Why Does the Good Life End?
By Victor Davis Hanson
A look Back
People just don’t disappear. Look at
Germany in 1946 or Athenians in 339 B.C. They continue, but their governments
and cultures end. Aside from the dramatic military implosions of authoritarian
or tribal societies — the destruction of Tenochtitlan, the end of Nazism, the
collapse of the Soviet Union, the annexation of tribal Gaul — what brings
consensual states to an end, or at least an end to the good life?
The city-states could not stop
30,000 Macedonians in a way — when far poorer and 150 year earlier — they had
stopped 300,000 Persians descending on many of the same routes. The French
Republic of 1939 had more tanks and troops on the Rhine than the Third Reich
that was busy overrunning Poland. A poorer Britain fought differently at
el-Alamein than it does now over Libya. A British battleship was once a sign of
national pride; today a destroyer represents a billion pounds stolen from
social services.
Give me
Redistribution of wealth rather than
emphasis on its creation is surely a symptom of aging societies. Whether at
Byzantium during the Nika Riots or in bread and circuses Rome, when the public
expects government to provide security rather than the individual to become
autonomous through a growing economy, then there grows a collective lethargy. I
think that is the message of Juvenal’s savage satires about both mobs and the
idle rich. Fourth-century Athenian literature is characterized by forensic law
suits, as citizens sought to sue each other, or to sue the state for
sustenance, or to fight over inheritances.
The subtext of Petronius’s Satyricon
is an affluent, childless, often underemployed citizenry seeking inheritances
and lampooning the productive classes that produce enough excess for the wily
to get by just fine without working. Somewhere around 1985 in California I
noticed that my students were hoping for a state job first, a federal job
second, a municipal job third — and a private one last. Around 1990, suddenly
two sorts of commercials were aired everywhere: how to join a law suit by
calling a law firm’s 1-800 number or how to get a free power chair, scooter, or
some other device by calling the 1-800 number of
a health care company that would do
the paper work for Social Security on your behalf.
Regulate, not create
Why is it more moral for a federal
bureaucrat in a state-supplied SUV to shut down an offshore oil rig on grounds
that it is too dangerous for the environment than for a private individual to
risk his own capital to find some sort of new fuel to power his government’s
SUV fleet? All affluent societies believe that they are just too rich not to be
able to afford another regulation, just one more moralizing indulgence, yet
again an added entitlement. But as we see now in postmodern America, idle
250,000 acres of farmland for a tiny fish, shut down an entire oilfield, put
off a new natural gas find in worry over possible environmental alteration, add
a cent to the sales tax, mandate yet another prescription drug entitlement not
funded, or offer yet another in-state tuition discount to an illegal alien —
and the costs finally equate to an implosion as we see in Greece or California.
And as we know from past collapses, a new entitlement in a matter of minutes
becomes an institutionalized right whose withdrawal causes far more anguish than
its prior nonexistence. Justinian learned that when he sought to cut the civil
service and almost lost his throne.
Them
Not that the elite are exempt.
Western moral literature, from Horace to Thackeray, focuses on the vanity of
the rich who think that a greedy heir won’t really inherit their hard-won or
suspect riches, or that their always aging hips and knees will always so
briskly power them up the monumental stairs of their colossal homes, or that a
fifth sailboat or another 1000 acres will at last end the boredom. But the rub
is not whether they are rich but whether they are idle, whether they send a
message that affluence can make life better, rather than affluence is
inevitably corrupting. In Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, the theme is not just
imperial decadence and cruelty, but also the blind passions of the mob that the
elite so cynically manipulate for their own useless privilege and nonsensical
indulgence.
We are good and therefore can act
badly
The outsourcing of private morality
to the state is a particularly modern affliction, but equally as pernicious. We
witness the startling paradox that today’s private society is crasser, less
honest, and more uncouth even as its government’s official morality stresses
gender, race, class, and green ethical superiority. But just because the state
now thankfully mandates disabled parking spaces does not mean that we honor a
crippled relative more than in the past, or that our children are more likely
to write a note of thanks to a grandparent’s gift. I can surely see an erosion
in the public expression of manners and morality even as I sense our government
is now more “fair” and “equal” than ever before.
Just because the state will sue you
for the appearance of sexual harassment does not mean that leaving your laptop
in a college university carrel means it is less likely to be stolen than, say,
a wallet in 1955. The frightening worry is that the two are connected: the more
the state steps in to to assure that we are cosmically moral, the more we
assume we can relax and therefore become concretely immoral. Detroit is a
symptom of that transition from family to state definitions of morality. Go to
Athens today, and one can read high-sounding praises of the all-encompassing
welfare state, and see all around private machinations to get out of taxes and
boasts about getting a public job that requires no work and earns lots of pay.
When poverty is defined as relative
want rather than existential need, states decay and societies decline. In the
fifth century, Athenians were content to be paid to go to the theater; by the
fourth, they were paid also to vote — even as they hired mercenaries to fight
and forgot who won at Salamis, and why. Flash mobbing did not hit bulk food
stores. The looters organized on Facebook through laptops and cell phones, not
through organizing during soup kitchens and bread lines. Random assaults were
not because of elemental poverty, but anger at not having exactly what appears
on TV.
Obesity, not malnutrition, is the
affliction at Wal-Mart. In our strange culture, that someone drives an
overpriced BMW apparently means that our own Toyotas don’t have air
conditioners or stereos. But that John Edwards or John Kerry or Al Gore has a
huge house doesn’t mean that mine is inadequate — or the tract homes that
sprout in my community for new arrivals from Mexico are too small.
Of course, the elite have
responsibility to use their largess wisely and not turn into the Kardashians.
But that a fifth of one percent of the taxpayers are finding ways not to pay at
the income tax rate on their large incomes does not hurt the republic as much
as 50% of the population paying no income tax at all. The latter noble sorts do
not bother us as much, but their noncompliance bothers the foundations of our
society far more than that of the stingy, but minuscule, number of grasping
rich.
Lala land
Unreality is an especially
disturbing symptom. When Jimmy Hoffa threatens the non-unionists, one imagines
that Detroit is building better, safer, more reliable cars at a better price
and has for decades. When Barack Obama urges the Black Caucus to march for
equality, and adopts the cadences and pose of a 1960 civil rights leader, one
would think the right wing in Florida just picked Bull Connor, not Herman Cain,
as their straw poll winner. When the third-generation, hip spokesman for La
Raza talks about inequality, one would think she herself just crossed the
border from Oaxaca, forced to flee a benevolent Mexico to work in the pits of
an American Mordor.
Hope
We all know what will save us and
what is destroying us. But the trick is to see how the two will collide. A new
tax code, simple rates, few deductions, everybody pays something; new
entitlement reform, less benefits, later retirement; a smaller government, a
larger private sector; a different popular culture that honors character rather
than excess — all that is not, and yet is, impossible to envision. It will only
transpire when the cries of the self-interested anguished are ignored. My
expectation is that soon that the affluent of suddenly rich China and India
will come down with the Western disease that we see endemically in Europe and
among our own, even as America snaps out of it, and recommits itself to
self-reliance and wealth creation. But when I look at 18th-century Venice, or
1950s Britain, or France in 1935, or 3rd-century Athens, or 5th-century AD
Rome, I am worried. I don’t think we wish to live in a quiet but collapsed
Greece in the age of Plutarch, forever dreaming about a far off age of past
accomplishment.
