By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, February 14, 2013
Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?
Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of
Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from
inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, when
historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the
Aztecs, and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to
Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure — and who gets the most of both — more often
than poverty and exhaustion, cause civilization to implode.
One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian
literature on the eve of the city’s takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over
slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent
reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes, and fudging
eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary
Latin literature — from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius, and Tacitus
— pointed to “bread and circuses,” as well as excessive wealth, corruption, and
top-heavy government.
For Gibbon and later French scholars, “Byzantine” became
a pejorative description of a top-heavy Greek bureaucracy that could not tax
enough vanishing producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats. In
antiquity, inflating the currency by turning out cheap bronze coins was often
the favored way to pay off public debts, while the law became fluid to address
popular demands rather than to protect time-honored justice.
After the end of World War II, most of today’s
powerhouses — China, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and Taiwan —
were either in ruins or still pre-industrial. Only the United States and Great
Britain had sophisticated economies that survived the destruction of the war.
Both were poised to resupply a devastated world with new ships, cars,
machinery, and communications.
In comparison with those of Frankfurt, the factories of
1945 Liverpool had survived mostly intact. Yet Britain missed out on the
postwar German economic miracles, in part because after the deprivations of the
war, the war-weary British turned to class warfare and nationalized their main
industries, which soon became uncompetitive.
The gradual decline of a society is often a self-induced
process of trying to meet ever-expanding appetites rather than a physical
inability to produce past levels of food and fuel or to maintain adequate
defense. Americans have never had safer workplaces or more sophisticated
medical care — and never have so many been on disability.
King Xerxes’ huge Persian force of 250,000 sailors and
soldiers could not defeat a rather poor Greece in 480 b.c. Yet a century and a
half later, a much smaller invading force from the north under Philip II of
Macedon overwhelmed the far more prosperous Greek descendants of the victors of
Salamis.
For hundreds of years, the outmanned legions of the tiny
and poor Roman Republic survived foreign invasions. Yet centuries later, tribal
Goths, Visigoths, Vandals, and Huns overran the huge Mediterranean-wide Roman
Empire.
Given our unsustainable national debt — nearly $17
trillion and climbing — America is said to be in decline, although we face no
devastating plague, nuclear holocaust, or shortage of oil or food.
Americans have never led such affluent material lives —
at least as measured by access to cell phones, big-screen TVs, cheap jet
travel, and fast food. Obesity rather than malnutrition is the greater threat
to national health. Flash mobs go after electronics stores, not food markets.
Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts, and tummy tucks than on the
age-old scourges of polio, smallpox, and malaria.
If Martians looked at the small houses, one-car families,
and primitive consumer goods of the 1950s, they would have thought the postwar
United States, despite a balanced budget in 1956, was impoverished in
comparison with an indebted contemporary America where consumers jostle for
each new version of the iPhone.
By any historical marker, the future of Americans has
never been brighter. The United States has it all: undreamed-of new finds of
natural gas and oil, the world’s preeminent food production, continual
technological wizardry, strong demographic growth, a superb military, and
constitutional stability.
Yet we don’t talk confidently about capitalizing and
expanding on our natural and inherited wealth. Instead, Americans bicker over
entitlement spoils as the nation continues to pile up trillion-dollar-plus
deficits. Enforced equality, rather than liberty, is the new national creed.
The medicine of cutting back on government goodies seems far worse than the
disease of borrowing trillions from the unborn to pay for them.
In August 1945, Hiroshima was in shambles, while Detroit
was among the most innovative and wealthiest cities in the world. Contemporary
Hiroshima now resembles a prosperous Detroit of 1945; parts of Detroit look
like they were bombed decades ago.
History has shown that a government’s redistribution of
shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector’s creation of new sources
of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.
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