Caesar and Christ, A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325 (The Story of Civilization Volume III) by Will Durant (1944)

"We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us . . . but what if we're only an after-glow of them."  J.G. Farrell, as quoted by Robert Harris as an introduction to his historical novel, Conspirita.

The Black Holes in my Knowledge, or, Why I Read this Book.    

"Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance."  Will Durant

In recent years, my readings on various historical subjects of personal interest have, again and again, led me back to Rome.  I have come to realize that, in the West, the men and women who peopled most historical eras since 300 AD were, themselves, studiously interested in the classical world, and so, to understand the viewpoints of prior generations it is imperative to know at least some of the basics of Greek philosophy and Roman history, together with Biblical religion, which influenced so much of the worldview of all those who came after.  The medieval Christians, for example, in addition to their reliance on the Biblical revelations of Jerusalem, plumbed (albeit selectively) the philosophy of Athens and the literature of Rome for their moral, ethical, and legal precepts.  The nation builders of the same era constantly sought to revive the dream of a new, but holier, Roman Empire. Later, the architects of the Renaissance saw their chief mission as bringing a "new birth" of Hellenized Rome's scientific and artistic achievements to a benighted world.

In the 18th Century, the English-speaking world was intensely interested in Roman history, knowledge of which was considered by our nation's founders to be essential as a guide to informed self-government.  A young John Adams practiced for future rhetorical glory by reciting Cicero's Catalinian Orations in front of a mirror and Thomas Jefferson used Cicero's "The Case Against Verres" as a model and template for his own case against King George in the Declaration of Independence.  It is impossible to understand the founders or the Revolution without understanding, among other things, the history of Rome and the lessons the founders derived for the future, right or wrong, from that history. Jefferson's life-long distrust of standing armies was grounded in the many examples afforded by Roman history of such armies, from Julius Caesar to the Praetorian Guard, seizing control of the civil government. And Adam's lifelong belief that an aristocracy would inevitably develop in America, whose interests would need to be checked and balanced, was similarly based on his knowledge of Rome, and of what came after.  [Endnote 1]

As historian Bernard Bailyn has pointed out, "Knowledge of classical authors was universal among colonists with any degree of education, and references to them and their works abound in the literature" of the revolution. [2]   The founders of our Nation were especially enthralled by that period of classical history in which the Roman Republic made its last valiant stand before falling into libertine anarchy and civil war, which ended via the imperial dictatorships of the Roman Empire [3] established by Julius and then Octavius Caesar, fulfilling one of the Platonian patterns of history. The revolutionary colonists saw their own struggle against British tyranny as akin to that of the Roman generation which had unsuccessfully attempted to forestall the overthrow of the Republic and its replacement with a military dictatorship.  [4]  Thus, when a beleaguered Washington wanted to improve the morale of the troops at Valley Forge, he arranged for a showing of his favorite play, Joseph Addison's popular drama, Cato, about the Roman Senator's principled stand against the tyranny of Julius Caesar.  (It had been from this play, earlier in the war, that captured colonial spy Nathan Hale had drawn his famous last words, before being hung by the British: "My only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country").  And when a victorious Washington, at the end of the war, returned his commission to the Continental Congress, both he and the world were keenly aware that he was acting in the role of an American Cincinnatus, the General of Republican Rome who had taken up the sword and the mantle of leadership to save his people from peril, and then relinquished that power and returned to his farm. [5]

But in our own time, any description of the fall of a republic and the rise of an empire is far more likely to be understood as an allusion to Star Wars, than as a reference to Rome. After decades of relentlessly and ruthlessly utilitarian educational "reforms," of which the common core is only the most recent example, most Americans no longer know anything about Rome.  Why this came to be, and how modern Americans were cut off from vast swathes of a historical heritage which earlier generations considered their intellectual commons, is a story for another day. For present purposes, it suffices to say that I count myself one of the victims of this imposed ignorance and deliberate policy of abetting historical illiteracy.  My religious upbringing has given me some grounding in one leg of what has been called the three legged stool of Western Civilization: the biblical theology of Jerusalem.  But as for the other two legs of the stool, the philosophy, art, and science of Athens; and the legal principles of Rome and the lessons of Roman history, I must learn of those on my own, having been exposed, instead, to hours of mindless fluff in the formal education of my youth.  Hence my interest in this book. [6]

The Third Book in the Durants' Series.

Caesar and Christ, subtitled, A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from their beginnings to A.D. 325, is the third volume in Will (and eventually Ariel) Durant's famous 11-volume series, The Story of Civilization, written between 1935  and 1975, and introduced into thousands of middle class American homes as the bonus for joining the Book of the Month Club.  This volume, published in 1944, is the first and only book in the series I have ever read cover to cover.

Will Durant's Wisdom

The author, Will Durant, is as congenial a guide through this history as anyone is likely to find, and he knows just where to pause for asides and personal commentary and observation that overcome the dustiness one usually finds in chronological summaries of history.  Indeed, it is his authorial asides which make the book most worth reading, raising its value as a storehouse of not just knowledge, but also of wisdom, and demonstrating why bland, committee-written, textbook history, has done so much to kill off historical interest in our public schools.  A few examples of Durant's asides, which are what really make the book worth reading:


-On the inherent conflict between security and freedom:

"The principle of democracy is freedom, the principle of war is discipline; each requires the absence of the other."

"Caesar returned to the task of persuading the Gauls that peace is sweeter than freedom."

"We must reconcile ourselves to the probability that whatever power establishes security and order will send taxgatherers to collect something more than the cost."

-On Cicero:

"Not since Plato has wisdom worn such prose."

"Next to Cicero, [Seneca] was the most lovable hypocrite in history."

-On human nature:

"The constitution of man always rewrites the constitutions of states."

"[I]t is as difficult to forgive forgiveness as it is to forgive those whom we have injured."

"Sanity, like government, needs checks and balances; no mortal can be omnipotent and sane."

"[O]nly youth knows better than twenty centuries."

- On the patterns of history:

"Democracy had fallen by Plato's formula: liberty had become license, and chaos begged an end to liberty.  . . .  Dictatorship was unavoidable."

"The very peace that Augustus had organized, and the security that he had won for Rome, had loosened the fibre of the people.  No one wanted to enlist in the army, or recognize the inexorable periodicity of war.  Luxury had taken the place of simplicity, sexual license was replacing parentage; by its own exhausted will the great race was beginning to die."

"When great men stoop to sentiment, the world grows fonder of them; but when sentiment governs policy, empires totter."

"In every epoch something is decaying and something is growing."

"History, like the press, misrepresents life because it loves the exceptional and shuns the newsless career of an honest man or the quiet routine of a normal day."

"Nothing reaches maturity except through the fulfillment of its own nature."

Balance

Durant's writing reveals him to be a man of great Aristotelian medians.  Balance seems to be the governing principle of his writing, which goes to some length to avoid extremist positions.  Even in describing the worst and most notorious of Rome's post Augustan despots, for example, Durant gives them credit, where it is due, for their administrative achievements:  "There was something good in the worst of these rulers -- devoted statemanship in Tiberius, a charming gaiety in Caligula, a plodding wisdom in Claudius, an exuberant aestheticism in Nero, a stern competence in Domitian.  Behind the adulteries and the murders an administrative organization had formed which provided, through all this period, a high order of provincial government."  Durant suggests that the the most salacious details from accounts of the more tyrannical leaders' lives, as written by ancient Roman historians with political axes to grind, should be taken with some grains of salt; and argues that the circumstances of the despots' lives, explains their behavior as almost rational:  "The emperors themselves were the chief victims of their power. . . . Seven of these ten men met a violent end; nearly all of them were unhappy, surrounded by conspiracy, dishonesty, and intrigue, trying to govern a world from the anarchy of a home.  They indulged their appetites because they knew how brief was their omnipotence; they lived in the daily horror of men condemned to an early and sudden death.  They went under because they were above the law; they became less than men because power had made them gods."  Still, he rejoices when a sensible emperor now and again comes along, in the middle of a series of arbitrary and capricious despots, beginning his account of Vespasian's reign with the remark: "What a relief to meet a man of sense, ability, and honor!"

