During the Middle Ages in England, the poor had babies, but they mostly died. Neither did they have the income to feed a lot of them if they had tried to have large families. Children of the comparatively rich survived. Those higher in socioeconomic status are generally smarter and healthier. Since the poor were failing to reproduce at replacement levels, there was downward mobility as the children of the relatively smart and rich moved down the economic scale and took over jobs formerly done by the dumber and poorer. Thus, there was a eugenic effect on the whole of society. This trend culminated in the Industrial Revolution, an English phenomenon, creating more food than ever before due to advances in farming, and more wealth in general. Thanks to these developments, eventually leading to modern medicine, the population of the Earth went from one billion to around eight billion. This ability to feed the world on a mass scale and keep them alive with modern medicine were an exclusively European and Anglosphere phenomenon. White Europeans have gone from 28% of the world’s population in 1900 to 11% now. We are dying out and not breeding at replacement levels. There is a simmering hatred and resentment in countries that have been less successful, and in populations in richer countries that have not risen very high in the social hierarchy. This hatred and resentment has been actively exacerbated and encouraged in any number of university departments which only exist to foment outrage directed at the successful – so-called “Grievance Studies.”
Objective subjects like mathematics, with no room for grade inflation, one would think, have now been infamously described as “racist.” Of course, there has been grade inflation there too. One math professor in the area was only too happy to retire when the pressure came down to pass students for calculus who could not do calculus, and that was over twenty years ago.
The hatred directed at white people and their active demotion to the most contemptible section of society is really unnecessary. We are very busy failing to reproduce at replacement levels anyway, other than religious conservatives. Wait a bit longer and you will not have anyone to get angry at. These supposedly white racist countries are the only ones that refugees and immigrants desperately try to get into. Not the countries filled with the non-odious “people of color.” Be careful what you wish for. Globalism, that deracinated nightmare of atomized individuals with liquid assets jumping from major city to major city without concern for which county that might be is derived from white Western civilization too. Bruce Charlton comments in an interview[1] that with the end of white hegemony and thus that vampiric globalism, will come the end of modern living standards and relatively quick collapse back down to the one billion levels of population that existed before all the advances.
A black US podcaster, Jesse Lee Peterson, commented that black Americans are clamoring for the reins of power and to switch places with the white overlords, although this is really mostly just white people virtue signaling to other white people. He contends that were this vision to be realized, the whole of America would take on the characteristics of the ghetto. Low living standards, barely functioning infrastructure, which is possibly already here, and high crime and general lawlessness. Black Americans will end up the hegemons of the bankrupt.
Camile Paglia, back in the early 1990s, had already identified all the ways that this period in time resembles all the other collapses of civilization; namely, the Greeks and, especially, the Romans. These factors may have not held good with The Great Catastrophe somewhere around 1100 BC only because that was so fast. Items that indicate civilizational collapse include feminism. Whatever the female genius is, it does not include preserving structure. The feminine tendency is towards pathological altruism and hatred of hierarchy. This impulse towards egalitarianism and sympathy for the downtrodden includes an animus to rules, principles, and equality before the law. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, gives the example of kids playing baseball. The worst player strikes out and begins to cry. The boys wait for him to vacate the plate. The girls feel sorry for him and say “Oh. Go on. Give him another chance.” The boys say, the rule is three strikes and you are out. That is only fair. It is the same rule for each of us. And the fact is, there is no game at all without those rules. One has stopped playing baseball if people just stand there and keep pitching and swinging until bat hits ball. As I have argued before, there can be brief moments of compassion for the loser, but if that becomes dominant, the whole activity ceases. We need patriarchal structure with occasional exceptions. The reverse is just chaos. Hence, the dissolution of society. Every institution is now dominated by the Left, or whatever would be the correct name these days, and the Left is a fundamentally femininized phenomenon. Universities cannot exist or function without hierarchy. They are no longer hiring the smart, but the conscientious. As Charlton points out, not only are we less capable of achieving excellence due to dramatically falling intelligence levels, but we are not even trying. Geniuses have super high IQs, and are antisocial. They cannot be concerned with worldly success – fame, money, status, and sex, but with their self-chosen problem. Many people will be offended by what they discover and they will be told they are wrong. Those who are too agreeable will not want to offend the consensus or to ruffle feathers and will thus stop what they are doing. University selection committees select for conscientiousness and medium intelligence (midwits), the head girl type, popular with her classmates, and now for race and sex. They cannot achieve excellence if they are not even trying for excellence. Geniuses also have to be obsessed with truth – a transcendental value. In the past, most geniuses were Christians or Jews (we could add Platonists). There was a single generation of atheists in the Twentieth Century who were geniuses, making it seem like there could be atheist geniuses, and that that would be the new trend going forward, but then it stopped. Charlton argues that these atheists were brought up in a religious household where they were taught to admire transcendental values, truth, beauty, and goodness. They then applied this zeal to their chosen subject-matter and field but that this phenomenon had ceased by the next generation down, hence we have simply stopped producing geniuses for the most part. Ed Dutton has contended that the transition from group orientation to extreme individualism that we saw with the 1960s results in a brief efflorescence of creativity as the restraints on individualism and thus individual genius are lifted, but then this collapses into sterility as individualism becomes the norm.
