[This is Chapter Thirteen of Murphey’s book The Emerging Crisis of Economic Displacement

[This is Chapter Thirteen of Murphey’s book The Emerging Crisis of Economic Displacement.]

Chapter Thirteen

THE THREATENED EXISTENCE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

A convergence of demographic, intellectual and moral forces is leading rapidly to the demise of European and North American civilization in anything like the form we have known it. Americans of European extraction will be a minority within the United States shortly after the middle of the twenty-first century, if not before. A similar migration is changing the face of Europe. What is perhaps most important, the civilization of the West has long been under attack, from outside but most significantly from within its own ranks, so that it has no meaningful intellectual or moral defense against the demographic swamping-out that the world's growing population disparity, to be compounded by the effects of economic displacement, portends for it.

In Chapter One, I asked the reader to join me in a personal intellectual odyssey. The intervening chapters have largely been descriptive, telling of what is happening in the world. We come now to something that is also descriptive, but that more than anything raises a question of values and of loyalty. Do we care about whether the civilization that goes back to the Greeks and the Romans, that includes the rich tapestry of Christianity and of medieval Europe, and that was given heightened vitality by the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment continues to be a presence in the world and in the lives of our grandchildren?

In the preceding chapter, I suggested that that civilization, having been the milieu in which science, technology and market have sprung, may be essential as the economic and technical underpinning of the world's immense human population that now exists and that is coming into being. That is ample reason to care in itself, if one has the wisdom to see that such forces don't just come into being and maintain their existence by themselves, but have civilizational prerequisites. (This is an insight that won't necessarily be apparent to everybody, and may even be repugnant to some, since people everywhere have reason to think that the task is simply to enjoy the products and develop technical competencies of their own for such a world.) Now, however, I would have us face the question independently of the speculation over whether western civilization is essential to the science and technology that sustain the world's population. Because peoples of other cultures have primary attachments of their own, this is a question that must find resonance primarily within people of European extraction. Is the survival of western civilization important to them? And, since I am one of them, is it important to me?

For reasons that will become clear as we go on, this question is one that is "out of bounds" for respectable discussion today. It is not a "politically correct" issue to raise. Every people on earth are permitted to care, and to care passionately, about their culture, but the current ethos insists that Americans and Europeans are not. This mental bind reflects both the intellectual, moral attack that has been underway against Euro-American society and the capitulation of Europeans and Americans to it. But unless we are to join that capitulation, we will have to brush the constriction aside. I feel no reason to apologize for caring about the survival of the civilization I have known, value and love; and if you have a similar identification with the European heritage, or are even a person from outside it who appreciates its significance, I hope you won't either.

What value does western civilization have? I have written enough on the subject over the years that I am aware of considerable complexity in answering this question. The reason there is complexity is that we are not talking about something that is monolithic, with a single face or essence. The history is long and convoluted. It is full of conflict, and without necessarily an Hegelian dialectic leading ever-upward into one admirable finality. In my book Understanding the Modern Predicament, one of my major points was that ancient and medieval Europe gave rise to no fully acceptable paradigms that modern man could simply embrace; rather, the heritage was one of rich texture and much that could be derived from it, neither more nor less. I agreed with the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset who saw the modern age as a period of "crisis" in the sense that it was no longer a time of "concord" or "consensus." The emergence from the medieval consensus (one that existed around a Christian and feudal cosmology even though there was much movement within that consensus, eventually shattering it) left Europeans in an existential quandary in which they have had to "find themselves." The ideological divisions of the past three centuries attest to the fact that they have not thusfar done so.

Traditionalist conservative philosophers such as Richard Weaver and Russell Kirk believe that the Christian cosmology prior to the fourteenth century was ontologically sound, having had a correct perception of the true reality of God and of man's relation to God. Accordingly, they understand western civilization to have been losing its bearings during the entire period of Enlightenment and of growing secularism. This is a perspective that anyone devoted to Christianity will have reason to take seriously. To someone like myself who is more secular, however, it is precisely the ideals of the Enlightenment (though greatly abused) that have represented the best the civilization has produced. Those ideals have been much befuddled by the ideological conflict between classical liberalism and socialism, a conflict that has simultaneously been a sociological one, since it has represented a struggle between the intelligentsia and its varied allies as against the predominant commercial middle class.