The book's final chapters are a description of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and the founding of Christianity, in a Hellenized world which was bound to influence its doctrine.  (Tad R. Callister's The Inevitable Apostasy,  quotes frequently from this volume, in support of the Mormon sense that Christianity soon became unmoored from revelation and too influenced by the philosophies of men. Durant takes that idea even further than most Latter-day Saints would be willing to do, arguing for example that the Gospel of John is an essentially Platonic, rather then Hebraic, document, suggesting that the influence of Greece arose even while the canonical scriptures of Christianity were being transcribed.)  When writing on the life of Christ, the missions of Paul, and the founding of the Christian faith, Durant writes as a non-believing scholar, but not as a scoffing skeptic.  He offers, for example, a psychosomatic explanation for Jesus's miracles.  However, he rejects the claim of Higher Criticism that Jesus never even lived, noting that this theory would require the early Christians to have created the Jesus personality in one generation, which he finds absurd; and agreeing with another historian's suggestion that, if the tests against Christ's historicity were applied with equal fervor to other historical figures, they would erase from the record many of history's most prominent persons.  He accepts the likely accuracy of most of the Gospels on the grounds that writers of inspirational fiction would have kept out the squabbling among Christ's apostles, and Christ's agonized query from the Cross as to why he had been forsaken. The religious reader, like myself, will not be strengthened in their testimony by this book.  But they will also not be weakened, nor offended. Indeed, I came away from my reading grateful for the much deeper understanding the book provided me of the historical context of Paul's epistles, and the rift between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians which was occurring while they were written, which I find helpful to understanding the doctrinal points Paul was asserting.

The Fall of Rome

Political observers have, for centuries, looked to Rome's fall as a source for prescient observations about their own society's shortcomings.  Durant makes no such attempts at modern political application, but he does describe various causes of Roman decline, leaving the future reader of some declining world to draw his own parallels.  Rome actually went through two falls: the fall of the Roman Republic into class strife and civil war, leading to the restoration of stability and order via the establishment of an Empire led by autocratic military dictators; and the subsequent fall of that Empire itself, a fall which Durant notes lasted three centuries, longer than many nations' entire history, from their rise to their decline.

Here are some passages on the decline of the Roman Republic, implicating all of the usual suspects: easy money, luxury, immorality, corruption.  Certainly glad nothing like this is happening anywhere near me:

"As currency multiplied . . . the owners of realty in the capital tripled their fortunes without stirring a muscle . . . .  Industry lagged while commerce flourished. . . .  Rome was becoming not the industrial or commercial, but the financial and political, center of the white man's world. . . .
[T]he Roman patriciate and upper middle class passed with impressive speed from stoic simplicity to reckless luxury; . . . .   Houses became larger as families became smaller; . . . .  [T]he old simple diet gave way to long and heavy meals . . . .  Exotic foods were indispensable to social position or pretense. . . . Drinking increased; goblets had to be large and preferably of gold; wine was less diluted, sometimes not at all.  . . . .

The individual became rebelliously conscious of himself as against the state, the son as against the father, the woman as against the man. . . .  Prostitution flourished.  Homosexualism was stimulated by contact with Greece and Asia;  . . . .  Women . . . divorced their husbands or occasionally poisoned them . . . .  Cato and Polybius . . . noted a decline of population and the inability of the state to raise such armies as had risen to meet Hannibal.  The new generation, having inherited world mastery, had no time or inclination to defend it. . . . [T]he Roman landowner disappeared now that ownership was being concentrated in a few families and a proletariat without stake in the country filled the slums of Rome. Men became brave by proxy; they crowded the amphitheater to see bloody games.  . . .

In the upper classes manners became more refined as morals were relaxed. . . .  Everyone longed for money, everyone judged or was judged in terms of money.  Contractors cheated on such a scale that many government properties . . . had to be abandoned because the lessees exploited the workers and mulcted the state . . . .  [The] aristocracy . . . accepted presents and liberal bribes for bestowing its favor upon men or states, . . . .  It became a common thing for magistrates to embezzle public funds and an uncommon thing to see them prosecuted.
Marriage, which had once been a lifelong economic union, was now among a hundred thousand Romans a passing adventure of no great spiritual significance, a loose contract for the mutual provision of physiological conveniences or political aid."

And here are some passages on the decline of the Empire.  Once again, any similarities to times being lived in by the reader are likely purely coincidental:

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within.  The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian. . . .  The holocausts of war and revolution, and . . . the operation of contraception, abortion, and infanticide had [their] effect. . . . The dole weakened the poor, luxury weakened the rich; . . . .  [Immigration occurred too quickly to allow] time [for] a leisurely assimilation [in which the immigrants] might have reinvigorated the classic culture . . . .  [Instead], the rapidly breeding [immigrants] could not understand the classic culture, did not accept it, did not transmit it; . . . were mostly of a mind to destroy that culture; the Romans, possessing it, sacrificed it to the comforts of sterility.  Rome was conquered not by barbarian invasion from without, but by barbarian multiplication within.  Moral and esthetic standards were lowered by the magnetism of the mass; and sex ran riot in freedom while political liberty decayed.

The political causes of decay were rooted in one fact--that increasing despotism destroyed the citizen's civic sense and dried up statesmanship at its source. Powerless [politically] the Roman lost interest in government and became absorbed in his business, his amusements, his legion, or his individual salvation.  Patriotism and . . . religion had been bound together, and now together decayed."

Surely none of that sounds familiar to modern ears.

Still, there is room for hope in Durant's writing, even on Rome's decline and fall, perhaps explaining why that fall took so long: "Around the immoral hub of any society is a spreading wheel of wholesome life, in which the threads of tradition, the moral imperatives of religion, the economic compulsions of the family, the instinctive love and care of children, the watchfulness of women and policemen, suffice to keep us publicly decent and moderately sane."

And perhaps, in any event, it is not the fall of Rome that we should fear most.  But, rather, its new rise.  The fact of the matter is that, for all of their contributions to science, art, literature, and the theory of law and jurisprudence, and for all of the graceful prose, poetry, and philosophy offered up by their most noble citizens, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, and for all of the best traits which marked the best of Roman society, as outlined in the final pages of this book, the Romans were a brutal and in many ways a despicable people.  Maybe everyone else was back then as well, and maybe the order they imposed upon their time allowed the growth of a stable society which would shun their excesses, and embrace the beauties of Christianity. But even still, their excesses were notably horrifying.  The Romans were politically corrupt; practiced the horrors of slavery and infanticide and pederasty without any apparent moral qualm; entertained themselves with bloodthirsty spectacles which were even worse than our most violent horror films, because they were real; and engaged in war with a relish and callousness difficult for us to fathom. This rottenness in the Roman soul was true even in the days of the Republic, or the years in which they were ruled by benevolent monarchs (Durant quotes Gibbon on the pinnacle of society reached before the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius: "If a man were called upon to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would without hesitation name that which elapsed from the accession of Nerva to the death of Aurelius.  Their united reigns are possibly the only period of history in which the happiness of a great people was the sole object of government.").  The story of the Roman Republic's dealings with Carthage immediately before and during the utter destruction of that City by Roman troops is, simply, horrifying.  And in the most prosperous and peaceful years of the Empire, the Colosseum continued to be a place of vileness and violence.  Thus, as much as I loved this book, and consider it one of the most intriguing and fascinating volumes I will ever read, I must disagree with the author's final, elegiac statement, in which he wishes that Rome may rise again.

I certainly hope it will not.  Indeed, if the book taught me anything, it is to treasure and be grateful for our current relatively stable and free society, in the knowledge that such societies are the exception not the rule, and that while our society is in obvious decline, there is still some chance its ultimate fall may at least be postponed. Historically, this book caused me to reflect, slavery is more to be expected than freedom; poverty more to be expected than prosperity; greed and stupidity in political leaders more to be expected than wisdom and beneficence; corruption in government and commerce more to be expected than honesty; vice more to be expected than virtue; and war more to be expected than peace.  It would be wonderful if the best of Rome could rise again, and her worst stay in the past. But I'm not holding my breath.  

