By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, July 30, 2020
Cultural suicide used to be a popular diagnosis of why
things suddenly just quit.
Historians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee
cited social cannibalism to explain why once-successful states, institutions,
and cultures simply died off.
Their common explanation was that the arrogance of
success ensures lethal consequences. Once elites became pampered and arrogant,
they feel exempt from their ancestors’ respect for moral and spiritual
laws — such as the need for thrift, moderation,
and transcendence.
Take professional sports. Over the past century,
professional football, basketball, and baseball were racially integrated, and
they adopted a uniform code of patriotic observance. The three leagues offered
fans a pleasant respite from daily barroom politics. As a result, by the 21st
century, the NFL, NBA, and MLB had become global multi-billion-dollar
enterprises.
Then hubris ensued.
The owners, coaches, and players weren’t always racially
diverse. But that inconvenient truth did not stop the leagues from hectoring
their fans about social activism — even as they no longer honored common
patriotic rituals.
All three leagues have suffered terribly during the viral
lockdown, as American life mysteriously went on without them. And they have
almost ensured that they won’t fully recover when the quarantine ends. Many of
their often-pampered multimillionaire players refuse to honor the national
anthem. In the NFL, players will now broadcast their politics on their helmets.
They will virtue-signal their moral superiority to increasingly turned-off fans
— as if to make sure that their sources of support flee.
Lots of American universities became virtual global
brands in the 21st century. Sky-high tuition, rich foreign students, guaranteed
student loans, and Club Med–like facilities convinced administrators and
faculty that higher education was sacrosanct. The universities preached that
every successful American had to have a bachelor’s degree, as if the
higher-education monopoly deserved guaranteed customers.
But soon, $1.6 trillion in aggregate student-loan debt,
lightweight and trendy curricula, ideological hectoring, administrative bloat,
reduced teaching loads, poor placement of graduates, and the suspension of the
Bill of Rights on campus began turning off students as well as the public.
If students can Zoom or Skype their classes from home
this fall, why pay $70,000 a year for the campus “experience”?
Supposedly woke and informed rioters this summer
incoherently toppled or damaged the statues of everyone from Robert E. Lee and
Ulysses S. Grant to Frederick Douglass and Miguel de Cervantes. So the public
might begin to wonder how the nation’s multi-trillion-dollar investment in
higher education actually serves the country.
Soon, popular fury will beget more dangerous questions
for American universities. Maybe the country should subsidize the training of
more essential electricians, plumbers, contractors, and masons instead of
unemployable environmental and ethnic studies majors.
If a university president wanted to devise a plan for how
to destroy his university, he could not have come up with a better one than
what has happened on campus in recent decades.
Hollywood should have been ecstatic over 21st-century
globalization, which should have made filmmakers and stars even richer and more
popular, with a potential audience of more than 7 billion. But the quarantine
has shut down most theaters.
Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook, along with cable TV, have
sent theater revenues diving for years. Silicon Valley can create filmmakers
who have no need to get near Southern California.
In response, Hollywood counts on bringing comic books to
the big screen, or on making poor remakes of old classics. When directors try
to make a serious new movie, the result is often the monotony and boredom of
thinly veiled woke propaganda.
Viewers can take only so many heroic green crusaders,
diverse superhumans, and beautiful feminists — and only so many villainous
cardboard-cutout Russian oligarchs, toothless and twangy Southern Neanderthals,
and corporate yes-men.
The hypocrisy gets worse when the Chinese government
often adjudicates movie content as the price of entering a Chinese market with
more than a billion potential customers.
And will viewers seek out theaters for more lectures from
beautiful multimillionaires on their racist, sexist, homophobic country?
Professional sports, universities, and the motion-picture
industry all know that what they are doing is bad for business. But they still
believe they are rich and powerful, and thus invulnerable. They also are
ignorant of history and cannot be persuaded that they are destroying
themselves.
At this late date, all that matters is that the country
itself learns from these suicidal examples and heals itself. If the U.S. is not
to become an extinct Easter Island, it must rediscover a respect for its past,
honor for the dead who gave us so much, the desire to invest rather than spend,
and a need for some sense of transcendence.
If we do not believe that what we do today has
consequences for our children after we are gone, there are ancient existential
forces in the world that will intervene.
And it won’t be nice.
No comments:
Post a Comment