In my Taki's Magazine column, I consider progressive Kevin Drum's idea that lead pollution caused the 1960s:
As part of my continuing series on the causes of the 60s, let’s consider Kevin Drum’s revival (”America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead”) in Mother Jones magazine of the recurrent theory that lead poisoning leads to the decline of civilization.
... Ironically, Drum stands the dominant narrative about the 60s on its head. Instead of the 60s representing enlightened emancipation from the shackles of 50s conformist culture, Drum finds the 60s, with their rising rates of crime and illegitimate births, to be the result of brain damage.
Read the whole thing there.
Posts
69 comments:
At what point in the late 20th century did cash-carried-on-person peak? (vs. now you see people putting a McMuffin on charge)
You couldn't do that diner scene from Pulp Fiction today.
I didn't think there really was heavy metal until the 1970's. Like, Sabbath and Zeppelin were barely getting started in the 60's.
I favor the HBD/Urbanism/Migration reasons for high crime starting in the 60's
HBD - Diversity leads to lower social trust.
Urbanism - American cities are ghastly places that breed anti-social behavior.
Migration - Even internal mass migration leads to higher crime, a teenager is much less likely to commit a crime in town where he grew up and has dozens of relatives.
I'm sort of fascinated by how Steve Sailer and Kevin Drum are strange mirror images of each other. They're both about the same age, white guys with reasonable dispositions who feel an intense nostalgia for the Southern California of their mutual youth. But Drum filters everything through his center-left lens while Sailer looks at his through a paleo-conservative HBD perspective. But I can't help but think that if the two ever met they'd get along famously, even if Drum's Mother Jones friends would be horrified by the thought of the two talking to each other.
"strange mirror images of each other."
Not particularly strange, but, obviously, we have a fair amount in common.
From Wiki:
In an interview with Norman Geras, Drum stated that his intellectual heroes were Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes, Edward R. Murrow and Charles Darwin. He also considers Benjamin Franklin his all-time favorite political hero.[2]
Aren't you a Darwin and Franklin fan?
"if the two ever met they'd get along famously"--what a charming mental image right there!
Drum is a fool.
"I'm sort of fascinated by how Steve Sailer and Kevin Drum are strange mirror images of each other. They're both about the same age, white guys with reasonable dispositions who feel an intense nostalgia for the Southern California of their mutual youth. But Drum filters everything through his center-left lens while Sailer looks at his through a paleo-conservative HBD perspective. But I can't help but think that if the two ever met they'd get along famously, even if Drum's Mother Jones friends would be horrified by the thought of the two talking to each other."
How the heck can a guy believe Keynesian econ works?
"But Drum filters everything through his center-left lens while Sailer looks at his through a paleo-conservative HBD perspective.'
This doesn't really capture the difference from what I've read from the two of them.
Sailer seems to be the ultimate empiricist. "Show me the data," then "show me more data that replicates that data" and then do it again. A number's guy.
Frum takes a position he likes because it suits what he wants to be true, then tries to make data support that.
Wasn't marijuana enough?
Melanin?
How many countries used leaded gasoline? Some of them? All of them? If all then you could look at car ownership penetration relative to crime rates a generation later. One problem with the US, leaded gasoline had been prevalant for decades before the 1950's but no crime boom.
I think drummy should go easy on the lead.
From Taki's Magazine:
"One reality check immediately suggested itself: Back in the late 1960s, densely populated Japan was notorious for automobile-induced air pollution. Yet crime didn’t rise in Japan. The country remained an orderly, intelligent, non-impulsive culture."
I wondered when someone would notice that the U.S. wasn't the only country in the world using leaded gasoline - nor anywhere near the last country in the world to phase out its usage.
Mebbe this should be called
'mis-leading'.
Libs like drummy are willfully misleading us with theories like this. Why? Occam's Switchblade says blacks are more violent and dangerous because they are (1) naturally tougher/stronger (2) know they can whup non-black ass and (3) are naturally more aggressive due to biochemical or neural factors.
(IQ is less important since dummies with mild temperament--forrest gumps--aren't dangerous.)
What I say is so obvious. I've been seeing it with my own eyes since I was a child. But to acknowledge it would open up a whole new can of worms on ideas about race,crime, and etc.
It will also undermine the cult of 'white guilt'--the very foundation of modern liberalism--as people realize that black problems are more racial than historical. In other words, if whites had enslaved small vietnamese and welcomed big strong blacks as free immigrants, we would still have more problem with blacks.