Endnotes

1. Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different  Chapter 6 "The Relevance and Irrelevance of John Adams" (The Penguin Press 2006)

2. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution p. 23 (Harvard University Press 1967, 1992).

3. Id. pp. 24-26.

4. Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of America  Chapter 2 "The Legacy of Rome in the American Revolution" (Penguin Books 2011)

5.   Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different  Chapter 1 "The Greatness of George Washington" (The Penguin Press 2006)

6. An attempt to learn more about the classical world could start chronologically, with Greece.  But trying to understand that era by slogging through Greek history, drama, and literature, is a bit like trying to get into Tolkien via the Silmarillion.  There are elements of the Greek mind that are simply . . . alien.  Try for example to read some Greek play, like The Libation Bearers, which might as well have been written by Martians, and you'll see what I mean.  Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, or Plutarch's Lives, by contrast, are remarkably accessible to a modern reader.

Back to the Future. Welcome to the Post-Christian West

Pre-Christianity

In the year 65 A.D., the Roman Emperor Nero got in a row with his second wife, Poppea, and viciously kicked her in the stomach.  Poppaea was pregnant and died from her injuries. The Roman historian Cassius Dio records that, grief-stricken by the loss of his murdered beloved, Nero sought a replacement.  He found a youth named Sporus who he felt resembled Poppaea, castrated him, "married" him in a formal and public ceremony, including all of the customary recitations hoping for progeny, and, “used him in every way like a woman.”  This might have been Western civilization’s first same sex marriage, except that Nero, at the time of the wedding, was already married to another man, a former slave named Pythagoras.  As historical precedents go, this doesn't have quite the romantic resonance of Adam and Eve. But I'm sure the decorations were lovely, and that the bakers all knew better than to object. The pre-Christian Romans, like the post-Christian moderns, found the concepts of male, female, and marriage, to be loose, subjective, and fluid.  Or at least, when their rulers told them to think that way, they got on board if they knew what was good for them.

Nero’s views on marriage never really stuck.  Perhaps because they violated the prior understanding of what marriage was, and what marriage was for, as previously held by earlier generations of Greeks and Romans and every other civilization on earth, and perhaps because a new religion, little noticed by Nero until he needed someone to blame for the fire which destroyed much of Rome, was growing in influence, and would, some generations later, become the majority religion of the Western world which emerged from Roman ashes. That new religion, Christianity, would have very strict views about marriage, which would eventually come to be adopted by the West, making marriage between a man and a woman the centerpiece of the Western world's long-held child-centered and family-centered sexual ethic.

But Christianity's integration with and influence upon Western culture has now officially ended, and if we want to know what life is going to be like in the future, in our new non-Christian, but nevertheless Western, world, going back in time to study ancient Rome is one good place to start.  For the pre-Christian Romans resembled today’s post-Christian moderns in other ways as well. They were comfortable with a form of allegedly Republican government in which the Senate, as a polite fiction, still pretended to exercise its former legislative functions, but had in fact, since the time of Julius Caesar, ceded all real authority to the Emperor, whose pronouncements they rubber-stamped into law.  In similar fashion, modern state legislatures, and our federal congress, still like to pretend that Americans live in a democratic republic, but have long since ceded all real power to a judicial oligarchy, over the strenuous objections of earlier American Catos such as Jefferson and Lincoln, and to a President who makes law by executive order.  Other similarities abound.  Like Roman Emperors, who controlled the doctrines of the official State religion, our own Presidential office holders and candidates have recently become quite comfortable in making pronouncements on what churches should teach, with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama having recently lectured us on the need for a change in religious beliefs on subjects such as abortion and same-sex marriage.  Also, like Nero, our own judicial oligarchy gets a kick out of putting us in our place from time to time, and reminding us that our pretense to government by the consent of the governed has long since gone out of fashion, and that the judiciary's votes are the only votes which actually matter.    

Post-Christianity

Our judicial overseers most recently reminded us of how things really work in their decision in the case of Obergefell v. Hodges, issued June 26th, 2015.  Obergefell overturned a 1972 decision, Baker v. Nelson, in which even the Court which was otherwise liberal and arrogant enough to give us Roe v. Wade, took all of one sentence to explain that the U.S. Constitution does not mandate same sex marriage, and that claims to the contrary do not even raise a serious federal question. The proverbial toad has been in the increasingly hot water for a long time since then though, and its brain is long since boiled.  

Of course, what happened last week was more than just yet another act of raw political power, exercised by Judges supposedly occupying a non-political branch of government, who insist that their own personal policy preferences are Constitutional mandates, even with respect to subjects on which the Constitution is silent.  It was also the culminating act in the sexual revolution, which began in the 1960s, and has brought our nation such happy statistics as an illegitimacy rate which increased from less than 10% to almost 50% within my lifetime, a youth suicide rate that has increased threefold since 1950, and a welfare state whose non-discretionary expenditures now exceed 100% of the annual GDP.  

But what happened last week was more even than that.  What happened last week was, also, a final and culminating act in a drama which has unfolded over a much longer period of time: Call it the death of Judeo-Christian America if you will, or call it the official displacement of religiosity with secularism, or call it the creation of an official American Establishment of Religion: the Church of Secular Humanism, whose sermons and homilies are taught in movie theaters (hence the steeples in the architecture of so many Cineplexes) and written on Supreme Court letterhead.  Call it what you will.  What is clear is that Western civilization is now post-Christian, and, in many ways, closer in spirit to the pre-Christian Western civilization of Rome, than to the Christian era which just ended.  That Christian era began in roughly the third Century A.D.; flourished most successfully in an America governed by Madison's vision (as set forth in his Memorial and Remonstrances against Religious Assessments) of a secular government, distinct from and holding no authority over faith, but nevertheless recognizing that the demands and rights of faith were "precedent, both in order of time and in degree of obligation, to the claims of" that distinct government; and finally ended, and was given its funeral, on June 26th, 2015.

To be sure, just as there were additional battles and skirmishes after Yorktown, there is still some mopping-up to do.  The Obergefell decision will not be the final cultural skirmish in the sexual revolution or the battle of precedence between the secular and the divine, but it is nevertheless the decisive moment. What follows next will be ugly but is largely preordained. Churches must be emptied, either of their adherents or of their doctrines.  This will be easy in a world where the secular left holds all the fortresses: publishing, the news and entertainment media, universities, government, and the governmental and quasi-governmental bureaucracies which license citizens in their professions, accredit colleges, and oversee public education. It will be extremely easy to stomp down on dissenters in a world where, as a very non-Madisonian New Mexico Judicial Oligarch recently explained, the loss of religious freedom is now the “cost of citizenship.” If people of faith fail to resist, the mopping up effort will not take long.  

But there is still some cause for hope, albeit distant, at least for those of us who take a long view of history. Everything the secular left is about to impose upon American Christians --the editorial attacks against reactionary religious forces in the newspapers, the inability of a believer to get into the right college, or be accredited or licensed in her profession if she graduates from the wrong college, the co-opting of private civic organizations, such as the BSA– has been done by secular leftists before, in Eastern Europe between 1947 and 1949. Whether it will get even worse after that, here, as it did after 1950, there, remains to be seen. But if you want to know the broad outlines of what's coming, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum’s amazing book, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, needs to be put on your must-read list.  Cold War Eastern Europe, like ancient Rome, is another helpful subject to review in analyzing what a non-Christian Western society will look like.  But the story of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe brings us some glimmer of hope: the Catholics of Poland refused to give the government and the Party the same legitimacy, in their hearts, that they gave to their Church, and in the end, after whole lifetimes were lived under militantly secular oppression, freedom was restored.  So follow up Applebaum’s book by reading, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, by John O’Sullivan, which tells the end of the story, and may give you hope that totalitarian left-wing secularism can be endured long enough to someday be defeated by faith. Give these books to your grandchildren, to read in secret in the basement. 

