[ April 26, 2024 ]
Victor Davis Hanson’s column puts to paper what so many of us have known for some time. His glaring omission is what led to the demise of our free, independent nation and abandonment of its original founding principles. The left. The cause is the same: the growth of collectivism and statism.
How We Pale to Previous Generations
By Victor Davis Hanson, October 10, 201:
A distant generation created; we mostly delay, idle, and gripe.
Story continues below advertisementMany of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks.
Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers’ monumental palaces that were still standing around. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions.
We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.
Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?
Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns, and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up. The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno — and not yet a foot of track laid.
Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system?
California’s roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.
When California had to replace a quarter section of the earthquake-damaged San Francisco Bay Bridge, it turned into a near-disaster, with eleven years of acrimony, fighting, cost overruns — and a commentary on our decline into Dark Ages primitivism. Yet 82 years ago, our ancestors built four times the length of our singe replacement span in less than four years. It took them just two years to design the entire Bay Bridge and award the contracts.
Our generation required five years just to plan to replace a single section. In inflation-adjusted dollars, we spent six times the money on one quarter of the length of the bridge and required 13 agencies to grant approval. In 1936, just one agency oversaw the entire bridge project.
California has not built a major dam in 40 years. Instead, officials squabble over the water stored and distributed by our ancestors, who designed the California State Water Project and Central Valley Project.
Contemporary Californians would have little food or water without these massive transfers, and yet they often ignore or damn the generation that built the very system that saves us.
America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today? No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years, and it may not happen in the next 50 years.
Hollywood once gave us blockbuster epics, brilliant Westerns, great film noirs, and classic comedies. Now it endlessly turns out comic-book superhero films or pathetic remakes of prior classics.
Our writers, directors, and actors have lost the skills of their ancestors. But they are also cowardly, and in regimented fashion they simply parrot boring race, class, and gender bromides that are neither interesting nor funny. Does anyone believe that the Oscar ceremonies are more engaging and dignified than in the past?
We have been fighting in Afghanistan without result for 18 years. Our forefathers helped to win World War II and defeat the Axis Powers in four years.
In terms of learning, does anyone believe that a college graduate in 2020 will know half the information of a 1950 graduate?
In the 1940s, young people read William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck, and John Steinbeck. Are our current novelists turning out anything comparable? Could today’s high-school graduate even finish The Good Earth or The Grapes of Wrath?
True, social media is impressive. The internet gives us instant access to global knowledge. We are a more tolerant society, at least in theory. But Facebook is not the Hoover Dam, and Twitter is not the Panama Canal.
Our ancestors were builders and pioneers and mostly fearless. We are regulators, auditors, bureaucrats, adjudicators, censors, critics, plaintiffs, defendants, social-media junkies, and thin-skinned scolds. A distant generation created; we mostly delay, idle, and gripe.
As we walk amid the refuse, needles, and excrement of the sidewalks of our fetid cities; as we sit motionless on our jammed ancient freeways; and as we pout on Twitter and electronically whine in the porticos of our Ivy League campuses, will we ask: “Who were these people who left these strange monuments that we use but can neither emulate nor understand?”
73
In comparison to us, they now seem like gods.
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33 Comments
4 years ago
I think a lot of this can be traced to groupthink on a vast scale.
Group intelligence is always less than individual intelligence of a group’s members, and groupthink is a natural consequence of this. Groupthink produces a wide ranges of biases that isolate the group from outside facts, which is compounded by a desire not to upset the group’s cohesion (such as by stating facts that are contrary to the group’s narrative).
(fun fact: The Israeli government established an Office of Devil’s Advocate after the Yom Kippur War because the IDF’s officers all agreed the Arabs were a *not* threat which led to Israel’s guard being down when the Arabs invaded).
Bureaucracies are a special case. Not only are bureaucracies suffer the effects of groupthink, they tend to become self-perpetuating due to nepotism, evolving into oligarchies, oligopolies and in extreme cases — such as North Korea’s government — monarchies. The Biden family’s corruption demonstrates this well.
