HANSON: Why do societies give up?
Slicing up a shrinking pie breeds class envy, then ruin
By Victor Davis Hanson, Washington Times, 2/18/2013
Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?
Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure — and who gets the most of both — more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization. ...
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/18/why-do-societies-give-up-slicing-up-a-shrinking-pi/#ixzz2LJqMb0Eh
I have great respect for Dr. Hanson's overall scholarship, but it has to be said that liberals lie through lying, while neocons (some unknowingly?) lie through half-truths. For example, in writing about Hiroshima and Detroit trading places in their bombed-out appearance, there is no mention of the teensy fact that the earlier economically booming Detroit was largely European American, while today's dangerous dilapidated Detroit looks pretty much like black-majority cities everywhere, whether, by the way, they happen to be in 'blue' or 'red' states--Memphis anyone?
About the only time neocons mention race is to try to prove that if it weren't for nutty and destructive liberal Democrats--and, yes they are both of those things--minorities today would be successful industrious little entrepreneurial Republicans or libertarians. This neocon denial almost becomes master satire with Hanson's cheerful news of our "strong demographic growth." Yes, growth of nonwhites--who will not be able to maintain Western civilization after our globalist elites finish demographically eliminating European Americans, as well as Europeans throughout all Western nations. And this has to be told to a prominent historian who specializes in classical Western civilizations?
Rather than playing amateur psycho-sociologists and talking about societies giving up, it makes more sense to ask: Why do civilizations fall? The pattern is that successful nations are built by a certain population of people who have successfully jelled in a certain way. As these nations become more successful, they grow until they may become empires--which is the kiss of death, no matter how slow the final end.
Such empires start burning through natural resources like there is no tomorrow, as well as sending out giant straws and sucking up resources from the far reaches of their empire, at the same time importing vast numbers of alien peoples for cheap docile labor and to populate their military. Of course during all of this time the population grows and there is an improved standard of living, and so it appears to leaders and their followers that all that is necessary is just to continue pursuing the same expansionist house-of-cards policies.
But here's the kicker. During all of this time the original population and their unique genetic stock is being diluted and overwhelmed, until the original people who built the successful nation become a shadow of their former selves and begin to wink out like so many dying twinkling stars. During this time of course government has become bigger and bigger, and there are all sort of societal dysfunctions and decay, but these are more symptoms that the machine is starting to wobble and grind to a halt, rather than the being the original causes.
So then, given their earlier great empires, why weren't modern Egypt, Greece or Italy the first to land astronauts on the moon? Because, no matter what might be the positive merits of their populations today, they are no longer the same people. Someday take the time to look at the artwork depicting those who founded the great classical civilizations of Egypt, Greece or Rome and compare them to photos of the populations and their leaders of those same nations today. If the recent Japanese tsunami had wiped out 95 percent of Japan, Japan could have proudly risen again. Detroit will never come back because the people who built that civilization are gone from Detroit. Is that really such a difficult concept to understand?
So when civilizations burn through their natural resources like there is no tomorrow, it is not just things like topsoil, underground water aquifers and forests that are being vacuumed away, but also the civilization's unique genetic resources, the very biological stuff that made the civilization successful in the first place. You can be beaten down and down and still come back if you are, say, Japan or China. But you, your family, your people and your civilization can no longer come back if you and your people are ultimately erased from the scene.
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