What We Have Lost

In the meantime, it might be worthwhile to contemplate what we have lost, as the hope for its restoration may give us the motivation to fight on, if only in secret, in hopes for a better tomorrow. Herewith, a non-exhaustive list of key principles which Post-Christian Western civilization has decided to forego, and the consequences of these losses to ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren: 

Loss 1: The Abandonment of Christian Sexual Morality and the Best Interests of Children which Were Advanced Thereby.  

I have written elsewhere on the history of the decline and fall of the Christian sexual ethic, which displaced and prevented (well, . . . at least postponed) Nero’s vision from becoming that of the entire Western world: 


http://www.mytakesonthat.com/2013/09/is-americas-decline-and-fall-inevitable_9703.html

Suffice it for present purposes to note that the Christian sexual ethic which has governed the outlook of humankind in the West for most of the past 17 centuries could be thought of as an arch which protected the children who were sheltered beneath it.  Christian sexual morality performed this function by ensuring that the bonding right of every child to know and be loved and reared by her own mother and father, would never be intentionally taken away, except when in the best interests of the child, and not merely to gratify the desires of any adult.  The keystone of that child-protecting arch was conjugal marriage between a man and a woman, and with that keystone removed, the arch has fallen, and the children previously sheltered by its protections will be the victims of that calamity, deprived of either their mother or (almost always) their father, and told that they must not only accept and adapt to this loss, but may not mourn it, and must instead celebrate it.  It seems that every generation perpetuates its own new lies about the separate but supposedly equal institutions it establishes for its children, in the name of what the adults want to do.   

Loss 2: The Loss of Respect for Objective Reality   

The West advanced beyond other corners of the globe based on its discovery and implementation of the scientific method: observe those material realities which are capable of observation, hypothesize about those realities, test the hypothesis, determine if the test’s outcome can be recreated and is therefore demonstrative of the true nature of that which is being tested.  Niall Ferguson has called the scientific method one of Western civilization's "Killer Apps", which led to the West's ascendance over the rest of the globe in the past five centuries. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/civilization-west-and-rest/killer-apps/

But science requires working and living in the world of objective reality.  And that is no longer permissible.  

Instead, we now live in a world where words have no objective meaning, and a reader's personal understanding of a text trumps the author's intention, not just in poetry, but also in law. Subjective reality now trumps all sorts of objective facts. A white woman can insist that she is black. An able bodied person can insist that he is disabled.  And Bruce Jenner can insist he is a woman, despite the evidence of his chromosomes, his anatomy, and the children he has sired. Such fantasies would be no cause for any real alarm if they were maintained privately.  But when a United States Governmental Agency, such as OSHA, declares that the nation's private employers must jump through the same looking glass, as they implement restroom policies and assess the diversity, rather than the competence, of their staff, something has gone amiss.  And woe be to the man who fails to prove his virtue by keeping silent, and instead ventures to question whether the new subjective emperor has any clothes.

The mindset can best be understood by studying the history and meaning of the left's fascinating new term: "Cisgendered" which is used to describe a person who “identifies” with the sex she was “assigned” at birth. The word "assigned" is the key to the imagery meant to be invoked.  You are not male or female in any objective sense.  Rather, shortly after your birth, an aging white male member of the patriarchy in a lab coat walked into your nursery, and, while you were innocently sleeping, arbitrarily and capriciously “assigned” you your sex, cackling away as he wrote it on your Birth Certificate.  The Bastard.  

And so we have school districts in North America implementing policies preventing teachers from using words like boys, girls, men, women, or their accompanying gender pronouns. Will there be exemptions for biology teachers, so they can teach the basics of human sexual reproduction?  I wouldn't count on it.  Allowing biology teachers to teach the basics of human sexual reproduction would destroy the whole point of banning gender pronouns in the first place.  Heaven forbid that young biologically informed Patrick, upon meeting Heather and her two mommies, might stumble upon the depraved thought that Heather doesn't really have two mommies, and must have a daddy somewhere, who has been treated as expendable, and of whose presence Heather has been deprived.  

Loss 3: The Loss of Respect for Faith, and of Legal Protections for the Faithful. 

Science is not the only way to learn about truth.  There are also immaterial realities for which we rely upon revelation, rather than observation.  As Dallin H. Oaks, put it, "we believe there are two dimensions of knowledge, material and spiritual.  We seek knowledge in the material dimension by scientific inquiry and in the spiritual dimension by revelation.” 
http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/fundamental-premises-of-our-faith-talk-given-by-elder-dallin-h-oaks-at-harvard-law-school

As G.K. Chesterton (another author whose books will be vital reading in our children's secret basements) similarly explained: "The man who cannot believe in his own senses, and the man who cannot believe in anything else, are both insane."  They are both boxed in a cell of their own devising, said Chesterton, on which can be written "He believes in himself."   This is a perfect description of the modern West, which exalts the subjective, and rejects both objective reality and religious faith as legitimate sources of truth, in favor of personal opinion.  Justice Kennedy made the exaltation of subjective opinion official in his notorious magical mystery passage from Planned Parenthood v. Casey: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."   Chesterton would recognize this as a long-winded way of saying "he believes in himself."  Where can we turn for truth? To the Bible?  To Aristotle? To science?  To the Declaration of Independence?  To the Constitution?  No, no, no, no, and no. To one's own personal subjective conceptions and opinions.  

And if one's own personal conceptions, enshrined as the heart of Constitutional liberty, are offended by another's religious beliefs, when publicly exercised?  Then of course, the latter must give way to the former.  (The First Amendment speaks of the "free exercise" of religion, but certain politicians and jurists are increasingly uncomfortable with that terminology, and prefer to employ the phrase "freedom of worship" not of "exercise". The majority in Obergefell for example, in claiming that their decision would not unduly impact faith, made no reference to free exercise. Perhaps some words really do have objective meanings after all, and must therefore be ignored and avoided.)  The great analogy repeatedly made and employed by the same-sex marriage movement has been a comparison to the civil rights movement.  It is a false and an evil analogy.  But it has been accepted.  And that means the rest of the story will play out as follows: If you oppose same-sex marriage, or did so before the Supreme Court’s recent diktat, you are deserving of the same kind of scorn which we have heretofore reserved for members of the Ku Klux Klan. Your right to dissent, to speak out, to exercise your own religious beliefs in how you conduct your own personal or business affairs is simply not worth preserving.  You may go to Church, if you must, but what you say and do there must be kept within the walls of your own Church and your own home, and never acted upon any where else.  Contra Madison, the demands of the secular state now take precedence over the demands of faith.  Step into the street, and you must not only tolerate, but celebrate and perpetuate and embrace your neighbor's personal concepts of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of marriage, of gender, and of the mystery of human life (so long as those personal concepts are not based in religion).  Or else.  

Loss 4: The Loss of Checks, Balances, Separation of Powers, and the Rule of Law.  

We now live in a nation which still calls itself a democratic republic, but is in fact only governed as such with and by the leave of the other two branches of government, when they find it convenient.   And when they do not find it convenient? The Executive branch issues Executive Orders, and its vast bureaucracy issues kabillions of pages of annual federal regulations, to override the laws passed through merely democratic processes.  And the Judicial branch no longer even pretends that it must tie itself to the text of the Constitution as understood and intended at the time the provision in question was written or amended, to validate their decision to strike down a law they happen to personally disagree with, as supposedly Unconstitutional.  Instead, they strike down disfavored laws based on how they the Justices determine the words of the Constitution should be read today, in a process of perpetual judicial amendment.  We claim to honor the rule of law, but in fact honor the rule of lawyers, especially lawyers in robes. When Judges act like legislators, real legislators, and the voters who put them there, become obsolete.  And when men are governed by laws written in words which judges and bureaucrats can read as meaning something entirely different than what the words actually say (because words mean whatever, subjectively, a judge or a bureaucrat wants them to mean) then men are not governed by laws at all, nor by the elected legislators who enacted them, but are governed instead by sympathies and emotions and refs with money on the game.  

