by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n A Look Back<\/strong><\/p>\n People just don\u2019t disappear. Look at Germany in 1946 or Athenians in 339 B.C. They continue, but their governments and cultures end. Aside from the dramatic military implosions of authoritarian or tribal societies \u2014 the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the end of Nazism, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the annexation of tribal Gaul \u2014 what brings consensual states to an end, or at least an end to the good life?<\/p>\n The city-states could not stop 30,000 Macedonians in a way \u2014 when far poorer and 150 year earlier \u2014 they had stopped 300,000 Persians descending on many of the same routes. The French Republic of 1939 had more tanks and troops on the Rhine than the Third Reich that was busy overrunning Poland. A poorer Britain fought differently at el-Alamein than it does now over Libya. A British battleship was once a sign of national pride; today a destroyer represents a billion pounds stolen from social services.<\/p>\n Give Me<\/strong><\/p>\n Redistribution of wealth rather than emphasis on its creation is surely a symptom of aging societies. Whether at Byzantium during the Nika Riots or in bread and circuses Rome, when the public expects government to provide security rather than the individual to become autonomous through a growing economy, then there grows a collective lethargy. I think that is the message of Juvenal\u2019s savage satires about both mobs and the idle rich. Fourth-century Athenian literature is characterized by forensic law suits, as citizens sought to sue each other, or to sue the state for sustenance, or to fight over inheritances.<\/p>\n The subtext of Petronius\u2019s\u00a0Satyricon<\/em>\u00a0is an affluent, childless, often underemployed citizenry seeking inheritances and lampooning the productive classes that produce enough excess for the wily to get by just fine without working. Somewhere around 1985 in California I noticed that my students were hoping for a state job first, a federal job second, a municipal job third \u2014 and a private one last. Around 1990, suddenly two sorts of commercials were aired everywhere: how to join a law suit by calling a law firm\u2019s 1-800 number or how to get a free power chair, scooter, or some other device by calling the 1-800 number of Regulate, Not Create<\/strong><\/p>\n Why is it more moral for a federal bureaucrat in a state-supplied SUV to shut down an offshore oil rig on grounds that it is too dangerous for the environment than for a private individual to risk his own capital to find some sort of new fuel to power his government\u2019s SUV fleet? All affluent societies believe that they are just too rich not to be able to afford another regulation, just one more moralizing indulgence, yet again an added entitlement. But as we see now in postmodern America, idle 250,000 acres of farmland for a tiny fish, shut down an entire oilfield, put off a new natural gas find in worry over possible environmental alteration, add a cent to the sales tax, mandate yet another prescription drug entitlement not funded, or offer yet another in-state tuition discount to an illegal alien \u2014 and the costs finally equate to an implosion as we see in Greece or California. And as we know from past collapses, a new entitlement in a matter of minutes becomes an institutionalized right whose withdrawal causes far more anguish than its prior nonexistence. Justinian learned that when he sought to cut the civil service and almost lost his throne.<\/p>\n Them<\/strong><\/p>\n Not that the elite are exempt. Western moral literature, from Horace to Thackeray, focuses on the vanity of the rich who think that a greedy heir won\u2019t really inherit their hard-won or suspect riches, or that their always aging hips and knees will always so briskly power them up the monumental stairs of their colossal homes, or that a fifth sailboat or another 1000 acres will at last end the boredom. But the rub is not whether they are rich but whether they are idle, whether they send a message that affluence can make life better, rather than affluence is inevitably corrupting. In Suetonius\u2019s\u00a0Twelve Caesars<\/em>, the theme is not just imperial decadence and cruelty, but also the blind passions of the mob that the elite so cynically manipulate for their own useless privilege and nonsensical indulgence.<\/p>\n We Are Good and Therefore Can Act Badly<\/strong><\/p>\n The outsourcing of private morality to the state is a particularly modern affliction, but equally as pernicious. We witness the startling paradox that today\u2019s private society is crasser, less honest, and more uncouth even as its government\u2019s official morality stresses gender, race, class, and green ethical superiority. But just because the state now thankfully mandates disabled parking spaces does not mean that we honor a crippled relative more than in the past, or that our children are more likely to write a note of thanks to a grandparent\u2019s gift. I can surely see an erosion in the public expression of manners and morality even as I sense our government is now more \u201cfair\u201d and \u201cequal\u201d than ever before.<\/p>\n Just because the state will sue you for the appearance of sexual harassment does not mean that leaving your laptop in a college university carrel means it is less likely to be stolen than, say, a wallet in 1955. The frightening worry is that the two are connected: the more the state steps in to assure that we are cosmically moral, the more we assume we can relax and therefore become concretely immoral. Detroit is a symptom of that transition from family to state definitions of morality. Go to Athens today, and one can read high-sounding praises of the all-encompassing welfare state, and see all around private machinations to get out of taxes and boasts about getting a public job that requires no work and earns lots of pay.<\/p>\n When poverty is defined as relative want rather than existential need, states decay and societies decline. In the fifth century, Athenians were content to be paid to go to the theater; by the fourth, they were paid also to vote \u2014 even as they hired mercenaries to fight and forgot who won at Salamis, and why. Flash mobbing did not hit bulk food stores. The looters organized on Facebook through laptops and cell phones, not through organizing during soup kitchens and bread lines. Random assaults were not because of elemental poverty, but anger at not having exactly what appears on TV.<\/p>\n Obesity, not malnutrition, is the affliction at Wal-Mart. In our strange culture, that someone drives an overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don\u2019t have air conditioners or stereos. But that John Edwards or John Kerry or Al Gore has a huge house doesn\u2019t mean that mine is inadequate \u2014 or the tract homes that sprout in my community for new arrivals from Mexico are too small.