So you can see why I am inclined to avoid platitudes that would oversimplify the reasons western civilization is of value to us. Instead of cliches, what we need are distillations of the central values and lessons. Needless to say, as I state them I will be doing so in very abbreviated form, ignoring much that deviates from them, and will probably overlook many that should be included.

. A civilization is based on a shared culture, and it is hard to think of Europe without bringing to mind its vast accretion of art, music, crafts, architecture and literature. It is the civilization of the Parthenon, Notre Dame, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Sophocles, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Hawthorne and Twain -- just to suggest the texture.

. To list such things is to suggest one of the West's central features: the ennoblement of man. The fashion today is to revisit its oppressions and brutalities, and there have been many of those, but look again at the list just given and see whether its primary thrust has not been one of uplift. There have been many exceptions, but it isn't too much to say that the worth of the individual human being, and the person's potential for the noble, has been an underlying motif. It is to be seen in the "democratic revolution" of the past two hundred years, by which hundreds of millions of people have come to live in the full bloom of life at a level far above what the "masses" have experienced in any other time or place. This is true even though an unfortunate aspect of that democratization is that it has lessened the elevation, substituting, say, Gershwin for Brahms. (The music and films have in significant part gone far below what this comparison suggests, but for reasons of intellectual alienation instead of from the cultural preferences of average people.) A part of the struggle "for the soul of the West" has to do with whether this sense of ennoblement can be regained.

. At its best (and, its critics can point out, at its worst), western civilization has been marked by a vigor and "sense of life" (to use one of Ayn Rand's concepts) that have bespoken a high level of vitality. Taken over its long history, it has not been a quiescent society. This was evident during the Age of Discovery and the colonial period; it has also been evident domestically in ferment and highly developed activity. Aristotle and Euclid, not to mention Alexander the Great and Columbus, exemplify this pattern. The expansion of European peoples across the North American continent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was a story of hardship and energy (a fact that is not captured by focusing, as alienated literature does today, on the consequent displacement of the indians).

. No civilization has been as marked for its cultivation of what used to be known, with a capital R, as Reason, followed by centuries of empirical science. The Greeks, the Scholastics, Bacon, Descartes, Newton and Salk attest to intellectual vitality and to a reduced place for the superstitions that so often have held peoples in bondage.

. Not everything has been in the clouds; down on the ground, there has been settled civilization: the church spires of New England, the white-fenced pastures of Kentucky, the farmsteads of Iowa and Nebraska with their well-kept fields of corn and wheat, the skyscrapers of New York and Chicago. Such a society finds its springs in personal responsibility and industry, devotion to family, civic virtue and political participation, respect for property, and a culture of good faith and honesty. These in turn have spiritual, intellectual and cultural sources.

. Institutions and the ideas that inform them have been important. The ideals of Rome and of the Middle Ages were (although with a very different outward appearance between the two) tightly-knit community, a strong religious sensibility with institutions to match, respect for tradition, social hierarchy, a landed rather than commercial economic base, and (much of the time) strong government. In the modern age, especially under the influence of the American experience, there has been separation of church and state, government that is adequate but limited, Constitutionalism, the decentralization of political power, protection of the individual, economic freedom, and some form of republican or democratic control.

. I would be forgetting the lesson of F. A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty if I concluded even this partial list without mentioning the Rule of Law. Although it is much breached in the realities of life as it is lived, the Rule of Law is an ideal that goes back to the Greeks, where it found expression in Herodotus and in Pericles' funeral oration as reported by Thucydides. It doesn't mean, as the name may suggest, a suffocating web of regulations and statutes. Instead, it refers to the standard that the State must act through rules that are clearly stated, known in advance, equal in their application; general rather than rifle-shots aimed at specific individuals; prospective rather than retroactive; applied by an independent, objective and incorruptible judiciary; and administered with "due process of law," which hears before it judges. If this ideal is even approximated, it serves both as a limit upon the State and as a dependable frame of reference for individual action.

