You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. [Big Yellow Taxi, Joni Mitchell.]
As Western Civilization is decaying, we still don’t know what we had and there’s a good reason for that. As I’ve stated repeatedly, a civilization is mostly inside of its members: our understanding of ourselves and others, of Creation and Creator. That is in terms of theists such as Christians and Jews. The Body of Christ believe He has and they have received special revelations about the God Who is Creator. Something similar can be said about Jews, the People of Israel. For the civilizations of other sorts of peoples, you can adjust the language; such civilizations will resemble the Body of Christ even if they have truly evil aspects but, even in terms of this mortal realm, they won’t have the fullness or most of the virtues of that Body.
Human communities are for real and Christians are bound to believe that the Body of Christ is the perfect and complete human community. Yet, there are many human communities, some of which feed into the Body of Christ in some ways, some of which are dead-ends of a sort. All of those communities are mortal creatures as much as are the individuals who are members of those communities. The United States has had a longer lifespan than did George Washington, but it won’t live for ever and is currently a setting for battles between various gangs of bankers and politicians and national security thugs and corporate executives and—very bad sign—seemingly a few generals of recent retirement and maybe a few still on active duty.
A well-known economist, Michael Hudson, wrote a book in recent years which bore the title, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy. You can pretty guess his claim from the title. I think his idea can be generalized—and, in fact, without pretending to special prescience I can state that I had a similar idea based upon my readings of standard histories of periods when human communities were in turmoil and the ruling classes had broken up into gangs not fully different from those street gangs found in the bad neighborhoods of our greater cities. Each power-holder or wealth-holder is hard at work satisfying his own greed and ambition or perhaps—a little less despicably—trying to hold onto power and wealth for the sake of his own children or for the sake of his greater family. We wanted individualism and we got a snake-pit.
I’m going to lightly address one pseudo-charitable, pseudo-humanitarian program in the modern ideology of liberalism or reductionistic individualism: mass immigration based upon the idea that communities are nominal entities, mere voluntary gatherings of individuals which are accorded `true existence’. We can build better communities, inclusive communities made of all sorts of peoples of different characteristics and beliefs and behaviors. By simply “taking down walls,” we can advance directly to Heaven. None of this stuff about evolutionary and developmental processes which work over the millenia. None of this Christian stuff about slowly struggling toward Heaven and often falling back, seemingly further back than the position of our barbarian, devil-worshiping ancestors. We can do it because we’re exceptional and we just need to describe a world of peace and justice and love and then harshly punish those who don’t act up to our standards. I’ll write a little later about our fall into a state of greed, but here I’d just like to note that some of our well-meaning citizens fell for the ploys of exploiters by way of an ignorant and stupid belief that we can design human communities, ones which approach perfection by some standard or other—usually a standard appropriate for a promising 12 year-old.
I’ve been writing more than a bit about communities recently and my latest book, The Shape of Reality, was an effort to better describe complex entities, such as communities, by drawing upon concepts abstracted from mathematics, the qualitative drawn out of the quantitative and formal. I worked with differential geometry and topology and am currently engaged in a slow and frustrating struggle to expand the mathematical horizons of my 62 year-old mind.
Before moving on, I wish to emphasize that, in this Creation, things happen slowly and gradually, by way of processes of evolution and development. The members of the Body of Christ come from a species which has evolved from unknown ancestors which lived about 3-3.5 billion years ago. The universe itself has been developing, and perhaps evolving, for about 14 billion years or so, though that estimate is subject to some revision.
We are an impatient species, a species which finds it hard to realize something I’ve claimed several times:
In this mortal realm, the mind’s main domain is the future.
For example, our moral actions are habitual and almost reflexive—we don’t have time to think through all our moral decisions or even many of our moral decisions. Our habits and usual behaviors are developed under the guidance of our elders in a particular cultural tradition. Some will participate actively in these complex processes of education and character-formation. Most will allow themselves to be shaped by those they trust or at least those they are dependent upon. Unconsciously formed in most, moral habits and other habits and attitudes will seem to be a part of our human being as much as our instincts to form families or kin-groups or even our instincts to survive.
This is likely one reason that multi-cultural human gatherings don’t easily or quickly turn into real communities—and may turn into killing fields or highly stratified gatherings of peoples who remain separated, some maybe living under enforced condition of hardship. We often find living in settled communities easy just because we share habits with our storekeepers, lawyers, doctors, bankers, and local political leaders. If we don’t share such habits with the various retailers and service-providers we depend upon, then we have to engage in exhausting and sometimes dangerous efforts to figure out the motives of mysterious aliens and then to enter potentially dangerous and nerve-wracking relationships. This is one reason that some cosmopolitan human beings are very valuable and are (sometimes) well-rewarded. They make it possible for Irish and Italian and Jewish and Black communities to exist separately but nearby, interacting through those with the skills and attitudes to deal with alien others. Most of us aren’t Marco Polo and many will go voyaging among alien peoples and show ourselves to be closer to the Spanish conquistadors—who were not evil but were tough warriors forged in centuries of fighting against North African Moslems and were also a bit ambitious and hungry for wealth. Their moral characters were better formed for the battlefield or for exploring dangerous wilderness regions than for peacefully occupying the lands of alien peoples.
