current approximate age spread for Gen Z)?
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It is less about voting for malignant buffoons in the near-term than about the longer term extermination of our vibrant culture.
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God bless you for your optimism. I keep hoping that paying the steep wages of sin/Deep Stupid will eventually cause more young people to turn away and rediscover some good stuff that was always already there, waiting for them.
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It is the culture but what we have witnessed is an utter mismanagement of the culture of economic growth. The result is an over-concentration of wealth instead of a wide distribution. Much of the accumulated wealth has been derived from land and natural resource utilization, assets that naturally belonged, in the beginning, to all of humanity but have now been channeled in ways that bring prosperity to only a chosen slice of humanity. Growth can come in more than this one way.
The globalization movement as set forth by the World Economic Forum in the great reset would firmly entrench the ten percent with most of the world's accumulated wealth. The American Dream is based on striving for a different outcome.
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