Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: roo_ster on January 23, 2012, 10:55:40 AM
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http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/288436/civilization-reverse-victor-davis-hanson
That choice would be "decline."
The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of classical Greece, lamented that in his time weeds grew amid the empty colonnades of the once-impressive Greek city-states. In America, most would prefer to live in the Detroit of 1941 than the Detroit of 2011. The quality of today’s air travel has regressed to the climate of yesterday’s bus service.
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The average Californian, like the average Greek, forgot that civilization is fragile. Its continuance requires respect for the law, tough-minded education, collective thrift, private investment, individual self-reliance, and common codes of behavior and civility — and exempts no one from those rules. Such knowledge and patterns of civilized behavior, slowly accrued over centuries, can be lost in a single generation.
Nobody attacked, invaded, plundered, burnt down great swaths of Detroit, and scattered half its population. Yet the effect has been nearly identical.
We can possibly still pull out of this civilizational nose dive, but if we don't, get ready for a new Dark Age.
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Well THANKS for that. As if I weren't skittish enough about a closure of the Straits of Hormuz (acute problem), you're reminding me about systemic problems.
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http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/288436/civilization-reverse-victor-davis-hanson
That choice would be "decline."
Nobody Feral Detroit residents attacked, invaded, plundered, burnt down great swaths of Detroit, and scattered half its population...
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I really don't care what happened to Detroit. Those people moved elsewhere to hopefully better parts of the same country. What I don't like is the same type people who ran Detroit into the ground trying to do the same on a national scale.
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What he said about CA is sadly too true.
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Victor Davis Hanson is a great writer. Also, if you like this kind of acute thinking, read Richard Fernandez at "the belmont club". No question at all, he is one of the very brightest minds on the web. Unbelievably well read and educated, has more insight about the USA than 99% of the inhabitants.
He is a Filipino by birth, and lives in Australia.
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We can possibly still pull out of this civilizational nose dive, but if we don't, get ready for a new Dark Age.
I don't think we can pull out, just a matter of time and degree of collapse.
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I don't think we can pull out, just a matter of time and degree of collapse.
If we built it once, we can build it again. There's nothing more special about our ancestors than us as human beings. The difference is the cultural importance given to freedom. And they all came from cultures that gave little or no value to freedom too.
The question is whether we can go back to advancing freedom before everything goes all Mad Max.
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If that column by Victor Davis Hanson is too depressing, read this one by him for a bit more of a lift:
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson111711.html
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If we built it once, we can build it again. There's nothing more special about our ancestors than us as human beings. The difference is the cultural importance given to freedom. And they all came from cultures that gave little or no value to freedom too.
The question is whether we can go back to advancing freedom before everything goes all Mad Max.
Freedom built civilization. Freedom can rebuild civilization.
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If we built it once, we can build it again. There's nothing more special about our ancestors than us as human beings. The difference is the cultural importance given to freedom. And they all came from cultures that gave little or no value to freedom too.
The question is whether we can go back to advancing freedom before everything goes all Mad Max.
Actually, I disagree. Many of our ancestors literally sold themselves into slavery for 7 years in hopes of achieving freedom and opportunity. No one (excepting recent immigrants) in our current generation has any concept of not belonging to the richest, most powerful, and generally most free country in the world. It's the difference between a kid who pays his way through college and a trust fund baby who has it handed to him along with the keys to that brand new BMW.
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The indentured servants were selling temselves out for freedom - the colonies were if anything less free than England- but for pure financial gain (which doesn't make themselves evil).
Even the Founders did some real nasty stuff (slavery? treatment of the Indians?) that wouldn't be tolerated today. We have improved our understanding of freedom in many ways. It's not all regression.
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Many of the colonists were fleeing religious persecution. And freedom to economically prosper is still a form of freedom.
Nothing the Founders did compares to the current genocide of the unborn. So yes, some things have improved. But it's not all rosy freedom progress yay either.
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Many of the colonists were fleeing religious persecution. And freedom to economically prosper is still a form of freedom.
I think there's a difference between "I cannot prosper because the government is taxing the hell out of everything or does not respect private property" and "there are no jobs here, I'll move to the Clondike to dig for gold". Both are respectable, but different.