It has been said that bad laws are among the chief enemies of the rule of law.  So are bad lawyers, especially the ones wearing robes.  I was not and am not a fan of Cliven Bundy and his Jacobin resistance to the rule of law.  But every time the judiciary makes stuff up (which they did not do in Bundy's case, but have done in many others), they encourage more such Jacobin resistance among a populace which cannot fathom why they should be bound by laws if their government is not.    

http://www.mytakesonthat.com/2014/04/what-lance-armstrong-and-cliven-bundy.html

The modern citizen agrees or disagrees with a Supreme Court Decision depending on whether or not he likes the outcome, not based on whether the outcome was in fact compelled by the language and intent of the Constitution.  

Our world no longer employs or understands the analogy of different hats, such as: When I go into the voting booth I am wearing a different hat than when I as a Judge preside over a trial.  When I go into the voting booth I am wearing a different hat than when I as a journalist report the news. When I go into the voting booth I am wearing a different hat than when I as a college professor teach history.  A nation without hats is a nation without separation of powers.  A nation without hats is no longer made up of three governmental branches and a fourth journalistic estate to act as checks and balances upon each other.  The root source of this loss of hats is easily found: the self-anointed's belief that the virtuous cause of social justice (however they are defining it this week) is more important than the ends utilized to obtain it.  The ends they seek are so righteous and so virtuous and so important, that any means justify these noble ends: Gay marriage is more important than the proper role of the judiciary in a constitutional republic.  And so are a lot of other things. Getting a favored Presidential candidate elected is more important than practicing honest and objective journalism about any subject which might discomfit the cause.  And so are a lot of other things.  Telling the next generation what to think, and training them up to be warriors for social justice is more important than teaching University students facts and how to think.  And so are a lot of other things.   Challenging the traditions of the patriarchy is more important than a federal government which is sovereign solely as to its own limited and enumerated powers.  And so are a lot of other things. Shutting people up who do not think the way they are supposed to think, so we can silence them, rather than debate them, is more important than the First Amendment.  And so are a lot of other things.  

We have forgotten some of history's most important lessons: that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions; that no matter how virtuous the ends are which a beneficent dictator may seek, or even realize, relying on dictatorial power to achieve such ends leaves the populace at risk of the evil ends which the next dictator may use his power to achieve. A Marcus Aurelius will inevitably, eventually, be succeeded by a Commodus.  The same judicial power grab which gave us Obergefell previously gave us Dred Scott.  The doctrine of ends which justify procedurally improper means is fit for Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Pol Pot’s Cambodia or Fidel Castro’s Cuba.  But not for America as its institutions were once understood by anyone who had passed 5th grade civics. The whole point of the clunky procedural safeguards, separation of powers, and checks and balances in our Constitutional system is to differentiate America from nations where the government's most powerful officer or officers, can do whatever they want to, just because they think it's a marvelous idea.  To live in a world where any officer of the government can do whatever it thinks would be a marvelous idea, is to live in pre-Christian Rome or post WWII Eastern Europe. As post-Christian America becomes increasingly similar to such places, it won't just be the elderly believers in our culture's former Judeo-Christian values who find it an unfortunate place to live.  It will be everyone who holds no government office. 

Christianity and Society

Each of the losses described above are, in their own way, based on the loss of a Judeo-Christian frame of reference.  

The Christian not only believes in a Child-centric sexual morality, and a Government which protects his rights to religious liberty.  He also has little use for placing too much power in the hands of too few elites.  It is no mere coincidence that the French Revolution, steeped in anti-Clericalism, rejected a system of separated powers which might have checked and balanced the new regime's leaders, and prevented the bloodshed of the Terror into which that revolution fell as it consumed its own children.  Or that America rejected not only the Anti-Christianity of Thomas Paine, but also his call for a unitary government led by a single assembly.  

The Christian understands that humanity is fallen, and that a Utopian Eden may not be reclaimed by human efforts, but only by divine grace in God's due time. This tragic understanding makes him suspicious of major societal transformations, in an attempt to build a tower to God, or create a new Utopian Eden through the efforts of man. Such societal transformations inevitably come with unintended consequences, far worse than whatever evil is sought to be remedied through their implementation. Knowing that man is not an angel, but is fallen, and prone to corruption, the Christian citizen fears the evil the all-powerful can do, more than he cherishes the hope of the good they might accomplish, and favors dispersed and separated powers.  He doubts the ability of any one fallen man, or few fallen oligarchs, to govern wisely and show the way to a better future, unrestrained by tradition or majority opinion. History has proven the Christian view to be correct.  But a Nation which no longer reads history, and gets its values from cable television rather than Judeo-Christian scripture, has set a new course. 

Again from G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy:  "The one specially and peculiarly un-Christian idea is the idea . . . that the man should rule who feels that he can rule.  Whatever else is Christian, this is heathen.  If our faith comments on government at all, its comment must be this--that the man should rule who does NOT think that he can rule. . . .   [W]e have not got to crown the exceptional man who knows he can rule.  Rather we must crown the much more exceptional man who knows he can't."   From this perspective, the most post-Christian characteristic of the modern Supreme Court is not their views on sexual morality, or their ruling on the meaning of marriage, but their lack of judicial restraint in overturning laws they don't like, without any constitutional basis, on questions where the Constitution is silent.  They are not post-Christian merely because their morality is post-Christian. They are post-Christian because of their certainty that they are fit to make these decisions free from democratic restraint, check, or balance.  They are post-Christian because they are far too comfortable in their crowns.  

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1945-1956, by Anne Applebaum

This was the perfect book to read after completing The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, telling, as it does, the rest of the story, of what happened after Hitler's death and the fall of Nazi Germany, to the Eastern European nations "liberated" by the Soviet Union.  The story of how the Soviet Union sought, from the years 1945, until the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956, to convert the citizens of East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the Ukraine into committed communists is absolutely fascinating, and highly disturbing.

They tried, at first, under the pretense of cooperating with the other WWII Allies, and perhaps even believing that their ideas deserved to be implemented on their own merits, to have the people of these nations "choose" communist leaders (somewhat) democratically, through elections which were only partially corrupt. When that proved a complete failure, and it became clear that the citizens of Eastern Europe didn't want what they were selling, the Communists quickly gave up all pretenses of democracy (though they still utilized the word, as well as many others) and banned opposition political parties, took over the control of all private organizations, starting with scouts and other youth organizations, formally banned the newspapers they had previously simply refused to provide with paper, and took over formal control of the radio, the remaining newspapers (utilized to editorialize about the evils of reactionary religion), previously private businesses, large and small, and implemented their command economy and totalitarian political system.  Soon, soon, soon, they told the cooperative people (the ones who weren't being arrested and sent to the Gulag or shot) prosperity will come.  It never did, while in Western Europe, the economies flourished.  And after 44 years, the Soviet Communists finally gave up and went home.

I have a relative who is a Marxist professor of Latin American studies at a University in the United States. He told me once that Marxism had never been tested or tried in its correct form, so there was no way to actually claim that its theories had been proven false.  The next time someone tells me that, I will use this book . . . to hit them repeatedly in the nose.

One positive thing must though be stated in favor of the Soviet Union's occupation of Eastern Europe, which I learned from reading this book back to back with the Rise and Fall.  When they finally conceded the reality that their experiment was an unsustainable failure, and withdrew from the nations of Eastern Europe, the Soviets did at least leave behind living citizens, psychologically traumatized from the decades long effort to kill their souls, to be sure, but still alive, residing in nations that were at least sufficiently established to be withdrawn from.

