Must admit, vergism was coined by yours truly. Long ago and far away, as a semi-professional college and university student, taking many courses in U.S. history, world history, American comparative politics, international comparative politics and foreign relations, I started to notice this assumption that poor people and poor seemingly dysfunctional nations were always on the verge of ... a New day!
You also notice this in American history and politics. You see things like, decades ago, the Model Cities Program, in which I was employed for a time, to the more recent No Child Left Behind, and countless other government programs that keep promising Americans that inherent racial differences will be erased and thus proven to be temporary glitches in the steady onward march of human progress.
Back then, in the 60's and 70's, Latin America was just beginning to stride into its rightful place in the prosperous democratic sunshiny future. In Africa, this was particularly said to be true of Nigeria. With all of its oil and other resources, Nigeria was going to be the economic dynamo to harness all the energy of Africa, helping to drive the various African nations forward toward an ever-larger middle class, enjoying wealth, democracy and freedom. Decade-by-decade, Third World nations kept getting designated by different adjectives: "poor," "underdeveloped," "developing," as each description came to look a bit scruffy, dogeared and, well, unchangeable.
At about this time, in the 60's and 70's, a big idea in comparative world politics courses was the "civic culture." Various nations were compared to see how they were semi-inexorably progressing toward having a civic culture. This included concrete things, like written constitutional guarantees, to intangibles, for example, when people exit their voting booths, do they feel any sort of civic pride? As you might imagine, third-world nations were very low on this civic culture scale, while Southern European nations, like, say, Italy, were much higher, but not as high as, say, (the then) West Germany, Sweden or the UK.
But eventually you start to ask yourself, "Wait a minute, isn't this the same as saying that Western and Northern European nations, plus the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, are at the sparkling tippy-top of where all nations and people should be? Isn't this sort, um, imperialistic or even racist? Keep in mind that by this time liberals were fairly firmly in charge of most higher education. So how did this happen?
Because those on the Left, with all of their talk of diversity and multiculturalism, tend to assume that the parts of Western thought in which they actually believe merely exemplify modern enlightened thought that everyone in the world would believe in if they were sufficiently prosperous, educated and enlightened, rather than these ideas being part of the Western tradition, a tradition that the Left likes to ridicule or dismiss. But there is more to it than that.
If Western civilization is going to try to continually economically prop up the Third World and eventually convert its own white population, through mass migration and differential birthrates, into peoples from the Third World, it must constantly be demonstrated that there are no deep inherent racial or cultural differences. The U.S. is just an 'idea' nation and the West is just an 'idea' civilization. Washington DC can be entirely African American. London can be entirely Muslim. These changes will not make one bit of difference. Of course this is absurd to any experienced adult who knows about humans, natural selection and human history on this planet, or is aware of the science of genetics and intelligence testing.
However, through vergism it is always made to seem that racial and national inequalities are on the verge--teetering on the very edge, I tell you!--of disappearing, transforming us all into a global multicultural free-market utopia. Because, obviously, if racial and national differences are inherent, we are witnessing the death of Western civilization, and what is left of its environment.
No matter. The constant drumbeat beats on. Discover Magazine recently devoted an entire issue to telling readers how deadly overpopulation never really happened and in so far as it can be said to exist, population numbers are on the verge of leveling off (this assumption from a "science" magazine?). Often such claims involve using the trick of percentage trends. For example, if Manhattan's total population dropped by one person on Tuesday and two people on Wednesday, you could accurately project that trend to someday show a future Manhattan empty of all people, tumbleweeds stacking up against the Empire State building. Of course this is known as lying with statistics. Similarly pundit Michael Barone now advertises that he is coming out with two new books, respectively, showing that smaller government may very well be on the way and that mass third-world in-migration is on the verge of withering away.
Two final examples. As they say, you be the judge--vergism?
“'One hundred years from now your grandchildren and mine will look back and say this was the beginning of an African renaissance,' Mr. Clinton said in Accra, Ghana, in March 1998.
"In remarks to a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that year, Ms. Rice was equally breathless about the continent’s future. 'There is a new interest in individual freedom and a movement away from repressive, one-party systems,' she said. 'It is with this new generation of Africans that we seek a dynamic, long-term partnership for the 21st century.'
"Her optimism was misplaced. In the 14 years since, many of these leaders have tried on the strongman’s cloak and found that it fit nicely. Mr. Meles dismantled the rule of law, silenced political opponents ..."
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