Also, I believe indentured servants were most common in the areas where the Anglicans immigrated (Virginia, etc.) while New England, where the people who fled persecution settled, had far less of them due to less fertile soil not lending itself well to the form of agriculture that required them.
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Everyone who came to the colonies was taking a massive risk, regardless of their exact means of obtaining the means to do it. It was a pioneer culture that needed to take what it got instead of being handed it.
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But the question remains, will we pull out of the current nosedive before we hit bottom? Heck, at this point can we?
You are all talking about a time and culture when the USA "made things" as opposed to moved ideas around - and we have off-shored a great deal of that as well. If you are not working for the government the main choices seem to be service work (an area defaulted to the illegal immigrants because _____ ) and IT (that which is not already off-shored). Fewer folks want to be lower middle class producers. Some of that is our own fault as we have made too many things too cheap (from toasters to computers) and others too complicated (automobiles as the prime example) for the average person to fiddle with and/or fix at home. Heck, even the newest crop of PSAs for The Job Corps focuses on technical service jobs such as LPN and Dental Tech as opposed to the not-so-old days of selling training to become welders and masons.
It's as if we have abrogated the base layer of the socioeconomic pyramid to the untermenchen of the illegal immigrant. Everybody complains about it but nobody is doing much of anything to fic the reasons why.
Comments?
stay safe.
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Everyone who came to the colonies was taking a massive risk, regardless of their exact means of obtaining the means to do it. It was a pioneer culture that needed to take what it got instead of being handed it.
Many of them had no choice: forcibly evicted from their homes and herded onto ships after 1715/1746.
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the colonies were if anything less free than England
Well, that's debatable at best. That may be true from some perspectives, false from many others.
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Many of the colonists were fleeing religious persecution. And freedom to economically prosper is still a form of freedom.
Nothing the Founders did compares to the current genocide of the unborn. So yes, some things have improved. But it's not all rosy freedom progress yay either.
I laugh and laugh and laugh.
Yeah, so they could come here and make everyone part of THEIR religion.
Historically, civilations that gain unprecedented advances, generally collapse eventually. Usually under the weight of their own sucess.
We just happen to be due for it. It doesn't mean modern people are morally inferier to those that came before. It means modern people are dealing with an incrediable complex structure and it's coming down whether we like it or not.
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I laugh and laugh and laugh.
Yeah, so they could come here and make everyone part of THEIR religion.
I really don't know what you're trying to express here. "I know nothing about Colonial history" is what's coming across, but somehow I doubt that's what you're going for.
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It's funny...this article started as a discussion of the collapse of the American civilization as we know it, due to crushing Federal debt and deficit spending, and now is a debate on the American Colonies and their intents and purposes when building the new nation of America. Gotta love APS...
The thing I see as important to this entire discussion is how the civilization would colapse. In other words, how does it fall apart? Is it a collapse into complete chaos? Is it an end of a centralized federal government into either regional or state authority? Is it a complete war against a federal government trying to assume control? Is it the emergence of a new centralized government using martial law and an iron fist to enforce its will on the people after burning the Constitution and Bill of Rights? What do you all think?
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The thing I see as important to this entire discussion is how the civilization would collapse. In other words, how does it fall apart? Is it a collapse into complete chaos? Is it an end of a centralized federal government into either regional or state authority? Is it a complete war against a federal government trying to assume control? Is it the emergence of a new centralized government using martial law and an iron fist to enforce its will on the people after burning the Constitution and Bill of Rights? What do you all think?
Historically, how have civilizations fallen apart?
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how about "i don't idealize and can see that the settlers of this country were as flawed as everyone else".
Balog, the repeated attempts of the early settlers and their decedents to angelicasis everyone from east to west belies the high sentiment of "religious freedom".
It never was about all religions. It only applied to the diffrent protestent flavors of christianity and was set in place to keep the infighting to a minimum.
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Historically, how have civilizations fallen apart?
Well, I don't think we need to worry about murading germanic barbarians....
But that's just a maybe.
=D
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I don't idealized them. I also don't think that since they don't adhere to the same standards that you hold hundreds of years later that it discounts the fact that they were in fact a force for religious tolerance. And none of that matters at all in regards to the point I made in bringing them up.
