Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy
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Meaning comes from family, friends, faith, community, and countless little platoons of civil society. When those institutions fail, capitalism alone cannot restore them. As a result, human nature starts making demands of the political and economic systems that neither can possibly fulfill. Liberty, economic and political, is recast as the source of our problems. Having lost faith in other realms, we lose faith in the Miracle itself, and we cast about for what feels more natural: tribalism, nationalism, or socialism in one guise or another.
Most people recognize that “consumer confidence” is important for the economy. When people feel optimistic about their own financial situation and the prospects for the overall economy, they are more likely to spend money and businesses invest more in workers and equipment. Tragically, we spend vastly more time talking about consumer confidence than we do about civilizational confidence, and yet civilizational confidence is vastly more important. Western civilization created the Miracle, even if it did so by accident. When we lose our confidence—and pride—in what it has accomplished, we are committing a suicidal act on a civilizational scale.
* Increasingly, education might also be an enemy of capitalism, as I discussed earlier.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. xlii.
2. I am indebted to Joshua Greene, author of Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (New York: Penguin, 2013), for this thought experiment.
3. Robin Fox, The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 6.
4. “GDP, 1990 International Dollars,” Human Progress. http://humanprogress.org/f1/2128. All figures from Human Progress, a project of the Cato Institute. Marian L. Tupy and Chelsea Follett were extremely helpful to us for this portion of the project.
5. Todd G. Buchholz, “Dark Clouds, Silver Linings,” in New Ideas from Dead Economists: An Introduction to Modern Economic Thought (New York: Penguin Group, 2007 [1990]), p. 313.
6. I use the word “tribal” because it is the more serviceable adjective. Technically, humans evolved in smaller units called bands. But “bandal” isn’t a word, and “tribe,” the next unit of organization up from band, captures the point just as well.
7. With the exception of a few nocturnal lower primates and the higher primate, the orangutan, virtually all primates live in communities.
8. Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (New York: Grand Central, 2016, Kindle edition), pp. 2-3.
9. “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become European,” a French émigré writer, Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur, observed in 1782. “There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.” “Crèvecoeur seemed to have understood that the intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal that the material benefits of Western civilization couldn’t necessarily compete with,” Junger writes. “If he was right, that problem started almost as soon as Europeans touched American shores. As early as 1612, Spanish authorities noted in amazement that forty or fifty Virginians had married into Indian tribes, and that even English women were openly mingling with the natives.” Ibid., p. 10.
10. The Austrian writer Ernst Fischer found that Marx’s vision was an extension of “the romantic revolt against a world which turned everything into a commodity and degraded man to the status of an object.” The socialist scholar Michael Löwy, in a deeply researched essay, “The Romantic and the Marxist Critique of Modern Civilization,” concludes that as “a matter of fact Romantic anti-capitalism is the forgotten source of Marx, a source that is as important for his work as German neo-Hegelianism or French materialism.” But Paul Johnson sums it up best: “There was nothing scientific about him; indeed, in all that matters he was anti-scientific.” Michael Löwy, “The Romantic and the Marxist Critique of Modern Civilization,” Theory and Society 16, no. 6 (November 1987), p. 897; Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: HarperCollins, 2009, Kindle edition), Kindle location 1233-37.
11. Thirty years after its publication, its Amazon sales rank was 5 in books on political science as of 1/17/18. It’s an unrelenting indictment of America as a force of evil. It remains one of, if not the most, widely used textbooks in American high schools and colleges. “Given a choice between a book that portrayed America honestly—as an extraordinary success story—and a book that portrayed the history of America as a litany of depredations and failures, which do you suppose your average graduate of a teachers college, your average member of the National Education Association, would choose?” asks Roger Kimball. He adds, “To ask the question is to answer it.” Roger Kimball, “Professor of Contempt,” National Review online, February 3, 2010. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/229071/professor-contempt-roger-kimball
12. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2005 [1980]), p. 10.
13. “163. The Hen and the Golden Eggs,” Aesop’s Fables (trans. G. F. Townsend, 1867. See Aesopica: Aesop’s Fables in English, Latin, & Greek. http://mythfolklore.net/aesopica/townsend/163.htm
14. “Avyan 24. Of the goos and of her lord,” Aesop’s Fables (trans. William Caxton, 1484. See Aesopica: Aesop’s Fables in English, Latin, & Greek. http://mythfolklore.net/aesopica/caxton/724.htm
15. I am indebted to Paul Rahe for calling the significance of this scene to my attention. For his full argument, see Paul Rahe, “Don Vito Corleone, Friendship, and the American Regime,” in Reinventing the American People: Unity and Diversity Today, Robert Royal, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1995), pp. 115-35.
1: HUMAN NATURE
1. Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Broadway Books, 2013, Kindle edition), pp. 23-29.
