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Read on Twitter 1/ Here’s a fun thread on how to ruin Western civilization. *Except it’s not so fun because it’s sort of happening…
Some might find my analysis and analogies somewhat controversial, but at least it will be thought provoking. 
2/ I’m going to borrow from the Nobel Prize winning philosopher Bertrand Russell’s “A History of Western Philosophy” (published 1945). It’s a dense read, but it’s packed with insights that help make sense of some of the more alarming ideological trends underway today. 
3/ One of the more interesting sections examines the differences between the society and dominant philosophy of Greek antiquity and that of early Christendom. Later on, I’ll tie this to some of the corrosive ideologies currently ascendant. 
4/ Whereas Greek society was concerned with the “joy and beauty” of present life, the early Christian world through the Middle Ages was concerned about sin and salvation. Russell persuasively argues that early Christian philosophy reflected the gloom of pre-Renaissance times.
5/ Life after the fall of the Roman Empire was tough: wars, pestilence and widespread poverty were a marked turn from the height of the Roman world (and before that the Greek city states). A philosophy focused on the afterlife was understandable, though it led to stagnation. 
6/ In an age of “ruin,” a strict approach to spiritual matters took precedent over more earthly concerns. If “earthly hopes seemed vain,” what good was it, after all, to focus on statesmanship as opposed to the soul? Left neglected, civilization decayed.
7/ In a world where life was harsh, the notion of original sin must have especially resonated with many and helped rationalize a difficult existence. Unfortunately, as Russell highlights, the doctrine of “universal guilt” gave rise to future ferocity in western institutions.
8/ Such gloom, pessimism, doctrinal strictness and guilt was not conducive to a thriving public life outside the Church. In Russell’s words, this philosophy of the early Church led to an age that “surpassed almost all other fully historical periods in cruelty and superstition.”
9/ The Greek world’s focus on the present naturally lended itself to making sense of it. Sciences, arts and philosophy flourished. Whereas the early Christian world’s focus on sin and afterlife resulted in neglect of the institutions necessary for civilization’s preservation.
10/ Positivity, curiosity and the motivation to improve (hallmarks of antiquity Greece) are, unsurprisingly, more helpful in sustaining civilization than embracing, rationalizing and even institutionalizing hardship.
11/ Sidenote: since Medieval times, Christian thought has evolved – spurred by the Reformation. The Renaissance, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution (even America’s founding ethos) are testaments to its positive influence. [This was a focus of mine as a history student.]
12/ Now back to the decline of civilization. It’s happened before. It can happen again. I prefer it not! The main culprit long ago was an outlook that embraced and glorified victimization. It was borne out of real suffering, but only served to prolong struggling and malaise.
13/ Today, the doctrine of victimization and I’d add it’s close cousin – grievance – is again in vogue. Its destructive force caused a millennium of stagnation prior to the Renaissance and could very well hinder our current progress and living standards.
14/ These disastrous ideologies begin on society’s fringes before gaining broader acceptance. The most concerning today are “wokeness” and extreme progressivism (along with closely related democratic socialism). Likewise, the populist right has foolishly embraced grievance.
15/ Regrettably, the initial merit of these movements has been coopted by the masses for purposes antithetical to their origins. Wokeness and progressivism at one point focused on expanding civil liberties, not functionally curtailing them and undermining socioeconomic stability.
16/ Wokeness and extreme progressivism today no longer are ideologies seeking human improvement for its own sake, but are rooted in victimization and grievance, seeking vengeance in righting perceived wrongs – where only maligned groups benefit. It’s inherently divisive.
17/ Like the 4th and 5th Century Christians, they embrace victimization as a means to cope with life’s intrinsic challenges. However, instead of focusing on their own suffering and salvation, they turn their attention to the imagined source of original sin: systemic “inequities.”
18/ It’s a glorification of victimhood – even though much of the societal oppression is overblown. Rather than self-improve, the far left’s adherents seek to gain via the destruction of concocted sources of inequities: capitalism, the justice system, education, fossil fuels, etc.
19/ Sadly, in attempting to overthrow these very bedrocks of modern civilization, today’s far left activists fail to appreciate they are undermining any prospects for improving the lives of those for whom they “fight.” We should aspire to be equally prosperous, not miserable.
20/ The early Christian world’s embrace of victimization set back civilization 1,000 years. Today’s far left activists risk doing the same; and in their coercive process of doing so, they have become as true to the authoritarian and fascist spirit which they label their critics.