There are some who can deal properly with alien peoples. Marco Polo comes ever to mind in that context, a man successful in his stay in China and after his return to Italy. Such men are very valuable, but they are valuable as bridges between communities of human beings who take relatively more time to grow comfortable with each other; that process of growing more comfortable involves the building of habits of behavior which are common to both peoples, at least under certain circumstances. A simple example of different habits is: fixed and (presumably) fair prices vs negotiated prices which typically start from a high offering price by the one holding a desired product. It’s fun to bargain for hats or elephant statues in the shops in Tijuana, but it would be exhausting—at least for most Americans—to have to do that for their cans of peas and their children’s underwear. And such problems lead to distrust, with one disturbing example being the seemingly simple issue of greeting a woman on the streets. Moslem women coming to the United States seem to feel free to move around with relative freedom but ignore the American customs of casual but friendly greetings on the sidewalks and in the public buildings in small towns.
So it is that I come to the research of Robert D. Putnam, research which I’ve referenced a few times over the past ten years or so. In that article, we learn:
In recent years, Putnam has been engaged in a comprehensive study of the relationship between trust within communities and their ethnic diversity. His conclusion based on over 40 cases and 30,000 people within the United States is that, other things being equal, more diversity in a community is associated with less trust both between and within ethnic groups.
We learn in that same article that lowered trust in areas with high diversity is also associated with:
- Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.
- Lower political efficacy—that is, confidence in one’s own influence.
- Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.
- Higher political advocacy, but lower expectations that it will bring about a desirable result.
- Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).
- Less likelihood of working on a community project.
- Less likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.
- Fewer close friends and confidants.
- Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.
- More time spent watching television and more agreement that “television is my most important form of entertainment”.
Now we come to the punchline. The deliberate opening of the immigration gates and the other programs which have led to great damage, not yet complete destruction, of the countries of the West are the result of programs of the mainstream institutions of the West:
- the governments,
- the non-denominational charitable agencies,
- the Christian churches and the various branches of Judaism, including their charitable agencies,
- the schools at all levels,
- the publishing and journalistic industry,
- the banks and various corporations including the real estate developers local and national, etc.
The ongoing damage, and perhaps ultimate destruction, of Western Civilization has many of the appearances of a well-organized and huge conspiracy. As do most large-scale movements in human history. We need to realize that even the multi-culturing of the United States, and all of the West, is but a part of destructive parasitical behavior by our ruling elites and their allies—clueless snowflakes, morally corrupt intellectuals, politicians desperate to control all that exists, and so on.
Conspiracy? Well, we should reserve that word for specific, criminal projects, such as the Brink’s robbery or the takeover of Russia by Lenin and his followers or some of history’s most spectacular murders of public figures. Usually, we should think in terms of convergence, as individuals or small groups act in their own parochial interests and those interests turn out to significantly overlap with each other. Such a process might even be that which led to some of the spectacular crimes of recent decades in various parts of the world—the United States itself or those with an American embassy or those lacking in the capability of excluding American activists and intelligence agents.
The invisible hand. The invisible claw. The invisible fang dripping in blood. Adam Smith saw truly but he saw truly in an age when there was very imperfect but still substantial Christian moral order in England and Scotland, when there was so much opportunity as to leave little room for the types of parasitical human beings described by Professor Hudson, when true innovators and wealth-creators were dominant and still rising. The invisible hand phenomena he saw can take some nasty forms in other circumstances than those of Glasgow and London in the 1760s. (Though they were nasty enough even in those circumstances; young men were setting off to make their fortunes and to have some adventures and would come back with chests of silver and gold after trading slaves or opium.)
Given some freedom for the various agents in the economy or politics or science or cultural projects, momentum builds and the herd starts moving together as if coordinated by an invisible hand. If not for this growing coordination between members of the involved populations, nations would not have formed and religions would have been all local and science wouldn’t have become (at least for now) a self-sustaining operation. Nor would the West African slave-trade have taken on such a well-organized form—as if directed by an invisible hand. Or an invisible claw. Or invisible fangs dripping in blood.