Had the Nazis won WWII, and fully implemented the plans they had already begun to execute while the war was still waging in the early 1940s, there would be no Poland, no Hungary, no Czechoslovakia for anyone to have left in 1989, and no native populations of living Polish, Hungarian, Czechoslovakian or Ukrainian citizens to turn their countries back over to.  Hitler's plan was to leave the peoples of these nations completely destitute, and reduce the "inferior" slavic peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia to absolute slavery.  The vast majority of them were to be slaughtered, or simply left to die in the inevitable post-War famines.  As for the rest, they were to be denied education.  They were to be denied religion.  And they were to be enslaved, either to farm their own prior lands for the benefit of Germany, or as imported slaves living within Germany. The Soviet Union at least pretended to be striving to build a better world for the people of these countries, and many Soviets may have actually believed in the propaganda. After all, communism was a powerful idea, which continues to deceive many otherwise intelligent people even today.

I've always been bothered that "victory" in WWII still left the peoples of Eastern Europe (including Poland, on whose behalf Britain had declared war against Germany in the first place) enslaved by a foreign dictatorial power.  So, understanding the difference between what was offered by the Nazis and what was offered by the Soviets does at least give me some comfort.  Communism was, at least, the lesser of the two evils.

Still, Communism has ultimately left behind even more corpses than Naziism did, if not all of them in Eastern Europe.  Its beliefs and ideology, and why they are false and why they fail, needs to be understood.  So too, how leftists seek to dominate the institutions of a society in order to propagate their ideology must also be understood.  For the cold war between atheist collectivists and religious believers in free enterprise never really ended.  It just became more subtle, and moved, geographically, from Berlin to the United States of America.  It's a war that will never be completely over, because it is, essentially and at its core, the same war described in the Book of Revelation and the Pearl of Great Price.  With the same competing ideologies.  As a wise man once said, in history, the sets and costumes may change, but the plot never does.  This book is an important contribution to our knowledge of left-wing totalitarianism and it deserves to be far more widely read than it will be, and to be promoted far more vigorously than it has been (by our own leftist-dominated educational, media, and similar institutions).  It is dedicated "to those Eastern Europeans who refused to live within a lie."  I greatly fear there will continue to be a great need for such people in the future.  If we can find them.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer

What can be said about this book?

It deals with some of the most important subjects a person can study in this lifetime: (a) the causes of WWII, in simple numerical terms, the single most catastrophic event in human history, causing the death of 60 million people, more than any other plague, war, or catastrophe on record; (b) the attempted, and almost successful, genocide of the Jewish people in the world's most horrifyingly bureaucratic holocaust; (c) the simply incredible methods and means by which, in one of Western Civilization's great stronghold's, a government and a ruler who were dedicated, wholly and openly and overtly, to monomaniacal evil, came, through bluff, aggression, and dark luck, to seize and then maintain absolute power over an enthralled populace; (d) the equally incredible methods and means by which that government and that ruler, aided and abetted at every turn by its own neighbors' greedy participation, or war-wary appeasement, took control over a large section of central Europe without having to fire a single shot, in a series of coups which could have been turned back at any time by a single act of intestinal fortitude on the part of France or Britain, had they been willing to exercise it; (e) the waging of a total and complete war, for the purpose of killing off and/or enslaving the "lesser" Slavic peoples of Europe; (f) the abject ruination of the lands and people of Poland and other Eastern European states as they were first divvied up by the Germans and the Russians, and then used as their battlefields; (f) the nature of totalitarian government; (e) the setting of the scene for the establishment of the iron curtain and the beginning of the cold war.

The book tells this story from a very focused perspective.  We don't learn much about what is going on in the U.S. or in Britain or the Soviet Union during these years, except as they relate to events in or caused by Germany.  It is Germany's history we are learning, but not from a friendly source.  William Shirer does not pretend to be writing a detached, objective, or academic history.  He is telling an amazing story and doing so as accurately and as compellingly as he can. That's not to say he is sloppy or breaks any rules.  If the specifics of an event are disputed, he'll give us more than one account and tell us the sources and offer his own take on which version may be the most accurate and why.  But he is not interested in academic debates about economic or philosophical causes and effects. He is a working journalist, who was living in and writing from Berlin during most of these events, and he is willing to relate his own personal reactions, and to describe his perception of the German people's moods and responses.  He takes sides.  He despairs at the stupidity of the allies at certain key moments.  He is appalled by the Germans.  (When translated, the book was not well received in Germany.  Its author was accused of being anti-German by West Germany's prime minister. The book clearly discomfited the German people, who wanted to believe that Nazi-ism was a phenomenon which could arise among any people, given the right conditions, and was not a peculiarly German evil.  The German people may have been right about this  -- that is an argument for another day. But the point here is that Shirer tells a great story, because he isn't afraid to call it like he sees it.)  

Most importantly, Shirer did his homework.  He dug through the Nazi journals, diaries, and official but secret histories in the archives which the allies seized at the end of WWII, rifled through briefly for the trials at Nuremberg, and then stuck in a warehouse somewhere until Shirer, Indiana-Jones-like, came along to dig in and find their treasures.  We know what key German leaders were thinking before and after the major events.  But our narrator, having lived also through these events, can still get us emotional about them.  It is the best of both worlds: a personal account, with footnotes.  The book is a page-turner.

Yes.  It's very, very, long.  Any given chapter could have been made, with a few more paragraphs, into its own short book, which would have stood as one of the most detailed accounts ever published of any particular portion of this history.  Yes, even though it was always a compelling page-turning read, I set it aside for a few months at least twice to read other books that were of more immediate interest to me in a particular time period, and then came back to finish it later.  But that may have had more to do with the book's subject matter than its length.  The book deals with a great deal of darkness.  Sometimes I just needed to read something else for a while, instead of a book that made me want to puke.

There are some books that I feel each of my children should read. Some books that I think it would be wonderful if every American could read.  This is a book that everyone on the planet ought to read, at some point in their lives.  It's that important to know what happened here and to come to terms with it.

Is America’s Decline and Fall Inevitable? A Pessimistic View of the Current State of America. Part I: Introduction

My reading of late has been incredibly pessimistic. But, just as third and fourth century Romans had reason for pessimism as they viewed the state of their society and warily meditated on the barbarian hordes beyond their gates, there is, today, real cause for pessimism.  It is unfortunately all too easy to conclude that Western Civilization is about to see another historic fall.  If so, then, as America, not Rome, is now the center of the west, the fall of the U.S may be where the decline will happen most dramatically.

The portrait of a society on the brink of ruin: 

-U.S. Debt as a percentage of GDP: 1981 32.5% ; 2012 100.8%
-Number of Workers per every social security recipient: 1950 16.5 ; 2012 2.8
-Percentage of population living in a home receiving governmental benefits: 1983: 30% ; 2012 48%
-15 to 24 year old suicide rate: 3 times what it was in 1950
-Percentage of children born to unwed mothers: 1960 5.3% ; 2013 48%
-Statistical probabilities for children of unwed mothers: More than twice as likely to be arrested for a juvenile crime; roughly twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school; a third more likely to drop out before completing high school; 80% percent more likely to live in poverty.

Maybe there is a way out, but it looks a lot like our society is doomed to implode sometime soon, and anyone who doesn’t see the danger has his head buried in the sand.  The sand in question is admittedly very inviting. For many, life is good in Western Europe and the United States right now, but it is good in a way that is economically and demographically unsustainable.  It is being financed by borrowing billions of dollars from other countries, and passing those bills on to the next generation.  But the decline in fertility throughout the western world means there will be no next generation to pay those bills, unless the Muslims being imported into Europe to replace the missing generation vote to keep paying these taxes for the elderly heretics they support, and the third-world, poorly skilled, poorly educated immigrants being imported into America want to keep paying taxes for recipients of this largesse with whom they will share no particular cultural or ethnic affinity.  The “promise” which liberal Utopians have been advertising for years, an ambition-crushing cradle to grave welfare state, in which millions get to live like prisoners, or trust fund beneficiaries, being fed and clothed, but never accomplishing anything that might lead to a valid sense of self-worth and justified satisfaction, turned out to be achievable after all, just not sustainable.  It’s a party that only one generation, or maybe two, will get to enjoy before the bills come due and there’s nobody around to pay them.  Socialists always run out of other people’s money, and this trend is accelerated when the people themselves disappear.