Since this isn't a book on western civilization specifically, there is no purpose going on. What I have mentioned is enough to remind us of European civilization's essential features. It's had a checkered history lived by millions of people over thousands of years, and so it need not be seen through rose-colored glasses to be appreciated.

The sources of the threat to its existence

The demographic swamping-out

The preceding chapter had to do with the burgeoning growth of world population, and one of the points mentioned there was that a substantial migration of Third World peoples into Europe and North America has already taken place. I looked ahead to our present discussion to observe, also, that that migration is nothing compared to what is to come. If several billion more people are added to the world, if most of them are economically displaced or marginalized by non-labor-intensive technology, and if the birthrate among Europeans and people of European extraction continues to be low, there will be every incentive for Third World peoples to migrate in great numbers to the developed countries. When that happens, the civilization of those countries will become no longer identifiable as having appreciable continuity with western civilization as I have just described it. Their culture, even their ethnic composition, will be something else. It is no wonder that Patrick Buchanan has been able to say that "the issue of the new century will be whether America survives, as an independent republic, with her owned defined borders, a common language, and a common culture."[1]

To point this out is not "xenophobia" as that term is ordinarily taken as signifying provincialism and bigotry; rather than being in any sense critical of other peoples, it expresses concern for the United States by someone who identifies with what it now is. The only way to have clarity of mind on a subject such as this one is to dissect independently the many epithets that are thrown around as intimidators. Most of those epithets reflect double standards and are ideological in origin. The multiculturalist movement is right when it says that individual cultures are things to be valued; but it also argues vehemently that that applies to every culture except any that is European, and it is there that it reveals not only its inconsistency but also its essence as an instrument of attack. There is no moral or intellectual reason to acquiesce in it.

I gave certain data in the preceding chapter, and will only give additional information here. As to the United States, Lawrence Auster cites calculations by demographer Leon Bouvier that arrive at a 53.8 percent white non-Hispanic population in the United States by the year 2050, but then adds that a more realistic set of assumptions about immigration and birth rates leads Bouvier to a 48.9 percent figure.[2] (Even this lesser estimate doesn't take into account the scenario of worker-displacement pressure for immigration, nor the probability that as minorities get closer to becoming a majority they will be able to exercise increasing political and ideological leverage for even greater immigration. That is why I consider it reasonable to think that non-Hispanic whites may become a minority well ahead of the middle of the century.)

In certain parts of the United States, non-Hispanic whites are rapidly becoming a minority already. This may occur in California by the year 2000. George M. Carmichael said in 1990 that in California "while whites are still a majority among the older people, white children are now a minority in the public schools. Hispanics make up 31.4% of the children enrolled in the public school system, Asians and other immigrant minorities constitute 11%, and blacks 8.9% -- totaling 51.3% non-white."[3] It is projected that in Texas "by 2005 non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the majority and by 2020 Latinos will surpass Anglos to become the state's largest ethnic group."[4]

This was made possible by the 1965 Immigration Act, which eliminated the "national origins" principle that had favored Europeans. The result has been that 85 percent of the 11.8 million legal immigrants (and virtually all the illegal immigrants) arriving in the United States between 1971 and 1990 were from the Third World, with 20 percent from Mexico. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act put on some cosmetic restrictions, but primarily granted amnesty to 3.1 million illegal aliens. The 1990 Immigration Act raised legal immigration by almost 40 percent.[5]

In the preceding chapter I quoted Winston Churchill's grandson's objection to the "relentless flow of immigrants" into Great Britain. He said further that "if our prime minister believes that fifty years hence ‘spinsters will still be cycling to Communion on Sunday morning,' he had best think again. Rather, ‘the muezzin will be calling Allah's faithful to the High Street mosque.'"[6] With regard to France, Jean Raspail wrote in 1985 that "to be sure, a mighty vanguard is already here; in twenty years they will make up thirty percent, strongly motivated foreigners, in the bosom of a people that once was French."[7] The outsiders may be wonderful people, but they will change France from anything we have known.

