OK John – I’m worried you may have actually lost your mind. You started out well enough with this post, and went on to make an excellent point that we know how to defeat poverty (ironically it’s the liberals who are preventing it), but then you went way over the top.

I’ll concede that there appears to be a negative correlation between prosperity and population growth. But there is a big difference between people consciously choosing a family of four over a family of seven, and a Culture of Death!

In other words, increased affluence is almost certainly playing out demographically, but how in the hell has prosperity created nihilism? I’m not sure how you support that philosophically and I’m quite certain it can’t be supported based on any evidence.

If I had to make a list of the least nihilistic populations of the world I’d start with the English speaking peoples, and they tend to be pretty affluent. If I had to identify a poster child for the Culture of Death, I’d start with Russia where they are aborting more babies than they are giving birth to, and the birth rate stands at roughly 1.3 - well below replacement, obviously. Russia is not a prosperous country.

One could certainly argue that the Middle East has gotten caught up in a Culture of Death, but the nihilism that you speak of is part and parcel of post-modern thought, which is largely a Western phenomenon. I have some thoughts on why post- modernism has become so dominant in the West (affecting the English speakers the least), but those thoughts are somewhat fuzzy and ill-formed and I’d really just be thinking out loud. So I don’t know exactly what’s causing it, but I know what’s not causing it – prosperity is not causing it!

My post, as is often the case, is to some extant "thinking out loud," not a completely formed theory...

The reasoning on prosperity leading to nihilism is that the underlying problem is an unwillingness of people to "grow up." Especially in the sense of making life's painful commitments, and sticking with them. I'd place in the same bag commitments to a philosophical system, to staying married to the same person, to raising children, or caring for elderly parents. That is to say, you get both nihilism and "culture of death." They go hand-in-hand.

And we are in this situation because for the first time in history a majority of our population can look forward to a comfortable middle-class existence, unless they screw-up mightily. We can expect to never suffer plagues, famines, depressions, invasion, and expect to prabably live to be 80 or 100. Divorce is easy, and with contraceptives we can for the first time in history not have children if we wish.

So, for the first time in history, a majority of the people have the option to not "grow up." And that's exactly what I think is happening. (I see a lot of it in this burg.)

There are other factors, and I think there is something in the Anglo-sphere that tends to work against this. And there's something the Red States as opposed to the blue ones.

I don't know much about Russia, but I'd guess that 70 years of the destruction of meaning and tradition by socialists has had a similar effect.

Also, the Russians were in a sort of slavery, under a "progressive" regime. And a slave has very little incentive to "grow up." He doesn't have many choices, and when he does he usually doesn't get rewarded for making the tough choices.

I think it was Lyle who once made a comment about people not growing up, and got me onto this train of thought. Thanks, Lyle or whoever it was!

Prosperity doesn't kill people; people who don't deserve to be prosperous do.

No, I'd say prosperity kills people who are not prepared. It's sort of like having a possibility of gravity being turned off. You should be carrying ropes and a grappling hook in your pocket, or you might just float away...

John,

The "Anglosphere" is better off in comparison to "Old Europe" and Russia because it never fell as fully under the spell of socialism/communism as they did.

If I may (once again!) ride my favorite hobby-horse....?

If people who see themselves as mere cogs in a vast machine, as helpless lumps of raw material to be shaped by their "betters", a.k.a. the planners, then they aren't going to grow up. There's no incentive to do so. If they conform to the Plan, they get taken care of (as if they were children), and if they don't conform to the Plan (in an effort to grow up and take charge of their lives) they get slammed down hard and are made to conform. (Which goes some way to explain why Christianity, especially, is so discouraged, even brutally suppressed, in Communist countries-- it encourages adulthood and non-conformance to the Plan.)

We see the sad results of this in "Old Europe" and in Russia, and to a lesser extent in your neighborhood, John.

Your neighbors never grew up because they didn't have to-- they bought into the New Deal, the Great Society, etc., and are being taken care of (or so they think, not realizing how they're getting reamed on their 1040s, but that's a rant for another day), and they don't have the impetus of a muscular religion, such as Christianity, to get them to stand on their own two feet as adults.

Fortunately, San Francisco is not the entire United States, which is why "flyover country" prospers and grows like it does.

Nihilist is some one not religious?. A secular person?. Or a Non-Christian?

Nihilism is "the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless."

