Barbarians inside the Gates?

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Barbarians inside the Gates. pp. 3 - 5

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Barbarians inside the Gates?

IS IT HOPELESS?

That is the question that seems implicit—and often explicit—in discussions of the degeneration of American society and of Western civilization.

The signs of this degeneration are all too plain and all too widespread, from declining educational standards to high crime rates, the disintegration of families and record rates of suicide among young people. Able-bodied beggars have become a common sight in American cities from San Francisco to Washington, as well as in such foreign capitals as London and Paris.

Senator Pat Moynihan recently pointed out that handgun murders in New York City are now 30 times what they were half a century ago. Racial polarization has also become far more common on elite college campuses than it was 30 years ago, and segregated living arrangements have been created by college administrators who publicly proclaim their devotion to "diversity" almost hourly.

Perhaps worst of all, much of the degeneracy of our times is not merely tolerated but celebrated.

The ugly, ignorant and barbaric lyrics of "rap" music have been sanctified by benedictions in the columns of the New York Times and by Ph.D.s teaching at Ivy League universities. Multiple murderers are mourned at their executions and a child molester on the faculty of Stanford University had a medal struck in his honor after he committed suicide when confronted with his crime.

Despite a long history of struggle of blacks for better education, it has now become common in ghetto schools across the country for those black youngsters who excel academically to be denounced for "acting white"—and to face social ostracism or even physical violence from their classmates.

The dangerous notion that some categories of people are guilty until proven innocent has been creeping into our legal system, along with the sophistry that double jeopardy is not double jeopardy if it is cops who were acquitted when we wanted them convicted.

The barbarians are not at the gates. They are inside the gates—and have academic tenure, judicial appointments, government grants, and control of the movies, television, and other media.

The question of the hour—and of the next century—is whether all this can be turned around.

History shows that degeneracy can be turned around because it has been done in the past. But the real question today is: Will we turn it around—or is what we are doing likely to make matters worse?

Clever sophisticates use history to show that there were alarms about crime and violence, and about the decline of the younger generation, in the past, suggesting that this shows that there is nothing to worry about. On the contrary, past lamentations were often both correct and a spur to doing something about it.

That is what turned things around.

In the early 19th century, for example, there were alarming levels of crime and degenerate behavior in American cities and in many European cities as well. What was done about it?

Massive efforts were made on many fronts to roll back the tide of barbarism. Programs to instill moral values became widespread, both in the schools and in such newly created organizations as the Young Men's Christian Association. Sunday school attendance tripled between 1821 and 1851.

The first real police forces were organized in cities across the United States and mass movements to get people to stop drinking likewise spread across the country. The per-capita consumption of alcohol, which had been going up for decades, fell by 1850 to about one-fifth of what it had been in 1829.

Not surprisingly, crime rates began to drop in the middle of the 19th century and continued to fall on into the early years of the 20th century. Studies of crime in London, Stockholm and Sydney show similar trends during the era of what the intelligentsia today refer to sneeringly as "Victorian" morality.

We have grown so used to crime, violence and other social degeneracy increasing that it may be hard to realize that improvements in all these things have occurred for long periods of time in the past.

The homicide rate in the United States declined from the time national statistics began to be collected in the early 1930s until the 1960s, when the bright ideas of the anointed began to be applied in the criminal justice system, the schools, and elsewhere in American society and in Western civilization in general.

Virtually everything that was supposed to make things better made things worse.

Worst of all, the assumptions and social dogmas of the anointed reign supreme from the schools to the colleges and in all the media. What has failed is accepted without question by so-called "thinking people" and what worked is disdained as being out of touch with the times.

No, the situation is not hopeless. But it is grim—and if nobody does anything to turn it around, it can become hopeless.

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12 June 2024