Paul Kennedy tells a striking fact about the former Soviet Union. In what were the southern Muslim republics, the "birth rates are similar to those in the Middle East." The result is that "the average annual population growth rates of those republics... [are] three to five times larger than the 0.7 percent average annual increases in the Russian population." Kennedy says "the Russian share [of the population] will be 46.4 percent in the year 2000, and then fall relentlessly throughout the twenty-first century."[8]

The intellectual, moral attack on western civilization

Chapter 15 will be devoted to a review of the ideological divisions that have been so important to Europe, and through Europe to the rest of the world, for the past two to three centuries. That will be an essential backdrop to my later discussion of the central points in modern thought about economics, property, individual responsibility, and the like. It is also vital, however, for our present discussion, since it relates to the threat to western civilization. In what follows, I will give as much of the review as I feel is needed at this time. The result will be that when we get to Chapter 15 I will need to point back to it.

Many readers will wonder why a look at history is necessary. They have learned to be impatient with it, as something irrelevant to "the bottom line" of what applies today. What I would stress, if you have agreed to join me on this intellectual odyssey, is that nothing could be further from the truth. There is no attitude that more condemns them to a shallow understanding. Unless they see the build-up of thoughts and feelings, the continuity, and the sources that feed into something that exists in today's world, they won't really comprehend its intensity and tenacity.

There is a major fact of modern life that a lot of people ignore because their lives are more agreeable that way, but it has long been one of the more obvious features of contemporary culture in the United States that most of the literary, artistic and celebrity elite actually hate the society in which they live. They make their millions off it, but they show their disdain for it in a constant stream of vituperation. Think back over the films you have seen recently (or at any time during your lifetime). How many of them showed a love for, or even respect for, the people they portrayed? A few do, and they are a delight. But most express a deep alienation against anything or anybody in the mainstream culture.

This is not simply a legacy of the 1960s. Rather, the 1960s were an exacerbation of ideas and attitudes that have been predominant in the intellectual, artistic, literary subculture of the West since the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, and that were given philosophical expression even a century before that by Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau won a prize for his essay on The Origins of Inequality in which he argued that it was private property and civilization itself that warped mankind out of shape from its original innocence in the "state of nature." What needs to be noticed is that this perspective involved his standing outside the evolved culture in which he lived (in eighteenth century France), identifying with nothing within it, and hostilely critiquing it.

I am not much sold on the type of intellectual history that sets thinkers up as though they are milestones, with everything that follows simply being follow-ups on their ideas. Instead, it is important to know why their ideas caught hold; and this requires an understanding of the historical context of their own time and afterwards. The reason Rousseau's ideas were attractive was most immediately that they provided ammunition for the intellectual, social movement that culminated in the French Revolution. That is minor, though, compared to the reason for their attractiveness to the West's main intellectual culture a short time later in the early nineteenth century -- and during what is by now almost two intervening centuries. What happened is that the Old Regime of aristocracy, kings and Church were no sooner overthrown than the rapidly growing European "intelligentsia" began to develop an equally vehement adversarial relationship with the rising commercial middle class. The Romantic movement swept across Europe with a repudiation of everything modern, and especially of the "bourgeoisie." Rather than being an expression of the Enlightenment, it was a repudiation of it and of what had been a growing classical liberal rationale for individual liberty, economic freedom, limited government, and the other features of what we think of as a free society based on a broad middle class. All sorts of "blood and thunder" thinking sprang up across Europe during the nineteenth century, two important branches of which were "left-wing Hegelianism" that stressed "class-struggle theory" and that fed into Marxism, and "right-wing Hegelianism" that stressed "race-struggle theory" and that fed into the German Volkish movement and eventually Nazism. For a picture of the fecundity of these movements, read Julian Benda's famous little book The Betrayal of the Intellectuals.

With the printing press and a growing readership, the number of "intellectuals" -- defined as people living off of their expression of ideas--increased dramatically during the nineteenth century. But they would always have been a tiny minority by themselves. This is why the alienated intellectual subculture has for two centuries sought allies among any disaffected or unassimilated group within the society. Marx can be seen this way: he was an intellectual who sought to provide a rationale for revolution by the "proletariat" (the propertyless workers). For almost two centuries, the ideology of alienation has been adapted to appeal to a series of "outsiders." The central vision of "the Left" has been that "bourgeois society" exploits and oppresses those outsiders, making it necessary for a revolutionary or ideological movement to provide the vehicle for their liberation. The role of the State and of socialism, from this point of view, is to serve as the primary instrument of the liberation.