The USA has several layers of government and corporate bureaucracy. This is compounded by deliberate efforts to create tribalism (the worst kind of groupthink) to keep people fighting each other rather than against the oligarchy/oligopoly (the “Swamp”).
Islam, being the world’s largest religion, has not made any significant technological or social progress for thousands of years.
4 years ago
Reply to
Lagertha
The seduction of the west has been slow and deliberate over the decades. Misguided compassion, propaganda substituted for knowledge, hedonism, and narcissism are promoted alongside Marxism. Group think and “team work” have replaced the individual. The principles that made the U.S. unique are being rejected. Older people know a different U.S..When the older generation is gone will the younger generation finally get it?
4 years ago
Reply to
felix1999
Both of the above commentators seem to have put there fingers on the issues facing today’s society, but I see the problem at least one step beyond theirs. I truly believe that what we are facing now is a change in our society that acts contrary to the very nature of the human species. I have always thought of our species as carrying a competitive trait that motivates us to get things done, often in situations where we allow our accomplishments to enable us to prosper in one manner or another. I today see what seems to be an attempt to frustrate the very nature of our species by adopting what appears to be :”a hand out society,” where we are overconcerned with everyone’s plight to the effect that we ignore and remove that competitive spirit from those who need it to accomplish whatever prosperity is needed..” We see that in the Democratic party, and the media, and I respectfully believe we have lost our way, a way our founding fathers would today find very disheartening. Politics has become a full time job. Instead of determining what is best for the general population, the motivation has become retention of ones position and that promotes conduct which essentially is greed/money motivated. That is why I believe we need term limits, balanced budgets, control of the ability to lobby, and adoption of the keyword tolerance. I cannot see us abandoning our poor and helpless, but I believe they need to first work on what will motivate them to re-adopt that competitive/non-violent spirit that is the character of man. If we work to do that, we might turn this country around and return ourselves to what we can reasonably expect from our citizens.
4 years ago
Reply to
Dennis
Oh, I don’t know…. The Pilgrims experimented with socialism and it failed They mistakenly believed that Christianity endorses socialism. It doesn’t! I think human nature can be easily corrupted. Let OTHERS do the work and benefit from it. Of course they don’t teach about the Pilgrims failed socialism experiment in schools and instead vilify Pilgrims. Today they push Marxism and intolerance to other views.
The Pilgrim’s Failed Socialist Experiment
Nov 18, 2011 | Economy, Taxes
By Dr. Harold Pease
Few realize that New England’s first form of government under the Pilgrims was communalism (socialism) where “each produced according to his ability and each received according to his needs,” more than two centuries before Karl Marx first penned the above script. The result of “share the wealth” then and now was, and always will be, shared poverty.
William Bradford, the colony’s governor its first 30 years, wrote of the agreement between the Pilgrim passengers and the financial “Adventurers” in his book Of Plymouth Plantation. He noted that the seven-year contract signed July 1, 1620, before leaving Plymouth England, stipulated that the Pilgrims were to pool, for common benefit, “all profits and benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means of any person or persons…” It further noted “that at the end of the seven years, the capital and profits, viz. the houses, lands, goods and chattels, be equally divided betwixt the Adventurers and Planters…” During this time the colonists were to “have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock and goods of the said colony.” It doesn’t get more socialistic than this because the government divvied out the goods and loafers received the same as those who worked.
The first two years the result was shortages and starvation. About half the colonists died. No one did more than the minimal because the incentive to excel was destroyed. The industrious were neutralized. Bradford wrote of the scarcity of food “no supply was heard of, neither knew they when they might expect any.” The socialist experiment Bradford added, “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to the benefit and comfort. For the young men, that were most able and fit for labour and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense….” In other words, socialism made strong men lazy. In another book written by the same author, History of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford spoke of another problem because of the government created famine—thievery. Even in this Christian community, “much was stolen both by night and day….”