21/ Doctrines of victimization and grievance inevitably lead to destruction. Often violent, total and irrecoverable. In this regard, the most alarming ideological strain of the far left today is democratic socialism (history is not on their side):
22/ And for what it’s worth, Russell saw socialism in the same vein – a psychological offshoot of the doctrine of victimization. Little could he have known in 1945 how destructive socialism would prove – rivaling the civilizational collapse of the so called Dark Ages.
23/ Not that it’s worth much, but my advice to traditional liberals would be to disassociate from those peddling the malignant and divisive ideology of victimization. And to conservatives, to similarly disassociate from those whose politics are simply based on grievance.
24/ I’ve focused most of my criticism here at the far left, as that movement is most responsible for making life worse in my home of Chicago. But trends on the far right are troubling as well. For my longer take on US polity and politics, please see below:
25/ Civilization is precious and precarious. We should learn from history to ensure its future survival and our prosperity. We must combat malignant doctrines of victimization and grievance with Greek-like ones rooted in positivity. Otherwise, we’ll all burn down with Rome.
I guess this thread is resonating. For a brief exploration on why we may be prone to these ideologies, see below (approached it more in an investing context). Key point: across history, when life gets hard, people are more prone to psychological escape.
Bruce Gilley joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss one of the biggest criticisms of the west – Colonialism. From antiquity to modernity, the two give an in-depth examination of the practice. Should Colonialism stay cancelled?
Uncancelled History re-evaluates events, people, and ideas that have otherwise been cancelled from the past. Learn more at http://www.uncancelledhistory.com
Have you ever been bullied by someone from the reparations crowd? Perhaps there are a few possible answers in here.
The first cropped photo is what activists would like you to see.
The unedited version of the same photo is what pride is at the moment and what they do not want you to see.
There is no pride in ‘liberating’ activities that do not belong in the public sphere.
Be discerning and realize that the current incarnation of Pride shares very little with its roots of gay equality, rights, and marriage. This new pride is very much based on the picture below.
This is a lens shattering essay by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò who asks us to put aside our current demarcations of African history – Precolonial, Colonial, and Post-Colonial because they obfuscate the rich tapestry that is the history of Africa.
“When ‘precolonial’ is used for describing African ideas, processes, institutions and practices, through time, it misrepresents them. When deployed to explain African experience and institutions, and characterise the logic of their evolution through history, it is worthless and theoretically vacuous. The concept of ‘precolonial’ anything hides, it never discloses; it obscures, it never illuminates; it does not aid understanding in any manner, shape or form.”
[…]
“Perhaps the most pernicious effect of deploying the various iterations of ‘precolonial’ is the way it marginalises ideas, especially philosophy, in Africa. Because ‘precolonial’ takes colonialism as the dividing line for organising ideas within its temporality and forces us to conceive of spaces relative to how they stand in the arrival and dispersal of colonialism in the continent, we, unwittingly for the most part, end up talking as if ideas, practices, processes and institutions can be understood within frameworks delineated by the precolonial, colonial and postcolonial schema. So, when we are looking at philosophy or modes of governance – to take two arbitrary examples – given our justifiable hostility to things colonial, we construe ‘precolonial’ as necessarily having nothing to do with the colonial, the latter understood as having ‘European’, ‘Western’ or ‘modern’ provenance while, simultaneously, interpreting it as ‘traditional’, ‘indigenous’ and the like.
The misdescription we identified above induces misinterpretation as well as a misrecognition of the genealogy and exchange of ideas, the evolution of institutions, and the identity of thinkers in the area. The problem is profound. Because of the primacy accorded to identity in the business of finding ideas and institutions that could be separated from anything European, Western or modern, African scholars for a long time contorted themselves into finding ‘African philosophy’ that was authentically ‘African’, were even willing to give up on the very term ‘philosophy’ and called their ideational production ‘African Traditional Thought’. The driving question was a matter of whether or not such ideas had been ‘contaminated’ by colonialism and its appurtenant practices, ideas, processes and institutions. When a scholar announces an interest in studying ‘Traditional African Political Thought’, in light of our analysis so far, the first question to ask is whether ‘traditional’ in this formulation has any room for evolution such that we can periodise ‘traditional thought’. Of course, I am assuming what should be obvious: is the thought involved the same throughout history, or were there changes induced by both exogenous and endogenous causes to it, and how are those changes to be understood? The other problem takes us to the next section of this discussion: the problem of facilely deploying an entire continent as a unit of analysis.