It is my suspicion that there are a LOT of nihilists these days. Most people probably consider me to be wrong in this, because no one actually admists to being a nihilist.

But it seems to me very significant that there are many people who will never argue based on their underlying principles. They will argue for some particular policy or politician, but never connect that argument to something deeper.

I might like a policy, but I can usually support that preference with my view of American traditions or our Constitution. And I could support those things because I have under them beliefs about Western Civilization, and about "The Rights of Englishmen." And those in turn are supported by my Christian faith, and are consistant with it.

But the odd thing I've found in blogging since 11/2001 is that I never found anyone to argue against me (or against bloggers much more popular than I) in the same deep way. In particular, there are a vast number of left-leaning types in the world, but none of them ever allude to any deep leftist philosophy...

I don't deny that you are on to something with your observation that, for the first time in history, a majority of the people have the option to not "grow up." And that reality presents a real threat to our culture and future. But for what it's worth, I think you have taken a valuable incite and expanded it into a theory that is very difficult to support.

I suppose our disagreement comes down to what nihilism is. I simply wouldn't call a culture that is soft, lazy, and prone to take the easy way out "nihilistic". It's something - and something not good - just not nihilistic.

For anyone interested I'll post a counter-theory as to why nihilism is in the very air we breathe. Sorry – it’s long.

It starts with the premise that philosophy matters a great deal. Even if one agrees with that premise I would contend that you are likely still under-estimating its importance. A society is damn near defined by the "truths it holds self evident". The truths that it holds self evident will be determined by the philosophy it embraces.

I also contend (without evidence) that ideas flow from the top down. They do not bubble up from the masses. They are conceived by the highly educated, and the highly educated usually have access to a platform to distribute those ideas.

The bulwarks of that distribution network are the classroom (from the university level all the way to grade school) and the media in all its forms. So discussions in the Humanities Department of your local university are not innocuous thought-experiments at all.
Ideas conceived in ivory towers wind up getting thoroughly disseminated throughout the culture even though there is not necessarily a conscious intent to do so.

Some how, some way, and I truly don't know how, the Left has gotten almost complete control of the entire distribution network. Academia, public education, and the media are all institutions of the Left. The exceptions to this rule, the ones liberals love to point out (talk radio, Fox, blogs) are all very recent phenomena.

Thus, it is Leftist ideas that have become the truths that we hold self evident. The pursuit of self interest is bad; the love of one’s culture or country is xenophobic; educated, enlightened people do not attend church on a weekly basis; what’s true for you is not true for someone else. I could go on and on, and these premises are re-enforced by nearly every institution in our culture.

OK, believe it or not that was just the wind-up, here is the pitch. Post-modernism and the nihilism that accompanies it are not necessarily systemic to Leftist thought. It is itself something of a recent phenomenon (adopted within the last 60 years), and it is something of a defense mechanism - a security blanket for the Left. The “underlying principal” of Leftist thought is Socialism. But very shortly after the first experiments in Socialism began, the shrewdest thinkers on the Left could already see that it was being discredited.

Socialists held tremendous contempt for the morality of the Capitalist countries, yet Socialism kept leading to tyranny and mass graves. As silly as it sounds today, the Socialists of the 20’s and 30’s truly believed that their system would be more economically fruitful, as well as morally superior.

By any conceivable objective or empirical standard Socialism was proving to be inferior to Capitalism. Faced with this unthinkable horror Leftists academics and philosophers faced a near impossible choice. They could concede that Socialism, the underlying principal of their world-view, was wrong (and many did by the way – Orwell is the most famous, but there were many more – Google “The God That Failed”), or they could retreat deep into philosophy and attack reason, objectivity, evidence, and rationality itself.

They were not the first to do so. Many of the Continental philosophers in the previous century had, ironically, attacked the Enlightenment using precisely the same method. The true post-modern intellectuals like Foucault simply had to update the playbook a bit.

All of this would be obscure liberal arts history if it weren’t for the facts that I laid out in the beginning of this diatribe – the descendants of Foucault and his ilk have near complete control over academia, and their sympathizers have near complete control over the media. Thus, it is a truth that we hold self evident that there is no Truth. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Only a Neanderthal would ever use a phrase like “The Evil Empire”. And on, and on, and on.

Has our prosperity resulted in a certain intellectual laziness that has made us more susceptible to ideas that our grandparents would have immediately dismissed as childish nonsense? OK – maybe.