In this essay, I’ll sometimes write about the West as a whole and sometimes try to be more particular, especially in giving examples, by writing from the American viewpoint. In fact, it’s at least arguable that the current moral and social disorders of the West began in the United States. Henry James is said to have claimed, circa 1900, that the United States would corrupt the entire world. I’ve claimed a number of times that Europe was a bit tired and in the process of fading by 1900 and the US, materially prosperous frontierland of the West, failed to take up the task of maintaining and advancing Western Civilization; Americans didn’t seem to have realized, and don’t yet seem to realize, that a civilization is anything that needs to be maintained or advanced. We assume the existence of Western Civilization and move on to drill oilwells and build amusement parks.
We Americans think ourselves to be sophisticated residents of a advanced and complex civilization. At a moment’s notice, we can throw up more magnificent skyscrapers or factories in Detroit and Chicago and…
Maybe we’ve hit a roadbump or two, but we look back just a few decades and see that we were building cities on a scale beyond the dreams, or nightmares, of our ancestors. We now have smartphones and ebook readers which can carry large personal libraries on a tablet smaller than the keyboard I’m now using. We have remarkable space exploration technology and desktop computers which can hold more information than the largest libraries of the ancient or Medieval ages. To be sure, we still seem capable of developing new and exotic technology though we are having more trouble, especially in the US, building and maintaining the workaday pieces of our civilization. I think that we are far worse than that when it comes to the `soft’ components of our civilization, especially the literary and other intellectual components which feed into our understandings of who we are and what our world is. We’re still pretty good at hard sciences though some, such as the late Jacques Barzun, have claimed we’re living off the creative advances of the decades around 1900; he was speaking of physics as well as pictorial art and literature and music.
Have our human beings developed as fast as our populations have grown and as our technology has developed? Even in science and engineering where we seem to know so much about the early periods of the expansion of our universe and are on solid ground for planning a colonization of Mars, have we come to better understandings of what our goals should be or do we just do what is possible and what strikes our fancy?
I’ve endorsed the claim of Ortega y Gasset that Western man has fallen back into a state of a barbarian child. Maybe the better claim is that, by the middle of the 19th century or so, Western man had matured to the level of a 12 year-old and then maybe fell back a couple of years of maturity over the next century and a half. We’ve continued to grow in many ways and haven’t taken care of some of our basic hard and soft infrastructure and don’t seem much interested, as a general rule, in developing new ways of organizing our communities or our individual lives. Even without our recent orgies of debt accumulation, many local ecological and moral and social problems were growing as we concentrated our efforts and resources upon the tasks of getting a new stadium for the regional NFL franchise or putting more computers in front of illiterate and innumerate and quite bored students.
The demands of our rapidly growing human communities, the need to feed and clothe and supply water and remove sewage and to develop proper political systems and to also develop private economic systems, maybe require more than even that 12 year-old man of the 1800s would have been able to deal with let alone man of the 21st century as he regresses toward infancy. The leaders of the West are acting as if they’re as clueless as any Joe Six-pack who sits in front of the television, letting it numb him into a morally culpable state of ignorance and stupidity.
Our huge and dense populations as well as our rapidly advancing technology seem to be demanding of us a level of sophistication and complexity which we can’t yet provide in the economic and political realms. A loose interpretation of the history of the 19th century, the golden years of classical liberalism, might indicate we had passed through a period in which individual human being had developed very rapidly in some ways but the development of communal human being was at best slower and maybe some important institutions had grown fast but into deformed, parasitic entities. Wealthy and highly centralized governments, had been hijacked by men I’ll label, following Acton, as having the “moral character of gangsters.”
A mature human community should be able to recognize those who serve their personal goals at the expense of the community and maybe some number of innocent individuals in particular. I believe it was GEM Anscombe who pointed out that a society is in deep trouble if it needs a formal resume? to tell if someone is a good man or woman. In fact, we use those formal resume?s for purposes other than judging character, but we are in a situation where we can’t recognize those gangsters Acton warned us about. We put great wealth and power in the hands of such criminals, members of criminal networks if not quite gangs organized as tightly as the Mafia, and they get to work. This isn’t to excuse us. If we can’t distinguish between good moral character or bad, or—worse—prefer the ones with bad moral character so long as they promise us some good share of the loot, then we’re almost certainly incapable of governing our complex communities.
Can it be true? Are we functionally primitives relative to our social and physical environments? Are we much like those rainforest natives who slash and burn to produce some open land which will be very fertile for a couple of years and decreasingly so after that? After that period of great fertility, the demands of the crops are too much for the soil and the tribe moves on.
Are our communities not fully such? Are they merely gatherings of selfish individuals? Do we seek short-term profits for our own benefit no matter the cost to our children or to our neighbors? Do we fail to make a proper effort to build the fertility of our country, the economic fertility and the political fertility and the cultural fertility?
Our publishing firms once had great potential, however much they failed spectacularly with Herman Melville and some others. True it is that junk books about buffalo hunters and tamers of the Wild West sold well while Moby Dick quietly died. The situation hasn’t changed. Good books die while easily marketed low-quality books dominate our best-seller lists, though now receiving reviews which make them seem like real literature for real, thinking readers. For a number of decades, the profits of the publishers were good and some good books were published; occasionally, an author of substance would even prosper. Then the publishers were sold to corporations with an eye on next week’s bottom line. The slashing and burning began in earnest and soon literacy standards were falling. (In such a complex situation, there is no way to label the acts of the publishing companies, the American educational system, and the entertainment industry as being the real `cause’ or driver. They were all correlative and interactive factors, along with a number of others.)