Acknowledging black muscle power and emotional aggression also justifies white fear, white anxiety, white ownership of guns, white flight, etc. People would realize that the issue wasn't so much color of the skin as tone of the muscle. Bad for the left's guilt-baiting.
This is why libs keep on misleading us with one half-baked or fully-baked theory after another. Some do it consciously, especially Jews who secretly know the truth about race.
I grew up with liberal Jews and in all our private conversations, they knew blacks were fearsome and dangerous.
But some libs have such complexes about race that they keep cooking up lies as an act of repression. Like hysterical patients of Freud who were repressed about sex, many libs are so repressed about taboos of race that they almost hallucinate nonsense theories to keep thr unwelcome under lid.
It's like looking at the planets and wondering why they're illuminated WITHOUT acknowledging the existence of the sun.
If mentioning the sun is a taboo, then you need to mislead others and yourself by cooking up theories to explain why planets are 'lit up'.
So, Drum mis-leads us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XntDBJfd-n0
"I couldn't look."
"Tell me about the nurses."
"IT'S A BROTHEL!!"
--------
It be da brotha!
Actually, Pb poisoning can lead to listlessness & infertility and may do this more often than leading to violence. Also, I imagine US worker productivity was up during the 60s while our education standards didn't seem to drop significantly until the 70s.
How the heck can a guy believe Keynesian econ works?
Steve has spoken favorably of Keynes:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/08/was-milton-friedman-secret-admirer-of.html
Parthian three point shot says Ockham's switchblade doesn't really add anything to the original concept.
Can't believe you did a piece on lead poisoning, mentioned The Simpsons, yet omitted perhaps the best of Troy McClure's lines.
"You may remember me from such educational films as Lead Paint - Delicious But Deadly."
Someone should right an alt history where easy e doesn't die and beats out Arnold to be the first celebrity Republcian governor of California.
We assume that the only reason liberals deny, obfuscate and lie about HBD is to purposely inculcate whites with guilt, and so make us more tractable.
However, we might also consider the alternative; what are the real-world consequences of societal acknowledgement of group-based differences in cognition and self-control? How would society be organized? Would this knowledge be used to rationalize slavery, apartheid, or genocide?
While I tend on the whole towards acknowledging the truth, I don't think it's the case that liberals are all necessarily evil or stupid.
Many of them have just come to the conclusion that the ends justify the means, that on the whole society is better for denialism, and the truth shall only be uttered in privacy, and then only when it really, really matters.
I think this is the more substantial position that we have to overcome in order to make headway, and it is not an easy argument to make to people whose strongest instincts are selflessness and decency, which is often the case in the 'useful idiot' type of leftist, but also in ordinary, well-meaning folks.
Anon.
Is it just that, being ideologically disposed, Drum et al won't do the one thing that might clarify their thesis more than anything else: control for race?
Come to think of it, controlling for race should be SOP now in any study where these nearly constant NAM/white behavioral disparities can be expected to skew results.
Someone should right an alt history where easy e doesn't die and beats out Arnold to be the first celebrity Republcian governor of California
Someone should do a remake of Face in the Crowd, substituting a rapper for Andy Griffith's country charismatic.
Don't quote me boy I ain't said sh$t should probally be the GOPs new media strategy.
...and I was thinking you were alluding to the British led musical genre as typified by Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, which was characterized by long hair, loud thrashing and pagan motifs.
http://www.newgeography.com/content/003409-the-new-power-class-who-will-profit-from-obama-s-second-term
Young Jews
I always wondered what sort of birth defects and mental deficiencies the drug-addled denizens of the 60's passed on to their kids, specifically the kids born 1968-1972. I graduated high school in 1989, and I remember my class and the others ahead of me being full of miscreants, low-achievers, and future criminals. By contrast, the kids that graduated with my brother's class three years later were better behaved, had higher test scores, and better social skills. I always wondered why that was the case. It wasn't demographic change. If anything, there were more NAMs in my brother's class.
"Many of them have just come to the conclusion that the ends justify the means, that on the whole society is better for denialism, and the truth shall only be uttered in privacy, and then only when it really, really matters."
"I think this is the more substantial position that we have to overcome in order to make headway, and it is not an easy argument to make to people whose strongest instincts are selflessness and decency, which is often the case in the 'useful idiot' type of leftist, but also in ordinary, well-meaning folks."
