Posted on 04/25/2017 11:16:24 PM PDT by babylon_times
Between 1935 and 1975, Will and Ariel Durant published a series of volumes that together were known as “The Story of Civilization.” They basically told human history (mostly Western history) as an accumulation of great ideas and innovations, from the Egyptians, through Athens, Magna Carta, the Age of Faith, the Renaissance and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The series was phenomenally successful, selling over two million copies.
That series encapsulated the Western civilization narrative that people, at least in Europe and North America, used for most of the past few centuries to explain their place in the world and in time. This narrative was confidently progressive. There were certain great figures, like Socrates, Erasmus, Montesquieu and Rousseau, who helped fitfully propel the nations to higher reaches of the humanistic ideal.
This Western civ narrative came with certain values — about the importance of reasoned discourse, the importance of property rights, the need for a public square that was religiously informed but not theocratically dominated. It set a standard for what great statesmanship looked like. It gave diverse people a sense of shared mission and a common vocabulary, set a framework within which political argument could happen and most important provided a set of common goals.
Starting decades ago, many people, especially in the universities, lost faith in the Western civilization narrative. They stopped teaching it, and the great cultural transmission belt broke. Now many students, if they encounter it, are taught that Western civilization is a history of oppression....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Edmund Burke saw that liberty and freedom were only possible within the confines of good morals, and our Judeo-Christian culture. He described it as liberty and freedom being the void inside a house, with the walls of that house being morals and Judeo-Christian culture. It is the modern zeitgeist that has been successful in tearing those walls down in the name of equality. Equality of all cultures, equality of all religions, and the eventual equality of all wages are the aim. This zeitgeist is not novel. Alexis De Tocqueville warned us in the mid 19th century of what he saw as a distinct problem: “Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.” Psalm 11:3 “When the foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous do?”
Hou mean Pokemon and Sim City aren’t serious subjects? /S
Baby boomers like Brooks suicided western culture. They got the ball rolling with the progressive, they raised their gen xrs to be compliant atheists while they raided the populace and brought in the muslim invasion. There was a brief pause with Reagan but once GW Bush got in the ball went out of control. If Trumpism doesn’t slow it down that’s it. No more places to find libery and it will be a bloody violent mess getting it back.
> Starting decades ago, many people, especially in the universities, lost faith in the Western civilization narrative. They stopped teaching it, and the great cultural transmission belt broke. Now many students, if they encounter it, are taught that Western civilization is a history of oppression
It wasn’t accidental and there wasn’t some loss of faith that just happened by itself. They stopped teaching it deliberately, so that they could teach the oppression tale instead and have it uncritically lapped up by students with no actual knowledge of anything else. It was a deliberate subversion of the education system to manufacture generations of people hostile to their own societies and trained to undermine civilisation from within.
Ah, David Brooks. Even this essay which started off with some reasonable discussion and valid observations, veered off into a sophomoric rant full of noise, but little else.
“Faith” wasn’t lost in it, it was ruthlessly uprooted, dug out and poisoned by communist and progressive scum that took root like weeds in our fertile land. We need to apply civilization grade roundup, nay, agent orange, to beat it back.
IIRC, They were asked if they could reduce their vast research to one sentence to be learned from all of history. Their answer: “Love one another.”
white civilization. This is a painful truth; few of us want to go that far. … The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballets, et al., don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself.”
ROTFLMAO...When this idiot gets to 8th grade they are going to look back on 3rd grade reasoning with some fondness for how silly it was...
“Love one anothe” by itself always devolves to loving your neighbors wife.
Oversimplification is for simps.
I seldom agree with David Brooks fully. I inherited a set of The Story of Civilization by Will Durant— I cannot reconcile most of what he published there to what our so called public education now pumps into “minds full of mush” -What I have read of Burke, Bastiat-and others suggest we agree more than I can agree with David Brooks of NPR.
Secular Jews like Brooks have an interest in preserving a secularized Western Civilization that doesn’t completely abandon Biblical morality. They have no other place to go. Too bad such a civilization is no longer viable because of people like Brooks.
In the very early 1900s, Charles Beard and other profs began the subtle demonization of our Framing generation. While they were refuted by historians like Forrest McDonald and Gordon Wood in the 50s and 60s, the Left remained stuck in poor scholarship that is accepted as the truth today.
Now, white people shouldn’t vote, they have privilege and may be denied freedom of speech. The Left doesn’t know when to quit because it can’t. It is how societies talk themselves into gulags.
My response is that I have a nationalist viewpoint. I care about what will best ensure the future survival and prosperity of MY descendants.
In that context, Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, and Shakespeare are of immensely more value than "autonomous civilizations" and the welfare of the snail darter.
Nationalism is the viewpoint that the well-being of your own nation is more important than the well being of those who are not of your nation.
Globalism is that viewpoint that it is immoral to value your own.
I’m reading Pax Romana by Adrian Goldsworthy now. In it, he talks about a similar shift in historians’ views about the Roman Republic and Empire. The first historians wrote about how great and civilizing the Romans were. Then it became popular to show how brutal and oppressive they were.
Goldsworthy looks at both, and says that things were somewhere in the middle, and a major flaw in both extremes is to exclude analysis of the neighboring societies and their conditions. When he does that, he says the Romans come out looking pretty good, relatively speaking. Yes, the Romans exploited conquered peoples, but their oppression was not that much different from what the people suffered before the Romans came. The Romans did bring more security, reducing the amount of piracy, highway robbery, and raiding, and increased trade and the quality of life. Many parts of the empire became so peaceful and civilized that the Romans could reduce their military to token levels. The Romans also introduced the ideas of a sort of rule of law and right to petition for redress that was attractive when compared with the capriciousness of local rulers. He points out that the Romans weren’t perfect, and they were sometime hypocritical, but in general, life was better under Roman rule.
I think that that sort of analysis is missing in this day’s attacks on Western Civilization, and the American version of it. The Spanish in Mexico were brutal and oppressive, but look at what the Aztecs were doing. The British exploited India, but look at the quality of life of the Indians under their local rulers before the British came, and the resulting expectations of present-day Indians for fairness and the rule of law from their government, an idea that was important to the British.
The bad things about Western Civilization look pretty bad until compared with what’s going on outside it, and the good things look really good compared to anything else.
Consider the SOURCE.....
Great points. I definitely need to read that book.
bump
I agree!
I agree with you, western civilization is in collapse and the main reason is what has been happing on collage campuses and in school is NOT our history or our values.
But rather politically motivated extremism. The irony is, those screaming fascist today as they try to shut down free speech and block Democratic transfers of power. Will be the legitimate fascist of tomorrow.
We need to stand up to theses people and Demand School reform, free speech on campus or compete halt to all Federal, and State education support for them.
The consequence of shutting down the exchange of ideas and the tolerance there to should be an end to University status. The American Taxpayer should not be on the hook for leftist’s professors attempts at political indoctrination.
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