There have been several mutually-reinforcing sources for the alienation. The one that the intellectual subculture would itself assert, of course, is that bourgeois society does indeed have the defects of which it complains. No doubt it has had some, since no society is perfect. The reformist impulse within classical liberalism could have addressed these, however, without a movement driven by hatred. Probably the central cause has been, as the philosopher Eric Hoffer argued, the drive by the intellectual for power, which has placed him in an adversarial role with the acting man of commerce and industry. Readers who would like a further exploration of the causes may want to read Chapter 11 of my book Understanding the Modern Predicament.

It wasn't long in the nineteenth century before these ideas crossed the Atlantic to become central to the incipient American intelligentsia, especially in New England. What started out as a scatter-gun dissatisfaction was cemented it into a common ideology, though, when many hundreds of American students went to Germany in the late nineteenth century to do graduate work under the German Historical School. That experience set the tone for American intellectual and university life throughout the twentieth century. "Classical liberalism" became a minority intellectual position even though it continued to serve as an underlay for American institutions and mainstream attitudes. What we have referred to as "liberalism" in the United States since World War I has, especially at its core within the intellectual subculture, reflected the alienation and seeking for allies.

One doesn't have to root around long within the pages of The New Republic or The Nation during the 1920s or 1930s to realize that liberal intellectuals in the United States wanted one form or another of socialism. In fact, the admiration for the Soviet Union was boundless, at least until Stalin began executing most of his associates whom leading American liberals had gotten to know on the many pilgrimages they took to Russia. After World War II, however, the Soviet Union went into disrepute and disillusionment even set in with socialism itself. This created something of a vacuum in the ideology. Where was it to go if "championing the proletariat" was no longer to be its inspiration and sustenance?

The answer was struck upon rather quickly, and it came in the form of championing minorities. It was possible to claim the moral high ground for "racial equality"--something that had considerable appeal to Americans in general precisely because it was so consistent with the classical liberal underlay about equality before the law. In successive stages, this was expanded, but at each step in the way the intellectual and moral claim to "equality" in one form or another has seemed irresistible. Women, Hispanics, homosexuals, animals, and the environment--all of these have been championed as allies of the intellectual culture and as having claims against the main society. The whole thing is confusing because many of these have had legitimate aspirations. American women, for example, are inclined to say that "the less extreme demands of feminism haven't been ideology; they've insisted on things that are important to women's fulfillment." Environmentalists don't think their desire to save the air and water and earth from degradation has anything to do with ideology. But their view of it is too simple. They are seeing only what they want to see. If they understood the context of ideological conflict over the past two centuries, they would see that their legitimate aspirations are not being presented as simply that. The reason feminism, environmentalism, homosexual-rights, etc., are often given a more "extreme" expression is that they are being used as instruments of alienation, just as the proletariat was. There is a broader ideological context within which they play a part. This is quite irrespective of the fact that most of the people who identify with one or more portions of it are not themselves a part of the "culture of alienation."

All of this has been prologue to the points I have to make about the intellectual, moral attack on western civilization. I hope it hasn't been too much to follow, or that it has been presented in too rapid and over-simplified a form to be credible. I will revisit it in Chapter 15, although without repeating all that I've said here.

What we need to note most specifically is:

. That perhaps the most successful part of the attack today comes in the form of the "multiculturalist" movement, which combines an intense criticism of everything "Eurocentric" with a championing of immigration into the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia. This provides the alienation with an endless flow of "allies" (whether they understand themselves in those terms or not) from the Third World.

It is in this context that the eventual swamping-out of European (and American) culture's very existence is occurring. That cultural suicide would be almost impossible to fathom without it.

It is interesting that not all "liberals" go along with this. They have not seen their liberalism in the context I have explained, as a vehicle for attack. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., has written The Disuniting of America to warn against the cultural fragmentation and separatism that the influx and its supportive ideology can bring; and former Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy is a leader in the so-far ineffectual movement to place a limit on further immigration. This is nothing new. Throughout the history of the Left, individual intellectuals have split off, sometimes in large numbers, as they have come better to understand the hatred that burns at the ideological reactor's central core. Many of the more prominent writers of the modern conservative movement -- people like Max Eastman, James Burnham and John Dos Passos -- have been people who started on the Left and have become disillusioned with it.

