Suicide of the West

Jonah Goldberg, “Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy,” Crown Forum, 2018, 379 pp. Plus notes.

Suicide of the West’s argument is rather simple. All of the good things we enjoy in the West today (high living standards, long life expectancies, a reasonable degree of social and political freedom) are the products of capitalism and liberalism*, the combined triumph of which Goldberg refers to as “the Miracle.” The Miracle is mysterious — an “unplanned accident” — and profoundly unnatural, in two senses. First, it is relatively recent — for most of the 250,000 years of human history, people lived in tribes of hunter-gatherers, and, beginning 8,000 years ago, in large agrarian states in which life for the vast majority was hellish and brief. The Miracle, therefore, cannot be a product of human nature. Second, modern societies, and especially liberal ones, tend to compartmentalize the questions of individual and collective meaning that, in previous societies, were fully integrated into everyday life. As a result, many modern people feel out of place, or alienated, and wish to reorganize society in order to revive a subjective feeling of wholeness they believe to have existed in the past — an impulse that Goldberg calls “romanticism” and that, in his view, explains everything from socialism to Trumpian populism.  We are surrendering to populism, nationalism and other forms of tribalism. Suicide is painless, liberty takes work.

Because the Miracle is unnatural, it will tend to decay absent our continued efforts to preserve and defend it. And although Goldberg repeatedly insists that it is impossible to know what exactly caused the Miracle, he tends to attribute its cause to “words and ideas”:  notions of property, rule of law, individual rights and freedoms, and the beneficence of the market and of innovation, all of which were written into the American Constitution. Since the whole edifice of the modern world rests on the foundation of these good words and ideas, the greatest threat to it, and the specific form that decay takes in our society, is bad words and ideas — namely, ingratitude toward the Miracle, usually in the form of romanticism peddled by some resentful intellectual or, more recently, Trump.

Addenda: *(Liberalism in politics is associated with nonauthoritarianism, the rule of law, constitutional government with limited powers, and the guarantee of civil and political liberties. A liberal society is tolerant of different religious, philosophical, and ethical doctrines and allows individuals to freely form and express their conscientious convictions and opinions on all matters and live according to their chosen purposes and life paths. In economic terms, liberalism is associated with an unplanned economy with free and competitive markets, as well as private ownership and control of productive resources.)  

My Notes:

*The world we live in today is unnatural, and we stumbled into it more or less by accident.  The natural state of mankind is hunting and gathering accompanied by grinding poverty punctuated by horrific violence terminating with an early death.  Only in the past 8,000 years of  Homo sapiens 250,000 years existence did this bleak description of living change for the better, in fact, nearly all of widely shared human progress has taken place in the last three hundred years (and for many of the billions of non-Westerners lifted out of crushing poverty thanks to capitalism, it’s happened in the last thirty years). 

(Note: the species Homo has been in existence for 2,500,000 years; Homo sapiens for 250,000; Homo sapiens are now the only remaining branch of the genus Homo.)

Pg. 6f:  The books assertions:

*Capitalism is unnatural.

*Democracy is unnatural.

*Human rights are unnatural

Pg. 8:  The prosperity of the Miracle didn’t happen because of the scientific revolution or from accumulating private property or conducting trade.  All of those things played important roles, but science, technology, trade, and property existed in countless civilizations prior to the Miracle, and yet we could not achieve escape velocity from the status quo of one to three dollars per day.  Ideas changed everything: the “Lockean Revolution” held that the individual is sovereign; that our rights come from God, not from government; that the fruits of our labors belong to us; and that no man should be less equal before the law because of his faith or class. 

Pg. 12:  Civil society is that vast social ecosystem composed of family, schools, churches, associations, sports, business, local communities, bowling leagues, etc., that mediates life between the state and the individual.  It is a healthy civil society, not the state, that civilizes people.  When civil society fails, people fall through the cracks.  When we fail to properly civilize people, human nature rushes in: That’s tribalism.

Pg. 13:  The author argues that the pull of tribalism and the sense of alienation felt toward liberal democratic capitalism should rightly be understood as romanticism.  Romanticism begins with the French philosopher Rousseau (1712-78).  The core of romanticism, for Rousseau, is the primacy of feelings   And if our feelings tell us that the world is out of balance, rigged, artificial, unfair, or—most often—oppressive and exploitative, someone must be responsible. Marx, for all his talk of scientific socialism, was a romantic, convinced that malevolent forces—Jews, the ruling class, industrialists, ‘capital’—were exploiting the masses.  Nazism shared many of the same theories about who resided behind the curtain, manipulating the German people.  All rebellions against the liberal order of the Miracle are romantic in nature.  They seek to return to some form of tribal solidarity where we’re all in it together. But there isn’t one.  Every other kind of economics other than capitalism—if there even is any other kind of economics—concerns itself not with creating wealth but with how to redistribute it. That is not economics; that is politics.

