And ingratitude, he argues, is the spirit of our age, on the left and right alike. This is why the task of restoration must be a labor of love, and why its character must be fundamentally intellectual. Taking up the terms of Deirdre McCloskey, Goldberg suggests that we can protect the Miracle only by making the case for it. We are essentially called to the task of argument. “Our civilization, like every civilization, is a conversation,” he suggests. “Therefore the demise of our civilization is only inevitable if the people saying and arguing the right things stop talking.”
Read the whole review. I, too, have written a review, but it will not appear for at least several weeks.
I think that if Goldberg wanted to recycle a book title, instead of Suicide of the West he should have picked Civilization and its Discontents. He sees our civilization as threatened by those who are ungrateful and resentful toward the institutions that have brought us prosperity and individual freedom.
This is why the task of restoration must be a labor of love, and why its character must be fundamentally intellectual.
Love is not, fundamentally, intellectual. The task seems to indeed need intellectual arguments, but the character of successful restoration, if there is success, will be emotional. That’s one reason JD Peterson is becoming so important – using intellect and reason based arguments to establish the emotional connection to being a better person.
Ingratitude is certainly the spirit of the age, tho far more on the Dems than from the Reps. And who among the Reps are most ungrateful? NeverTrumpers! … like Goldberg himself! Like most NR conservatives, he doesn’t like Trump. But is this because of Trump’s tax cuts? judicial appointments? the Rep-Dem budget he signed when Ryan & other Reps failed to reduce the spending?
… or is it more elitist snobbery / ingratitude? (I think this). Compare the two twitter feeds to see who is giving thanks more:
Goldberg does have one quick “Thanks”, but there’s very little of thanking others.
Trump has tweet after tweet thanking folks; voters who voted for good candidates; even talking about his foreign rivals in a positive way:
I will be speaking to my friend, President Xi of China, this morning at 8:30. The primary topics will be Trade, where good things will happen, and North Korea, where relationships and trust are building.
Just about any normal person, when asked “Who loves America more: Goldberg or Trump?” … would choose Trump because normals don’t know Goldberg.
So: “HR Clinton or DJ Trump?” I think almost all Trump voters would say Trump; but also most non-voters would say Trump. It might also be close among Hillary voters, but maybe like the 90+% black vote for Hillary.
But what about on this blog? I certainly get the feeling that Trump, despite his 3 marriages and alpha-male – jerk personal behavior, nevertheless really does want to Make America Great. More so than any Dem in the public eye now.
Restoration of the Miracle requires leaders who love the good parts of America, and are thankful to those Americans and even others doing good things. Trump’s doing this more than anybody else — and far, far more & better than I was expecting in 2016.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
All intellectuals who want to criticize Trump’s tweets should at least be reading them, not the Dem media spin about them.
https://twitter.com/JonahNRO?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
No, I think the greatest threat to developed world is why the richer the society becomes the less people can afford to have children.
It’s not about ‘afford’, it’s about standards and trade-offs, especially when women have options. For well over a century and a half, richer people in the West, more about to ‘afford’ more children than their lower-wealth compatriots in the same society, still had fewer kids.
And people in some of the poorest parts of the world are perfectly able to ‘afford’ lots of kids. If one is willing to accept a much less affluent and lower-status lifestyle, and willing to raise one’s kids in that lifestyle (which often means around underclass kids), then most people can easily afford lots and lots of kids, even without welfare, just like most of their poor ancestors did. Most people aren’t willing to make those trade-odds, and are very sensitive to the prospect of being perceived as strange which happens whenever one chooses to do something noticeably different from the norm.
Most political commentators – Goldberg included – have an allergy to talking in frank terms about who is having how many kids and why, what the implications are, and what, if anything, can or ought to be done about it. Indeed, they tend to reflexively suspect such people of being neo-Nazis, and so rush to disassociate themselves with anyone who would bring these matters up.
But what is happening is that the people will the most talent are being drawn into cities where they are least likely to reproduce because they have high productivity. So they will tend to generate a lot of output and prosperity in their lifetimes, and then gradually disappear with each subsequent generation, shredding the right tail of the human capital distribution, the part most important for future innovation and progress.
There’s the long-term “Suicide of the West” for you: you can’t preserve liberalism if liberalism is sterile – which it has proven to be pretty much everywhere – and especially if discussing that sterility is off-limits. It’s a problem worth talking about, but we can’t talk about it – not really – even in a book by that title.
How to stop this impending Idiocracy? A return to patriarchy perhaps. Women were happier by and large under the pre-1960s patriarchy that reigned in the West. European women may soon find out whether Islamic patriarchy is as pleasant.
Meanwhile, the U.S. is well on its way to becoming Brazil-North. K-selected people are going to have to learn how to survive in a low-trust, corrupt r-selected society.
The Levin review reeks of never-Trumper logrolling. The book sounds like a rehash of Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2012 book Why Nation’s Fail. Funny that Goldberg would cite McClosekey, who rejected “add institutions and stir” theories, in his apparent paen to institutions. And are our institutions today so wonderful? Hardly. You have to have your head in the sand to ignore the significant problems our institutions are failing to address (education, justice, finances, corruption, cronyism, military, economic, etc). Goldberg’s pox on both their houses platform is irrelevant and complacent. Change is coming no matter how much he romantices the glory of an imaginary age of elite expertise and benign governance. The worst part is that these reviews have groomed me to want to hate it and now I am going to have buy the thing and read.
