“A Look Back to the Past Decade” Sydney Willams
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In his 1961 work, A Study of History (a study of the rise and fall of twenty-three civilizations), Arnold Toynbee concluded that civilizations die from suicide, not by murder, brought on by a decline in the moral fiber of society. When a New York Times reporter compared the killing of Qassim Soleimani to the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Left never blinked, despite the implied insult to the Reverend King, his family and followers. When the West fails to defend the genocide of Christians in Africa, but are supplicant to Muslims who murder them, does that reflect a moral stance or a fear of retaliation? “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage,” spoke Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the Harvard commencement in 1978. The decline in moral courage has worsened over the past forty-two years. We in the West are more prosperous than ever before, yet we are filled with discontent: If we are black, we are victims; if we are white, we are supremacists; if we are Jews, we are subject to anti-Semitism; if we are Asian, we suffer from reverse discrimination. Unemployment, including minority unemployment, is the lowest in fifty years, and 2019 year-over-year wage growth was the highest for low-wage earners. Yet few of us seem happy with who we are. Perhaps because family has been subordinated to the village and the state?
There were, during the past decade, trends that might be a cause of this despair. While none began in the Twenty-teens, they accelerated over the past ten years. All stem from a desire for power, a sense of political correctness and identity politics coated in hypocrisy, and a belief we should apologize for the success we have had, individually and collectively. We were told we didn’t build the business we built. We tear down statues that represent our history. Hashtags rule and victimization reigns. In colleges and universities, the humanities have been attacked as representing only dead white males who promoted exclusivity. We are told to be inclusive, but not when it comes to political opinions. Where, for example, is the diversity of ideas promoted by a racially and sexually diverse slate of Democrat candidates for President?
Four trends come to mind: The increasing estrangement between bureaucratic global institutions like the United Nations and the European Union and the nation states that compose them; the aging of populations, especially in Western nations and Japan; the decline of participation in organized religion, and the curtailment of free speech. The consequence has been disillusionment and partisanship, fueled by supercilious entertainers and journalists whose readership and viewership are in decline.
Our democracy is predicated on the principle of representative self-government. A concerned and knowledgeable voter is assumed. When America’s Constitution was written in 1787, it was a revolutionary document, even though democracy had been invented in Athens in the Fifth Century BC by the statesman Cleisthenes. The idea that people could govern themselves was, nevertheless, a radical concept in the 18th Century, as Athenian democracy barely survived a century before morphing into rule by the elite.
Today there are those, including me, who fear a similar fate for our democracy. We see the rise of non-representative global institutions like the United Nations and the European Union, both staffed with appointed bureaucrats, unaccountable to the people of the nations they represent. This Orwellian world was anticipated by Margaret Thatcher in May1992. A few months after the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, she wrote an article for The European: “Experience has taught us that the best system under which to live is a democracy where members of parliament are seen to be accountable to the electorate.” She assured her readers that she was as idealistic about Europe as federalists: “We are,” she wrote, “just less federal.” Today, the European Commission and Parliament employ over 55,000 people in Brussels, Luxembourg City, Strasburg and Frankfurt. Parliamentarians from the twenty-eighty countries in the EU impose taxes and write laws, which affect the domestic affairs of individual states. So, the question arises: Will bureaucrats in Brussels preserve democracy in London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Rome, Vienna, Budapest and Warsaw, or will they drift, as they have, toward rule by non-elected elitists?
The United Nations has expanded its responsibilities beyond its Charter, signed in June 1945. Its original purpose was to be responsible for maintaining peace, developing friendly relations and achieving international cooperation among nations. It has grown from 51 nations, with a staff of 300 in 1945, to 193 nations and a staff of 44,000 today. It has instituted campaigns for issues like “sustainable development goals,” “climate change,” “sexual violence in conflict and “preventing sexual exploitation and abuse” – all worthy goals, but should misogynist autocrats in Syria tell Danes how to behave toward women? Should Muslim clerics in Iran preach religious tolerance to Israelis? Should Chinese dictators educate Americans on environmentalism? Should Macau and Luxembourg lecture Mali and Burundi on agriculture and water rights? Bureaucrats, justifying their jobs, have created a quagmire that mocks its original purpose. Departments like the Human Rights Council, with a membership that includes representatives from Libya, Venezuela, Somalia and Pakistan – all violators of human rights – are more concerned with equality in representation than with the promotion of human rights.