The Kali Yuga is part of a cyclical view of history embedded within Hinduism. It is the last stage in the cycle before the rotation begins anew. Everything goes to hell and is destroyed. After the catastrophe, the process starts again. Dutton warns that the higher the civilization, especially with regard to the Industrial Revolution, the worse will be the fall. So many of us have lost all knowledge of working the land thanks to the move to cities. After the fall of the Roman empire, more people knew about animal husbandry, agriculture, and horticulture and could return more easily to a lower mode of living.
It is not only feminism that emerges with civilizational collapse, but the removal of barriers to immigration. More and more members of the Roman Empire demanded Roman citizenship and flooded into Rome towards the end. Non-homogenous populations – genetically, ethnically, linguistically – diminish social trust, as Robert Putnam showed in the 1990s, even among those who share all those things. We have lost our trust in each other and as importantly, in all major social institutions, and deservedly so. We cannot trust the government, the Deep State, the FBI and CIA, the news media, the schools and universities. America is simply printing money (metaphorically) and banking (haha) on the fact that the USD is the dominant worldwide currency to prop it up. A lot of the money goes to hedge funds and then into assets like housing.
Rather bizarrely, and specifically, an obsession with blurring the distinction between male and female is also a feature of collapse. From a Girardian point of view, and perhaps Jungian, chaos is simply the loss of distinctions. Teacher/student, parent/child, human/animal, employer/employee. Many myths have women giving birth to animals, or things like dressing in seal skins and returning to the sea, and then coming up on land while removing the skins. Charlton points out that the demand that we agree that men can become women is so absurd and unscientific that pretending to agree that it is possible is intensely demoralizing. It is a show of force. What self-respect or devotion to truth is supposed to remain after conceding to that?
Before he died, Thomas F. Bertonneau read book after book about the Great Catastrophe, about Hesiod and Homer and their conscious effort to foster the reemergence of civilization, looking to the Bronze Age for inspiration. He read dozens of books about the Myth of Atlantis concerning lost civilizations, and books about the end of the Minoans, and the Mycenaean’s relatively brief prolongation of Minoan civilization after a volcanic eruption (probably) deposited ash all over the region to great depths.
Dutton sees the whole thing as analogous to the life cycle of an organism, with inevitable senescence and decrepitude. Spengler compared it to seasons with the Kali Yuga being winter. From Dutton’s point of view, there is no point in getting too caught up with conspiracy theories nor with thinking things like “if only we could get rid of critical race theory,” not least because anti-white hatred will still be in the minds of many teachers no matter what you do. The Romans too had grain surpluses and distributed them to the poor allowing them to multiply, lowering IQ and health. Once a civilization becomes very successful it can afford to be generous and general level of wealth is high. Without mortality salience, and with dysgenic breeding, people lose their natural religious impulses. The rich and smart use contraceptive methods and stop having children seeing them as a barrier to hedonistic self-indulgence and even higher standards of living. Without religion giving a vision of transcendental values, of eternity, moral realism, and the conviction that creation is good and life worth living, people sink into depression and nihilism which also contributes to not having children. Evolutionary psychology itself is “science” and thus embodies a materialist, non-religious metaphysic. Science cannot identify intrinsic value and thus has a black hole of nihilism sucking in everything. Science can only be the handmaiden of the religious. Once it becomes totalized, the Kali Yuga is only decades away.
