The Idea of Decline in Western History
Herman, Arthur
not black. (Richburg names names: Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King, among others—people "completely ignorant about Africa.") But Richburg knows that he is condemning the refusal by...
...The ideology that displaced assimilation generally goes under the name of "multiculturalism," but Salins claims that a better term would be "ethnic federalism...
...Maybe it is because mankind has made such astonishing material, political, and social progress in the last two centuries that we cannot quite trust our good fortune and, like a dog with a new bone, feel we can only hold on to it if we worry constantly that it may be taken away...
...Peter D. Salins, professor of urban affairs at New York's Hunter College and former editor-in-chief of City Journal, believes this blissful state may not endure for long...
...But the anger is often justified and in most cases controlled...
...Judging from the rest of the book, there must be a lot of them...
...Herman's book would be worth attention if it did nothing more than quote from an endless parade of doomsayers, which it does extensively...
...Eventually, Herman writes, Adams "happily concluded that the human race was stuck on an ever-accelerating evolutionary course that must end in extinction....By 2025, at the latest, the planet would be reduced, like its sun and moon, to a cold and lifeless lump of matter hurtling through the nothingness of space...
...T]he pursuit of happiness and comfort is paramount, and the consumption of an endless stream of shiny new products is encouraged as the best way to succeed in that pursuit...
...He delves into the writings of a variety of nineteenth-century thinkers, beginning with the French count Arthur de Gobineau, who claimed that all civilization was the product of the white Aryan race, which was doomed to decline as a result of centuries of thoughtless interbreeding with The S Even Is Always Falling en It's Blue The American Spectator • May 1997 75 inferior peoples...
...Progress is not inevitable, but what many people have done in recent years is give up on the idea that progress is possible...
...Until then, he took solace in the attractions of socialism...
...How did ethnic federalism come to replace assimilation as the lens through Multicultural Meltdown_ The American Spectator • May 1997 77...
...Nietzsche had considerable influence on Oswald Spengler, whose Decline of the West expressed his disgust with classical liberalism and democracy and argued that "we need a class of socialist master men...
...What all of these Eeyores shared is what many on the modern left and right share: a powerful aversion to change, a distrust of unregulated commerce and individual liberty, and a dark certainty that the modern world has unleashed satanic forces that may be beyond our control...
...This is a book about decline," Bork announces on page two...
...Half his readers have probably started eyeing the razor blades by the end of the first chapter...
...and in the pursuit of happiness as an essentially rational activity—as a source of corruption, exploitation and death...
...Chamberlain's ideas captured the imagination of one Adolf Hitler, who upon meeting him in 1927 addressed him as his "spiritual father...
...It is legitimate to deplore certain trends and developments in any society as malign or destructive," he acknowledges...
...Even America, whose creation as a country was a great act of faith in the possibilities of free people, soon had its prophets of decline...
...If the race is ever going to progress, we might start by admitting that the enemy is within...
...He rejects the notion that white America owes black Americans something on account of slavery...
...The "rot is spreading...
...And it is in service of truths that badly needed saying...
...The spread of Communism owed much to Marx's conviction that the capitalist order was doomed by its own internal defects...
...Bork, Gore, and a host of others trumpet the bad news: Civilization is hurtling toward destruction...
...If his book has a shortcoming, it is that he doesn't offer a clear explanation of the perennial appeal of apocalyptic visions...
...Whether they know it or not, they are part of a long tradition of bitter disenchantment with Western civilization...
...Communism is dead, the world is at peace, enormous strides have been made toward racial equality, the environment is getting cleaner all the time, crime is falling, personal freedom has greatly expanded, rising living standards have made life easier and fuller for even the poorest Americans, socialism and much of the welfare state have been discredited —at one time, achievements like these would have seemed figments of utopian fantasy...
...Other countries are "ethnic nations" in which the main bond uniting the citizenry is a common ethnicity...
...Assimilation, American Style Peter D. Salins New Republic—Basic Books 259 pages / $26 We Are All Multiculturalists Now Nathan Glazer Harvard University Press 179 pages / $19.95 REVIEWED BY Joseph Shattan Although not exactly in vogue today...