Note: John Dryden, not Rousseau, coined the term ‘noble savage.’  But Rousseau propagated the myth that humans in their natural state are selfless, peaceable, and untroubled, and that blights such as greed, anxiety, and violence are the products of civilization.

Pg. 27:  One of the most interesting taboos in American life is the taboo against discussing human nature.  This is probably because Americans have struggled to live up to the ideals of universal equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and similar canons.  Discussing human nature inevitably bleeds into debates about genetic differences between groups or claims that certain behaviors or chokes are ‘unnatural.’  This kind of discussion is also at loggerheads with the French Enlightenment tradition that believes in the perfectibility of man.’  The feeling that modern man is corrupt and unnatural—or, more specifically, has been corrupted by modern society—suffuses vast swaths of our culture.  It fuels a host of ideological and religious assumptions about past ‘golden ages’ and nostalgic nostrums about how things used to be better in previous generations.

Pg. 30:  Steven Pinker has written that if similar proportions of people died from violence in the twentieth century as did in most prehistoric societies, the death count of the twentieth century would not be 100 million but two billion--twenty times greater than it is.

Pg. 33:  Slavery was less common among primitive man than among the societies that arose after the agricultural revolution, not because primitive man was more moral but because he was much poorer.  Slaves are a very large expense for nomadic bands.  After the agricultural revolution roughly 11,000 years ago, slavery emerges almost everywhere.

Pg. 34:  Slavery disappeared only as industrial capitalism emerged, slavery was destroyed by capitalism.  The fact that the US needed a war to end slavery shows that not everyone saw the light at once (of course this statement ignores that the preponderance of capital in the South by 1860 was in slaves.)

Pg. 39:  Sociologists distinguish between two kinds of status in all human societies: ascribed status and achieved status.  “Ascribed status” refers to what you are born with (royalty the quintessential example; some people are just born better).  Entire populations were divided this way, such as in India, into castes.  One of the greatest achievements of the American Revolution was the decision to abolish such things.  Yet ascribed status remains and shows up in cliques whether in high school or prison, inheritance (Roosevelts, Bush’s, etc...),

Pg. 55:  Pope Benedict VIII banned the children of priests from inheriting property in the Second Lateran Council of 1139 when the Church fully barred priests from marriage.  While this rule proved effective for the rank and file, the elites exempted themselves from the rules they applied to others.  Cardinals and Bishops built up their wealth and land holdings as did the Popes as they created a parallel aristocracy.

Pg. 59:  The lesson of the Chinese eunuchs, Ottoman Janissaries, and countless other groups is the same.  Given time and incentives, any group of humans will start to see themselves as a cohesive group, a caste or aristocratic class.  This natural human tendency is neither bad nor good. It’s simply a fact.  The only time self-interested groups or coalitions become a real threat to the larger society is when they claim the power of the state for their own agenda.  When you have only have a handful of ‘stakeholders in a society—usually the priest, the landholding aristocrats, the military, maybe some guilds and bureaucrats, and, of course, the monarch—power is defined by the personal relationships between a tiny handful of elites.  They in effect form a ruling coalition against the masses.

Pg. 63:  The glory of money—and the rule of law—is that it empowers us to cooperate with strangers.  The democratizing power of money is one of the great forgotten advances of humanity.

Pg. 64:  It is interesting that what we call corruption in developing countries today—tribalism, favoritism, nepotism, self-dealing, patronage, graft, etc.—went by a different word for most of human history: politics.

Pg. 84:  There is reason to believe that religion itself is an evolutionary adaptation.  Group cooperation is the key to human survival, and religion can be an incredibly powerful source of social cohesion, fostering sacrifice for the greater good of the community.

The agricultural revolution created a social landscape as alien to our genetic programming as a colony on Mars.  Humans adapted to the first city-states the only way any animal adapts to any new environment: by applying their nature to it as best they could.  The Big Man was replaced by the stationary bandit, who was replaced by a king.  People needed a story for the father figure: the king is thus anointed or otherwise chosen by some divine authority to rule over his people.  From 4000 B.C. until today, monarchy has been the default arrangement for human affairs for roughly 99 percent of the period.  Some kind of aristocracy with a solitary paternal figure at the top defined nearly all human societies until around 1800.