Such are the happy thoughts you get to think after reading books like Niall Ferguson, The Great Degeneration, How Institutions Decay and Economies Die (Penguin Press 2013); Jonathan Last, What to Expect When No One’s Expecting, America’s Coming Demographic Disaster (Encounter Books 2013); How the West Really Lost God, a new theory of secularization by Mary Eberstadt; and reviewing old favorites like Mark Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation, or The Secret Knowledge by David Mamet.

So, how did we get here?  It has been said that every civilization is only one generation away from collapse, if it fails to transmit its core values to the barbarian horde of newborn babies which arrive every year.  After 500 years of ascent and dominance, Western civilization’s last two generations have now failed to meet that challenge.  The values of Western Civilization were not transmitted to those in our society who are now under 35.  Instead, those values were deconstructed and critiqued by a news and entertainment media and academia whose ranks were filled with red diaper babies and other societal skeptics, acting as the vanguard of the non-believers.  And so, most citizens of the first world democracies no longer believe what their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents believed, and they no longer behave as their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents behaved. And, as culture and behavior and ideas and beliefs matter, the nations of the west have fallen into decline, with America the last holdout, whose citizens no longer know what they were holding out for.

What Is Western Civilization?

I love the idea of Western Civilization as a three-legged stool, based on the interplay between biblical, Judeo-Christian religion inherited from Jerusalem, the love of reason and art inherited from Athens, and respect for the rule of law, rather than the rule of might, inherited from Rome. This is a concept of Western Civilization that is beautifully expressed in an article by George Weigel, “The Handwriting on the Wall” which can be read here: http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-handwriting-on-the-wall.

A stool needs three equally sturdy and equally lengthy legs to stand.  Cut or unduly emphasize the importance of any of the legs of our society, and the society will fall.  This is why it is such bad news that, one by one, the values westerners inherited from Athens, from Jerusalem, and from Rome, are collapsing.

Is America’s Decline and Fall Inevitable? A Pessimistic View. Part II: The Fall of Athens: The End of Reason and the Rise of Emotion.

“No wonder your President has to be an actor, he’s gotta look good on television.”  Doc Brown, Back to the Future.

TechnoUtopia

Many would argue that we are, today, living in an era in which our inheritance from Athens is stronger than ever.  We have allowed scientific inquiry to raise us to heights previous generations could have only dreamt about.  Before I was five years old, we had put a man on the moon.  But the phone in my pocket now holds more computing power than the rooms full of computers that helped us to put him there.  Clearly, we are living in the age of reason, science, technology, and intellectual advances.  As for art: our movies and television dramas, the 20th and early 21st Century’s favorite mass medium pop cultural events, integrate music, storytelling, art, design, costuming, acting, and state-of-the-art special effects to create spectacles that would have made the groundlings in Shakespeare’s globe weep.

When it comes to upholding our cultural inheritance from Athens, many would argue, we have nothing to fear.  We believe in reason, science, technology, and the arts.  We are standing on the shoulders of intellectual giants and reaching, literally, for the stars.

The Stupidity Problem

The problem with this rosy scenario is that it ignores a few inconvenient facts, about how stupid the vast majority of Americans have become in this age of “reason” as our electronic devices, technologically impressive wonders that they are, make the humans who use them increasingly less impressive. As Mark Bauerlein has argued in his book, The Dumbest Generation (Tarcher Penguin 2008), television, video games, social networks on the internet, mobile phones, and other video devices have had the effect of completely killing reading among the emerging generation, and that in turn has killed much of the functional capacity of their brains.

Troubling signs of the times include: The incredibly tiny percentage of the population that has the slightest idea how their mobile phones actually work, but play with them for hours which used to be spent, by their grandparents, reading or learning to play a musical instrument; the numbers of American Ph.D recipients in medicine, science, and technology who were raised in foreign, non-Western, countries, compared to the percentage of native-born American citizens who are qualified to pursue a similar education; that when an American calls a help-line to assist him or her with a technological conundrum, the Indian on the other end of the line has been trained, not without reason, to think of Americans as fairly stupid, and to patiently help them through their issues using the simplest language possible; that while the percentage of High School graduates pursuing college has increased, so also has there been an increase in the number of American college students, even those arriving on government funded scholarships, who require remedial course-work during their first year; that most Americans cannot identify any of the literary, historical, biblical, or classical allusions referenced in their most popular entertainments; and that a large majority of High School graduates will never voluntarily read a book after leaving High School (and that’s the statistic for the graduates).

The End of Reading and the Rise of Screens.

The most telling blow to the idea that we are living in an age of reason and appreciation for the arts is to be found in the decline of reading, and the concurrent decline in participation in other forms of art.  It has now been almost a decade since the National Endowment for the Arts published its landmark study, “Reading at Risk”.  Key take-aways from the press release that accompanied that 2004 report:

“Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature, according to a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey . . . .  Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline - 28 percent - occurring in the youngest age groups.  The study also documents an overall decline of 10 percentage points in literary readers from 1982 to 2002, representing a loss of 20 million potential readers. . . .  Reading also affects lifestyle, the study shows. Literary readers are much more likely to be involved in cultural, sports and volunteer activities than are non-readers. For example, literary readers are nearly three times as likely to attend a performing arts event, almost four times as likely to visit an art museum, more than two-and-a-half times as likely to do volunteer or charity work, and over one-and-a-half times as likely to attend or participate in sports activities. People who read more books tend to have the highest level of participation in other activities.”

This is not a portrait of a culture that has retained its ties to the values of Athens.  Reason requires reading.  Appreciation of art does as well.  You don’t have to have researched a book on this subject, like Mark Bauerlein, to know intuitively where to place the blame. It lies, clearly, on the most destructive invention in the history of the world: the screen, be it the television screen, the movie screen, the videogame screen, the computer screen, the internet screen, or the smartphone screen.

Here’s an experiment: Find a precocious second or third grade student, one who is considered bright, and capable of reading far above the average ability in his or her grade level.  Choose a book to read together that was written for the-mid elementary years: for 8 to 10 year-olds.  But choose a book that was published before the advent of television.  Ben and Me, by Robert Lawson, would be one appropriate example.  You will likely find something very sad.  The book is no longer written for today’s precocious nine year olds.  Its vocabulary is too advanced. The background facts one would be expected to understand to pick up on the book’s nuances are out of reach. You’ll have to wait a few more years for most children to get there, years interrupted by their viewing of screens.

We are no longer a nation of readers.  We are a nation of watchers.  And since the medium is the message, this means we are no longer a nation that thinks.  We are, instead, a nation which emotes.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love movies.  I really, really, do.  Few Americans from my generation (around 11 when Star Wars hit the big screen, about 15 when Indiana Jones outran that giant boulder) grew up without developing a deep fondness for the movies.  And television has become much better in recent years, with its serialized adult dramas, like Lost, now telling lengthy stories on the (once) small screen.  But this has come at a horrible price.

The Educational Cost.

During a child’s developmental years, reading activates and develops different parts of the brain than those developed by watching television, or playing video-games. The neurological connections which are, or are not, formed in early childhood, have lifelong implications.  Denying the rising generation of the neurological connections which will enable them to prosper later in life is a form of neglect.

The reports and statistics on life outcomes for struggling vs. proficient readers are not difficult to find.  Take two third graders, one of whom reads at or above grade level, and enjoys reading voluntarily, for fun; and another who reads below grade level, and never reads for fun.  The gap between the sheer volume of reading material read by the first student versus the second will begin to grow exponentially, and will obviously concurrently increase the gap in their relative reading skill and proficiency.  Studies have shown that this will affect not only academic ability, but personality, with readers tending to be more empathetic than non-readers, as their immersion in fiction exposes them to the reality that other people have inner lives and feelings.  In the latter part of the third grade, the so-called “Matthew Effect” (named for the Gospel in which the parable of the talents appears) will then begin to kick in.  As more and more school reading is done, not to learn to read, but to learn other subjects, the non-reader will fall further and further behind his peers.  The student who falls behind will become ever more frustrated with and detached from schooling.  This will profoundly affect statistically probable life outcomes, in areas that go far beyond academics.  The slower reader is more likely, not just to get bad grades, but to drop out of High School early, and is more likely to become involved in juvenile delinquency and crime.  He is more likely to need government assistance at some point in his life, and more likely to have difficulty keeping a job, or maintaining a stable marriage.

