History Where did Western Civilization go wrong?

[Zachowon]

For the same reason it always did: another war in Korea would be an awful bloodbath that would leave thousands of US servicemen dead and decimate South Korea. Between Korean fortifications in the mountains, their large military (that persists despite acquiring a nuke - again) and high likelihood of Chinese volunteers infiltrating the theater in small army groups, it's just not worth it, nuke or not.

Iran hasn't had a nuke for decades. If US was serious about invading a country three times the size of France and 80 millions of population, it would have done it ages ago.
The truth is that, again, nuke or no nuke, invading an occupying Iran would be a terrible bloodbath for very little gain.
Much easier to dickwave across the strait.

What part of US military's tenfold growth compared to pre-nuke times looks like "careless" to you?
Right now, after all the post-Cold War cuts and terrific innovations, US military is four times the size compared to 1920s or 1930s.

I know more about the north Korean theater then you, it is no where like that, plus they are poorly trained compared to the ROK for instance. A nuke allows their poor training to never be noticed in conflict.

That we know of. I am almost positive Iran has nukes, that is without me even looking it up, and should Biden get elected we most likely will go to war with Iran.
Nukes would prevent us from doing anything against them and they can constantly keep biting us in the heels knowing we wont do shit to them. Look at China and Russia for instance during the Obama admin.

It is almost like the population grew and we had three or four times of conflict since then? It is careless, as training has grown less like the old days and is more relaxed, is more like a country that knows they have a way to never be harmed or invaded because of its nuclear dterence. One that is pulling out of its conflict zones and may be permanent as watchers instead of invovled.
Had Iraq or A-stan had nukes we would never had gone in there. We only got Bin Laden because we had stuff that got them into Pakistan without being caught, Pakistan is a nuclear power, we could not invade to deal with them for that reason.

Think of this, had we nuked china during the Korean war, we could have changed warfare in such a way that using nukes to help win wars early on would be a common tactic. Something we would not want. Nukes have become a deterence because of its power and the death it brings. Take away nukes and you have a world where you can actually do more then talk to deal with someone trying to kill your citizens, trying to do worse.

 

[Deleted member 88]

Military counter factuals aren’t what this thread is about.

The French Revolution seems to me to be a strong and solid candidate for when western civilization collapsed.

All leftism can be traced back to it. And it is arguably the true birth of modernity.

When the Bastille was stormed, western civilization began to crumble. And it has been in the process of decay for the last 231 years.

 

[Firebat]

The French Revolution seems to me to be a strong and solid candidate for when western civilization collapsed.

In which way did it collapse?

 

[Deleted member 88]

In which way did it collapse?

It’s moral order was shattered. The natural and God ordained order that is. The social order followed suit.

 

[Firebat]

It’s moral order was shattered. The natural and God ordained order that is.

What was that order? What properties did it possess?

 

[Deleted member 88]

What was that order? What properties did it possess?

Well firstly inequality.

There is a king. There are nobles and clergy, merchants and peasants. These stations in life are not necessarily pleasant or desirable, but they are given from the Divine.

-Secondly this inequality is natural and just. And extends to all spheres of human life. Men are higher on the ladder than women, the lumpenproles are lower than the middle class, and so on.

The French Revolution was at its heart, a rebellion against this. Against inequality.

 

[Firebat]

Well firstly inequality.
There is a king. There are nobles and clergy, merchants and peasants. These stations in life are not necessarily pleasant or desirable, but they are given from the Divine.

Secondly this inequality is natural and just.

But that's not how the world worked before 1789. People did not behave like the inequality was natural and just.
You open any history book and you drown in a torrent of noblemen who, giving zero shits about their station in life or alleged divine sanction, tried to become kings. Or make themselves equal to the king. French monarchy had to deal with that constantly since there were Franks. And that's just the people who got to write most of their stories down.
Ditto for everyone else, with a caveat that a peasant's story had less chances to be recorded. You had to be a taborite or something to get noticed.

 

[Deleted member 88]

But that's not how the world worked before 1789. People did not behave like the inequality was natural and just.
You open any history book and you drown in a torrent of noblemen who, giving zero shits about their station in life or alleged divine sanction, tried to become kings.

People sinned against God and nature, so what?

They did not before 1789, outright seek to remove that which God had established.