2. Ibid., pp. 110-111.
3. Ibid., p. 14.
4. Carl Schmitt, Glossarium: Aufzeichnungen der Jahre 1947-1951, Eberhard Freiherr von Medem, ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991), pp. 4-5, 243. Quoted in Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 293.
5. Bloom, Just Babies, p. 15.
6. Donald E. Brown, “Human Universals, Human Nature & Human Culture,” Daedalus 133, no. 4 (special issue: “On Human Nature,” Fall 2004), pp. 47-54.
7. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2003 [2002], Kindle edition), p. 6.
8. Ibid.
9. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Second Part,” sec. 207, “A Dissertation on the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind,” The Social Contract and Discourses, Online Library of Liberty, 1761. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/rousseau-the-social-contract-and-discourses#lf0132_head_066
10. Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 29.
11. Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1846,” Romanticism: The Documentary History of Western Civilization, John B. Halsted, ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1969), p. 119.
12. Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), p. 73.
13. Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 154-55.
14. Steven Pinker, “A History of Violence,” New Republic, March 18, 2007. https://newrepublic.com/article/77728/history-violence
15. Matt Ridley, “Farewell to the Myth of the Noble Savage,” Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2013. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142412788732394000457825772097210
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16. Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2006), p. 151.
17. Chagnon was besieged by anthropologists, indigenous activists, and Catholic missionaries for his relentlessly bleak portrait native of the primitive societies he suffered. The typical charges of colonial bias, Western chauvinism, and racism were hurled at him. But he was ultimately vindicated by subsequent research, most notably the work of Alice Dreger of Northwestern University. See Alice Dreger, “Darkness’s Descent on the American Psychological Association: A Cautionary Tale,” Human Nature 22, no. 3 (September 2011), pp. 225-46. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs12110-011-9103-y. See also Matt Ridley, “Farewell to the Myth of the Noble Savage,” Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2013.
18. Napoleon Chagnon, “Life Histories, Blood Revenge, and Warfare in a Tribal Population,” Science n.s., 239, no. 4843 (February 26, 1988), pp. 985-92. http://www.class.uh.edu/faculty/tsommers/moral%20diversity/bood%20revenge%20yanomamo.pdf
19. Marvin Harris was the reigning authority in the early 1960s when Chagnon first set out for the Amazon to do his research. The Columbia professor was a cultural materialist, which is a fancy way of saying he was a Marxist. He rejected that notions of honor or contests over women could lead to perpetual bloodshed. Instead, he bought the theory put out by his former student Daniel Gross, who in 1975 published a paper postulating that the scarcity of animal protein in the Amazon was the only reason tribes there resorted to war. He told Chagnon: “If you can show me that the Yanomami get the protein equivalent of one Big Mac per day, I’ll eat my hat.” The protein studies are still hotly debated, with partisans of Chagnon finding whole Happy Meals’ worth of protein and opponents finding slightly less. But as far as Chagnon’s larger argument goes, he has been vindicated. Still, even if it were the case that the typical Yanomamö warrior ate less animal fat than Gwyneth Paltrow on a cleanse fast, it doesn’t matter much for my larger argument. First of all, rates of violence are remarkably constant across time and geography for primitive societies. Surely some of them had enough protein? Second, if a relative shortage of tree sloths and bush pigs can lead to staggering levels of violence and infanticide, the fact remains that the Yanomamö live in constant violence. And given that resource scarcity defined virtually every human society before the agricultural revolution—and well beyond it—it would be racist, not to mention woefully ignorant, to assume that other human populations didn’t respond to scarcity in the same way. See Emily Eakin, “How Napoleon Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist,” New York Times, February 13, 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/magazine/napoleon-chagnon-americas-most-controversial-anthropologist.html?mcubz=1
20. Michael Graulich, “Aztec Human Sacrifice as Expiation,” History of Religions 39, no. 4 (2000), p. 353.
21. Robert J. Sharer and Loa P. Traxler, The Ancient Maya, 5th edition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994 [1946]), pp. 543-44.
22. Bradley J. Parker, “The Construction and Performance of Kingship in the Neo-Assyrian Empire,” Journal of Anthropological Research 67, no. 3 (Fall 2011), p. 372.
23. Matthias Schulz, “The Worst Ways to Die: Torture Practices of the Ancient World,” Spiegel Online International, May 15, 2009. http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/the-worst-ways-to-die-torture-practices-of-the-ancient-world-a-625172.html
24. Marvin Zalman, “Miranda v. Arizona,” in Rolando V. del Carmen et al, Criminal Procedure and the Supreme Court: A Guide to the Major Decisions on Search and Seizure, Privacy, and Individual Rights (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), p. 240.