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I don't idealized them. I also don't think that since they don't adhere to the same standards that you hold hundreds of years later that it discounts the fact that they were in fact a force for religious tolerance. And none of that matters at all in regards to the point I made in bringing them up.
Yet you have been consistently touting them as morelly superior, which made them, supposedly, able to do something you hypothisis that the current generations can not.
Rome wasn't built in a day and civilazations have risen, fallen and then risen again.
And survival has much more to do with it then freedom, anyway.
Some will, some won't, and moral highground will be a liability rather then an asset when push comes to shove.
And since the really big shakers and movers of the civilizations of past and present seem to grow and expand in terms of philosphical freedom each time, the next one will likely be even more free then America.
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I have not claimed them as morally superior. Morals are not the same thing as work ethic, willingness to sacrifice, and dedication to the future generations vs current pleasures. Your attempt to put words in my mouth fails as hard as the rest of your argumentation and your grasp of history.
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That's a good article. Very true. Unfortunately, we only have two political parties, and they agree only on one thing...spend spend spend. You can raise taxes until there are no people left to pay them, or you can reduce spending. Also, like Rome, we need to reduce the impact of people and events outside of our borders, whether it's foreign wars, or unlimited/unregulated immigration.
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Actually, I disagree. Many of our ancestors literally sold themselves into slavery for 7 years in hopes of achieving freedom and opportunity. No one (excepting recent immigrants) in our current generation has any concept of not belonging to the richest, most powerful, and generally most free country in the world. It's the difference between a kid who pays his way through college and a trust fund baby who has it handed to him along with the keys to that brand new BMW.
If this isn't claiming the moral high ground, I don't know what is.
Just because the silver spoon aspect of the current generations is part of the cause of the forseen failure, doesn't mean it won't also end up helping the reestablishment.
People on high learn a lot when they fall. The hard way.
You write off a huge group of people, simply because they've never had to make these choices. You have no clue where they will all fall. You assume too much.
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I don't idealized them. I also don't think that since they don't adhere to the same standards that you hold hundreds of years later that it discounts the fact that they were in fact a force for religious tolerance. And none of that matters at all in regards to the point I made in bringing them up.
tolerant?! [popcorn]
Before white settlers arrived in Maryland, the Algonquin and other Native American tribes occupied the region. By the time Annapolis was settled in 1649, the Algonquins were gone from the area, forced out by raiding parties of the Susquehannock tribe.
The original white settlement of the area near Annapolis was at Greenbury Point, although the land is now mostly covered by the Severn River. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Puritans living in Virginia were threatened with severe punishments by the Anglican Royal Governor if they did not conform to the worship of the Anglican church. Then Cecil Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, offered the Pilgrims generous land grants, freedom of worship, and trading privileges if they agreed to move to Maryland, which he wanted to have settled. In 1649 they started a community on a site at the mouth of the Severn River on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay.
The Puritans named their new settlement Providence. In 1650, Lord Baltimore, the overseer of the colony, granted a charter to the county that surrounded Providence. He named it Anne Arundel County after his beloved wife, Anne Arundel, who had died shortly before at the age of thirty-four. But the Puritans refused to sign an oath of allegiance to Lord Baltimore, in part because he was a Roman Catholic. In 1655 he sent the St. Mary's militia, headed by Governor William Stone, to force the Puritans into submission. A battle between the two groups took place on March 25, 1655. The Puritans won the conflict, which was the first battle between Englishmen on the North American continent. Eventually, Maryland became a royal colony. The capital was moved further north in 1694 to the site of present-day Annapolis. By that time, for reasons unknown, the Puritan settlement of Providence had all but disappeared.
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Compared to the actual world they lived in they were, yes.
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http://www.mayflowerfamilies.com/enquirer/king_philip.htm
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Historically, how have civilizations fallen apart?
Here's a few thoughts on that subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_the_Roman_Empire
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Here's a few thoughts on that subject.
It's widely thought among historians today that Gibbon was wrong, you realize that, right?
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It's widely thought among historians today that Gibbon was wrong, you realize that, right?