Let us recall the temporal framework adopted by Solanke above. Anyone reading his account is immediately enabled to situate his ideas about what transpired in medieval West Africa in relation to what was happening at other places in Africa, nay, the world, within the same temporal boundaries. This enables us to see how similar ideas found in different parts of our world do not have to be explained in terms of influences or common origins. That way, we would have no difficulty identifying African contributions to the global circuit of ideas in ancient times, in medieval times and right to the present. And such contributions would not be limited to so-called ‘authentic’, ‘indigenous’ or ‘traditional’ African fare. The tendency to treat Africa as a unit of analysis motivated by a wrong-headed approach, which took challenging Europe’s ignorant elucidations of African phenomena as the primary object, has issued in genealogies and narratives of intellectual history that bear no resemblance to how things really happened in history, or how African thinkers actually conducted themselves in the global circuit of ideas. This is why Africa hardly ever features in the annals of philosophy, and chronologies in philosophy anthologies do not carry African entries in frameworks demarcated by the Gregorian calendar.”
[…]
“All this would be invisible to the trinity of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial division of African history for organising states and ideas, practices and institutions, processes and thinkers and intellectual movements through time. Tossing the retrograde ‘precolonial’ epithet in the dustbin can bring only gains in expanding our knowledge, enriching our conceptual repertoires, and telling stories that are closer to the truth than the alternative.
It is time to say bye-bye to the idea of a ‘precolonial’ anything in our intellectual discourses respecting Africa.”
I recommend following the link and reading the entire essay, it’s a great read.
Learning without Flinching from History
“The United States has been the imperial power of record on this planet since World War II. Lately, the economic and moral aspects of that power have waned, even as our military power remains supreme (though without being able to win anything whatsoever). That should tell you something about America. We’re still a “SmackDown” country, to borrow a term from professional wrestling, in a world that’s increasingly being smacked down anyway.
Harold Pinter, the British playwright, caught this country’s imperial spirit well in his Nobel Prize lecture in 2005. America, he said then, has committed crimes that “have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.”
Anyone with a knowledge of our history knows that there was truth indeed in what Pinter said 15 years ago. He noticed how this country’s leaders wielded language “to keep thought at bay.” Like George Orwell before him, Pinter was at pains to use plain language about war, noting how the Americans and British had “brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call[ed] it bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East.”
The point here was not simply to bash America. It was to get us to think about our actions in genuine historical terms. A decade and a half ago, Pinter threw down a challenge, and even if you disagreed with him, or maybe especially if you did so, you need the intellectual tools and command of the facts to grapple with that critique. It should never be enough simply to shout “USA! USA!” in an ever-louder fashion and hope it will drown out not only critics and dissenters but reality itself — and perhaps even your own secret doubts.
And we should have such doubts. We should be ready to dissent. We should recognize, as America’s current attorney general most distinctly does not, that dissenters are often the truest patriots of all, even if they are also often the loneliest ones. We should especially have doubts about a leader who threatens to bring violence against another country 1,000 times greater than anything that country could visit upon us.
I don’t need the Catholic Church, or even Christ in the New Testament, to tell me that such thinking is wrong in a Washington that now seems to be offering a carnivorous taste of what a future American autocracy could be like. I just need to recall the wise words of my Polish mother-in-law: “Have a heart, if you’ve got a heart.”
Have a heart, America. Reject American carnage in all its forms.”
I am hoping we do not have to learn about how bad the second wave is before it is too late.
