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.