 

[Firebat]

People sinned against God and nature, so what?

Well, if your theory of moral pre-1789 order is to be proven, there must be some difference before and after.
Your proposition of universally accepted inequality as defining pre-1789 feature doesn't work as per above.

They did not before 1789, outright seek to remove that which God had established.

Of course they did. It's not like there was much room for kings in Fraticelli or Taborite world.
French revolutionaries did not innovate nearly as much as they would have liked to believe.

 

[Deleted member 88]

Of course they did. It's not like there was much room for kings in Fraticelli or Taborite world.
French revolutionaries did not innovate nearly as much as they would have liked to believe.

These movements such as they were failed. The French Revolution succeeded. My thesis is that is where modernity began. In 1789. Thus we have the modern world.

 

[Bonhofmar]

In my estimation, 1789 truly gave birth to the demons of radicalism but it was the Great War that unchained them. After that, Europe was winded and tottering about after a blow to the stomach, but it looked to be getting its footing until Germany sperged out and kicked it in the balls. We'd been injured, but it was World War II that really knocked us down.

There had been big wars before like the thirty years war in Germany and the English Civil war on the Isles but there had been few times when it all goes up in flames and then does it again without a break

These movements such as they were failed. The French Revolution succeeded. My thesis is that is where modernity began. In 1789. Thus we have the modern world.

The English Civil War also was fought against a king and resulted in the massive decrease of the power of the nobility by the dissolution of the house of Lords. The New Model Army won the war because of it's equality. Cromwell and Fairfax didn't especially care about who a soldier's father was as much as they cared about who he was. Algernon Sidney and Henry Ireton were just as radical and as brilliant as any Robespierre.
And you do know that, peasants revolts were a thing right. Wat Tyler's didn't succeed but did prevent the poll tax from being placed. The concept you have of people being fine with inequality is very flawed and seems to be caused by a misunderstanding of the middle and early modern ages

 

[Deleted member 88]

Looking further at the subject, apparently Martin Heidegger saw the west’s downfall as going back to Plato, and western metaphysics as a whole. Modernity and all its problems were baked in from the start.

I’ll need to look more into this, and Heidegger is super dense, but this is a very radical perspective.

I can somewhat see the general reasoning, Plato’s idea of forms, and Aristotelian logic, have combined to produce the basic software of western civilization, and this software now running for 2,500 years has reached its logical end.

But if we reject western metaphysics and Plato, we must reject “The West” itself.

As an inherently broken and flawed project, with internal weaknesses and seeds of decay that existed from its earliest days.

 

[Urabrask Revealed]

But if we reject western metaphysics and Plato, we must reject “The West” itself.

As an inherently broken and flawed project, with internal weaknesses and seeds of decay that existed from its earliest days.

You say "Destroy it!", but you never said what we are supposed to replace it with.

 

[Cherico]

Looking further at the subject, apparently Martin Heidegger saw the west’s downfall as going back to Plato, and western metaphysics as a whole. Modernity and all its problems were baked in from the start.

I’ll need to look more into this, and Heidegger is super dense, but this is a very radical perspective.

I can somewhat see the general reasoning, Plato’s idea of forms, and Aristotelian logic, have combined to produce the basic software of western civilization, and this software now running for 2,500 years has reached its logical end.

But if we reject western metaphysics and Plato, we must reject “The West” itself.

As an inherently broken and flawed project, with internal weaknesses and seeds of decay that existed from its earliest days.

Speaking as some one who does history 2,500 years? That's actually a pretty good run.

 

[Yinko]

You say "Destroy it!", but you never said what we are supposed to replace it with.

True, at that point you'd pretty much have to do a dissection, trying to find the strengths and weaknesses in order to found a completely new culture from the ground up. That would be tricky, because most of the ideological weak links are objects of faith for the western tradition.

 

[Buba]

when did Western Civilization go wrong?

When it introduced universal and EQUAL suffrage. Thus enabling the cycle of "vote for me and I will give you toys bought by money taxed out from others".
Mob rule, basically.

 

[Deleted member 88]

True, at that point you'd pretty much have to do a dissection, trying to find the strengths and weaknesses in order to found a completely new culture from the ground up. That would be tricky, because most of the ideological weak links are objects of faith for the western tradition.

