Why Some Cultures Don't Die

What with the decline of the west—particularly the demographic collapse in western Europe—it is appropriate to ask: Why?

Or perhaps, as the Asia Times Spengler asks, why not?  For the normal thing is extinction, not flourishing.

[A] majority of the world’s cultures simply will themselves out of existence, largely through the individual decision of their members not to rear offspring.

Just like today’s welfare state Europe.

The situation in Europe is all the more puzzling because the old threat of extinction, continuous warfare, appears to have been removed.

The modern world, with few exceptions, removes the violent threat to the national existence of small peoples, yet the rate of their extinction by strictly voluntary means is faster than ever before in history.

So why do people “cease to have children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves[?]”  Spengler says we should understand it as “a symptom of a culture’s mortal illness.”

We see cultural illness everywhere in the world and nowhere more than in the global south.

Yet it is there that Christianity is making its strongest growth.  Why is that?

[I]ndividuals embrace Christianity when their pre-Christian culture no longer can transmit their memory as well as their genes to future generations.

They become Christians, children of God, when their culture of “clan and kindred” is collapsing all around them, as it is across the world today.

Christianity provides an abstract family, replacing the love of the kindred with the love of the church family, the memory of the clan with the memory of Christ’s suffering, and the hope for the children with the hope for salvation.

Of course, in the western welfare state, there is no need for any family because the family is replaced by the paternal/maternal state.  People can live their entire lives as selfish children.  They do not think of the future; they do not have to think at all.

They find that such a life is not worth living, or not worth sacrificing for the sake of the children. 

But life must be lived, as Burke wrote, by treating it as a covenant between the ancestors, the living, and the generations yet unborn.  That is how you create meaning in your life in the modern world where the kindred embraces the whole human race.

Fifty Years After Little Rock

The confrontation at Little Rock, Arkansas, fifty years ago, was the moment where the United States had to choose between democracy and white supremacy, writes Shelby Steele. 

It was an epochal moment.  The world has always believed in racial supremacy, my race over your race.  For two thousand years Christianity had said it was wrong.  For two hundred years the Enlightenment had said it was wrong.

And so it was that in the fall of 1957 “[President] Eisenhower enforced democratic authority over white supremacy.” The United States used its political and military power to mark the end of the age of white supremacy.

 But that wasn’t all.  

Because of television, America—and the world—got to see the ugly side of white racism.

Every day for weeks they saw white people so consumed with racial hatred that they looked bestial and subhuman. When white racism was a confident power, it could look like propriety itself, like good manners. But here, in its insecurity, it was grotesque and shocking.

And America was ashamed.  So we set to work and got busy.

The country got busy self-consciously redeeming itself. Redemption would be our big, ingenious achievement.

But what we got was not really a proper chastening, a truthful learning from our sins.  What we got was today’s busybody liberalism,

a busybody, interventionist liberalism that was more bent on erecting an American redemption than ensuring freedom. The Great Society wanted to make America look like a country in which Little Rock could never have happened. It failed because it was a venture in denial rather than in realistic social transformation.

Fifty years later, we still haven’t moved on.

There is too much invested in white guilt and black innocence, for the busybodies enjoy the power they got from the redemption movement too much to give it up.

Race Commission Out in UK

Those of you who believe that in the modern world we should judge people by the content of their character will no doubt be glad to hear that the British Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) is going out of business.

Unfortunately it is only going out of business because “its duties are acquired by the Commission for Equality and Human Rights next month,” as Rod Liddle reports in the London Spectator.

The new organisation, headed by Trevor Phillips, will co-ordinate all manner of whining on behalf of absolutely anybody who considers him- or herself to be oppressed and victimised and discriminated against by the vindictive white male hegemony.

So that’s all right.

Being a good bureaucratic institution and all, the CRE issued a valedictory report. And things are not good.

An ethnic minority baby born today is sadly still more likely to go on to receive poor quality education, be paid less, live in sub-standard housing, be in poorer health and be discriminated against in other ways than his or her white contemporary.

Oh yeah, writes Liddle, then how you you CRE chaps explain this?

A Chinese baby born today [in Britain], for example, would be much, much more likely to grow up to be better paid than his or her white contemporary.

Then there is the

‘East Asian’ community, whose performance outstrips not only the indigenous whites, but even their Chinese cousins.

Let’s look at some more info, shall we?

• A child born to an Indian family today can expect, on average, almost precisely the same educational achievements, housing, employment and good or bad health as his or her white counterparts.
• Meanwhile, Pakistani kids do slightly worse, on average, than their white counterparts but are more likely to end up self-employed and less likely to be found doing menial work.
• Black African girls are likely to do rather better out of the education system than white British boys.
• A child born to any one of the following ethnic minority groups is far more likely than a white British child to get a job in the top managerial and professional class: Indian, Chinese, East Asian, Irish [Irish? -ed.].
• A boy born to a white British working-class family will do worse at school than every ethnic minority other than those from the Caribbean, Bangladeshi and travelling communities.

All this puts a bit of a kybosh into the basic assumption of commissions like the CRE that “ethnic minorities” form a sort of undifferentiated mass of helpless oppressed people.  No they don’t.

