Thursday, October 19, 2006

300 Million, Western Civilization...and Oblivion?

The nation was 125 years old before its population reached 100 million, but gained its next 100 million in only 52 years and its next 100 million in less than 40 years. Its center of population was in Maryland in 1790, Kentucky in 1880 and Missouri by 2000. By 2050 there will be well over 400 million citizens, less than half of them Caucasian for the first time in history. Counting the some 55 million people potentially accruing to the 47 million abortions since 1973 and the potential offspring of the earliest aborted fetuses, the population might have been 355 million. Life expectancy at birth was 47 years in 1900, 68 in 1950, and about 78 today, but anyone making it to 76 can expect another 12 years, on average.

The demographics are simple enough and the reasons, though not the methods, for the phenomenal changes are not complicated. Life expectancy at birth in the African nations of Swaziland and Zimbabwe is only 33 and 39, respectively. Their people are time-warped back to the Middle Ages, when life expectancy in Medieval Britain was 33 years. By contrast, Europeans developed a “Western Civilization” that carried over to this country.

This doesn’t mean that everything regarding Western Civilization has always been civilized, defined as “characterized by taste, refinement, or restraint.” Slavery, the backbone of the economy of the entire world for millennia right into the 20th century, could hardly be reckoned as a product of civilization, though the ending of it can. Saudi Arabia (not Western-oriented) did not officially end slavery until 1962, but that was only100 years later than the U.S. Germany’s perpetration of 11 million deaths in the total holocaust of the 1930s-40s is another case in point.

The keystone of Western Civilization lies in its emphasis upon individualism, education, curiosity, and the understanding that anarchy is anathema to survival, or at least “quality” survival, whether thwarted by the abuses of monarchy/dictatorship or simple communal mayhem – every man for himself. These characteristics were embodied in Martin Luther, perhaps the father of the Reformation and certainly the driving force in successfully establishing that the individual stands on his own feet before God and man, his obeisance to the former fashioning his relationship with the latter.

The arts and sciences as developed in Western Civilization, tempered with the importance of recognizing the Judeo-Christian God as the Supreme Being defining the “way to live and let live,” have afforded this nation the dominant position it maintains among all the nations. Painting, music, writing have flourished in an atmosphere of freedom secured by technologies used to both enhance the quality of life and protect the citizens against danger from both within and beyond the nation’s borders.

The relatively well-educated products of Western Civilization who came here were searching for a place to live and maintain a society. Their counterparts went to South America concurrently but just searching for a place to do business. The differences between North and Central/South America connote the result. Though the neighbors to the south, blessed with abundant natural resources but sadly lacking educational opportunities and leadership, are making progress in pulling themselves into the 21st century, they are light-years behind the U.S. For instance, the GDP of Brazil, the same size as the “lower 48,” owns a GDP of $1.5 trillion ($8,100 per capita), while the U.S. GDP is $11.8 trillion ($40,100 per capita). The colonizers left a dark continent eventually, but stable governments are sadly absent throughout the region and conducted mostly by despots, while poverty is extensively pervasive.

The colonizers of the U.S. stayed the course and invited the world into its “melting pot” of humanity, with successes virtually too amazing to believe. A strange paradox is obvious, however. There are now those, particularly in academia and in mainstream religious denominations, who constantly try to lay a “guilt-trip” on the nation for the very success it has enjoyed. Inherent and most important in the progress of the nation have been unity of purpose, one official language (English), and the nuclear family as the basic unit of society.

For the last three decades, the notion of unity has been degraded by the elitists in favor of multiculturalism and diversity. In other words, the people’s differences with each other have been deemed more important than their similarities, one outgrowth – among many – of this approach being the insistence upon Multilanguage, notwithstanding either its silliness or obtuseness with regard to practical considerations and as a unifying concept.

This approach destroys the effectiveness of the tenets of Western Civilization, since by definition multiculturalism advances other forces as equal when, in effect, they are not. This is not to disparage other cultures; rather, it is to insist that the approaches of other cultures have not produced the results endemic to this nation. For example, African music has contributed to posterity little more than rhythm and simple instruments and harmonies with virtually nothing written, while musicians in the countries of Western Civilization have produced instruments of every description and everything from simple ditties to complicated symphonies to majestic church music, with elaborate methods of producing written notation and text.

Technically, the American Indian had not even made use, at least extensively, of the simple wheel when the first settlers arrived, having remained primitive when people in other parts of the world, principally those of Western Civilization, had been inventing everything from printing to sailing vessels to guns. Again, this is not to disparage the culture, intelligence, or lifestyle of people; rather, it is simply to state the obvious.

Since the 1960s-70s, the era of “if it feels good, do it,” the family has been under attack, to the detriment of the society and even to the extent of states having to pass constitutional amendments forbidding the “marriage” of a man to a man, as if such a thing is possible in the natural order of things. In 1921, the number of divorces was 13% of the number of marriages and in 1960 the figure was about 25%. Today, the number of marriages and divorces are equal at 50%. The behavior leading to this sad state of affairs belies the “characterized by taste, refinement, or restraint” description of civilization.

Since the 1980s, the hippy-dippy, flower-children generation of the 60s-70s and their offspring have been operating the nation’s institutions as its social fabric – the family – has disintegrated. Not even the magic of Western Civilization will hold together a society marked by coarseness even as it is availed of the brightest brains in the world, such coarseness defined by men and women unable to form inviolable commitments to each other and their children.

It is the element of Western Civilization that has made this country what it is. If those who are in the process of rewriting history to make this nation the devil of the ages and multiculturalism the new foundation undergirding the society are successful, the United States will pass into the oblivion that overtook other great civilizations, such as Rome and Greece, which also rotted from within.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark

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