I recall Camille Paglia’s thesis, that one readily finds similar patterns in (at least, Western) civilizational decline. Her most persuasive evidence to my eyes was her discussion of the gender blender phenomenon.
As Rome declined, its male statuary assumed ever more feminine characteristics — thus one may claim the same of people in the world in which the sculptor lived. And then these feminized were overcome by the barbarians (who spoke bah bah bah — oh the contempt they had for those who overcame them!), the Goths and Vikings and such, who apparently were as masculine then as men east of the Bosporus are today.
As in the modern West, although not seen through sculpture, rather the forms of expression common to today’s world (of which sculpture one might associate with traditional forms is now uncommon). And the barbarians…
Thanks!
Well that was a ray of sunshine! But I’m afraid you are right that these are deep structures that we as powerless to stop as we are powerless to stop continental drift. I think you once before mentioned the cyclical theory of Sir John Glubb, and his observation that feminism and celebrity worship always mark the beginning of the end. I remember that he also said that decadent civilizations always place their hope in an intellectual solution to their problems, but that the problems that bring a civilization down cannot be solved by intellect. We appear to have placed our hope in artificial intelligence, which isn’t really intelligence and so may possibly make things worse.
The dysgenic argument strikes me as unanswerable, and I’m guessing that we are masking the empirical evidence by creaming the best and brightest from countries that need them even more than we do. Assuming there are historians in the future, they will be astonished to see how the word eugenic was increasingly deprecated by a civilization that was increasingly dysgenic. Or maybe they won’t be astonished once they discover that we have elected to reduce crime by letting criminals go free and to boost grades by making tests easier. If we saw the same traits in an individual, we would say he was in “deep denial”–that he could not begin to work on his problems because he was incapable of seeing that he had problems.
Not sure it’s a matter of decades. In 1989 I was in law school and watching live footage of Germans taking pickaxes to the Berlin Wall. I said the Soviet Bloc would be gone in five years; my roommate said ten. It took less than two.
But yes, if you parse through all the details, the geography and logistics, the institutional inertia, and all the people (including me) with an incentive to keep it all together (I’m 7-9 years away from Social Security), then the timeline is probably decades.
I was commenting on iSteve today how incredible it is to have a senile old man as President; it literally no longer matters who the President of the United States is. We’re like the anonymous Soviet politburo cycling through old, gray figureheads. Eventually somebody is going to notice that vacuum swirling around at the top of the State apparatus and seize power. I mean, when has that not happened?
This could be a perfectly good outcome. I don’t see things tipping to bolshevism, honestly. Americans, even American immigrant populations, seem to have a blessedly ornery streak. But we’ll see.
Thanks, theantignostic. You and I are a similar age. I have three countries I could conceivably live in, but I don’t see who is safe from the coming tsunami. New Zealand has gone straight totalitarian like Canada and the housing is unaffordable. Serbia is already dysfunctional.
An online friend around our age blames technology (call it, the Technological Revolution). I live in one of the last affordable spots in swampy, chaotic Florida and, paradoxically, think it’s as good a place as any to ride things out.
What I worry about more is the fate of Christianity and, peculiar to me, the Orthodox Church. The Church has simply not been there, asserting herself as a coequal institution with an increasingly dysfunctional and fraying State. If the Church does not assert herself she will be replaced, as surely as Hypatia’s gods were replaced by the One God. What comes afterward? I shudder to think.
My creed tells me the gates of Hell will not prevail against her but so far I don’t see anybody like an Ignatius or John Chrysostom among our bishops. But there is also a vacuum forming in Orthodox ecclesiology and someone could grab that $100 bill off the floor too (to put it in mundane terms).
Interesting times.