...The idea of decline, however, continues to permeate the political atmosphere...
...Rejecting the separationist tendenThe Idea of Decline in Western History Arthur Herman Free Press / 521 pages / $3o REVIEWED BY Stephen Chapman I n the acknowledgments to Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Robert Bork thanks his wife, who "provided moral support on bleak days...
...These ethnic groups are endowed with certain inalienable rights—including the right to speak their "native" tongue at school and work, as well as at home...
...black leaders to "talk straight" not just about Africa but also America...
...His brilliant Assimilation, American Style argues that, over the past thirty JOSEPH SHATTAN is consulting editor of The American Spectator...
...They are not entirely to blame for their warped perspective...
...the right to proportional representation in every walk of American life...
...The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche didn't mourn the decay of modern civilization, regarding it as the decadent embodiment of a "slave morality" that forces men to become weak and docile...
...The United States, however, is a "civic nation" that discounts ethnicity in favor of a common culture...
...What we should have learned from the pessimists is that history is not preordained and that human beings are not helpless before historical forces...
...Moreover, whereas the older assimilationist dispensation accorded immigrants full rights as citizens (except the right torun for president) provided they learned English, took pride in being Americans, and agreed to live by the precepts of the Protestant ethic—to be hardworking, upstanding, self-reliant citizens—the new multiculturalism explicitly rejects these requirements...
...Whereas the old paradigm saw America as a single nation composed of individuals who all subscribed to the truths contained in the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Gettysburg Address, no matter what their ethnic background, the new ethnic federalism regards the United States as a multiethnic confederacy—a "salad bowl," "kaleidoscope," or "gorgeous mosaic" — made up of groups rather than individuals...
...So numbing is the assault on our sensibilities that many of us grow numb, finding resignation to be the rational, adaptive response to an environment that is increasingly polluted...
...Tracing that tradition, and explaining its influence on contemporary thinking, is the job undertaken by Arthur Herman in The Idea of Decline in Western History...
...in the possession of private property as a fundamental natural right...
...America was the country of tomorrow, as Emerson put it, but it had its own incurable pessimists...
...English proficiency is •no longer seen as the sine qua non of American citizenship, and the view that children of immigrants should be instructed in English as quickly as possible is regarded as hopelessly antiquated...
...4* chronicling the many ways in which the world is going to hell on a bullet train...
...Published in late February and in its fourth printing by the end of March, Out ofAmerica has been called an "angry" book...
...DuBois, who denounced the false idol of "triumphant commercialism" and saw in the outward poverty of his ancestral Africa "the leisure of true aristocracy, leisure for thought and courtesy, leisure for sleep and laughter...
...Assimilating its vast immigrant population to this common culture has been one of America's greatest success stories, and one measure of that success is that we have been largely exempt from the kinds of ethnic conflict that are tearing other nations apart...
...Well, look who's talking...
...In Europe philosophers predicted rapid decay as a result of any number of causes —the dilution of the white race, man's growing separation from nature, the rise of capitalism, the power of technology, and so on...
...They also seem to have in common a psychological need to savor the prospect of imminent catastrophe...
...But Richburg knows that he is condemning the refusal by U.S...
...cies among some black Americans —tendencies encouraged by Afrocentrism — Richburg contends that "we need instead to go back to the original idea of America as a melting pot and create a society that's truly color-blind, not carved up into racial and ethnic duchies...
...some even forecast human extinction, and not necessarily with regret...
...Many religious conservatives see America as a latter-day Sodom bent on defying God and fated to suffer the dire consequences...
...Assorted environmentalists delight in warning of ecological apocalypse...
...One of Gobineau's intellectual heirswas Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who called for the regeneration of civilization through the pursuit of racial purity...
...And extolling the Protestant ethic is regarded as "blaming the victim," since the only way that immigrant and native-born poor can realistically hope to overcome the racism and discrimination that are the root causes of their plight is through extensive government assistance...
...Herman's book is particularly useful, though, for illuminating the ties that connect most declinists, past and present: "[They see belief in the autonomy of the individual...