It is also interesting that the probability is high that the ethnic minorities that are being championed by "multiculturalism" will have no greater desire ultimately to be on intellectual lead-strings than have any of the earlier "allies" of the intellectual subculture. Early in the twentieth century, American union members showed their dislike for what they saw as patronizing intellectuals seeking to use them. It didn't take long in the Civil Rights Movement for blacks to kick out their "white liberal" patrons. Hispanics and Asians are people of considerable strength, too, and there is no reason to suppose that over the long run they will see "white intellectuals" as their natural leaders. There is, of course, irony in this. It means that while the Oliver Stones of the world are bringing about the demise of the civilization they hate so much, they are also preparing the way for their own displacement. They will probably not like the society that replaces western society any more than, or as much as, they do the present one. They will especially not like it if it does not give them the central place. Whether they will be guillotined the way most of the Jacobins were, or executed in a cellar the way most of the original Bolsheviks were, is something that only history can tell.

. During the summer of 1997 I was a member of a panel speaking to a group of top Kansas high school students who were attending a "summer academy." One of the panelists was a "black activist" who damned white society and who claimed repeatedly that the Egyptians, who had been the fount of civilization, were black. (Another black activist on a "Multiculturalism Week" panel the prior winter had claimed that the Greeks were.) The activist was fully supported by a black former state senator who was also on the panel. What was striking was that during the question-and-answer period the students, who were mostly white, took great issue with me and were morally self-righteous in their support for the attack on whites.

I cite this example to illustrate how it is that by now at least two generations of young people have been given to see none of the virtues and great ideals of the American past, but have rather been given to see them as hypocrisies and instruments of oppression. When I describe classical liberalism as a philosophy of individual liberty, for example, and say that it is the underlay for most American beliefs, this can have no resonance for those whose perspective has been formed around the idea that there is nothing truly progressive or humane about American society. I doubt that they will have the slightest idea what I am talking about.

This "loss of memory" within the society regarding its core consensus over ideals, ways of life and institutions is of deadly seriousness to the society's survival. A civilization is bound together by a number of factors, among them a common language, the sharing of a common place, mutual economic interests, and the like. But informing it all must be something of a spiritual unity whereby its people perceive themselves as "one people" because they share fundamental values and see themselves in a particular way. It helps if they share a certain "compact experience" of mutual adversity or effort that welds them together. A good deal of this amounts to a social "myth," in the better sense of the term, since their common outlook and memory of the past isn't framed in terms of a grimy realism that emphasizes their warts and failings, but in terms of what they see about themselves and their predecessors that has been heroic and good. When a civilization has lost this spiritual essence, the glue that binds it together is no longer there. The death of that myth within the United States (and Europe) marks the ultimate success of the intellectual, moral attack upon western civilization.

The society's lack of will to survive

John Stuart Mill saw that a free society needs an intellectual culture appropriate to it. Without that, it is like a body without a head. It isn't hard to see why, given its loss of memory and its long having been under intellectual siege, the main society within western civilization shows almost no determination to continue its existence. That society has for almost two centuries lacked one of the most basic ingredients of a successful civilization. UCLA economist William Allen has said to me that "maybe western civilization has a death wish and hardly deserves salvation." A salient feature of Jean Raspail's novel about the swamping-out of Europe by flotillas from the Third World is that the French and the rest of Europe are so befuddled by ideology, a feeling of guilt, and loss of will that they offer no resistance, and indeed even find reason to welcome their own passing. Raspail says "the West is empty, even if it has not yet become fully aware of it... [T]he West has no soul left. At every level--nations, races, cultures, as well as individuals--it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles...Looking, for example, at my own country, France, I often get the impression, as in a bad dream dreamt wide-awake, that many Frenchmen of true lineage are no longer anything but hermit-clams that live in shells abandoned by the representatives of a species, now disappeared, that was known as ‘French'... [T]hey are no longer in solidarity with anything... Does he [the petty bourgeois] know, does he finally know that it is he who is the rich guy, and that the cry for justice, that cry of all revolutions, projected by millions of voices, is rising soon against him....? ...The times will be cruel."[9]

