Decline And Fall

There’s a lot of talk these days about the decline of America, both domestically and on the world stage. I shan’t disagree too stridently, as the indicators have trended downward ever since the late 2008 mortgage crisis and the Bush the Younger Administration’s wholly incorrect response to it (compelled in part, I will allow, by hostile control of Congress.) Yet there are some hopeful signs. My colleague Dystopic highlights one in a recent essay:

Most of the time I prefer to mock Social Justice Warriors. Yes, I know, it’s probably petty, but they aren’t exactly welcoming of debate (you racist!), and so satire is the only real vehicle left to those of us who oppose them. Today, however, I will endeavor to rationally deconstruct their notion of privilege for the benefit of others.

If you read this little gem, Dear White, Straight, Cisgender, Man People: You Are Privileged, you will see the lunacy in all its obscene glory. This is a site that deliberately invokes a sort of childish air, with its hand-scrabble cartoons, preschool fonts and overall nursery-rhyme appearance appropriate for the infantile generation of coddled Social Justice advocates.

To the headline, I can only say: duh. Of course you are privileged. Anyone who is reading this is privileged. You have a computer or mobile device, you probably live in a First World country and there is a high probability you are in the upper 10% of income-earners worldwide. Your skin color and your sex are both irrelevant to that point.

Please read the whole thing. It’s a jewel of its kind.

The sign, of course, is that Dystopic’s reaction to the cited tirade has become the norm. A hefty majority of Americans have simply had it with the “social justice warriors,” their constant whining, their envy-driven demands, their inability to accept themselves as privileged, and above all their insistence on their moral superiority – a state of grace that entitles them to disrupt the lives and affairs of peaceable Americans in the name of whatever Holy Cause animates them this week.

We can’t know what the backbreaker was. It might have been the Occupy “protests.” Or the riots in Ferguson, Missouri. Maybe the crass behavior of the crowd at the first Obama inauguration had something to do with it. Perhaps there have been a few too many public celebrations of homosexuality and demands that it be viewed as “normal.” Perhaps the new trend of Y-chromosome bearers donning women’s clothes, proclaiming themselves to be women, and demanding to be treated as such – never mind the mutilations some of them accept upon their bodies – has finally opened a sufficient number of eyes. Maybe the horde marching down city streets chanting “What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want them? Now!” was simply too much for the longsuffering public and its badly tried patience. It might never become clear.

Whatever the causal tale, it appears ever more likely that the “social justice warriors” have embarked upon their final voyage: the decline and fall of their Insanity Movement. Please, God, let it be so.

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Revulsion is a powerful social force. When a people finds itself appalled by some practice, it will move against it. If the practitioners are themselves peaceable and orderly, they might merely be marginalized or ostracized. If they practice their habits “in your face,” the treatment they receive from the decent public will be proportionately less gentle. If they go to the extent of disrupting the affairs of others, they’ll be lucky to escape with their lives.

The contemporary Left has composed a strategy out of inverting those responses by the invocation of two words to which it has no proper claim: “rights” and “justice.” The more repellent are some group’s actions or demands, the more likely it is that the Left will adopt them as mascots and embrace their “cause.” The next step is the claim that the group’s members are “oppressed,” with a demand for compensatory action by “society.” Once the group’s status as victims, now the most priced of all political currencies, has been accepted by a sufficient fraction of the Main Stream Media, all that remains is the shouting for insane “rights” and social “justice”...and anyone not deafened by previous episodes of this sort surely hears a lot of it.

However, the artificially inculcated guilt upon which this relies has a finite lifetime. The more frequently the “victim” button is pressed, the less powerful and less prompt is the response. In addition, significant events such as the persecutions of George Zimmerman and Darren Wilson can lower the public’s susceptibility to the stimulus in a “step function” fashion.

My estimate of current public receptivity to the Social Justice Warriors’ demands and tactics is that it won’t take more than one more provocation from them to topple them into the abyss of overwhelming popular contempt... possibly with much worse consequences for their various causes and mascot-groups.

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It’s highly significant that the Social Justice Warriors, sociologically, come mainly from the most privileged stratum of American society. Their economic standing is in the top 5% to 10% of the nation. A high percentage of them have college educations. Those that work are almost unanimously in white-collar trades. They are predominantly without a care for their general well-being...even the ones who’ve never earned their own livings.

