After Us, Deluge or Renaissance?

John Derbyshire is one of my favorite commentators. He writes about politics, mathematics, and culture, and even has written a novel about a Chinese immigrant obsessed with Calvin Coolidge, no less. (Haven't read it, but will get around to it). Derbyshire's website even features a pretty good guide to the pronunciation of Chinese.

His Thanksgiving column, although on the surface an expression of thankfulness, iterates on a common theme, the Untergang des Abendlandes, or Decline of the West.

Derbyshire goes on at some length about his excitement, from childhood until now, at the progress of space exploration (he prefers the robotic kind).

There followed, through the succeeding decades, images of Mercury and Venus, of the great gas giants and their astonishing moons, of the lesser bodies. If the New Horizons mission reaches Pluto intact, my entire adult life will have been encompassed by this most marvelous of all scientific adventures -- the exploration of the solar system. I wouldn't have missed it for... well, for worlds.

Space exploration is a proxy for Derbyshire's gratitude at living when and where he has. He's about two years younger than I, and I must agree. We missed the slaughters of World Wars I and II, and are in late middle age as the world we know that treated us so well threatens to unravel.

That prompts other reflections about life in these past few decades, and in the next few. The sum total of those reflections is that I have been living in a golden age that will soon end. Born between VE Day and VJ Day, I missed all the greatest horrors of the 20th century. If granted a normal lifespan, I shall miss the horrors of the 21st, too. If my parents' generation was the greatest, mine has been the luckiest. For that, in this Thanksgiving season, I give sincere and heartfelt thanks.

It is not just space exploration I am thankful for, but I see that bold adventure as symbolic of the age now slipping away. It was a manifestation of our civilization's confidence. Look at what we can do! See where our ever-questing curiosity can take us! -- supported and funded, of course, by a proud and efficient public culture, in which enterprise and government deliver results.

All of this, Derbyshire fears, is slipping away.

He points to France as the harbinger of a decline of the West, due to "taxation, regulation, and litigation." Government, larger than ever, no longer works very well. Terrorism threatens to get much worse, with nuclear weapons smuggled into our cities. Western Europeans, rather than showing confidence in their civilization, wallow in guilt and self-deprecation, and things aren't likely to get better:

I can't believe my kids will have that kind of luck. The welfare state, which provided my education, no longer works -- not for them, not for anybody. (I sometimes marvel at how well it did work to lift up the deserving poor in the years after WWII. Don't laugh; it really did.) I shall have to beggar myself to put the little Derbs through college, and they will likely still end up with huge debts. There will be no 9-to-5 jobs for them to go to after graduation, quite possibly no jobs at all other than in government work, which by that time will occupy a Soviet-sized slice of the national economy.

The concept that lay beneath and supported our collective consciousness until recently, the concept that white Europeans, their civilization and their bourgeois culture, were the apex of human achievement, will have been shamed, mocked, and badgered out of existence— along, of course, with that civilization and that culture. Religion, which, following the lead of my Anglican education, I have always regarded as an occasional source of comfort and inspiration that should on no account be taken too seriously, will have become very serious indeed, with religious fanatics committing murder on the grand scale all over the world. Nuclear weapons, throughout my lifetime kept safe under guard in just a handful of reasonably well-ordered nations, will be traded for cash in third-world bazaars and smuggled into American cities ready for the day of judgement. (Perhaps they already have been.) Clever new viruses will mutate, escape from labs, or be released...

My diagnosis is somewhat different from Derbyshire's, and at times I indulge in cockeyed optimism, but it's hard to quarrel with much of what Derb says.

The critical expression of the loss of cultural self-confidence that Derbyshire notes is, for me, the decline in population throughout Europe, and in Japan. Although there are economic factors, such as the shortage and resultant high cost of places to raise a family, and in America, the price-fixing of universities, which have become gatekeepers to the meritocracy, even if they are arguably obsolete as purveyors of knowledge and skills--consider this, for example--a society, which, for whatever reasons, ceases to reproduce itself is likely to be supplanted by those who do. Social reproduction presupposes a functioning family system, which in turn requires some domestication of male sexuality. This domestication, in turn, has often been promoted by religious belief of one kind or another.

In Europe especially, these have vanished in a couple of generations, to be replaced by a welfare state that enables idleness and hedonism, whose taxes burden those who work, marry, and try to raise their children. The sad collapse of Republican fiscal discipline suggests that "tax and tax and spend and spend and elect and elect" (or perhaps, "borrow and borrow and spend and spend . . .") is a recurrent pattern in modern democracies.

Meanwhile, the non-breeding ex-Christian Europeans are being replaced by immigrants from the Muslim and African worlds, who are not encouraged or permitted to become part of their new nations, and many of whom do not want to. Between the seductions of Muslim preaching and the pyrotechnics of burning cars, what is left of the European tradition is imperiled by the newcomers to what is in their tradition the dar al-harb, or "house of war," as contrasted with the Islamic world, the dar as-salaam, or "house of peace."

To all this we can add terrorism, which could get much, much worse, as Derbyshire fears; environmental problems, whose extent is debatable but whose realityundeniableible; and most of all, the rise of a sensibility that does not value, but despises, Western civilization. See this specimen as an example (HT: Michelle Malkin.)

So Derbyshire might be right. There is cause for some pessimism. I hope my girls don't face what he fears. And yet, perhaps these fears are a kind of perverse comfort for an older generation regretting its aging and coming passage from the scene. I am reminded of Cavafy's poem:

Why don't the worthy orators come as always
to make their speeches, to have their say?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today;
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.

Why all of a sudden this unrest
and confusion. (How solemn the faces have become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

What if our children end up having to muddle through, and disaster does not strike, or at least remains limited to certain times and places?

Unlike Derbyshire, I think our best hope is probably a religious revival of some kind in the West. We've dipped into and exhausted the moral capital left to us by past generations. Skeptic that I am, I nevertheless believe that our best chance is to seek renewed strength from the old sources, or at least new variants of the old sources.

If we believe Pitirim Sorokin, a new cycle of religious revival may be upon us. Perhaps we can still explore the solar system and restore social discipline and confidence in our own culture.

Neither Derb nor I will live to see more than, perhaps, the very beginning of these events. For our children's sake, I hope the glass is half full.