The Political Cost.

In our adult years, we can’t hope to really understand what political forces were behind the big drama down at the County Commission hearing this evening, if all we know about it is the two minute blurb the local tv station gave us, and we don’t bother to read the lengthy articles and editorials in a special feature of our local newspaper.  And so politicians get away with more crap, and have to reach us at a much more basic, and base, level, than was once the case.  If you can’t convince an American of the validity of your cause with a two or three word bumper sticker (or better yet: a symbol on a bumper sticker that doesn’t even have to be read at all, let alone thought through), in the age of television, your cause is doomed.

Think what a tragedy this is for America, given our history.  Until a few decades ago, we had always been a nation whose politics were fueled by passionate readers, and it has always been the written word which has moved our history forward.  The Founding Fathers, almost to a man (Washington being the major exception) became prominent because they were writers, whose words found access to local presses, and were consumed, enthused over or argued about, by partisan readers.  Benjamin Franklin’s satirical, “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One”; James Otis’s speeches against the Writs of Assistance and the Stamp Act; John Dickinson’s “Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania” essays, against the Townshend Acts; Samuel Adams’ “The Rights of the Colonists as Men”; The Novanglus letters, by John Adams, making the legal case for the sovereignty of the colonies; “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” by Thomas Jefferson, setting forth a similar argument in response to the Intolerable Acts.  Each of these writings strengthened the colonists resolve to create their own continental congress, and propelled into prominence the men who would play leading roles in the drama of the American revolution and founding of the Constitution (although Franklin was already famous).

Common Sense, a 46 page editorial, which drew heavily on stories from the bible that most Americans had learned to read by, swayed public opinion in favor of independence just in time to give the Second Continental Congress political cover for declaring that independence. (Cagey guy, wasn’t he, that bible-quoting Thomas Paine–who later found his anti-Christian voice when writing to a much different audience of anti-clerical revolutionaries in France).  Before the Revolutionary war had even been won, the presses were churning with essays on the problems with the articles of confederation, and the need for a new Constitution, to unify the colonies, such as Hamilton’s “The Continentalist.” Our proposed new Constitution was ratified by the States only after it had been passionately defended, primarily by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, in the Federalist Papers (and its potential pitfalls foretold with eerie prescience in the Anti-federalists’ writings).  Later, the country’s political unity was reaffirmed by George Washington’s farewell address, not actually an address that was ever spoken at all, and mainly written by Hamilton, but which was published in all the major newspapers of the Country, and read by virtually everyone, and which is still quoted today. Later, de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America told Americans what was right about their country. The Lincoln Douglas debates were not viewed, but read, all over America, as were the other great speeches, books, and narratives that led to the Civil War and ultimately spelled the violent death of slavery: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Frederick Douglas’s autobiographical narrative, Lincoln’s Inaugural addresses and his speech at Gettysburg, and the fiery indignation of the radical abolitionist newspapers.  The era of civil service reform, the demand for an end to the spoils system and political machines, greater health and safety regulations in our meat packing plants: they were all influenced by books, newspapers, and the written word.  How might all of that history have been different, if we’d all been sitting around watching reality television, too entertained to read, laughing at Lincoln’s funny hair.

Visual imagery, accompanied by the right music, is much less likely to touch our brains, and much more likely to touch our heart.  This is not always a bad thing.  The images of wounded American soldiers which were seen during the Vietnam war, and in many subsequent conflicts, has probably made it far more difficult (as it should be) to drum up American enthusiasm for military conflicts. But, more often than not, politics based on emotion and visual images, rather than words and carefully presented logic, is overly simplistic, more easily subject to demagoguery, and less capable of the nuance that can lead citizens to understand that almost all of their political choices will be neither wholly good nor wholly bad, but will be subject to trade-offs, and have offsetting costs and unintended consequences.  In my lifetime, as Americans have debated changing the definition of our most basic institution, marriage, emotions and sanctimony have run high.  Words and written arguments?  Not so much.  Oh, lots of law review articles and legal briefs and even a few books have been written on both sides of the subject, but virtually no one has read them.  A bumper sticker with a yellow equal sign on a blue background tells you all you need to know, namely, that the American intellect is dead.

Our laws are still written in words.  But they are now sold to us on the basis of imagery.  It is, accordingly, increasingly the case that the laws in question have less and less to do with the basis on which they were sold.  Sell the sizzle, not the steak, is the mantra of the dishonest salesman.  It is a mantra which visual images are particularly adept at exploiting. We learn about virtue, duty, honor, by reading books, especially religious texts.  These are difficult ideals to show on a movie screen, which is far more adept at showing us fun, excitement, and enjoyment, arousing our anger, rather than our logic.

The Cultural and Historical Cost.

It has been argued, and not without some basis, that the rise of a post-literate screen-driven society spells the end of adulthood: http://www.artofmanliness.com/2014/11/03/secret-society-of-adults/  

And so our culture suffers.  Politicans and government officials can be less responsive and responsible, because no one will read about what they are doing.  And so they become more corrupt. Newspapers can unfairly target their political foes, via headline scandals which don’t seem particularly scandalous if you read and reason through the text of the article, but that doesn’t matter because no one does that.  And so they become more corrupt.  Businesses can tout wares which have long since been exposed as not living up to their promises.  But that doesn’t matter because no one has read those exposés.  And so the businesses become more corrupt.  Corruption, unchecked, increases the power of the few over the many.

And, as a medicine taken on an empty stomach may be overly potent, what little that is read has an increasingly powerful effect upon its recipient, regardless of its coherence, logic, or honesty.  It becomes easier to lead us astray.  Having no training in sophisticated and critical analysis of what we read, we peruse an article someone linked to on a facebook account (about whether vaccines cause autism, or a really weird trick that will help us lose belly fat) and we are unable to ask the critical questions which might debunk or strengthen the claims being presented.

But, most devastatingly of all, we don’t read history, and so we don’t remember our past, and so we have no past, and American culture means nothing because it never existed.  Like an Alzheimer’s patient who no longer remembers his wife, we might as well have never had a wife.  We might as well have never fought WWII, as we no longer honor those who won it, and, in winning it, ended a war started by Germany and Japan which took 60 million lives.  Instead, we see something on Youtube about Hiroshima and conclude that our nation was the guilty one, and does not deserve our respect or our loyalty. We might know different if we had read any books about WWII, but who does that anymore?

As Bruce Feiler has argued eloquently in the New York Times article, “The Stories that Bind Us” March 15, 2013, the children of a family which tells positive stories about itself are given great psychological benefits, as they come to understand their family’s narrative, and see their own roles in the generational story.  The same is true of military units, who have found that when recruits learn more about the history of the military branch or unit in which they serve, individual perseverance and group coherence are strengthened.  Id.  The same is true of companies and businesses.  And of nations.  A United States whose citizens understand the triumphs represented by the Declaration of Independence, victory in the Revolutionary War, founding of the Constitution, settlement of the west, abolition of slavery, and which understands the great moral good which was done by their country when it helped to defeat Naziism and Japanese military imperialism, and Soviet communist totalitarianism, is a nations whose citizens will love their country, and will believe that we can overcome current challenges, if we will get back on to a sensible path.  But our children don’t read enough to know any of that history, and, when they do finally become interested, they are more likely than not to be given Howard Zinn to read, instead of something truthful or even partially positive.  No wonder they decide it isn’t worth it to try to live within our means, but instead, with nihilistic self-contempt, fail to challenge a government whose debt will crush millions, in generations yet unborn, of our children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.  Why should these modern nihilists care?  They know nothing of their country’s past, so what reason do they have to care about her future?