Ludwig von Mises would classify them as among “the cousins:” they whose living standards and security stem from their clever, industrious older relatives. The more common term for them today would be “limousine liberals.” However, that term also subsumes many of the “idle rich:” the millionaire stars and moguls of the entertainment class. When they make themselves conspicuous, whether in the guise of an “Occupy”-style riot or a gathering of private jets as in Davos, they elicit contempt from the alert and knowledgeable, incredulity from the undecided...and unease from fellow-travelers who sense the hazards to their Cause.

That sense of unease is quite rational, especially given the already low reputations many of the more prominent individuals among them have earned in their several ways.

Let’s publicize such events to the hilt. It’s the best service we can do for freedom in these United States. Besides, shouldn’t the public be made aware of how deplorable are the conditions black transgender lesbian Marxist enviro-nazis must endure, to say nothing of the execrable accommodations at their semi-annual conferences? Some of them have only one iPad to their name – and no private jet! The horror! I mean, what if that were you?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have snow to shovel. (Yes, already.)

The Last Of The Harbingers Of Doom...

...comes when we cease to breed:

"My generation of boys is f**ked," says Rupert, a young German video game enthusiast I've been getting to know over the past few months. "Marriage is dead. Divorce means you're screwed for life. Women have given up on monogamy, which makes them uninteresting to us for any serious relationship or raising a family. That's just the way it is. Even if we take the risk, chances are the kids won't be ours. In France, we even have to pay for the kids a wife has through adulterous affairs.

"In school, boys are screwed over time and again. Schools are engineered for women. In the US, they force-feed boys Ritalin like Skittles to shut them up. And while girls are favoured to fulfil quotas, men are slipping into distant second place.

"Nobody in my generation believes they're going to get a meaningful retirement. We have a third or a quarter of the wealth previous generations had, and everyone's fleeing to higher education to stave off unemployment and poverty because there are no jobs.

"All that wouldn't be so bad if we could at least dull the pain with girls. But we're treated like paedophiles and potential rapists just for showing interest. My generation are the beautiful ones, " he sighs, referring to a 1960s experiment on mice that supposedly predicted a grim future for the human race.

After overpopulation ran out of control, the female mice in John Calhoun's "mouse universe" experiment stopped breeding, and the male mice withdrew from the company of others entirely, eating, sleeping, feeding and grooming themselves but doing little else. They had shiny coats, but empty lives.

"The parallels are astounding," says Rupert.

Overpopulation has little to do with it. Nor is Rupert, a young German, a member of the population I have uppermost in mind. Please read the rest of the article and return here forthwith.

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The Calhoun “Mouse experiments” alluded to by Rupert and cited above were designed to explore the consequences of overpopulation, but the consequences Calhoun observed need not be tied exclusively to that cause. Human beings respond to ideas and perceptions quite as strongly as mice respond to a lack of space or food...and there are some very pernicious ideas in the social atmosphere in our time.

Unless you’ve spent the last thirty years in a medically induced coma, you’re surely aware of the phenomenon called metrosexuality. The implications for traditional masculinity, male participation in the forward motion of American society, and male-female relations were disturbing from the first. However, it might prove to have been a transitional stage to something more ominous yet: spornosexuality, the complete descent of male consciousness into self-worship and self-indulgence, divorced from any perception of need or desire for the female.

It’s possible – barely – to view spornosexuality as a perverse hypertrophy of masculinity. Indeed, some of its characteristics, such as the immersion in fitness and sports, appear quintessentially masculine. But it omits all the other defining characteristics of masculinity as we have known it since the Cro-Magnons. In particular, it lacks the value of heroic courage, the desire to excel and to rise to leadership, and the drive to win a mate and reproduce. It is wholly self-absorbed, lacking all need or desire for the admiration of others...especially not that of women.

Viewed thus, spornosexuality seems a closer approach to narcissistic solipsism – an expensively groomed sort of eremitism – than to any variety of masculinity as its long been understood. One thing it is most assuredly not: a path that promises the continuation of our society beyond the present generation.