Goldberg’s talking about the “miracle” of our escape from the Malthusian trap, and it’s to Ernest Gellner that the owes the word.
This is what Gellner said: “The basic circle in which agrarian society is locked, is complete, and it is difficult to see how one could break out of it (in fact, this has happened, though no one is quite sure of how it was done).”
So Gellner had no answer. He definitely had no instant, pre-mixed, soup n’ stir. What he said was the opposite: “There is no exit from this circle. (Or, if you like, there is one, but it has only happened once, miraculously.)”
But we know exactly how to recreate the poverty and stagnation of a Malthusian, agrarian society. You just add zoning laws to occupational licensing laws, mix in a lot of segregated schools, stir in the mortgage interest deduction, student debt, subsidies for this, tariffs on that, and everything else that both houses of Congress are always eager to impose on a growing economy.
The miracle is that the last two hundred years of human history aren’t more like the previous twelve thousand years.
Hmmm, I think Africans having too many kids will cause mass starvation before zoning laws will, but I guess I could be wrong.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-worlds-most-important-graph/
Realistically, there are no solutions that involve anything less than total regime change.
The above comment went to the wrong place. It was supposed to respond to GU above, “How to stop …”
The media is the message so we be rounding up the usual debaters, but they don’t all agree on the media.
Like, today, in deploying the new money technology, we are congested up just trying to match the new semantics to the old, a lot of terms get misused during the early marketing. So we get hours and hours debating cash, the two sides not even agreeing on what cash is.
I’d say it’s an age of disappointment. Economic growth started to level off about 40 years ago in the US. This wasn’t anyone’s fault; it’s just that we started to reach the inherent limits of the fossil fuels that have been fueling our growth for ~200 years.
Not knowing that growth was permanently lower, we tried to stimulate the economy with debt. Debt works well in high growth periods, but poorly in low-growth periods, and is disastrous in recessions. We didn’t get higher growth, but we did get over $60,000 per U.S. citizen in Federal debt. This means that every time growth starts to pick up, rising interest rates have a huge effect which ruins the whole thing.
Also, the American population has more than doubled since 1950. This means that each of us has about half the land and natural resources that we would have in the 1950s, and that our labor is less scarce => less valuable.
People expected the lifestyles and growth that their grandparents had, and they aren’t getting it. Most are vaguely aware that their children will have things worse still. Most people are upset, and many want to believe that things would be different if we just (pick one) got government out of the way / smashed the patriarchy / brought Jesus back into daily life / uploaded ourselves to some combination of heaven and Dropbox. But it won’t, because those aren’t the cause of the problems.
I hear (and read) these sentiments a lot. Just today, in fact, from my elderly in laws. I know better than to try to talk someone out of their feelings. But it just isnt true.
Reading Goldberg reminds me of this great line from WF Buckley:
“The trouble with the emphasis in conservatism on the market is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.”
You could never devote your life to it, but it’s to the market that you owe your life.
Do you regret your own birth? Or is it like Orwell said: “All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.”
That’s not really true. Life goes on, even in East Germany. Watch Goodbye Lenin.
When I watched that movie, I watched it on a TV. And it’s to the market that I owe the existence of that TV. It’s to the market I owe all the comforts of civilization. The shirt on my back. A pencil. Sartre’s green curtains.
Civilization was built on the back of slaves so by your argument, you owe your life to slavery.
Certainly Greek civilization was built on the back of slaves but modern civilization is not and was not.
By the time of the Industrial Revolution, slavery was virtually non-existent in western Europe. It was abolished in the British Empire in 1833 and in the US in 1865.
The only way modern civilization is “built on the back of slaves” is if the money made from slavery was necessary to provide sufficient capital for the Industrial Revolution. I have seen no good evidence that is true.
Agreed. I started Goldberg’s book and thought the first summary chapter where he outlines everything was great, but it got really boring/rehashed really fast and I ultimately returned it.
Levin wrote
Unfortunately, that’s not even close to being accurate. The main feature of our time’s public intellectual discussions is that they tend to evade the merits and fundamentals and quickly devolve into meta-intellectual discussions of the effectiveness of the marketing of the ideas.
But here, the problem is not salient language and up-to-date ‘custom-tailored marketing’ at all. Mainstream Conservatives don’t even start with restating old truths, which is why the joke that they are slightly behind the times and “yesterday’s progressives” has been ‘funny ’cause it’s true’ for well over a century. It would be a tragi-comic exercise to compare what is printed in the pages of the National Review today with some issue exactly fifty year prior, and to notice how many traditional insights have gone out of fashion there. Gradually surrendering on one issue after another is not “pragmatic compromise for the sake of selling old truth,” it is just acquiescence to the replacement of old truth with new error. Neoconservatism was not merely some reconstruction of old conservatism and all its old truths, just repackaged in attractive new wrapping: it was something quite different.
Meanwhile, mainstream conservatives like Goldberg are telling us to remain loyal and venerate cultural institutions (e.g., the courts) which have been long been corrupted beyond any possible redemption, which no longer fulfill their historical functions, and instead serve the interests of one’s existential opponents.
If everyone can clearly see that your father has been possessed by a malicious demon, what to think of the man who uses that moment to remind you of your duty to honor and obey him? Not much.
In effect, Goldberg and company are asking us to preserve what has become bad, while giving up on old notions of the good which are now too unfashionable for respectable types to support. That’s why “conservatism” isn’t conservative and isn’t conserving anything, because it it not doing what Yuval Levin says it is doing.