This is an excellent point. The approach I take is to point out how denialism is making the problem even worse. Rather than accept the fact that many white folks and even more black folks will never amount to a hill of beans and proceed accordingly, we pretend the problem is "racism" and then expect black boys to sit through accounting and bookkeeping classes in HS, even though they are smart enough to know either (a) they will never pass, or (b) there are no jobs for them when they get out, or (c) brainwork drives them crazy!
Once we honestly accept we have a population of 50% dummies, we are faced with a choice: (A) jobless, violent proletariat that we have to support to the tune of $40K per year in jail (and baby-mama and bastard costs on top of that), or (B) erect trade barriers and pay a premium for their assembly line factory work.
Think of it as (A) more prisons or (B) more sheltered workshops.
One CAN break through the sympathetic denialism you recognize, but you have to show the denialists how they are engineering a social catastrophe--how their denialism is an even greater cruelty to the people they purport to care for.
DD: "Is it just that, being ideologically disposed, Drum et al won't do the one thing that might clarify their thesis more than anything else: control for race?"
This is precisely why I found Steve's racial breakout of the TIMSS (NAEP?) scores so enlightening a couple years ago.
When people thoughtlessly say that "America is falling behind in education!" I tell them of Steve's breakout:
White kids in America do better than all European countries except Finland,
Asian kids do better than all Asians except the Shanghainese, Mexican American kids to way better that Mexican kids in Mexico/SouthAmerica, and
Black American kids do better than every black country (Barbados?, Jamaica?).
The evidence is clear: America does great with every racial group, no matter where they come from. America just cannot turn Mexicans and blacks into white kids (and whites into Asians).
There are physical limits, after all.
All of a sudden, America is no longer racist and it is immediately clear why every Asian, Mexican and African would move here in a heartbeat.
It also becomes clear why we must keep most of them out if we want to be a first world country.
In short, the problem of sinking educational scores is an immigration problem and a gross over-breeding problem, and an easy welfare problem, not an education problem.
That should cheer up the teachers.
But, as Dennis notes, it only becomes clear when you break out the scores by race.
As an earlier commenter, said, Zeppelin and Sabbath didn't come in till after the 60's. Nonetheless, there is a statistically significant correlation between heavy metal and crime, I'm sure, if you run the numbers between 1935 and 1995.
That sounds like a good Steve Sailer statistical project. The problem is how to measure heavy metal levels across time and place. Aerosmith concerts might be a way to do it across place; mentions of the term in magazines for across time.
And don't forget the influence of the lead singer.
Something else for someone to look at. Compare the levels of lead which the EPA considers dangerous now with the *average* levels in 1960. I think I may have done that at one point and found that people born in 1958 like me should all be brain damaged. There's the Flynn Effect, of course, so maybe we are...
The move from B&W to color from the 50's to the 60's. If you don't believe me, gauge your own reaction to stills of your own family just a few years apart. The B&W shots seem far older, less lively and real, and from a different world.
It is not accidentally related to the phrase Black-and-white morality, that supposed reality of the 50's, compared with the more "sophisticated" 60's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinsel
"Lead foil was a popular material for tinsel manufacture for several decades of the 20th century. Unlike silver, lead tinsel did not tarnish, so it retained its shine. However, use of lead tinsel was phased out after the 1960s due to concern that it exposed children to a risk of lead poisoning.[3] In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concluded in August 1971 that lead tinsel caused an unnecessary risk to children, and convinced manufacturers and importers to voluntarily stop producing or importing lead tinsel after January 1, 1972. The FDA did not actually ban the product because the agency did not have the evidence needed to declare lead tinsel a "health hazard."[4]"
-meh
The major change that took place in the 1960's was a change in strategy by the Jews.
Prior to about 1963, the Jews were content with the existing structure of society. They were working to take over the existing structure and run it. Their goal was to be the financiers and Svengalis, running everything behind the scenes.
If society can be compared to a town, the Jews' strategy was, "This town is basically okay, it just needs us to run it."
Their psychologists peddled being "well adjusted" as the highest value. The goal was a Jew-run society with well-adjusted goyim happily working.
In the 1960's, under the influence of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, the goal changed to tearing down the existing structure and rebuilding it, not only with Jews in charge, but according to a new Jewish-drawn blueprint.
