US Decadence & The Facts/Wishes Distinction
Christopher Caldwell Reads Emmanuel Todd
I’m violating my “no posts on weekends” policy (which is about as hard and stable as the US southern border, heh heh) to bring to your attention a great column by Christopher Caldwell, who is always a must-read. (If Caldwell published his grocery list, I would read it, because there would be something important in it.) As a New York Times subscriber, I have ten gift articles this month, and I have used for the Caldwell piece so that you can all read the whole thing.
Caldwell talks about the new book, in French, called (in English) The Defeat Of The West. I wrote about it a month ago in this space. Todd is a French historian and anthropologist who first came to prominence in France when he predicted in 1976 the fall of the Soviet Union, based in part on infant mortality statistics. He predicted the decline of the American empire in 2002, when the US, at the height of its hyperpower moment, was preparing to invade Iraq.
Now Todd predicts the collapse of the entire Western order. Caldwell focuses on Todd’s criticism of the American Empire. To wit:
Mr. Todd is a critic of American involvement in Ukraine, but his argument is not the now-familiar historical one made by the dissident political scientist John Mearsheimer. Like Mr. Mearsheimer, Mr. Todd questions the zealous expansion of NATO under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the neoconservative ideology of democracy promotion and the official demonization of Russia. But his skepticism of U.S. involvement in Ukraine goes deeper. He believes American imperialism has not only endangered the rest of the world but also corroded American character.
In short, Todd (says Caldwell) argues that America grew fat and lazy, and quit making things like it used to. Manufacturing was the source of US prosperity, but we shipped most of that overseas. More:
Mr. Todd contends that Americans’ heedless plunge into the global economy was a mistake. Parts of his case will be familiar from other authors: The United States produces fewer cars than it did in the 1980s; it produces less wheat. But parts of his case involve deeper, long-term cultural shifts perennially associated with prosperity. We used to call them decadence.
More:
But ringing up profits is not the only thing America does in the world — it also spreads a system of liberal values, which are often described as universal human rights. A specialist in the anthropology of families, Mr. Todd warns that a lot of the values Americans are currently spreading are less universal than Americans think.
The world is not woke. What Western elites call “liberal democracy” is seen by many others in the world as what its critics derisively call globohomo, defined as “the supposed promotion of homosexuality, neoliberal economics, and progressive values by corporate and political interests.”
Boy, do we ever see that in Hungary, and throughout Eastern Europe. The US and the EU are fanatical about promoting LGBT. I mean, truly fanatical. When the Hungarian parliament in 2021 passed a law forbidding what it (accurately, in my view) sees as LGBT propaganda for children and minors, European elites went berserk. Mark Rutte, at the time the prime minister of the Netherlands, said that Hungary ought to be kicked out of the European Union over it.
Mind you, it’s routine for European governments to ban information aimed at children, who are (correctly) believed to be incapable of discerning truth and falsehood in them. In 2021, for example, the European Parliament voted to ban online advertising aimed at kids. So you can’t sell kids candy bars online, but Hungary’s refusal to allow people to sell transgenderism and sodomy to children is thought so egregious by European elites that many of them want the country thrown out of Europe.
Readers of this newsletter are well aware of how passionate the US State Department is about shoving LGBT in the faces of the world. Much of the world hates this, and sees it as a vivid sign of US cultural imperialism. Hungary is fairly tolerant on LGBT matters; same-sex couples can have registered partnerships, and almost every time I go out on the street in Budapest, I see at least one same-sex couple holding hands. But as we all know, in the eyes of these elites, to decline to accept the full and ever-changing panoply of LGBT demands is to be a horrible bigot not fit for civilized society.
Caldwell goes on:
Mr. Todd is not a moralizer. But he insists that traditional cultures have a lot to fear from the West’s various progressive leanings and may resist allying themselves on foreign policy with those who espouse them. In a similar way, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s official atheism was a deal-breaker for many people who might otherwise have been well disposed toward Communism.
Mr. Todd does believe that certain of our values are “deeply negative.” He presents evidence that the West does not value the lives of its young.
Of course we don’t. I don’t know if this is in Todd’s book, but a society that valued its young would have stopped the perverse sexually transitioning minors hard and fast. I’ve mentioned in this space before how bitter it is for me to travel and give talks, or to go to conferences, and to meet people who suffered under Soviet occupation, and who used to look to the US as a beacon of liberty, but who are now afraid of us. They see us as hegemonic and decadent. I tell them they are exactly right.