Well if we reject Christianity, Plato, Aristotle, and pretty much the last entire 3,000 years we either need to embrace some demonstrably superior civilization, or forge something else. Or return to some presumed pagan glory. Which is usually a cagey way of saying “I’m an atheist but Apollo/Odin/Saturnalia is so much cooler than lame Christianity”-neo pagans like this if you press them hard enough will flat out tell you their folksy atheists, more or less.

I don’t think we need to do the above, but previous attempts to do so have generally led to unsavory movements.

An important question becomes, what are the ideological weak links, making weaker? The West itself? Or something within the west we deem far more valuable?

All that said, I think we can see the “West” as coming to an end, it’s ideological and creative potential exhausted, it’s people demoralized and broken, and it’s creeds either absorbed by other civilizations or overcome.

 

[Yinko]

An important question becomes, what are the ideological weak links, making weaker? The West itself? Or something within the west we deem far more valuable?

Arguably, the latter. For instance, one of the flaws of the western tradition is the insistence on egalitarianism. This has weakened the West as a consequence of undermining institutions and degrading our behavior. Yet it stands unassailable because the concept of universal equality in all ways that "matter" for that given group is so sacred to the Western idea that every attempt to replace the west retains that kernel.

I imagine that those who saw the end of the Rome, the splintering of the Church and the downfall of Monarchism all thought that the West had come to an end as well. While they weren't completely wrong, what happened was that the whole ediface mutated in an attempt to compensate for the flaws that undermined it in the first place. So the downfall of the West may yet see a counter as new aspects are added and others are pruned in order to create a new budding from the rotting trunk of the old.

 

[Aldarion]

So in light of recent events, I have thought quite a bit about an important question, when did Western Civilization go wrong? This is an important if somewhat circlejerky question. Because to answer this we can better diagnose the disease of modernity. I do not want this thread to descend into blaming a particular individual, or group but many have been blamed over the past two hundred years.

To start with we must determine by what we mean by wrong. Is it when the West became nihilistic? When it rejected nihilism? When? When it embraced Christianity? Rejected Christianity? When it became capitalistic? During the scientific revolution? After? Before?

To give a few stock explanations of when modernity began and the West went wrong.

1789-the french revolution and the birth of the liberal ethos. There is quite a strong argument to be made for this, it weakened the traditional order and brought chaos, it schismed the West and destroyed its Christian confidence.

1517-The Reformation is another contender. It destroyed Christian unity in the West and promoted inter confessional wars that led to the development of the modern state system and Europe's eventual secularization.

1815-the dream of a European empire was dashed by the coalition against Napoleon, thus leading to an unstable balance which indeed in 1848 collapsed.

1914-The First World War more than many other events shattered Europe's faith in itself, and led to the emergence of Bolshevism and Fascism.

1945-the discrediting of Nazism and by extension nationalism or third positionist or anti capitalist and anti Marxist politics brought a world dominated by the material and the dialectic of capitalism-communism, which were neither salvation or paths to renewal.

370 AD-Christianity is itself the problem. It according to Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, was something that rendered the world a more mediocre and ugly place, destroyed the European aristocratic spirit, and enshrined the triumph of the mediocre, the slave, and presaged the egalitarianism of later eras.

Other possible dates might include the execution of King Charles I in England, or the Great Schism, or perhaps the failure of the Romans to incorporate Germania into the Empire. To throw some other dates around, it might be when Alexander died in Babylon and was unable to go West and install himself and his heirs as a universal dynasty of the Occident. Maybe Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates are to blame. Maybe the philosophical foundations of civilization were intrinsically faulty or within their machinery would inevitably bring ruin.

While I do not subscribe to a few of the ideas listed, I do think debating them is worthwhile.

It is clear somewhere in the past perhaps two thousand years, something has gone very wrong. Maybe it was always going to decline, maybe its the end of the ages, and their ever spanning cycles. It is clear to me regardless that what we call Western civilization is unsalvageable, and has failed.

Else we would not be where we are now.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Commentary?

Personally, I would say that the answer is all of them. It takes a lot to destroy the civilization, and events may result in brakes on self-destruction or even its reversal.

 

[ATP]

Thomas Molnar belived,that our cyvilisation started falling when Ockham in 14th century created nominalism,which reduced politic from looking at states,Church etc into individual interests.