A change can be seen here in the rhetoric of MLK:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXEIYpnlxbw
MLK here is trashing the old Jew strategy in favor of the new Jew strategy.
In the 1960's we witnessed Jews mounting a ferocious attack on goy families (which repress women and have too many children), the goy economic system (greedy and uncaring), goy businesses (polluters poisoning the environment), goy racism, goy militarism, goy TV shows (Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet), and goy Christianity.
There was an abrupt change in tone in the media in the 1960's that reflected this new strategy.
Someone should right an alt history where easy e doesn't die and beats out Arnold to be the first celebrity Republcian governor of California.
In a bored fit of perversity, I wrote such a story, though I made 2 Pac the stud/sacrificial king figure. Naturally, the history played out 50 years into the future as resembling William S. Burrough's The Wild Boys
Steve and Kevin Drum may be conflating the two common mechanisms of lead ingestion. It may be useful to distinguish between them.
Leaded gasoline caused lead to be present in the air, and for lead-containing particulates to settle on surfaces and into the soil near roadways. As a result, children from across the socioeconomic spectrum developed modest levels of blood lead levels.
In the first half of the 20th century, white and yellow house paint contained very high levels of lead. It's hard to say exactly how high (anybody know?). Here's one comment -- "[In the U.S.,] White house paint contained up to 50% lead before 1955 [when the maximum was dropped to 1% cite]. Federal law lowered the amount of lead allowable in paint to 1% in 1971 [sic]." CDC. Lead was finally banned from most paints in 1978 by the CPSC (the maximum was lowered to 0.06%).
There are two main ways to ingest lead from paint. Pica is eating chips of paint -- the lead makes them sweet. The second is via dust, created from wear and abrasion, mainly of window and door surfaces. Dust can be inhaled or eaten (e.g. via unwashed hands and sandwiches).
It's possible to achieve worrisome but still modest BLL levels from gasoline-souced lead. Perhaps in the range of 2 to 10 ug/dL. Much higher levels can readily result from exposure to lead paint in the home -- an order of magnitude more; enough to generate the symptoms of acute lead poisoning.
So, in the Sixties and Seventies, the background level of lead in U.S. children was generally much higher than it is now, but these were single-digit BLLs for the most part.
One has to layer on top of this the contribution to pediatric BLLs from lead paint exposure, which were much more focused on certain subpopulations. This source was, obviously, worst for kids living in older, deteriorated housing stock, especially units that had been painted with pre-1956 paint. And units that weren't kept spotlessly clean. So the residents of the bad neighborhoods of Rust Belt cities got the worst of it.
Marshall McLuhan as a college professor noticed that the kids he was getting starting in the late 50s and 60s had minds that worked differently from previous generations. Allan Bloom, also a college prof, spoke about kids coming to him about psychotic episodes they were having around this time. McLuhan would have pointed to television's impact on psychological development as the primary causative factor. In any case it does seem like something was up at that time.
RP-in-TX: Dave Davies of the Kinks: "It wasn't called 'heavy metal' when I invented it."
Pulp Fiction diner scene 2013:
Ringo and Honey Bunny walk out with a bag full of iPhones and one wallet that says bad MF on it.
This lame theory was discredited even when it was applied to the decline of ancient Rome.
Basically liberals will go to any lengths to explain away the post 60s socio economic disasters on pretty much anything(this "its all the lead's fault" excuse is the twin sister of the John Birch Societys flouride paranoia) but on themselves.
Big bill, i agree with your post. But rather than erecting trade barriers, can we somehow persuade the dummies to work picking crops and doing janitorial type work?
The crime wave of 1960-1990 hit the entire Western world, not just America. Did Western European countries use leaded gasoline as early and as intensely as Americans?
I could only quickly find dates on when leaded gasoline was banned, not adopted. However, the Wikipedia article says that early on the Europeans used alcohol instead of tetraethyllead.
Japan shows that lead is not sufficient, and I'm guessing the European countries will show that it's not necessary either.
Maybe flouride was a communist plot, and lead was a KKK plot.
Big Bill's post dated 1/23/13, 5:56 AM. Is good stuff. So is the post he quotes.
So much more compelling to save the underendowed in China than those you know closer to home. Although my experience w/ manufactured products has led me to conclude that our underendowed are less so than theirs. Surprising you can't find competence in a population that large. Though perhaps it has something to do w/ the one child policy and a preference for male offspring... "I don't wanna sew no stinkin' clothes?"