History (Straight from Wikipedia)
Timeline
First wave of early 1918
The pandemic is conventionally marked as having begun on 4 March 1918, with the recording of the case of Albert Gitchell, an army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas, United States, despite there likely having been cases before him.[24] The disease had been observed in Haskell County in January 1918, prompting local doctor Loring Miner to warn the US Public Health Service‘s academic journal.[25] Within days, 522 men at the camp had reported sick.[26] By 11 March 1918, the virus had reached Queens, New York.[citation needed] Failure to take preventive measures in March/April was later criticised.[27]
As the US had entered World War I, the disease quickly spread from Camp Funston, a major training ground for troops of the American Expeditionary Forces, to other US Army camps and Europe, becoming an epidemic in the Midwest, East Coast, and French ports by April 1918, and reaching the Western Front by the middle of the month.[24] It then quickly spread to the rest of France, Great Britain, Italy, and Spain, and in May reached Wrocław and Odessa.[24] After the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Germany started releasing Russian prisoners of war who then brought the disease to their country.[28] It reached North Africa, India, and Japan in May, and soon after had likely gone around the world as there had been recorded cases in Southeast Asia in April.[29] In June an outbreak was reported in China.[30] After reaching Australia in July, the wave started to recede.[29]
The first wave of the flu lasted from the first quarter of 1918 and was relatively mild.[31] Mortality rates were not appreciably above normal;[32] in the United States ~75,000 flu-related deaths were reported in the first six months of 1918, compared to ~63,000 deaths during the same time period in 1915.[33] In Madrid, Spain, fewer than 1,000 people died from influenza between May and June 1918.[34] There were no reported quarantines during the first quarter of 1918. However, the first wave caused a significant disruption in the military operations of World War I, with three-quarters of French troops, half the British forces, and over 900,000 German soldiers sick.[35]
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Seattle police wearing masks in December 1918
Deadly second wave of late 1918
The second wave began in the second half of August, probably spreading to Boston and Freetown, Sierra Leone by ships from Brest, where it had likely arrived with American troops or French recruits for naval training.[35] From the Boston Navy Yard and Camp Devens (later renamed Fort Devens), about 30 miles west of Boston, other U.S. military sites were soon afflicted, as were troops being transported to Europe.[36] Helped by troop movements, it spread over the next two months to all of North America, and then to Central and South America, also reaching Brazil and the Caribbean on ships.[37] From Freetown, the pandemic continued to spread through West Africa along the coast, rivers, and the colonial railways, and from railheads to more remote communities, while South Africa received it in September on ships bringing back members of the South African Native Labour Corps returning from France.[37] From there it spread around Southern Africa and beyond the Zambezi, reaching Ethiopia in November.[38] The Philadelphia Liberty Loans Parade, held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 28 September 1918 to promote government bonds for World War I, resulted in 12,000 deaths after a major outbreak of the illness spread among people who had attended the parade.[39]
From Europe, the second wave swept through Russia in a southwest-northeast diagonal front, as well as being brought to Arkhangelsk by the North Russia intervention, and then spread throughout Asia following the Russian Civil War and the Trans-Siberian railway, reaching Iran (where it spread through the holy city of Mashhad), and then later India in September, as well as China and Japan in October.[40] The celebrations of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 also caused outbreaks in Lima and Nairobi, but by December the wave was mostly over.[41]
American Expeditionary Force victims of the Spanish flu at U.S. Army Camp Hospital no. 45 in Aix-les-Bains, France, in 1918
The second wave of the 1918 pandemic was much more deadly than the first. The first wave had resembled typical flu epidemics; those most at risk were the sick and elderly, while younger, healthier people recovered easily. October 1918 was the month with the highest fatality rate of the whole pandemic.[42] In the United States, ~292,000 deaths were reported between September-December 1918, compared to ~26,000 during the same time period in 1915.[33] Copenhagen reported over 60,000 deaths, Holland reported 40,000+ deaths from influenza and acute respiratory disease, Bombay reported ~15,000 deaths in a population of 1.1 million.[43] The 1918 flu pandemic in India was especially deadly, with an estimated 12.5-20 million deaths in the fall months of 1918 alone.[31]
Third wave of 1919
In January 1919, a third wave of the Spanish Flu hit Australia, where it killed 12,000 following the lifting of a maritime quarantine, and then spread quickly through Europe and the United States, where it lingered through the Spring and until June 1919.[12][44][45][41] It primarily affected Spain, Serbia, Mexico and Great Britain, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths.[46] It was less severe than the second wave but still much more deadly than the initial first wave. In the United States, isolated outbreaks occurred in some cities including Los Angeles,[47] New York City,[48] Memphis, Nashville, San Francisco and St. Louis.[49] Overall American mortality rates were in the tens of thousands during the first six months of 1919.[50]
Fourth wave of 1920
In spring 1920, a fourth wave occurred in isolated areas including New York City,[48] Switzerland, Scandinavia,[51] and some South American islands.[52] New York City alone reported 6,374 deaths between December 1919 and April 1920, almost twice the number of the first wave in spring 1918.[48] Other U.S. cities including Detroit, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Louis were hit particularly hard, with death rates higher than all of 1918.[53] Peru experienced a late wave in early 1920, and Japan had one from late 1919 to 1920, with the last cases in March.[54] In Europe, five countries (Spain, Denmark, Finland, Germany and Switzerland) recorded a late peak between January-April 1920.[51]
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