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Metrosexuality, spornosexuality, and the widening gulf between the sexes generally are not the consequences of overpopulation. Indeed, the reproduction rate of the First World has fallen so low that several nations are disappearing as we watch: they’re “going out of business,” not due to lack of “customers” but to lack of “workers.” Nor is this a recent development; its inception can be traced back at least five decades. This leads to some fascinating correlations and investigations.

In America, the traditional masculine ideal was encapsulated in the manly virtues: in essence, the cardinal Christian virtues:

• Prudence,
• Justice,
• Temperance,
• Fortitude,

...unified around a clearly conceived standard of right and wrong, plus the courage required to uphold that standard when it’s challenged in word or deed. As I wrote in the cited essay:

A man must learn "where the line is:" the line that separates behavior that must be tolerated from behavior that must not be. He must be willing -- personally willing -- to fight in defense of the former and against the latter, though it might expose him to risk and cost him injury or death. He must be ready to swallow his distaste and protect the rights even of persons he finds repulsive, if they have harmed no other human being.

A man must learn proportionality and restraint. Biology has optimized the male body for purposive aggression, sudden acceleration and focused violence. These are not things to be deployed in their 200-proof strength against trivial or unworthy targets. A man doesn't kill the bounder who steals his parking space, his business idea, or his wife. Even a punch in the nose is excessive for infractions like these.

A man must learn never to shirk a freely contracted obligation. If you've said you'll do it, you do it. No excuses. Conversely, if you have failed to meet an obligation, you must admit to it and try to do better next time.

A man must learn not to whine about disappointments, reversals, or the ways of women. Especially about the ways of women. They're not men -- thank God -- and we can't fairly hold them to manly standards.

A man must learn reverence in the presence of the numinous. The fact that each of us is a part of an infinitely greater whole manifests itself in innumerable ways. Learning to let it in, to cherish it, and to use it to buttress oneself in times of darkness is critical to attaining the endurance the world expects from a man.

Last and most important, a man must transmit the manly virtues to his male children.

Every last atom of this set of desiderata has been under attack, by radical feminists, enemies of Christianity, haters of patriotism, pseudo-peaceniks, and others, for a minimum of fifty years.

The attacks have never commanded the active allegiance of a majority of Americans. Yet they have gained an enormous amount of “silent deference:” the reluctance to challenge their promoters, usually out of fear of the consequences. They’ve established a powerful bastion in the law and in popular culture. And in the minds of our impressionable young, they have largely succeeded in demonizing masculinity of the traditional sort.

But everything that exists exists as something specific. A thing cannot be devoid of all characteristics and identity. That applies to us male “things,” as well. So if our young men are being successfully deflected from the traditional masculine ideal, they will perforce replace it with some other ideal – and if among the driving force displacing traditional masculinity is an agglomeration of female lies, contempt, and legal hazards, the replacement ideal will naturally reduce the importance of women and their potential as mates well below other considerations...possibly to zero.

Such a demasculinized generation will never reproduce. It only takes one such generation to engineer the extinction of a nation.

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Senescence begins when growth ends -- “Lansing’s Law”

The above formulation originated, to the best of my knowledge, in James Blish’s novel They Shall Have Stars. Nevertheless, gerontologists use the cessation of growth as a reliable indication of the onset of senescence. It’s more empirical than theoretical, based on the lack of any observation of the reverse transition – i.e., the resumption of growth after a period of plateauing or decline.

“Lansing’s Law” appears to hold true for societies as well as for living organisms.

Mark Steyn’s marvelous book America Alone presents us with a stark survey of the First World societies whose reproduction rates have fallen below “replacement rate:” 2.1 live births per woman. Not one of them can be said to be healthy and vital. All are practicing the management of national decline. Some are frantically straining to shore up luxuriant welfare states by importing population from other lands. Others are merely doing what they must: centralizing their essential resources and services, the better to conserve what they require to sustain their shrinking, steadily aging populations.

Every nation in Western Europe is in this situation. So is Japan. A survey of the attitudes of young men in those nations suggests that, like Rupert, they have turned away from masculinity as older Americans understood and honored it. If American youth were to do the same...what then?

There are reasons to believe that America’s young men are doing the same. Metrosexuality and spornosexuality are our warning bells, for those inclined to listen.