...However, it is quite another to draw, or allow to be drawn, a picture that suggests that these problems have such 76 May r 9 9 7 • The American Spectator deeply rooted causes that they are unsolvable, or have such far-reaching implications that only a drastic overhaul of the society or culture as a whole can fix them...
...He also fretted that "the dark races are gaining on us"—includingthe "rotten, unsexed, swindling, lying Jews...
...French declinists of the 1920's were drawn to fascism as an antidote to the "decadence" of capitalism and democracy—paving the way for Vichy...
...The froth and frenzy of industrial civilization mask our deep loneliness...
...in science and technology as conducive to human happiness rather than otherwise...
...They could profit from Herman's book, a chronicle of the many ways Westerners have deluded themselves that all is lost...
...Societies of free individuals operating in fallible man-made institutions can alter their destiny for the better...
...Among the earliest was Henry Adams, who had only contempt for the economy and polity of his day, abhorring "its huge armaments, its vast accumulation of capital, its advancing materialism and spiritual degradation...
...But Bork, Gore, and many other commentators can't see past the imperfections that remain...
...When he was visited by Brooks Adams, brother of Henry, Theodore Roosevelt wrote, "He is having a delightful time here, and simply reveling in gloom over the appalling social and civic disasters which he sees impending...
...Each generation, it appears, feels obliged to find reasons to don sandwich boards and proclaim, "The end is nigh...
...Equally disdainful of laissez-faire was W.E.B...
...American exceptionalism"—the belief that the United States is at heart different from the world's other nations—is, in one respect at least, obviously true...
...Taking pride in one's American identity is not considered possible, given that American history "is a story of oppression, racism and genocide aimed at American Indians, blacks and most immigrants other than northern Europeans...
...Jeremiads like those from Bork and Gore have been heard issuing from both right and left across Europe and America for at least a century and a half—though similar laments can be found all the way back to the ancient Greeks...
...Maybe it is because even beneficial change is psychologically stressful...
...This apocalyptic impulse gathered considerable strength after the Enlightenment, which had the nerve to place confidence in the power of reason...
...Herman doesn't make the opposite mistake of blind optimism...
...Close...
...The vice president's 1992 book, Earth in the Balance, makes Bork sound like Norman Vincent Peale: [O]ur civilization is addicted to the consumption of the earth itself...
...After the publication of his book and the honor of World War I, writes Herman, the "only subject left for debate was not whether the modern West was doomed but why...
...Herman offers the good news: It has been for a long time...
...Bork, in his book, suggests that modern feminists decrying their oppression by a patriarchal society are motivated mainly by boredom...
...Not since The Divine Comedy has one book assembled so many sinners and documented so much wailing and gnashing of teeth...
...America continued on its course without paying much attention to such thinkers, but other countries were not so lucky...
...Mental illness in its many forms is at epidemic levels...
...and the right to have their culture protected, and their self-esteem nurtured, in all public institutions, particularly educational ones...
...Bork may not think he has much in common with Al Gore, but the two of them could have a good cry over dinner STEPHEN CHAPMAN is a syndicated columnist on the staff of the Chicago Tribune...
...Like many white declinists, he preached against the pollution of his race by contact with lesser breeds, in words that undoubtedly inspire Leonard Jeffries and Louis Farrakhan...
...years, our "opinion and policy elites" have turned their backs on America's historic commitment to assimilation in favor of a policy that aims at preserving and enhancing ethnic consciousness...
...Unless this approach is reversed, Salins warns, America will lose its exceptional character and "soon join the dismal ranks of the world's other multiethnic nations as a battleground of perpetual ethnic discord...
...A] new fear is now deepening our addiction: even as we revel in our success at controlling nature, we have become increasingly frightened of the consequences, and that fear only drives us to ride this destructive cycle harder and faster...
...They are not, however, endowed with any overarching American loyalty that transcends their ethnic loyalty...
...Harvard's Cornel West writes, "We live in a time of cultural disarray and social decay, an age filled with ruins and fragments...
...W]e are on the road to cultural disaster...Life in such a culture can come close to seeming intolerable...
...Maybe it is a product of the Christian expectation of a terrible Judgment Day...
Vol. 30 • May 1997 • No. 5