<\/p>\n Of course, the elite have responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians. But that a fifth of one percent of the taxpayers are finding ways not to pay at the income tax rate on their large incomes does not hurt the republic as much as 50% of the population paying no income tax at all. The latter noble sorts do not bother us as much, but their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping rich.<\/p>\n Lala-land<\/strong><\/p>\n Unreality is an especially disturbing symptom. When Jimmy Hoffa threatens the non-unionists, one imagines that Detroit is building better, safer, more reliable cars at a better price and has for decades. When Barack Obama urges the Black Caucus to march for equality, and adopts the cadences and pose of a 1960 civil rights leader, one would think the right wing in Florida just picked Bull Connor, not Herman Cain, as their straw poll winner. When the third-generation, hip spokesman for La Raza talks about inequality, one would think she herself just crossed the border from Oaxaca, forced to flee a benevolent Mexico to work in the pits of an American Mordor.<\/p>\n Hope<\/strong><\/p>\n We all know what will save us and what is destroying us. But the trick is to see how the two will collide. A new tax code, simple rates, few deductions, everybody pays something; new entitlement reform, less benefits, later retirement; a smaller government, a larger private sector; a different popular culture that honors character rather than excess \u2014 all that is not, and yet is, impossible to envision. It will only transpire when the cries of the self-interested anguished are ignored. My expectation is that soon that the affluent of suddenly rich China and India will come down with the Western disease that we see endemically in Europe and among our own, even as America snaps out of it, and recommits itself to self-reliance and wealth creation. But when I look at 18th-century Venice, or 1950s Britain, or France in 1935, or 3rd-century Athens, or 5th-century AD Rome, I am worried. I don\u2019t think we wish to live in a quiet but collapsed Greece in the age of Plutarch, forever dreaming about a far off age of past accomplishment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a92011 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media A Look Back People just don\u2019t disappear. Look at Germany in 1946 or Athenians in 339 B.C.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[247],"tags":[598,176,12,1014,258,289,553,1028,617,494,65,436,298],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-wg","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":10783,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/nation-v-tribe\/","url_meta":{"origin":2000,"position":0},"title":"Nation V. Tribe","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 6, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \u00a0 Read the original article in Defining Ideas here.\u00a0 Tribalism is one of history\u2019s great destroyers. Once racial, religious, ethnic, or clan ties trump all considerations of merit and loyalty to the larger commonwealth, then factionalism leads to violence, violence to chaos, and chaos to the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Tribalism"","block_context":{"text":"Tribalism","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/tribalism\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9339,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/america-historys-exception\/","url_meta":{"origin":2000,"position":1},"title":"America: History\u2019s Exception","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 13, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"We should seek to preserve the ideals that made America successful. By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online The history of nations is mostly characterized by ethnic and racial uniformity, not diversity. Most national boundaries reflected linguistic, religious, and ethnic homogeneity. Until the late 20th century, diversity was considered\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Europe"","block_context":{"text":"Europe","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/europe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8296,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/its-not-just-islam-its-the-tribal-mentality\/","url_meta":{"origin":2000,"position":2},"title":"It\u2019s Not Just Islam, It\u2019s the Tribal Mentality","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/ FrontPage Magazine The \u201cnothing to do with Islam\u201d mantra took a hit recently in one of the premier organs of liberal received wisdom, The Atlantic. Many have greeted as a revelation Graeme Wood\u2019s article on the Islamic doctrines behind ISIS\u2019s atrocities. Regular readers of FrontPage\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Religion"","block_context":{"text":"Religion","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/religion\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo via FrontPage Magazine","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/fft-500x281.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":10594,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/diversity-can-spell-trouble\/","url_meta":{"origin":2000,"position":3},"title":"Diversity Can Spell Trouble","author":"victorhanson","date":"September 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson Defining Ideas America is experiencing a diversity and inclusion conundrum\u2014which, in historical terms, has not necessarily been a good thing. Communities are tearing themselves apart over the statues of long-dead Confederate generals. Controversy rages over which slogan\u2014\u201cBlack Lives Matter\u201d or \u201cAll Lives Matter\u201d\u2014is truly racist. Antifa\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Defining Ideas"","block_context":{"text":"Defining Ideas","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/defining-ideas\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9879,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-end-of-identity-politics\/","url_meta":{"origin":2000,"position":4},"title":"The End Of Identity Politics","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 18, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/via Defining Ideas (Hoover Institution) \u00a0 \u00a0Image credit: Barbara Kelley Who are we? asked the liberal social scientist Samuel Huntington over a decade ago in a well-reasoned but controversial book. 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\na healthcare company that would do the paper work for Social Security on your behalf.<\/p>\n