If, for example, black African girls do rather well at school, better than white boys, and British Caribbean boys do less well, it suggests that either teachers or the education system are very discriminating about their discrimination, to a quite unbelievable degree, or that something else must be at work here.

It couldn’t be, could it, that different “ethnic minorities,” not to mention the evil white majority, have different cultural traditions and attitudes towards things like education and marriage and life achievement?

Then Why Are We Arguing?

Everyone agrees that President George W. Bush is determined to “win” in Iraq, and that the Democrats are determined to bring our troops home.

But that is not what Senator John Kerry (D-MA) is saying, according to Martin Schram.  On Meet the Press a week ago on September 16, 

Mr. Kerry was rather sharp and certainly clear in stating the Democrats’ position on the Iraq war. He did everything but call it what it really is — a two-pronged military strategy: (1) Gradually redeploy most combat troops in Iraq as Iraq’s civil war cannot be won militarily; (2) Keep enough U.S. combat troops there to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq.

And when you examine the fine print of the Democratic presidential candidates positions, you get the same result.

Barack Obama: “My plan would maintain sufficient forces in the region to target al Qaeda within Iraq.”

Hillary Clinton: “I will order specialized units to engage in narrow and targeted operations against al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations in the region.” 

You can see what is going on here.  Despite their rhetoric, the Democratic leadership is in accord with the Bush administration on what to do in Iraq.  Defeat Al Qaeda.  But the Democrats can’t admit it, because their left-wing netroots have been raised on the strict catechism of the war-is-a-cycle-of-violence religion in the academy.

We’ve said it here before.  Senator Kerry has a peculiar habit of articulating the current administration strategy as his own brilliant idea while declaring that the administration’s strategy is a total failure.

Somehow, I get the feeling that the Democratic leadership is a lot closer to President Bush’s strategy in the war on terror than they like to admit to their supporters.

'I'm a Supply-Sider' says Bush

Thanks goodness we can finally report that Bush is not in denial.  Yes, before a tough, hard-nosed audience of the nation’s top reporters, he finally admitted it, as the New York Sun reports.

“I am a Supply-Sider,” he said.

"We did it by cutting taxes. The tax cuts worked. The economy recovered. People are working. Interest rates are low." And then he said, in what will become a famous sentence, "I am a supply-sider." He said he believed that "supply-side economics, when properly instituted, enables us to achieve certain objectives."

What objectives were you thinking about, Mr. President? I’m glad you asked that. How about

"people finding work" and "hope in the economy" and "additional tax revenues."

That’s pretty brave of the president, considering that “everyone” now agrees with Jonathan Chait and his new book The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics.

It’s understandable that liberals don’t like supply-side economics.  It says that the key to prosperity is ordinary people working and starting businesses under a regime of stable property relations and low marginal tax rates.

Not a word about subsidies, tax the rich, and government programs. 

Conservatives Jumped to Support Chemerinsky

Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinksy is about as left as you can get.  But when he got the shaft from UC-Irvine, summarily fired as Dean of the future law school before he could even take up his duties, conservative commentators sprang to his support.  And even the lefty LA Times noticed:

Righties defend dismissed lefty law dean Chemerinsky

The commentators that the Times excerpted included Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Reynolds, John Leo, Steven Bainbridge and more.

It’s good to see that conservatives are anxious to stand up for their lefty brethren.

And it’s a tribute to Chemerinsky that, left as he is, his law colleagues on the right all respect and honor him.  Partisanship has its place, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to have friends on the other side of the aisle.

After all, you never know when you might need a friend.

And now the whole affair has had a happy ending, with Chemerinsky rehired as Dean.

Dueling Health Plans

This week Senator Clinton (D-NY) announced her new approach to health care, report Patrick Healy and Robin Toner in The New York Times. Trying to avoid the fate of Hillary 1.0, version 2.0 is called “The American Health Choices Plan.”  As Healy and Toner put it:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton unveiled a plan on Monday to guarantee health insurance to all Americans, but in a way carefully designed to avoid the political flaws in her failed proposal of 1993-94.

 Not so coincidentally, Karl Rove wrote up his Rx for health care on the Wall Street Journal edit page.  Conservatives can win against Clinton’s “government-heavy” plan, he insists:

Conservatives must put forward reforms aimed at putting the patient in charge. Increasing competition will ensure greater access, lower costs and more innovation.

In case the Republican presidential candidates didn’t get the point, he proceeded to map out a seven point plan.  Call it Rove 2.0.

Well. It is clear that Clinton’s plan is a lot less disruptive than the last one.  But it will increase government control and mandates.  And by expanding “Medicare, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program,” as Jacob Laksin points out, it will also increase the number of people with their health care subsidized by government.

There is one thing all Americans are agreed upon.  We want good quality health care.  But we quail at the idea of paying for it.

There are two approaches to health provision.  One approach is the pre-paid one, that wants all health care provided from a monthly payment.  Obviously, this approach must involve some sort of rationing.  Liberals and Democrats are in favor of this.

The other approach is self-financing.  You pay for your health care and protect your assets with a high-deductible insurance policy.  Conservatives and Republicans prefer this.

In the middle, of course, is the great mass of Americans.  These Americans just want health care when they need it.  And if Hillary Clinton proposes to make someone else pay for it, what’s not to like?