Pg. 86:  Every effort to do away with liberal democratic capitalism is reactionary because they all attempt to restore the unity of purpose that defines the premodern or tribal mind.  Socialism, nationalism, communism fascism, and authoritarianisms of every stripe are forms of tribalism.  The tribal mind despises the division between the religious and the secular, between the individual and the group, between civil society and the state.  The genius of the Miracle lies in the division of labor, not just in manufacturing or science, but in our own minds.  Save in times of war, meaning cannot be a mass, collective enterprise without crushing the rich ecosystem of institutions that actually give us meaning and ensure liberty and prosperity.

Pg. 89:  Where does the Miracle come from?  The names for this event vary.  Some call it the Great Enrichment or the Great Divergence.  Nearly all agree it began in the West, but little agreement on why.  The best explanation is: England did it.  England stumbled upon the idea that the government ought to be subject to the law, not the other way around.  The rule of law created security of property and contract, which in turn led to industrialization and modern capitalism. Finally, production was rewarded better than predation.  About the end of the seventeenth century, the English political establishment dropped all systematic hostility to invention.  So did public opinion and the scribes.  This change in attitudes made the Miracle possible.  Prior to this, vested interests—bureaucrats, aristocrats, guilds, and priests alike—formed coalitions of common interest to stifle innovations.  (Ex: in 1299, Florence banned bankers from adopting Arabic numerals, the emperor of China burned his oceangoing vessels in 1525 and the Turkish caliph banned the printing press in 1729).  Hostility to innovation and free trade was grounded in a worldview that saw money as the root of all evil. 

Pg. 97:  Numerous Latin American countries have constitutions based on the American model, but they have struggled to re-create America’s political and economic successes because culture matters—a lot.  It’s important to remember that when the Constitution and Declaration were written they captured the culture that was already present in the country.

Pg. 160:  In the Century and a half following the Revolution, America experienced the greatest run-up in material prosperity of any nation in human history.  From 1860 to 1900 the population went from 31 million to 76 million.  By 1900 America was one and a quarter times richer than the British.  From 1890 to 1910, the US GNP grew at 6 percent a year.  In 1870 America was creating 23 percent of the world’s industrial goods, while Britain and Germany produced 30 and 13 percent, respectively.  By 1900 America was in first place. 

Pg. 175:  America until the Progressive era and then the New Deal had a functioning government, but did not have a state.  Then Wilson and then the New Deal made the state a permanent fixture of American life; truly, a second revolution.  Before, the only business a citizen had with the government was through the Post Office.  Other than a soldier or sailor, the government had nothing to do with the general public.  By the end of Wilson’s first term, the administrative state had been created.  Personal income was now taxed directly as were corporations and estates.  Big industries were broken up.  The newly minted Federal Reserve regulated money, credit, and banking.  The FTC supervised domestic industry and regulated international trade.  State and federal labor legislation mandated workmen’s compensation; banned child labor; compelled schooling of children; established minimum wages and maximum hours, and established pensions for single mothers with young children.  Armies of regulators inspected factories, intervened in businesses, and demanded all manner of licenses to work in various fields.  And all of this happened before the US entry into WWI.

Pg. 177:  Two core assumptions of progressive intellectuals: First, modern government should be guided by science (experts) and not politics; and second, an industrialized economy should be supervised, investigated, and regulated by the visible hand of a modern administrative state.

Pg. 188:  The regulatory state or the fourth branch of government, the administrative state is today a vast complex of bureaucrats and regulators—and when rulemaking does include a public comment period, it is often more ceremonial than democratic.  Elected officials have been willing accomplices in this travesty.  Congress abdicated its responsibility to legislate, the courts have abandoned their obligation to safeguard the separation of powers, and presidents have proved unable or unwilling to curtail the bureaucracy.

Pg. 204:  Once unions enlist the state to achieve their ends, unions become guilds and, in some extreme cases, indistinguishable from hereditary aristocracies.  For instance, throughout much of Mexico, teachers unions enforce the rule that teaching jobs can be inherited (or sold).  In Oaxaca Mexico, 36 percent of teachers have directly inherited their position as have nearly half the teachers who start their careers each year. 

Pg. 208:  The American body politic is rotting, the rot is systemic.  The shadow government of the new class has fortified itself against democratic accountability and is sawing off the ladder to success beneath it.

Pg. 234:  There is tension inherent in Enlightenment-based societies.  The extra-rational institutions of family, faith, and community in all their forms are in constant battle with the force of change and the sovereignty of the individual.  Our inner Rousseauians crave community and group meaning.  Or inner Lockeans demand that we be given the tiller in finding our own fate.  Because capitalism is unnatural and government is natural, we constantly look to the state to fix the very real problems and anxieties that inevitably emerge from capitalistic destruction.

