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history's
WINNERS AND LOSERS
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books). His editorials appear
regularly in frontpagemag.com and
PJ Media. His monograph, Global Warning:
The Trials of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada)
was launched at the National Archives in Ottawa in September,
2012. His latest book of poetry, Habibi:
The Diwam of Alim Maghrebi
(Guernica Editions), is now available as is his most recent
collection of essays, The
Boxthorn Tree. And a song from David's soon
to be released CD.
The
difference between history’s winners and losers obviously
depends on the criteria we adopt to discriminate between success
and failure on the level of nation, culture and civilization.
For the purposes of this article, I will leave the display of
military splendor and the creation of great art out of the equation.
Neither military parades in a public square nor architectural
wonders constitute a boon for ordinary people, even if they
produce a feeling of national pride. Rather, I define success
as a function of three complementary factors: the ability to
survive intact for extended periods; the achievement of approximate
prosperity in a largely impoverished world; and the fostering
of a relatively free, confident and vigorous citizenry. (Jeremy
Bentham’s utilitarian calculus developed in his A
Fragment on Government, based on “the greatest happiness
of the greatest number,” plainly does not consort with
these observations, since happiness is both an ambiguous concept
and a non-measurable “quantity”).
Naturally,
political and social conditions will differ markedly owing to
the contingencies and realities of the epoch in question, but
these three criteria appear essentially stable. I should also
specify that the term “winner” in this context does
not designate mere brute power leading to longevity but comes
with a moral valence as well, ideally, a quality of mercy, respect
for one’s fellow citizens and the sane administration
of reasonable laws. President Kennedy was no paragon of virtue
and some of his pronouncements are distinctly troubling; yet
he clearly recognized the moral component of national success
when he wrote, in his Cuban Missile Cris address of October
22, 1962, in refutation of Thrasymachus’ “might
is right” doctrine in Plato’s Republic:
“Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication
of right.” It should be noted, too, that the three basic
factors I have outlined do not necessarily apply as an indivisible
unit; sometimes one, sometimes another, will predominate, but
no single one is sufficient in itself.
What
I regard as failure reverses the elements involved: an abbreviated
sojourn on the historical calendar; the curse of subsistence
living or economic destitution; and a repressive sociopolitical
system in which individuals are merged into a featureless collective
or, for one or another reason, despoiled of the opportunity
to realize their innate potentials.
Of
the losers, the most prominent contemporary instance is the
Soviet Union, whose overhyped “Communist utopia”
collapsed after 70 years. Founded on unworkable principles,
meretricious theory, false premises and a complete misunderstanding
of human nature, the surprise was that it lasted even that long.
Another undoubted loser is the Islamic imperium. Of course,
Islam as a composite civilization embracing many diverse nations
has endured for over 1400 years. It satisfies the criterion
of longevity, but its current differential prosperity relies
on external sources and is concentrated, for the most part,
in the hands of a dynastic or theocratic minority. Nor can its
citizens generally be described as vigorous, inventive, well-educated
and emancipated. Aside from a brief efflorescence in the medieval
era, Islam has given the world little in the way of human thriving,
maintaining itself through violence, dogma, slavery and conquest.
In his indispensable and encyclopedic Sharia versus Freedom,
Andrew Bostom quotes the scholar of religion James Freeman Clarke
to the effect that Islam “makes life barren and empty…It
makes men tyrants or slaves, women puppets, religion the submission
to infinite despotism.” Any nation or institution that
makes common cause with Islam or allows its incursion into the
body politic or into social and cultural life will eventually
go the same route.
Arguably,
the greatest winner in history was Rome spanning the period
from Republic to Empire, before disintegration set in. The United
States of America is not far behind in the winning category,
probably the most dynamic nation ever to have appeared on the
historical proscenium and the bulwark of Western civilization
in the modern world, although its tenure, unlike Rome’s,
was comparatively truncated, and many indicators suggest that
exhaustion and decrepitude are nigh. The great experiment in
republican governance, individual liberty, free market economics,
industrial potency and energetic entrepreneurship was doomed
by the inexorable forces of human corruption, naked greed, endemic
stupidity and the onset of relaxed indifference to the kinetics
of continued prosperity, the desideratum of internal unity and
the harsh demands of survival in an unforgiving world. Its early
decline may be understood as a function of its precipitous success
and, in this sense, the current woes afflicting the nation may
be considered as entirely predictable and strictly unavoidable.