“Demography is destiny” is a quote generally attributed to the 19th Century French philosopher of positivism Auguste Comte (1798-1857). It holds that the future well-being of a nation is dictated by births and deaths, immigration and emigration – that a shrinking and aging population leads to economic stagnation and eventual decline. The example of Japan suggests those trends can be mitigated – at least for a while – by the use of debt. But ultimately such a nation is left with fewer and older people to pay off ever-increasing financial obligations. The CIA, in their The World Fact Book for 2017, lists 224 countries by total fertility rate (TFR) – the average number of live births to a woman over her lifetime. For a population to show an increase, a number of 2.1 is needed. Of those countries listed, 106 show a TFR of below 2.1. With the exception of Israel, no Western, wealthy or democratic nation is replacing its population through births. This is a worrying trend for anyone who believes that it has been the liberal ideals and ideas of the West that have given mankind democratic governments, individual liberty and sustained rises in standards of living. TFRs in Europe and the U.S., for example, were about 3.8 in 1950; today, they are 1.6 and 1.7 respectively. The median age in Europe in 1960 was about thirty-three. Today, it is forty-three. In the U.S., the numbers have gone from twenty-nine and a half to thirty-eight. Lyman Stone, writing in the January 2020 issue of National Review, wrote that the global decline in births over the past decade is a function of concern over wealth and housing. Low birthrates suggest pessimism for the future. The consequences will be felt not only in terms of slower economic growth, but in rising risks to the preservation of democratic institutions and, in fact, the physical safety of the people.
A Pew Research survey in June 2018 equated more education and greater wealth with lower church attendance. Ironically, the greater the income inequality in a nation the higher the church attendance, which explains why nations in Africa, South America and parts of Asia have greater church attendance than those in Europe and the United States. The wealthier we are and the more we know (or think we know), the less our need for God. A 2010 Eurobarometer survey showed that only 51% of Europeans believed in God. It is difficult to imagine that that trend reversed in the past ten years. In the twenty-five years between 1980 and 2005, church attendance in England declined by 40%. In France, the number of churches vandalized in 2018 was 1063 – almost three a day. While Christianity is in decline, Islam has been ascendant. According to Giuliu Meotti, cultural editor of Il Folgio, over the past thirty years more mosques and Muslim prayer centers have been built in France than all Catholic churches in the past century. While Muslims represent only 9% of France’s population (the largest percentage in Europe), more of them attend weekly religious services than do Christians. TFRs for Muslim women in Europe is about twice that of Christians and Jews. In the U.S., statistics are similar. A Pew Research survey done in October 2019 showed that 65% of Americans describe themselves as Christian, down twelve percentage points in the past decade. The losses have been evenly divided between Protestants and Catholics. What makes these figures more troubling (at least to those of us who feel that, on balance, religion has been a force for good) is the combination of declining religious beliefs with an aging population, not what one would have expected.
The First Amendment of our Constitution provides our right to free speech, along with freedom to assemble and to practice the religion of our choice. It was a revolutionary concept in 1787. Those rights have been challenged and, in times of war, abrogated. We are now living through such a period, with conservatives being denied opportunities to speak on campuses, with “hate” speech being defined as anything uncomfortable to whomever deems it so, and with ubiquitous, private technology companies imposing their own views as to what is acceptable in terms of speech and what is not. There is no question that decency and respect help society be more livable. But the risk of imposing any limitation – whether it is the Right’s concern about big tech’s preference for Leftist politics, or the Left’s refusal to allow conservatives to speak on campuses – is that it is akin to a camel getting its nose under the proverbial tent. A restriction based on a dislike for “hate” speech will lead to restrictions on other speech at odds with which ever Party is in power. We should never forget that we have the right not to listen to and not to read those with whom we disagree. Civilized people recognize that opinions differ and that it is through reasoned and respectful debate that solutions are found. The Golden Rule had its origins in the Bible, when Jesus described it as the second great commandment: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Words to live by, even though a strict obeisance might have denied comedians like Don Rickles or Rodney Dangerfield. That would have been unfortunate, as I believe the world would be the poorer for their absence. Nevertheless, for those who find their humor repulsive, listening is not mandatory. But the ability to laugh at one’s self is healthy in a complex, racially and religious-mixed society where humor and tolerance are needed.
Some will disagree with the list: On both sides of the aisle there are those, like me, worried about the size of our deficit – who recognize debt is an obligation, both financially and morally. Some on the Right might say that Trump Hate Syndrome has despoiled our politics. Others on the Left might claim that it has been Mr. Trump who is putting at risk our democratic institutions, including the Presidency and the Judiciary. Still others on the Left would include climate change, saying that mankind is destroying the Earth and that our time is limited, while the Right could point to the legions of Cassandras who wrongly predicted that mega-droughts and rising sea levels would bring famine and pestilence. But, in my opinion Trump is not the risk claimed, and hatred blinds the assessment of his opponents. As for those doomsayers, they have been hoisted on their own petard – the world has improved over the decade, in terms of poverty and the environment, at least in developed countries, which offer a map for developing countries.
Nevertheless, what is troubling about these trends, if in fact they are trends, is that they offer bleak prospects for those of us – and our children and grandchildren – brought up within the wisdom from the Enlightenment that allowed freedom and democracy to blossom, which abetted economic growth that bettered standards of living, that provided moral teachings and the courage and certitude to differentiate right from wrong, good from evil – to defend the one and combat the other. Nevertheless, and to conclude on a positive note, the recent election in Taiwan and last weekend’s protests against the mullahs in Iran suggest that the desire for freedom is inherent, universal, alive and well.
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