25. Steven Pinker recounts his visit to the Museum of Medieval Torture (Museo della Tortura e di Criminologia Medievale) in San Gimignano, Italy: “I think even the most atrocity-jaded readers of recent history would find something to shock them in this display of medieval cruelty. There is Judas’s Cradle, used in the Spanish Inquisition: the naked victim was bound hand and foot, suspended by an iron belt around the waist, and lowered onto a sharp wedge that penetrated the anus or vagina; when victims relaxed their muscles, the point would stretch and tear their tissues. The Virgin of Nuremberg was a version of the iron maiden, with spikes that were carefully positioned so as not to transfix the victim’s vital organs and prematurely end his suffering. A series of engravings show victims hung by the ankles and sawn in half from the crotch down; the display explains that this method of execution was used all over Europe for crimes that included rebellion, witchcraft, and military disobedience. The Pear is a split, spike-tipped wooden knob that was inserted into a mouth, anus, or vagina and spread apart by a screw mechanism to tear the victim open from the inside; it was used to punish sodomy, adultery, incest, heresy, blasphemy, and “sexual union with Satan.” The Cat’s Paw or Spanish Tickler was a cluster of hooks used to rip and shred a victim’s flesh. Masks of Infamy were shaped like the head of a pig or an ass; they subjected a victim both to public humiliation and to the pain of a blade or knob forced into their nose or mouth to prevent them from wailing. The Heretic’s Fork had a pair of sharp spikes at each end: one end was propped under the victim’s jaw and the other at the base of his neck, so that as his muscles became exhausted he would impale himself in both places.” Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2012 [2011], Kindle edition), Kindle location 3063-67.
26. Steven A. LeBlanc, Constant Battles (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), p. 8.
27. See item 15 in “The Code of Hammurabi,” L. W. King, trans., Avalon Project, Yale Law School. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/ancient/hamframe.asp
28. Richard Hellie, “Slavery,” Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/slavery-sociology
29. Thomas Sowell, “The Real History of Slavery,” in Black Rednecks and White Liberals (New York: Encounter, 2005), p. 113.
30. “Where then there is such a difference as that between soul and body, or between men and animals (as in the case of those whose business is to use their body, and who can do nothing better), the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master.” Aristotle, “Book One, Part V,” in Politics, Benjamin Jowett, trans., Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html
31. One might object and say that the Founders, for all their wisdom, did not consider Africans fully human. That’s surely true of some of them. But not only is that a poor excuse, it’s a flimsy explanation. The original English settlers of the Virginia Company tried to turn local Indians into slaves, but it didn’t work for various reasons, the most obvious being it was easy for them to escape. The English also tried using white Europeans as quasi-slaves—i.e., indentured servants—but that didn’t work either. (In fact, the first blacks brought to America were made indentured servants, not slaves.)
32. Reuters Staff, “Chronology—Who Banned Slavery When?,” Reuters, March 22, 2007. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-slavery-idUSL1561464920070322
33. Jerome Reich, “The Slave Trade at the Congress of Vienna: A Study in English Public Opinion,” Journal of Negro History 53, no. 2 (April 1968), pp. 139-40.
34. See “Slavery Abolition Act.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.https://www.britannica.com/topic/Slavery-Abolition-Act; “1863 Abolition of Slavery,” Rijks Studio. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio
35. Ibid.
36. Don Bourdeaux, “Capitalism and Slavery,” Café Hayek, August 25, 2009. http://cafehayek.com/2009/08/capitalism-and-slavery.html
37. Adam Smith, “I.8.40: Of the Wages of Labour,” in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Library of Economics and Liberty. http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN3.html
38. Adam Smith, “III.2.9: Of the Discouragement of Agriculture in the Ancient State of Europe After the Fall of the Roman Empire,” in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Library of Economics and Liberty. http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN3.html
39. Abraham Lincoln, “House Divided Speech: Springfield, Illinois, June 16, 1858,” Abraham Lincoln Online. http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm
40. Daron Acemoglu and Alexander Wolitzky, “The Economics of Labor Coercion,” Econometrica 79, no. 2 (March 2011), p. 555. http://economics.mit.edu/files/8975
41. Harry Wu, “The Chinese Laogai,” Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. http://victimsofcommunism.org/the-chinese-laogai/
42. John Stuart Mill, “Essay V: On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It,” in Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy, Online Library of Liberty. http://www.econlib.org/library/Mill/mlUQP5.html
43. Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, People of the Lake: Mankind and Its Beginning (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1978), p. 139.
44. Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, p. xii.
45. Adam Smith. “III.1.8: Of the Love of Praise, and of That of Praise-worthiness; and of the Dread of Blame, and That of Blame-worthiness,” in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Library of Economics and Liberty. http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smMS3.html#Part%20III.%20Of%20the%20Foundation%20of%20our%20Judgments%20concerning%20our%20own%20Sentiments%20and%20Conduct,%20and%20of%20the%20Sense%20of%20Duty
46. See Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among the Apes (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007 [1983]).
47. Russ Roberts, “Munger on Slavery and Racism,” Library of Economics and Liberty, August 22, 2016. http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2016/08/munger_on_slave.html