I don't doubt but that this loss of vitality was contributed to greatly by World Wars I and II, which together constituted a European civil war of gigantic proportions. The simple loss of life, which was bound to include the cream of two generations, would account for a lot. (When the Soviets executed several thousand Polish officers in the Katyn Forest massacre, what was that other than a genocidal skimming?) Few of us today want to defend the colonial system by which European countries dominated much of the world, at the same time spreading much of their civilization to it; but we can surely recognize the connection between the two World Wars and the consequent collapse of those colonial empires, and see in that collapse a manifestation of loss of leadership and of will.

One of the more surprising signs of this loss of will to survive comes today from the deracination (i.e., loss of cultural identification and roots) that is apparent among many of the proponents of free-market ideology. I say this is surprising because I would venture that such nineteenth century classical liberals as Richard Cobden, John Bright, David Ricardo and Frederic Bastiat (not to mention Adam Smith before them), who formulated much of the philosophy of laissez-faire, never envisioned a loss of European vitality. It is hard to imagine that their system of thought did not presuppose, as a given about which they hardly found it necessary to speak, a certain civilizational order. In his diary, John Bright showed by his criticisms of what he saw in Turkey that he saw human, cultural factors as important: "There exists no spirit of emulation amongst them, and they drag on their existence as nearly as possible in the same listless and apathetic manner in which their fathers have done before them." From this, we see that there was almost certainly more to their philosophy, taken as a whole, than a cosmopolitan theory of free trade and open borders that appeared (superficially at least) to have little concern about nationality and culture. Classical liberalism is best understood as an entire philosophy, and thus more than just an economic theory.

There is much in classical and neo-classical economic writing to give a contrary impression, however, so that those who have mastered the ideology "pure" without broader reflection certainly have reason to think that specific peoples and cultures don't count. Adam Smith said "A merchant is not necessarily a citizen of any particular country. It is in great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade...."[10] The theory of a free market stresses the value of mobile capital, labor and resources, not just locally but on a worldwide scale.

Where do we see this deracination? Richard M. Ebeling of the Future of Freedom Foundation, writing in The Case for Free Trade and Open Immigration, says "America was not the child of one racial or cultural strain, but rather the offspring of diversity and change. Not bound by one cultural heritage or one concept of social strata, America developed precisely because of its multicultural fluidity...."[11] Bettina Bien Graves, who attended the Mises seminar at NYU much longer than I did and has long been a disciple of the Austrian School of Economics, writes in the same book that "the ideal would also include complete freedom of trade and freedom of movement...In such a world, the national sovereignty under which one lived and worked would be relatively immaterial."[12] In his book Population Matters, Julian L. Simon cites such a classical liberal giant as Friedrich Hayek in support of his laissez-faire perception of immigration, without discernible limits, as virtually an unmitigated good. The Wall Street Journal, the editorial page of which is closely identified with contemporary American conservatism, has endorsed a Constitutional amendment to declare that "there shall be open borders."[13]

I have made it clear that I see this as a very short-sighted "dropping of the context" of classical liberalism. Since in the world as it is rapidly becoming it helps seal the doom of western civilization, devotees of a free society should weep over how their philosophy can become the vehicle for so narrow and unseeing an extension. Thus we should add ideological dogmatism--the pinched extrapolation of ideology with blinders toward everything else -- to the sources of the West's current paralysis and loss of will. If it is possible any longer to speak of a "conservative movement" in the United States, it is a disastrously fragmented one. What is needed is a new coalescence of people who do care, with an appropriate intellectual foundation coming into existence to embody their values.