Maybe so, but most historians today aren't worth a plugged nickel. If that consensus was formed after 1960, I'd be predisposed to disregard it.
An attorney analyzing the decision, however, probably would have been surprised to see that the works of history upon which the Montana court relied were all published before 1977. She might even have wondered whether the court's reliance on older works suggested that it had ignored newer, perhaps contradictory, publications. But for anyone familiar with how the contemporary academy approaches U.S. history, the court's inability to find recent relevant works could have come as no surprise at all.
The study of U.S. history has transformed in the last two generations, with emphasis on staffing positions in race, class, or gender leading to dramatic declines in fields viewed as more "traditional," such as U.S. political, constitutional, diplomatic, and military history. And even those latter areas have been "re-visioned," in the word coined by an advocate of the transformation, Illinois history professor Mark Leff, to make their approach more accommodating to the dominant race/class/gender paradigm. In the new academy, political histories of state governments--of the type cited and used effectively by the Montana Supreme Court--were among the first to go. The Montana court had to turn to Fritz, an emeritus professor, because the University of Montana History Department no longer features a specialist in Montana history (nor, for that matter, does it have a professor whose research interests, like those of Fritz, deal with U.S. military history, a topic that has fallen out of fashion in the contemporary academy).
To take the nature of the U.S. history positions in one major department as an example of the new staffing patterns: the University of Michigan, once home to Dexter and then Bradford Perkins, was a pioneer in the study of U.S. diplomatic history. Now the department's 29 professors whose research focuses on U.S. history after 1789 include only one whose scholarship has focused on U.S. foreign relations--Penny von Eschen, a perfect example of the "re-visioning" approach. (Her most recent book is Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War.) In contrast to this 1-in-29 ratio, Michigan has hired ten Americanists (including von Eschen) whose research, according to their department profiles, focuses on issues of race; and eight Americanists whose research focuses on issues of gender. The department has more specialists in the history of Native Americans than U.S. foreign relations.
IOW, pretty much worthless.
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Maybe so, but most historians today aren't worth a plugged nickel. If that consensus was formed after 1960, I'd be predisposed to disregard it.
AFAIK we simply have possession of more documents today and have better understanding of the archaeological record.
The study of U.S. history has transformed in the last two generations, with emphasis on staffing positions in race, class, or gender leading to dramatic declines in fields viewed as more "traditional," such as U.S. political, constitutional, diplomatic, and military history
The 1940's and gave us tards like Beard.
The modern day gave us Cecilia Kenyon's trampling of Beard.
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AFAIK we simply have possession of more documents today and have better understanding of the archaeological record.
The 1940's and gave us tards like Beard.
The modern day gave us Cecilia Kenyon's trampling of Beard.
Good points.
I still see 18/29 of the faculty at the school in question as being race/class/marxism 'tards. I think the proportion of bilge vs useful output is less favorable today.
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It's widely thought among historians today that Gibbon was wrong, you realize that, right?
Actually no. My formal education in world history and especially that era, is severely lacking.
Just grabbing at the low hanging fruit.
If there is a reputable online reference that you know of I'd appreciate it.
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Sadly the last time I actually took a course in Roman history was when I was a puny undergrad student. It was with the late, great Professor Ze'ev Rubin.
But last I checked, the current theory was that the Barbarian attacks played a far more important role in the collapse of Rome than its corruption did.
...holy sh*t it's my third year in grad school wtf.
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Sadly the last time I actually took a course in Roman history was when I was a puny undergrad student. It was with the late, great Professor Ze'ev Rubin.
But last I checked, the current theory was that the Barbarian attacks played a far more important role in the collapse of Rome than its corruption did.
...holy sh*t it's my third year in grad school wtf.
Let the record reflect that I made no comment about where the Barbarians might come from this time. :lol:
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Let the record reflect that I made no comment about where the Barbarians might come from this time. :lol:
Jose is at the gates? :lol:
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Jose is at the gates? :lol:
Jose is coming here for work, not crossing the Allegheny Mountains on elephants looking to sack the Imperial Capitol.
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....looking to sack the Imperial Capitol.
I dunno... There seems to be a potential argument there.