After two years of such, with the survival of the colony at stake, they contemplated upon “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” They opted to abandon the incentive killing socialist contract in favor of the free market. And so they “assigned to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end…”
The effects were almost immediate. A delighted Governor Bradford wrote: “This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor… could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.” In other words, the free market is a much greater stimulus than governmental force. The Pilgrims now wished to work because they got to keep the benefits of their labor. “Instead of famine now God gave them plenty,” Bradford wrote, “and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God…. Any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day.”
Secure property rights are the key to prosperity for all who wish to work. When this right is threatened by confiscatory taxation or outright confiscation of property, or by excessive government rules and regulations governing such, whether planned as in a contract enforced by the government at Plymouth, or gradual as in our day, work and production slow and can eventually stop. The answer for them was to extract socialism from their midst as it is for us today as well. May we have the wisdom to do so?
4 years ago
Reply to
felix1999
One of the most idiotic things I’ve ever seen. Why would they make it that complicated? In fact such a simple calculation kids should be able to perform in their mind.
4 years ago
Reply to
Lagertha
Your underestimation of muslums and their death cult is no more apparent than in the here and now. At no point in islum’s endless, bloody, totalitarian history has it spread it’s fascist grip across the world as widely as it has now, in the 21st century. In the past Catholic men were willing to fight and die to throw the muslum vermin out of Europe but now degenerate atheists have now not only invited the muslum vermin back in, but are actively facilitating it. Muslums are actively ethnically cleansing all non-muslims for all their muslum sh!ttystans, from Papua W. New Guinea to the entirety of the Mid-East and N. Africa.
4 years ago
Reply to
Lagertha
Their conquests lately might come under the heading of social progress (at least from their POV). After all they’ve conquered Lebanon w/nary a fight and indications are they’ll do the exact same thing to the dying atheist West.
4 years ago
Reply to
MuhamMUDTheFakeProphet
My point was they never advanced beyond slavery, torture, etc, because they conform to a false prophet, and that’s true despite the ivory tower assholes including them under the banner of “progress.”
4 years ago
Excellent article and so bitterly true. But not even the failed Greek civilization plumbed the depths of stupidity we are seeing today. Think of the billions of dollars wasted by universities to come up with the multiple genders that are being pushed now on the idiot box and elsewhere. Then the vast resources wasted by the government and legal systems to shove this delusion down the general publics throat.
If the Greeks sunk as low as they did then, how much lower will the Western democracies sink with the levels of foolishness being conjured up by todays “Left-wing intellectuals” ? ( Forgive me; I know “Left-wing intellectuals” is an oxymoron; I just used the phrase for comparisons sake}.
4 years ago
Reply to
GonadTheRuffian
I believe the Greeks were conquered by a then relatively unknown group of barbarians called the Romans. When the Romans finally captured Syracuse (in Sicily, which the Greeks had captured decades earlier) the legionnaires were specifically ordered to spare Archimedes, but he managed to offend one of the ignorant bastards and was run through:
https://www.math.nyu.edu/~crorres/Archimedes/Death/Histories.html
4 years ago
my father’s generation conquered the word in 3.5 years after pearl harbor. 3.5 years. we can’t even get a building permit in CA in 3.5 years
4 years ago
Reply to
felix1999
We are able to do the same, but, we had leaders who saw $$$$$ by doing what we did. Now the generation to-day, doesn`t know which restroom to use, and I`d trust them to do one thing under fire. RUN AWAY .. Which is just what our enemies want.
4 years ago
The Left is succeeding at destroying the West and America will not be spared. It’s a fait accompli. England has been in decline for years and the rest of Europe is in denial. Brexit is a futile attempt at trying to stop a boulder from rolling down a steep hill.
Chew on this. Last year alone 330 million Americans each bought $1,149 more stuff from China than they bought from us. 330 MILLION x $1,149 = $378 BILLION TRADE DEFICIT. This is directly the result of Leftist Globalist policies enacted over the last 25 years.