The forces tending toward a global culture

Near the end of Chapter 3, I told of the world economy's pressure away from national identity and sovereignty. We saw how at a World's Fair "firms like Time-Warner, CNN and Du Pont considered themselves global and transnational and didn't want to be pegged as an American company." I observed that "everything about the global economy would create this mindset. When a product is designed in one place, built another from components coming from several countries, financed internationally, marketed everywhere, and involves effort by people of several different countries, it is dysfunctional for those involved to embrace any seeming ‘provincialism.'" Accordingly, business guru Peter Drucker is able to say that "it is one of the fundamental changes that there no longer is a ‘Western' history or, in fact, a ‘Western' civilization. There is only world history and world civilization--but both are ‘Westernized.'"[14]

This tendency is made even more powerful by all of the things I have pointed to in this chapter, except that, given the migration of Third World peoples into Europe and America, the "world culture" that Drucker speaks of will before long not include even much of a remnant of western civilization. To the extent it is "Westernized," it will be through consumerism and commoditization. Those, of course, are only the most superficial attributes of the erstwhile civilization to which they are attributable.

Displacement's forcing of local self-sufficiency:

an opportunity for cultural survival

If we extrapolated from all of the forces tending toward the demise of western civilization, there would be little hope for it. One major fact, however, stands in the way. It is the fact that the coming crisis of the world market -- in which there will be a split between the awesome productivity of technology and the inability of billions of people to derive income through work--will force every viable political entity to become the vehicle for "looking after our own." This will even be so in countries where the split gives rise to enormous polarization rather than actual unemployment. As I mentioned at the end of Chapter 3, the only mechanisms that can accomplish this "are national governments and perhaps some regional groupings, since we are far from any world government ready to assume the task of overseeing the world economy and the fate of all peoples." At the very least, wherever there is the capital for a market economy to continue to thrive under global competition, there will have to be a restructuring of the ownership base in a way that will allow everybody in the society to share in the product. This is not something about which market supporters will have a choice, since there will otherwise be a vast revulsion that will destroy the market and perhaps the society itself.

As later chapters will make clear, I would hope that classical liberal principles can be used in effect to split the State: to separate the mechanism that accomplishes shared ownership from the coercive portion of the State that exercises regulatory and police functions. A "separation of economy and state" in this sense may make it possible to avoid the dangers of socialism. But even though that may be feasible, the change will nevertheless involve a significant "intervention into the market," at least as those who most support the market now see it.

This political intervention, however muted, will have to take place all over the world. It will almost certainly be in everybody's interest to have considerable technology-sharing among nations so that the means will be there for everyone to stay afloat. What interests us in the context of the present chapter, however, is the effect of ownership-sharing's becoming necessary in the countries that make up western civilization. The very concept of a sharing of the national economic product among the citizens sets up a conflict with mass immigration. If there is a sharing based on entitlement rather than on work or some other contractual arrangement for remuneration, there is a fundamental change in the relationship among people. In the market economy as we have known it, everybody's contribution contributes to an "increasing pie"; the economy is not a "zero sum game" in which one person's gain deprives someone else of an equivalent amount. That has been one of the marvelous features of the market economy, despite socialist arguments to the contrary. It has meant that peoples' interests are not truly adversarial. That feature is lost, though, when it becomes essential to have people share in the economic product without having added to it. It is one thing to share the product of the American economy among 280 million people, say; it is another thing to share the same product among 500 million.

Taken in itself, this is a retrograde step in the development of mankind. Its silver lining, however, is that it will force the people of any given society to become more "self-regarding." And if it forces Europeans, Americans, Canadians and Australians to become so, it may also provide a powerful impetus toward their reaffirmation of their own identity. They may come to see themselves again more as members of a given community, and in doing so find reasons to reaffirm its traditional culture.

The economic sharing, which will have enormous ramifications in the style of life and the ethical foundations for it, will also do much of what socialists have been wanting done for almost two hundred years. To the extent their alienation from bourgeois society has been based on their view that a pooling alternative is better, a cause of their alienation will be removed. Even the other causes of that opposition will be affected in ways that we cannot now foretell. We can't be ready to predict a "drying up of the alienation" -- which indeed would take us into a new phase of history -- , but it is a possibility, in whole or in part. The chance exists that under those circumstances the intellectual attack on western civilization will cease or become much softened, changing the entire mix of what I have talked about in this chapter.

This concluding section unfortunately anticipates much that I will be explaining in greater detail later. If my references to ownership-sharing and to a "separation of economy and state," for example, do not seem self-explanatory, realize that they will be discussed in detail as we go along. It may be helpful to reread this section after you have finished the book as a whole.

ENDNOTES