More Caldwell:
While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones. The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”
For students of the Vietnam War, there is much in Mr. Todd’s book that recalls the historian Loren Baritz’s classic 1985 book, “Backfire,” which drew on popular culture, patriotic mythology and management theory to explain what had led the United States astray in Vietnam. Mr. Baritz concluded, “We are what went wrong in Vietnam.” Had Lyndon Johnson managed to impose his will on the Vietnamese, Mr. Baritz reflected, “an entire culture would have been utterly destroyed out of the goodness of the American heart.”
One is constantly reading in the papers that Vladimir Putin is a threat to the Western order. Maybe. But the larger threat to the Western order is the hubris of those who run it.
An entire culture would have been utterly destroyed out of the goodness of the American heart. Reminds me of a meme Elon Musk retweeted this week, about never in the history of the world has a civilization been willing to surrender itself out of fear of being mean.
And Caldwell writing, of Todd, “The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war” — well, it’s true about so much in American life, isn’t it?
We wish that the Middle East were liberal and democratic, and so we believed that we could make it so with enough application of money and military might. We believe that men can become women with the application of medical technology, legal hocus-pocus, and punishing those who refuse to live by that lie. We wish to think that all people are equally gifted, and that diversity is our strength, and therefore think we can win wars and maintain excellence in science and technology by arranging our institutions to fit an egalitarian schema regarding race and sex. Washington wishes to believe that the United States, despite its massive indebtedness, its manufacturing deficit, and its inability to attract new recruits to its army, can nevertheless wage a two-front Cold War against Russia and China. And so forth. The examples are endless.
It is unreality. And look, so as not to be entirely partisan here, my objection to MAGA is not that Trump is wrong about everything — he isn’t! — but that so many of my fellow conservatives want to believe a certain thing about Trump, and therefore dismiss or demonize hard evidence that he is not what we wish him to be. For example, the Chinese Communist Party has done a number of American youth with TikTok, but:
I am eager to read an English translation of Todd’s book, so I can judge his case for myself. But assuming he’s right, the urgency of learning to live not by lies is a matter of our very survival — especially if the Western civilization order is headed for defeat. If the civilizational order fails at a Roman Empire level, well, most of us will likely still be here. What then? How will we live? How will we get through it until renaissance is possible?
I’m with Andrei Tarkovsky:
By the way, I urge you to read Caldwell’s books. Powerful medicine. Courageous truth-telling.
"If the civilizational order fails at a Roman Empire level, well, most of us will likely still be here. What then? How will we live? How will we get through it until renaissance is possible?"
We'll do it the way they did in the "Dark Ages" (which weren't that dark, actually) - living in smaller enclaves and societies, with special people devoting themselves to maintaining the old learning and beliefs, watching out for marauders, and concentrating on what humans have for thousands of years: feeding / clothing / housing ourselves and our children.
Somewhere, a Byzantium will continue. (It did at the time, and lasted well into the 15th century.)
Sooner or later, the marauders will settle down, and the people who survive will join their enclaves to form kingdoms (for want of a better word).
Chaos never lasts forever: humans like living in stable, safe groups. A new culture will form. For those of us who, should the fall happen soon, and will never live to see the next renaissance, we will be no different than those who died in the late 500's AD, to whom St. Gregory the Great (Pope Gregory I) preached to "us, upon whom the end of the world has come", "Strengthen yourself to bear with the bad; If we are offspring of God's chosen ones, we must learn to live as they did." And begins with the example of Job.
(1) We should do what we can to prevent decline, awareness and action, but; (2) We should not assume that decline, which in inevitable in the long run, is going to fully happen in our lifetimes. Rome was 500 years in it's decay. (3) There is a mental bias from consuming news. Yes, we should consume news, but the only thing newsworthy is the bad/concerning stuff. We miss much of the good.
People, spiritual peace and effectiveness is not a product of depression and certain-defeatism. We don't really know what will happen. Let's do our best and also admit we just do not know the outcome for certain.
I think saying "doom is certain" is no more likely to bring the change we hope for than saying what changes we need to make and how this will help people. How about - "this hurts us and doom may result but lets try this....."