We were all sold the same global economic propaganda and its a disaster for the West. China is still abusing 1.5 BILLION people and we’ve lost millions of jobs.
The good news. I now own more cheap Chinese-made crap than I ever dreamed of. Prepare for a slow steady decline.
4 years ago
The Left is succeeding at destroying the West and America will not be spared. It’s a fait accompli. England has been in decline for years and the rest of Europe is in denial. Brexit is a futile attempt at trying to stop a boulder from rolling down a steep hill.
Chew on this. Last year alone 330 million Americans each bought $1,149 more stuff from China than they bought from us. 330 MILLION x $1,149 = $378 BILLION TRADE DEFICIT. This is directly the result of Leftist Globalist policies enacted over the last 25 years.
We were all sold the same global economic propaganda and its a disaster for the West. China is still abusing 1.5 BILLION people and we’ve lost millions of jobs.
The good news. I now own more cheap Chinese-made crap than I ever dreamed of. Prepare for a slow steady decline.
4 years ago
Great…… Thanks Pamela!
4 years ago
I really respect Mr. Hanson and love listening to him when Tucker Carlson has him on or just reading his thoughts on things going on today. The man is extremely smart but also humble. I could listen to him for hours and I follow him on Twitter. Everything he says is right on the money and a reason why I am grateful I’m on the second half of my life!
4 years ago
I admit I’m one of these losers..Haven’t done anything great but who knows one day.
4 years ago
Atlas has done Shrugged !
4 years ago
in a recent trip to China everything seemed brand new. Massive road and highway system, new subways built in 5 years, high speed rail, every airport was new and functioned beautifully. New hotels, apartments whatever. Sure they are controlled but results speak.
4 years ago
It took longer for the Obama administration to come up with a basic Obamacare online site than it did for the U.S. to fight WWII and the system crashed and burned spectacularly when launched.
4 years ago
This younger generation is really something to be ashamed of. I left a good paying job after 28 years because they told me” we like the fact you can think outside the box, But we only want people who can follow procedures.“
That was the final straw. They are pathetic. They used to at times say “ you been doing it longer than I have, do what you think best.”
The job would get done. Now days if there is not a procedure or something is out of the ordinary they freeze.
They need to go back to just letting the workers work. Come up with different ways of doing things on their own. Like it was a long time ago in an era far far away.
4 years ago
In today’s world, we mistake extortion and parasitism for innovation. Cue the internet giants and “start ups”. Most only parasitize, extort and “disrupt” the existing infrastructure and or market, then drive it into non existence.
4 years ago
“California’s roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them,
although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our
freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or
would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.”
Absolutely true! And CA continues to squeeze its citizens for more and more taxes. Registration fees for our cars, continue to rise. Gas prices are the near the highest in the country. The state of CA has more taxpayer money than it knows what to do with and all the idiots in Sacramento can come up with, is giving more tents and shelters to the homeless, changing bathroom door signs for transgenders and to strenghthen the state’s gun confiscation laws.
4 years ago
Reply to
santashandler
Californication has a state debt that is more reminiscent of the kind of debt nations accrue. I want out.
4 years ago
Reply to
MuhamMUDTheFakeProphet
I’m sure Newsome will be very sorry to see us leave…….:)
4 years ago
I blame Democrat corruption AND Republican disfunction.
4 years ago
Reply to
Philip
I like how you stated that, but, maybe, because I am a registered Republican. I totally don’t trust DimoKrots and know they constantly lie & attempt to convert our Constitutional Republic into a socialist communist country. I really don’t trust the GOP either, especially at the top levels. President Trump is an anomaly and a GREAT President. I think (I HOPE) the GOP is dysfunctional and not corrupt to the core like the dims ….. We will have to wait to see what happens after President Trump’s eight years as president are finished. God be with and guide President Trump, God bless the U.S.A.
4 years ago
Epic wisdom.