I was told by a psychology graduate student that researchers had found that the average reading level of American newspapers had reached fourth-grade by the late 1990s—that is, fourth-grade standards from prior to 1965 or so. Soon enough those newspapers were going bankrupt. Why bother reading that stuff if you do have reading skills enough to handle even a decent mystery novel? Why bother reading if your reading skills have fallen with those of the average American?
Slash-and-burn business techniques had reduced the publishing industry to a sterile farce of sorts and it was time to move on, to social websites or video-games or maybe televising the shocking and awful destruction of Baghdad or other foreign communities, that sort of destruction being something of an accelerated slash-and-burn process. The self-destruction of the publishing industry ran parallel to similar processes in education and other realms of culture.
We can’t create much that’s worthwhile and increasingly rely on Asians and others to produce the physical goods once so well made in Detroit and Hartford. All we can do is slash-and-burn, destroying human communities to break free the exploitable individuals, taking good advantage of their raw intelligence and making sure they never develop a proper intellect (communal form of intelligence). Literacy skills and general thinking skills were never so high in the general American public as some reactionary dreamers seem to imagine but they were developed well enough to hold up the profits during several decades in which there were grand profits from cookbooks and books of self-centered spirituality and novels written by untalented writers determined to prove their sixth-grade teacher was right: “You are such a creative boy.” They sought to prove that writers were to write and not think; they did prove that many writers could publish without showing signs of having learned how to think.
Since I’m an author who’s banged his head against the walls of the publishing industry, I’ve concentrated on the destruction of the literary culture of the West by seekers of short-term profits. Heaven help any who would wish to be serious readers of serious new books; heaven help those who own shares of the publishing firms, perhaps in their pension funds; the party’s almost over. The editors have slashed and the marketing executives have burned and the ground is now sterile. Time to move on. If only we had a place to go.
If there’s a lot of ruin in a country, there’s more in a civilization, but it’s still a finite amount of ruin. Eventually, the seeds don’t germinate or perhaps they come up as sickly and malformed things.
We seem awfully close to that point of sterility in the West and many of our communities are there, cities and maybe entire countries and vast realms of Western culture.
The Western publishing industries are dying. Our newspapers and most mainstream magazines are no better off. Detroit is dead with many other American cities following. American infrastructure is said by many to be very low-quality relative to most other developed nations, but they’ll follow us soon enough. Our military fights, destroys cities and the infrastructure needed for the care of millions of civilians, and can’t seem to win wars, or maybe they and their political bosses do a bad job of picking wars to fight.
It would seem that the economic and political and military realms of the US are in trouble as deep as the cultural realms. I think the West as a whole is in it as deep as the US.
This is to be expected. We have slashed-and-burned and built cities on the cleared land. Most realms of Western life are increasingly sterile, growing from wretchedly impoverished soil. It turned out that we were living on inherited resources without contributing much, but I’ve suggested in the past that this has been true from the beginning in the US regarding many aspects of human civilization. We could dig mines and build factories with the best of them but it’s beginning to look as if we never matured as a people in many ways, never learned how to build cities with staying power, never learned how to build the modern equivalent of the cathedral at Chartres, never learned how to build the narrative which would have made us truly a people. At some point, the Europeans seem to have decided to join the American party and joined us in our decay into deeper and deeper states of barbarism.
Our businessmen think of themselves as entrepreneurs on the march looking for the city which offers the best tax deal and already has a well-educated body of workers and good infrastructure for the exploiting. Our Christian houses of worship, liturgies, intellectual works, literature, and music are bereft of imagination—I’m being kind. After a good start by Francis Parkman and Herman Melville, Americans seem to have lost interest in any effort to find a meaningful narrative of this country and acted as if determined to destroy any narratives in the minds and hearts of all Western peoples. In any case, we declared the United States to be a special place filled with special people and then went on our special way. We combine greed with soullessness and preciosity and put it in a narrative which is kind of a football game between the American cowboys and all the bad guys.
Football and cowboys have been very profitable for the American regions of the West. Complex histories which show the great potential still found in the West aren’t any more profitable than discussions on the deck of a whaling ship about how it was we were failing to live up to that potential.
Is it any wonder than even the greatest of American cities seem little more than gold-rush cities only a few corporate relocations or unwise government fiscal decisions away from becoming ghost-towns?
Detroit and Chicago, and many other American communities, are more sterile than mules, intellectually and economically and politically and culturally, but we have no fresh regions of forest to start slashing and burning. This is despite the large expanses of physical lands available to Americans. We had already chosen the best of those lands, most especially the best with regard to water and some other key resources. More importantly, the forest was never really just the woods of Kentucky or the plains of Nebraska. The forest was also the civilization which came with the European settlers, even those with very rudimentary educations and only a bare grasp of the history of their own people. That civilization was in the minds and souls and customs of those settlers who were already giving themselves over to a booster mentality. We are no longer a people in touch with the Western Civilization which made it possible for the Founding Fathers to establish a country with some serious amount of respect for both individuals and groups, with a somewhat denatured Christian faith which at least made possible some degree of moral self-governance, which gave us both the common sense and the dreams which powered us on our slash-and-burn journeys across the continent and through our own minds and hearts and hands.
So, I ask, “Is Detroit the Result of Slash-and-burn Politics and Economics?”