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It approaches tautology to note that you cannot induce a people to breed for the sake of future generations. A people that has ceased to breed has lost interest in future generations, and in the future as such. If the young men of the First World have fallen into that abyss, only they can right themselves...but current conditions and present trends continuing, the likelihood is small.

What, then, must we do? Aside from pray, of course?

(Cross-posted at Liberty's Torch.)

A Question Of Public Deportment

By now, the entire country knows what’s happened in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the “no true bill” decision by the grand jury that sat on Officer Darren Wilson’s fatal shooting of giant thug Michael Brown.

I had a predictable reaction to the rioting and looting:

You can take the savage out of the jungle,
But it’s much, much harder
To take the jungle out of the savage.

I claim that the videos that have surfaced since the disorder began support that evaluation, and no other.

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Chiefest among the nominally nonviolent obscenities of this affair are the words of His August Majesty, Barack Hussein Obama, first Emperor of the United States:

That this man should have the gall to stand before an audience and prattle about the rule of law – he who routinely flouts the law! – is a blasphemy beyond my power to adequately condemn. That he should call the rioting “an understandable reaction” – he who accused the police of “acting stupidly” in the Henry Louis Gates matter, without having even a superficial acquaintance with the facts! – recalls Maxine Waters’s defense of the Los Angeles rioters after the acquittals in the “Rodney King” trials. Has there ever been a less sincere, more barefaced liar in any American public office, much less in the Oval Office?

America, your greatest shame isn’t allowing Obama the presidency. It’s having returned him to it.

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But let’s not dwell on the present when we have the past and future to address. After all, they’re so much bigger!

Time was, there was no hesitation on the police’s part to enforce noncontroversial norms of public conduct. They would routinely tell “undesirables” to “keep moving.” Nor was there any unease among law-abiding citizens about the practice. It was well understood that we would grudgingly tolerate much that went on behind closed doors that we could not countenance in public. Absolute intolerance of public misbehavior expressed an understanding of “camel’s nose under the tent lip” dynamics: a “broken window theory” of public conduct that reached well beyond vandalism and random disorder.

The breakdown, as always, started with little things. Littering. Public nuisances such as loudly played radios and boom boxes. Jostling on crowded sidewalks. Much followed from the mistaken tolerance of such behavior – a refusal by ordinary citizens to haul the offenders up by the scruff of their necks and compel penance and redress – that few predicted at the time.

We were opening the door to savagery in the streets. Some of us saw it coming and said so. Not enough Americans listened.

Incentives to savagery won’t affect everyone equally, of course. Those who responded by “acting out,” in the common parlance, were already predisposed toward such conduct: the sullen, the wrathful, the violently inclined previously held in check by a sense that they’d never get away with it. That the great preponderance of them are Negroes should surprise no one. What other demographic cohort has systematically been told that it’s “owed,” that “Whitey is holding you down,” that “justice” demands the mulcting of the innocent as “reparations”...and of course, “no justice, no peace!” -- ?

No one can hear such a gospel year in and year out without reacting to it. A hefty fraction of American Negroes have internalized it. Thus we have reached a situation quite similar to that of Muslims. It’s often said that, whereas the radical Muslim wants to behead you, the “moderate” Muslim merely wants a radical Muslim to behead you. Similarly, whereas the black rioter wants to loot your store and burn it down – assuming he gets the order right, that is – many a “peaceable” black merely condones such conduct as “an understandable reaction.”

Needless to say, this is not a formula that will restore order to America’s cities.

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The violence will continue. It’s likely to intensify, as the public reaction to it has been hesitant at best. Why, for example, have so few affected business owners not organized a private militia to guard their establishments? Why has no governor acted to arrest and confine those openly exhorting the “protesters” to violence and vandalism, as is licit under the doctrine of incitement to riot? Why has the president not federalized the National Guard nationwide and sent it to the sites of rioting and looting with orders to shoot to kill?

Given the identity and character of the president, I doubt we need an explanation for that last point.

Would anyone care to dispute John Derbyshire’s “The talk, non-black version” today?

There’s more and probably worse to come. Stay tuned.

(Cross-posted at Liberty’s Torch.)