Spengler on the affinity of the Chinese for the Jews.
A Chinese friend explained it to me this way: If you suffer a setback, even if through no fault of your own, and even if through the malicious acts of malevolent people, you must not feel sorry for yourself or blame others for your troubles. It is you who must take responsibility for overcoming them. You are required to redouble your efforts and work all the harder. Perseverance in the face of adversity is something Jews understand very well. Through two millennia of exile in the West, Jews maintained an autonomous high culture while succeeding at the highest level within Western culture, often despite persecution.
Civilizations fail when they become despondent, when they lose confidence in their history and their future, when their citizens cease to feel pride in and draw inspiration from their culture. Somehow, for thousands of years, Jews and Chinese kept their confidence in their civilization and preserved it through war and foreign conquest. Surely that helps explain their present success. The confidence to redouble one’s efforts in the face of adversity, even malevolence, cannot be explained by simple stubbornness. The grit required to excel even when the game is rigged against you is not only a cultural trait, but the trait of a culture, that is, a personal characteristic that draws on a culture’s self-confidence.
In the early 20th Century it was said among Jews that, “you had to be twice as good as a Christian to even be considered for a job”. The Jews, responding to that became seven times as good and rose to the top. Which as a commenter here note some while back provoked even more resentment. What has happened to every civilization that became too Jew unfriendly? Heinlein alludes to it:
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as ‘bad luck.’” Robert Heinlein
The Chinese in America for the longest time had similar problems.
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9 responses to “Civilizations Fall”
So riddle me this: Now that we don’t discriminate against Chinese and Jews, our culture has lost all confidence in itself.
Spengler answers;
c,
That begs the question. How did the West, confident enough in itself to accept Jews and Chinese as full-fledged citizens, end up reverting to tribalism soon after? Is a society that becomes “Jew unfriendly” susceptible to a run of Heinleinian “bad luck”? Or is it the other way around? Is “bad luck” the precursor to a real bout of “Jew friendliness”?
Or is it simply much more complicated than that?
The British Empire got tired of dominance long before Christianity faded. I think it is an effect of wealth and a lack of threats.
Long lasting civilizations take a much longer view. Americans can do five year plans. They can do twenty year plans. They don’t do much in the way of hundred year plans and nothing in the way of thousand year plans.
The British Empire was tired long before it gave up. Read Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden”.
There is absolutely no comparison in my mind between Jews and China. Foremost is the fact that Jews have never been responsible for killing between 50 and 80 million of their own people in a Cultural Revolution.
Civilizations fail when they become despondent, when they lose confidence in their history and their future, when their citizens cease to feel pride in and draw inspiration from their culture.
Germans had plenty to be proud of before Bismark, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Hitler. They had centuries of culture from the inventor of Western Music, J.S. Bach, to Schiller and the best of scientific discoveries. Yet they managed to kill 12 million people in a short time out of pure evil. That Germany didn’t suffer the fate of Carthage at the end is the shame of the West.
Spengler sounds like a crackpot.
Usual libertarian/conservative crap! If you like sayings here is one. When boswell asked DR. Samuel Johnson what he thought of the american revolution going on at the time he said “I observe those who scream the loudest about freedom and liberty are the slave holding southerhers!” Some things never change! They did a movie about your supermen in 1944 LIFEBOAT. It discusses this issue.
Neil,
The acceptance of Jews was a late 60’s early 70’s thing. Look at Woody Allen’s humor from the mid 60’s to get a grasp of what the Jews were making fun of among the gentiles. So this acceptance was occurring at the same time that relativism was arguing that all ethnic narratives are valid in repudiation of the Enlightenment idea that what mattered was proper and equal treatment of individuals (not ethnicities or collectives) before the law. So the acceptance occurred as a mixture of Enlightenment values of equality before the law and a burgeoning ethnic subjectivism which came to predominate.
It was this transitional period – late 60’s, early 70’s – that saw the loss of American confidence in the face of political policies and intelligentsia that undercut American efficacy at home and abroad in the first case and which condemned Enlightenment aka Western Culture aka Dead White Males as a uniquely evil culture in a narrative that claimed to see all viewpoints as valid… But only if they originated in some ethnic or class collective.
For an explication of this, (the triumph of subjectivism over the Enlightenment worldview) I would recommend Jean-François Revel’s book, “The Flight from Truth : The Reign of Deceit in the Age of Information “ and for an expansion of the topic into an American context, Thomas Sowell’s “The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy”, which used Revel’s format as the inspiration for its content and scope.
In regard to the racial elements of all minorities (not just Jews and Chinese) and in particular those that act as middlemen and facilitators in economies and countries not of their native ethnicities (and are hated for it) I can do no better than to recommend Thomas Sowell’s “Race and Culture” Series. It started out as 3 books, extensively researched and I understand he has written a 4th book which I have not yet read.
So read Revel and the first Sowell for a broad understanding of the loss of confidence in the Enlightenment West and the Sowell Race series for an explication of just how Heinleinian “Bad Luck” unfolds in the historical record.