28 4 / 2010
"Cultures live in one of three states. The first state is barbarism. Barbarians believe that the customs of their village are the laws of nature and that anyone who doesn’t live the way they live is beneath contempt and requiring redemption or destruction. The third state is decadence. Decadents cynically believe that nothing is better than anything else. If they hold anyone in contempt, it is those who believe in anything. Nothing is worth fighting for.
Civilization is the second and most rare state. Civilized people are able to balance two contradictory thoughts in their minds. They believe that there are truths and that their cultures approximate those truths. At the same time, they hold open in their mind the possibility that they are in error. The combination of belief and skepticism is inherently unstable. Cultures pass through barbarism to civilization and then to decadence, as skepticism un dermines self-certainty. Civilized people fight selectively but effectively. Ob viously all cultures contain people who are barbaric, civilized, or decadent, but each culture is dominated at different times by one principle.
Europe was barbaric in the sixteenth century, as the self-certainty of Christianity fueled the first conquests. Europe passed into civilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then collapsed into decadence in the course of the twentieth century. The United States is just beginning its cultural and historical journey. Until now it has not been sufficiently coherent to have a definitive culture. As it becomes the center of gravity of the world, it is developing that culture, which is inevitably barbaric. America is a place where the right wing despises Muslims for their faith and the left wing despises them for their treatment of women. Such seemingly different perspectives are tied together in the certainty that their own values are self-evidently best. And as with all barbaric cultures, Americans are ready to fight for their self-evident truths.
This is not meant as criticism, any more than an adolescent can be criticized for being an adolescent. It is a necessary and inevitable state of development. But the United States is a young culture and as such it is clumsy, direct, at times brutal, and frequently torn by deep internal dissension — its dissidents being united only in the certainty that their values are best. The United States is all of these things, but as with Europe in the sixteenth century, the United States will, for all of its apparent bumbling, be remarkably effective."