Pg. 240:  Until the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, humans did not, as a rule, divide the world into secular and religious, the personal and political, reason and superstition.  The ancient Roman priests who studied the entrails of birds to predict the future weren’t asking anyone to make a leap of faith.  This was sound science, magic, and religion.  The Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution are widely credited with giving birth to a more secular and less superstitious world.  But it was more of an unbundling.  In the medieval and primitive mind, science, magic, religion, superstition, and reason were all more or less fused together.  Then magic and religion started to be considered unrelated things.  Science and religion drifted apart from each other and traditional religion and politics split off. 

Pg. 262:  By any measure, the most important mediating institution in any society is the family.  Unhealthy, dysfunctional families are the primary cause of societal decline.  A baby born today is no different from a baby born 50,000 years ago, the only thing keeping that baby from growing up into a barbarian is the conversation he or she is born into.

271:  The Success Sequence:  at least finish high school, get a full-time job and wait until age 21 to get married and have children.  If young people do just these three things, in that order, they are almost guaranteed to climb out of poverty.

Pg. 281:  Fawning on dictatorships is morally grotesque.  It is ultimately just a form of power worship.  For instance, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has spent much of the last two decades gushing over China’s enlightened authoritarian capitalism.  After the authoritarian Mao oppressed or murdered hundreds of millions of people in China, rudimentary markets and property rights were introduced.  And suddenly, the Chinese economy took off.  Here in America the reaction to China’s success was “Wow. It must have been the authoritarianism.  Friedman being the head cheerleader.

 Pg. 307:  Between early 2000 and late 2016, the net worth of American households and nonprofit institutions more than doubled, from $44 trillion to $90 trillion. But per capita growth has only averaged about 1 percent.  In other words, the distribution of economic prosperity across the whole society has been painfully unequal.  We manufacture twice as much as we did in 1984 but with a third fewer workers.  Also, that it takes time for the American economy to adjust to the sudden expansion of the global market system is not an indictment of the market system...

Pg. 319:  According to a study by Robert D. Putnam, a left-wing liberal, people who live in more ethnically diverse communities tend to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

Pg. 320f:  The share of the foreign-born US population is at its all-time high.  In 2014, 27.7 percent came from Mexico and another 23.9 percent from other Latin American countries.  Of the 48 million students enrolled in K-12 public schools in 2012, nearly one in four spoke a language other than English at home.  Unlike the past when assimilation to American culture was pretty much mandatory, today there is a large and aggressive educational and political lobby that works against assimilation and created ever more incentives for immigrants—as well as native-born ethnic groups—to maintain their minority identity at all costs.

Pg. 326:  Conservatism was moving in the direction of identity politics for white people long before Trump, and it may have ended up where it is today sooner or later had he never run for president.  The right’s surrender to populism and tribalism was the failure of the Tea Parties.  The Tea Parties married populism to the principles of the Founding, demanding the government live within its means and abide by the Constitution.  They succeeded in getting many politicians elected.  But ultimately they failed by the standards they set for themselves at the outset.  The banks got bailed out.  Obamacare stayed in place.  The debt grew bigger.  Taxes went up.  But what really turned them into tribalist was the fact that, despite espousing the principles of the Constitution and arguing for wholly defensible and patriotic goals, they were still demonized by the media and Hollywood as racist yokels and boobs. 

Pg. 329:  Scholars studying such diverse phenomena as Islamic terrorism, white supremacy, street gangs, and cults have found that the key recruitment tool is always the same: the promise of meaning and belonging.  Human beings are hardwired to want to belong, to be part of a cause larger than themselves.  Young people with scant social capital are the most susceptible to such appeals. 

Pg. 330:  The Hebrew god reversed the division of labor, demanding that the people work for him, not the other way around.  The Hebrew god recognized the moral sanctity of the individual Jew, both male and female.  The Christian god universalized that moral sanctity.  From its earliest days, Christianity recognized that every person was due a certain measure of justice, and every person was obliged to respect others as children of God; in other words, we are born into a state of natural equality with others.  Christianity also created the idea of the secular, dividing the world between the City of Man and the City of God.  Protestantism liberated the individual conscience from the monopoly of the Catholic Church and led to an explosion of sects, which forced the state to expand the borders of liberty and tolerance.  Also, the notion that God is watching you even when others are not is probably the most powerful civilizing force in all of human history. 

Pg. 373:  As recently as 1820, only 12 percent of the world’s population was literate.  By 2014, only 15 percent of the world’s population remained illiterate.  The average amount of years of education worldwide has increased from 2.97 years in 1950 to 8.99 in 2015. 

Pg. 376:  A smartphone with 16 gigabytes of memory has 250,000 times the capacity of the Apollo 11 guidance computer that enabled the first moon landing. 

Addenda:

Author: Jonah Goldberg holds the Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute and is a senior editor of National Review.