But the central idea of Andrew Michta's essay at The American Interest is that, more than the jihadist threat, more than the challenges posed by North Korea, Iran, Russia or China, more than the economic underperformance of America and Europe, the reason the West itself has dicey prospects is the erosion of its foundational concept, the sovereign nation-state. Our decadent culture is to blame for that.
Okay, one teaser sentence:
Today, in the wake of decades of group identity politics and the attendant deconstruction of our heritage through academia, the media, and popular culture, this conviction in the uniqueness of the West is only a pale shadow of what it was a mere half century ago.Now, read it all.
And Happy Easter.
The uniqueness of the West is nothing more than mere nationalism. 50 years ago the US was engaged in a morass of "conflict" in Southeast Asia that significantly altered our view of ourselves. And freedom began to reign for all who did not get caught with drugs--Nixon's attack on the uppity blacks, Hispanics and the so-called counter-culture, ushering in a reign of fear and distrust, if not terror. He ignored the findings of his own commission, scheduling marijuana as a Class I drug, shutting down research into the promise of hallucinogenics, merely out of considerable spite for "the other." Then it was not long before the corporate allegiances shifted from the workers to the stockholders and people lost their jobs in droves as whole cities were drained of vital capital as business and industry shifted elsewhere, often offshore. Those damaged personally and financially were marginalized while the alleged "right stuff" thrived, often behind gated communities designed to keep the riff raff out, except during daylight hours when they were let in to clean and trim. So little wonder that many cried, "hell now we won't go" and "keep your hands off my stash." Freedom became just another word for corporate fraud. Much of your heritage was built on the deception of greatness. If the truth's pretty well out, well, let's move on, but power and money ain't gonna eat out many hearts any more.
ReplyDeleteAnd now you may puke away and throw some canine vomitus into the mix.....
Then there was the rise of women and then the internet. Books upon books in and of themselves. Nationalism is now for dictators.
ReplyDeleteMorale is way down in this country and has been trending downward since the late 70s when the corporations gained the upper hand and began tromping rampantly over American workers, their families and their livlihoods, a development which the bloggie and his ilk have continued to tout as freedom-loving.
ReplyDeleteI had no idea you'd gone full Noam Chomsky. I did, of course, know you to be so intellectually and spiritually stunted as to engage in a discussion on Western civilization - a subject going back centuries and involving such figures a Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Ovid, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Descartes, Shakespeare, Newton, Locke, Burke, Madison, Jefferson - you get the idea - by talking about marijuana policy over the last 50 years. You clearly have very deliberately chosen to embrace a worldview so trivial that it has nothing to contribute to a conversation about where this world goes from its current juncture.
ReplyDeleteSure, we found Prohibition of alcohol to be trivial too. A country that wars against its own people based on a lie is unworthy of patriotic fervor. And to call me intellectually and spiritually stunted is evidence of your own myopia. Marijuana policy is not the only thing I brought into the picture. As Kerouac suggested, I just lay low and avoid the authorities. And I've barely ever read a word of Chomsky. But plenty of the rest of the "Western" giants you cite, especially Shakespeare.
ReplyDeleteIt's just that there are a lot more niggers in America these days.
ReplyDelete"In 2015, Case and Deaton published research finding that although mortality is declining for virtually every other demographic group in every developed country, it has been rising for middle-aged white Americans since the early nineteen-nineties. The increase, they argued, was due almost exclusively to what they called “deaths of despair”—suicides, drug and alcohol poisoning, and chronic liver disease. During the campaign, their findings raised the possibility that whatever energies had consumed the white working class were not limited to political or cultural grievances but had a more pathological source, one that showed up in the United States but nowhere else."
http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-despair-of-learning-that-experience-no-longer-matters?mbid=social_facebook
Er, that chronic liver disease ain't caused by marijuana--that deadly Schedule I drug that drains the spirituality in Western peoples.
ReplyDeleteYou have dispensed a lot of verbiage here, but beyond hatred for the civilization that spawned you, I fail to see an overarching point.
ReplyDeleteIt's more like disappointment than hatred. My point is that there is much less to love about something you want me to fight and die for. And die upon you for judging me as spiritually wasted.
ReplyDeleteFie not die. That will come soon enough.
ReplyDeleteI view the entire world as my civilization
ReplyDeleteand endeavor to draw from the best of all cultures, east and west. It has enlarged both my mind and my soul which you have accused of being tainted. I just don't do much tired old nationalism anymore. I'll leave the military displays to North Korea. Yawn...,
Well, that may suit you, but it doesn't do much to stem the rot we all experience more of each hour.
ReplyDeleteA some-of-this-some-of-that-all-cultures-are-equally-beneficial-to-humankind approach is the problem.
ReplyDeleteIf returns to experience are in decline, if wisdom no longer pays off, then that might help suggest why a group of mostly older people who are not, as a group, disadvantaged might become convinced that the country has taken a turn for the worse. It suggests why their grievances should so idealize the past, and why all the talk about coal miners and factories, jobs in which unions have codified returns to experience into the salary structure, might become such a fixation. Whatever comes from the deliberations over Case and Deaton’s statistics, there is within their numbers an especially interesting story.
ReplyDeleteRead more at http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/the-despair-of-learning-that-experience-no-longer-matters?mbid=social_facebook