Cultural Survival Skills

America: The Best of The West

There will be too many that wish to find fault with my favor of our American Constitutional Republic. They may wish to cite great civilizations in antiquity and argue that their contributions to the evolution of societies have also been great. Indeed contributions have come from many civilizations through time and we may debate the relative contributions of the great historical civilizations: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Romans, Ancient Islam, Ancient China, the Incas and Mayans, and the rise of Western Culture in Western European counties, etc..

They may wish to argue a variety of faults that can be found in America’s behaviors of the past and present. All of these arguments, pro and con, could comprise a large tome, exclusively so dedicated. That is not the purpose of this book. The purpose of this book is to lay the groundwork to understand basic principles of behavior, known reasons for cultural success and decline, and then to identify as many reasons behind America’s decline as possible, as well as corrections that are logically consistent with all of that knowledge.

A bed-rock problem is that America has failed to honor and feed the spiritual force behind its meteoric rise to power in the world.

What is undeniable is that it was Western Civilization that collected the fruits of other formerly great civilizations and by extension to the shores of “The New World”,  assembled them into the greatest civilization the world has ever known: The United States of America.

My reading of history has led me to some firm conclusions about Americas’ birth, astonishing rise, and its current state of incipient decline. However, I am only an amateur historian and am humbled by my reading of those who are amazingly informed true historians. It is for this reason that , to a greater extend usual, I will let these authors speak to you in their own words.

These historians will confirm my understanding about the importance of Judeo/Christian religion in the historical preeminence of Western Culture and its last great fading symbol that is America.

Niall Ferguson (2011) in his great book, The West and The Rest, unequivocally concludes that it was Luther’s Reformation and Protestantism that propelled Western Civilization to its azimuth among all civilizations, before or since.

“Yet it was a very specific form of Christianity-the variant that arose in Western Europe in the sixteenth century-that gave the modern version of Western civilization the sixth of its key advantages over the rest of the world: Protestantism-or, rather, the peculiar ethic of hard work and thrift with which it came to be associated. It is time to understand the role God played in the rise of the West,” (Kindle loc. 4618)

Ferguson described six key elements–he called them “applications” in keeping with modern terms, that contributed to the meteoric rise and world-wide dominance of Western Civilization. These applications were 1. The encouragement of competition; 2. The development and use of the scientific method; 3. The establishment and legal protection of property rights; 4. The development and application medical technology; 5. The development of capitalism and its consumer society; and last, but not least in my judgment, 6.  Protestantism’s powerful moral and work ethics.

Stay tuned!

VTM, 11/8/13