“Spengler compared it to seasons with the Kali Yuga being winter.”
I know blogs necessitate a certain brevity, but you can’t neglect to do justice to Spengler’s brilliant thoughts on these matters like that!
Unfortunately, Thomas F. Bertonneau was the Spengler expert rather than me. Tom did say that Spengler commented on the modern omission of aspects of consciousness associated with intuition, creativity, humor, metaphor, and spiritual depth (right hemisphere things) and that makes him seem likely to be congenial to me.
The number and severity of adverse trends, plus the actively destructive world governance System, plus the astonishing compliance and self-blinding of the masses – all mean that I regard a global civilizational collapse as inevitable and unstoppable (even if there was a significant will to stop it – which there is not… quite the opposite).
For me, the only question is when?
Will civilization collapse today, tomorrow, in weeks, months or a few years…? I have no idea and there is no way of knowing until it has begun – when it will very soon be very obvious.
However, such a world view is actually liberating to a Christian. It means that I can (and indeed should) stop attending to politics (as far as possible); stop futile attempts favourably to influence large scale institutional trends (a project on which I wasted about three decades) – and instead focus my efforts on the personal, the directly experienced, and the spiritual.
I often find consolation in CS Lewis’s remark that the fate of a single individual human soul is more important than any civilization – a soul is eternal and has potential for divine glory, but all civilizations are transient and (at best) substantially corrupt things.
Thanks, Bruce. Since the crazies have actually announced that they want to end Western Civilization as a nasty patriarchal, white supremacist phenomenon, and Western Civ is now a global phenomenon, not restricted to one self-destructive country, and they run every major institution and get to brainwash children to their hearts’ content at every level, I don’t see how this conclusion can be avoided. They are explicitly anti-rational, anti-reason, and just laugh or ignore you if you point out contradictions and absurdities. Meanwhile, they have a political agenda that they actually put into practice, while the Right do not.
Every now and then I have considered actually reading “White Fragility,” or some such nonsense, in the name of doing some point by point demolition of it, but what’s the point? Non-crazy people don’t believe it, and crazy people will ignore it. This human tendency to listen to and concede to a minority that yells the most and seems the most upset is killing us. It’s good manners to cook vegan because one dinner guest is vegan, or for a Chinese person not to serve cat or dog to a visiting American, but, in the process, we give society over to people who spit on the notion of “manners.” The tail wags the dog in terms of the loudest and most vocal getting their way. BLM is the KKK for black people. John Brown returns from the gallows and spews anti-white genocidal hatred. My college directs me to a website on “the problem of whiteness” by which I am supposed to be edified. A black man just got a $5000 bond release after torturing and setting his six month pregnant girlfriend on fire, having doused her in lighter fluid, giving her burns on 60% of her body. A black teenager shot a classmate and a white teacher with a .45 magnum pistol and was released the next day. The teacher threw himself between the shooter and his target and the bullet narrowly missed his aorta. A black anti-white maniac ran over dozens of white people, killing 8, including a child, and the story got memory holed immediately.
Part of my conversion to a more fully religious mindset included an increased capacity to believe, but I continue to have trouble believing this level of immoral, irrational, stupidity. But, that’s my problem, I guess.
The Green movement, at least here in Ireland, is intent upon bringing intensive farming to an end and returning agriculture to something more like what existed prior to the industrial revolution.Yet, there are eight billion people that must be fed. Now. If the food surpluses generated by the US and the EU are reduced or eliminated for the sake of ‘the environment’, the consequences would be unthinkable.
Thanks, mickvet.
You may see mass starvation as a bug, but the Greens see it as a feature.
This gives me slight hope that those many countries that depend on the food surpluses of the West might see through all the propaganda. The Greens don’t just intend to deprive them of access to our food,they are also keen on taking their avocadoes and palm oil. Perhaps, the influx of the Islamist world into the West will play a part in maintaining sanity. If their aim is to establish a greater Caliphate, it’s not going to be helped by the original Arabic countries being deprived of the economic benefits of their fossil fuels. Then again, the pessimist in me envisages these various turkeys voting for Christmas.