The Choice America Is Making

[roo_ster]

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.
...
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.

[Hutch]

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.

[Stand_watie]

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... 

[MechAg94]

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. 

[LadySmith]

What he said about CA is sadly too true.

[tokugawa]

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.

[RoadKingLarry]

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.

[sumpnz]

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.

[Monkeyleg]

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

[MicroBalrog]

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.

[Balog]

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.

[MicroBalrog]

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.

[Balog]

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.

[MicroBalrog]

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.

[Balog]

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.

[vaskidmark]

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.

[Tallpine]

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.

[Perd Hapley]

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.

[BlueStarLizzard]

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.

[Balog]

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.

[T.O.M.]

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?

[Nick1911]

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?

[BlueStarLizzard]

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.

[BlueStarLizzard]

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.
 

[Balog]

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.