Clearly, it’s only a minority of the people of the West who have consciously turned a set of attitudes and incoherent ideologies into a project to destroy their own civilization—and that of their children, though they have recruited hordes of college students, snowflakes in a common way of speaking. More generally, those snowflakes are badly damaged human beings—including their communal parts and aspects of their human being. Perhaps mostly those communal parts and aspects. In any case, it might be that some of the children of the American middle-class and perhaps a lesser number of the children of the American working-class have been taught to hate their own families and ethnic groups, a lesson they’ve learned as least as well as the children of the Soviet Union in the days of Stalin and Beria. It would also seem that Christian leaders who have proven themselves incompetent at passing on the faith to the children in their communities have decided to betray the members of their communities in order to help peoples from other countries.
In my last post, Self-government Isn’t Government Structure, I had this to say about this situation:
We have let our exploitive classes destroy our own insides, our minds and hearts and hands—including all that is meant by “moral character.” We have, in old-fashioned language, sold our souls in return for television shows and the Superbowl and affordable tennis clubs and fancier housing than we need.
There is a major qualification to all of this. Many of the college students and religious leaders, probably some of the teachers and charity workers, some others, meant well and some might still mean well. Probably even some of the most greedy and ambitious of the exploitive class (elites, if you wish) had not meant ill when all of this decay was set in motion. At the same time, all of those people, and their equivalents in the past two or more centuries, should have been aware of a certain, shall we say, “loss of focus” in the Western mind, a problem which was spreading into Western feelings and behaviors by at least 1800: the mind leads the way into the future, the heart motivates and the hands get it done. The motivations of today’s hearts and the actions of today’s hands are shaped by yesterday’s minds. This lack of focus on what’s important led to various problems, including the one noted by Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses: the modern era freed many from what might be labeled peasant lives of limited opportunity and limited perspective but the leaders of all those parochial peoples who now had some access to more cosmopolitan lives failed to lead; they chose not to raise their flocks to a higher outlook and a greater understanding of Western, Christian Civilization; they chose rather to descend to the more vulgar lives of peasants having some money and being set loose in the wonderful and dangerous city.
So it is that the herd is still larger than the total of exploiters and activist-suckers. The herd is most of us and our priests and ministers and teachers and town-fathers and smalltown journalists and so on. It was most of our parents, all of those parents who tolerated:
- the low-quality of the American schools, deteriorating still more beginning in the false prosperity of the 1950s—the distinguished mathematician Raymond Wilder saw a significant drop in mathematical knowledge and skills starting in that decade,
- the ideological corruption of their children in schools which did their best to delay maturing of those students and to socialize them into being American consumerist widgets (for lack of a better term),
- television with its noisy children’s shows so destructive of any developing skills of concentration and its family entertainment composed of exceptionally nice people living in plastic communities bereft of the interesting characters found in the works of Mark Twain and other worthwhile, morally good entertainments,
- pro sports becoming a major part of American life even as it evolved from something largely admirable (“where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio”) to freak-shows run by moral degenerates,
- the destruction of smalltowns and city neighborhoods in the interests of mall developers and large stores,
- the centralization of the American economy and consequent mobilization of the American worker—didn’t settled peoples once look down upon nomadic peoples?,
- the destruction of local political corruption in order to centralize it in Washington,
- the destruction of local banking systems in order to centralize financial power in New York City and other such places (wonderful in their own way),
- …
In a word, we’ve destroyed what we inherited, what we were beholden to protect and hand on to future generations, and we did so in the interest of short-term gains of the sort that men and women of better moral characters might have disdained but certainly wouldn’t have accepted under the terms offered: “become dependent upon us, the rulers of centralized power and wealth, and give us your children and we’ll provide you with your hearts’ desires.” We made a terrible bargain with Satan and now he can’t even keep his promises of prosperity. But that matters not. Whatever the particulars of your beliefs—I consider myself a Catholic bound to a living tradition and don’t believe in the existence of angels and demons, the evil we’ve done is to turn away from God and from our communities. If we can’t get all we were promised in this mortal realm, we still gave up our desire to be saved, a desire which has to show in at least an awareness of our need to keep our priorities straight, for our sake and the sake of the future generations and the sake of the Body of Christ—the community of the friends of God. As it is, most Americans and most Westerners in general seem only to be upset that Satan isn’t keeping his side of his bargain with us.
As I’ve claimed for years, the true foundation of a civilization is found inside the members of that civilization, in an understanding of all that exists. I’ll be as intelligent as a musician or poet rather than as form-bound as `good’ writers; I’ll repeat an earlier part of this essay.
[refrain]
In my last post, Self-government Isn’t Government Structure, I had this to say about this situation:
We have let our exploitive classes destroy our own insides, our minds and hearts and hands—including all that is meant by “moral character.” We have, in old-fashioned language, sold our souls in return for television shows and the Superbowl and affordable tennis clubs and fancier housing than we need.
[end of refrain]