Big Bill's post dated 1/23/13, 5:56 AM. Is good stuff. So is the post he quotes.
Steve,
Please post a link to the post Big Bill referred to. Thanks.
I wouldn't sweat it Steve-O. I mean, so the HBD thing is fraudulent, hell, you can re-invent yourself as a West Coast Lewis Grizzard and make a grip writing about hawks in your backyard and suburban highways...
Re "Drum's Mother Jones friends would be horrified(if they talk)." And what of we faithful fans,would not WE have a conniption seeing Steve break bread with the unwashed?
But rather than erecting trade barriers, can we somehow persuade the dummies to work picking crops and doing janitorial type work?
The trade barriers are necessary to keep the globalists from exporting the work or importing the workers, so that the wages for 75-95 IQ work can be high enough to live on. If we're going to have all our factory work done by cheap Asian foreigners and our service work done by cheap Latino foreigners, we might as well get used to a huge welfare system that pays every American who can't get past algebra in high school to stay home and watch TV. That means some sort of tariffs or trade restrictions.
Not sure. But it sure as hell must've damaged lots of people's hearing.
Pre-Katrina New Orleans DID from say, the 1880s through the 1940's, possess a civil society among Blacks. Both Louis Armstrong's painfully non-ghostwritten autobiography and Jelly Roll Morton's Library of Congress recordings (now re-issued btw) speak to that, Armstrong was put in an Orphanage RUN BY BLACKS THEMSELVES.
It is hard for us to comprehend today, but back then, pre-Civil Rights, Black society got no welfare, had a lot of internal structure, and while having higher crime rates than White peers economically, the Black society of then worked in a way that it does not today.
I'd say the 1960's Collapse was the result of a decadent, new Aristocracy that greatly expanded post WWII, and adopted a "Regency Era" attitude towards morality and hatred for middle class values. Rather than lead or even diversity (little back then) the 1960's can be seen as a revolt by young Aristocrats against the old bourgeoisie regime.
The whole "the Jews" thing is retarded, and why HBD has such a bad rep (because the theory is as lame as Liberals "racism" or lead paint). Finland, France, Norway, the UK, Spain, Italy, all suffered the same ills in the 1960's onward and for the same reason: a giant growth of the State and State-dependent organizations creating a decadent, concentrated, hereditary, and intermarried new Aristocracy determined to eradicate the threat from the Old Regime of middle class modernism. In favor of group-think aristocracy.
This is btw nothing new save the position of women (who for the first time in history can avoid pregnancy completely without giving up sex and avoiding social constraints). Aristocracies tend to decadence.
Steve's point about Rome is well taken. Rome as a major power in the West lasted from say, 260 B.C. to around 290 AD or so, a period of almost 600 years, and lingered on in the East till say, 1070 with the Battle of Manzikert ending any pretension of power among the Byzantines. Which itself lasted until 1452.
What made Rome powerful was its military. Roman Legions fighting as a giant, but flexible stabbing machine with lots of frontal armor and support, including cavalry, and later flame throwers (Greek Fire) formed the intellectual basis for modern armies. The Army was professional, well trained, well paid (mostly), and adept unlike others at engineering and siege craft and road building.
Rome in the West fell, when the Empire had too few Romans to fill out the Legions, withdrawing the British ones in around 410 or so. Even conquering Visigoth, Ostrogoth, Frank, and Vandal kings tried to copy and keep up Roman military methods, considering them superior to their own. But not being Roman, they lacked the manpower and organization that characterized Roman power at its height.
....and I was thinking you were alluding to the British led musical genre as typified by Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, which was characterized by long hair, loud thrashing and pagan motifs.
Yeah, I thought the same thing!
The approach I take is to point out how denialism is making the problem even worse.
Since the true explanation for ongoing differential socioeconomic outcomes, is the fact that dare not speak its name (genetics), it is NECESSARY to provide, for public consumption, an alternate explanation that most people will believe.
They have to tell the people something... and if "genetics" is unsayable, then... it just "has to be", the legacy of discrimination past, the covert ongoing underground discrimination of today, structral racism, unconscious racism, unexamined privilege, blah, blah... in other words, it must be the fault of THE WHITE MAN.
Blacks who believe the false explanation (~96% of them), are driven crazy with resentment as a result. Nearly all of them are quietly frothing at the mouth with rage at us. UNJUSTLY. And of course a substantial minority of them translate this rage into violence against innocent whites, while the rest of the black population nods and secretly agrees with it.