Debt, dependency, unproductivity, preoccupation with untenable
theories and fads, internecine conflict, racial politics, affirmative
(or infirmative) action, the multicultural salad bowl, intellectual
debasement of the general public, a decadent clerisy, incompetent
and sybaritic leaders and a climate in which, to cite Victor
Davis Hanson, “profits create suspicion; failures earn
subsidies” — all were scripted in history’s
Domesday Book.
It
was only a question of time and time is now foreclosing. Winners
infallibly become losers in the chronicle of nations, cultures
and civilizations, tracing, as I wrote several years ago in
an analysis of the ideas of the philosophers of decline, “the
deciduous arc into the mulch of history.” The decline
is invariably accelerated by “the inner loss of the civilizing
imperative, the erosion of pride in accomplishment, of political
integrity, fiscal sobriety and belief in a system of core values,
laws and conventions.”
One
recalls Alexis de Tocqueville’s well-known and oft-cited
passage from Book Four, Chapter VI, of Democracy in America,
worth quoting more or less in full:
After
having thus successively taken each member of the community
in its powerful grasp, and fashioned them at will, the supreme
power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers
the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated
rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds
and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise
above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened,
bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they
are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not
destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but
it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people,
till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock
of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is
the shepherd…Our contemporaries are constantly excited
by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish
to remain free: as they cannot destroy either one or the other
of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them
both at once…A great many persons at the present day are
quite contented with this sort of compromise between administrative
despotism and the sovereignty of the people; and they think
they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom
when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at
large.
Tocqueville’s
premonition of what lay in store for America is an expansion
of Benjamin Franklin’s famous observation from the Historical
Review of Pennsylvania of 1759: “Those who would
give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Franklin’s
apothegm itself derives from Aristotle’s seminal discussion
in Politics: A Treatise on Government, where he stresses
the necessity of active and committed citizens if the state
is to flourish and remain strong; where such commitment is absent,
the state invariably grows weak and decays into anarchy or absolutism.
When one examines the social and political conduct of the United
States today, one sees both anarchy and absolutism at work:
a divided citizenry, giving the impression that America comprises
really two — or more — competing nations, with the
threat of secession floating in the air and economic chaos in
the offing; and an increasingly autocratic political administration
governing via executive privilege, the bypassing of Congress,
the proliferation of draconian laws and regulations, internal
espionage, stygian secrecy, constitutional delinquency, bureaucratic
engorgement and the assumption of elitist privilege converging
in the person of a “great leader.” The octopal state
has its tentacles everywhere and its citizenry is subject to
the invasive probing of a panoptic and all-encompassing entity.
“1984 is here,” writes Roger Simon, “Someone
is watching me, monitoring whatever I do. If I make a mistake,
I will pay for it. My future will be bleak.” “And
here’s the big problem,” he continues, “it’s
hard to see how it’s going to get better.”
History
has been kind to America for an ephemeral moment in aeonian
time; and America has been good for the world. But not everyone
loves a winner. Envy and resentment rather than gratitude have
been its international reward. But what is even more damning
and far less resistible is the spirit of envy and resentment
that emanates from within the republic as it turns against itself
— envy directed toward the productive classes; resentment
for accomplishment and earned stature. And once an entitlement
mentality asserts itself and begins to determine public policy,
as Milton Friedman warned, the tipping point relentlessly approaches.
When, as it has been said, there are as many people riding the
wagon as there are pulling the wagon — the socialist conundrum
— the wagon moves ever more slowly before grinding to
a halt. This is precisely the condition of America today, where
we appear to be witnessing the impending end of republican democracy
and the “fundamental transformation” of a flawed
but admirable nation into a neo-Marxist caricature of itself.
The
only issue that remains is whether a winner that is losing can
reclaim its place on the podium. Secession of a vital part from
a sickly and imploding whole may go some way to restoration,
but only for the part, and even then it is a risky proposition.
A noble and determined leader — charisma is not enough
and may often be destructive, as we have seen in the U.S. today
— emerging unexpectedly on the scene may stave off disaster,
at least for a time. For all his foreign policy blunders —
withdrawing the marines from Lebanon, arming the Islamists in
Afghanistan — such a leader was Ronald Reagan, who in
his Farewell Speech pointed out “what it means to be an
American,” namely, “a love of country and an appreciation
of its institutions,” without which that “rare”
and “fragile” thing, freedom, would be lost. A winner
who lets freedom slip away becomes a loser before his time.
But
the forecast is not encouraging. Reagan’s proud city “strong
and true on the granite ridge” is sliding brick by brick
and building by building into the environing ocean whose waves
he thought it could withstand. Barring a miracle or a propitious
awakening, the future has been written. History is claiming
its due and history does not play favorites. Indeed, history
does not play.
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