Black crime might just be a lot lower if the truth were admitted, and accounted for in our social policy. Maybe.
Whites who believe the false explanation, tend to degenerate into self-hating. America-hating, freedom-hating, capitalism-hating leftist basket cases. The truth could set them free.
"The crime wave of 1960-1990 hit the entire Western world, not just America. Did Western European countries use leaded gasoline as early and as intensely as Americans?"
I guess this followed the "War Wave". What's the explanation for that?
TontoBubbaGoldstein said...
Big Bill's post dated 1/23/13, 5:56 AM. Is good stuff. So is the post he quotes.
Steve,
Please post a link to the post Big Bill referred to. Thanks.
Please tell me you're joking. You can't go up to the post and find the quote yourself? Maybe you too got too much lead in your formative years?
"Would this knowledge be used to rationalize slavery, apartheid, or genocide?" - it wouldn't justify any of that. slavery and genocide simply are, have always been, and don't need a rationalization. That these things have largely ended has been the result of us imposing our will on the rest of the planet. The rights to freedom of association and self determination likewise already have a rationale, and don't need HBD to provide that. Though again, those things only exist if we impose them on others who would deprive everyone of what we consider their rights.
Given that the blank slate is the underpinning of a lot of liberalism these days it would certainly demolish that.
Leaded gas sure made old outboard boat motors run beautifully- good onvalve seats, increased lubricity, higher octane, etc.- and I sure enough did an ENORMOUS number of stupid things on boats as a kid.
Clear causation.
I like my television disconnected inter-generational cultural transmission theory better.
It would explain why the 1960s didn't happen in bluecollar areas until the 1970s.
The upper middle class got TVs earlier.
"How the heck can a guy believe Keynesian econ works?"
It works very well in societies which are both highly homogenous and high average IQ i.e. all the countries which routinely top the lists of best places to live.
America, even just white America on its own, isn't homogenous enough.
not too sure about this hypothesis. probably does not check out nation by nation.
a related idea which i have heard is that the steadily increasing incidence of asthma may be due to automobiles, but not sure this one checks out either. think researchers just don't know why asthma is becoming so common. 17% of african children in the US are now diagnosed with asthma. the rates vary from group to group.
Which building in the USA has seen the most lead-laden paints liberally slathered o'er its archetypically white exterior?
Once I was laboring away in an old state gov't occupied building, and noticed a stranger behind me with a weird device. Turned out that she was from the EPA, checking for lead levels.
Was there lead? Yes.
Next thing we knew, they moved us out and gave this primo office space to a department dedicated to an historically hindered group.
"Have you ever noticed that nobody is much interested in how the Roman Empire managed to last so long?"
Well Steve, what's your theory?
"Whites who believe the false explanation, tend to degenerate into self-hating. America-hating, freedom-hating, capitalism-hating leftist basket cases. The truth could set them free."
Oh, is that what's causing that?
The parallels between Rome and modern day America are legion – pun intended. Rome had the overwhelmingly dominate military machine of its day (as already noted by Whiskey), as does the U.S. today. Rome did suffer defeats now and then (i.e. Varus in the Teutoberg Forest in 9 A.D.), but always came back stronger than ever. Same with the U.S.
The Rome of the early Republican years was united (Patricians and Plebes) by a strong common culture emphasizing frugality and martial virtue; it had to be, surrounded by many competing tribes on the Italian peninsula. It also had a well structured, easily understood legal system founded on separation of powers ,and checks and balances, like our Constitutional system. The Patricians and Plebes shared power, though at the end of the day, both new the Patricians were the leaders. After Rome subdued its local rivals, and particularly after Rome destroyed Carthage, their only real economic/military rival, Rome went on a conquest binge. The overwhelming wealth that flowed in, particularly slave labor, destroyed the healthy equilibrium and common culture between the Patrician and Plebe classes. Slaves displaced freeborn Roman Plebes who did the “blue collar” work in the city and on the farms and they became destitute and dispossessed. They sought economic empowerment by using the Roman political/legal system to get some of the wealth, which became increasingly concentrated among a smaller group of Patricians (Senators), redistributed to the Plebian classes. They championed a series of reform-minded Patricians (i.e. the Gracchi brothers) who started to manipulate the legal system to “even the playing field”; the legal code became increasingly complex, hard to maneuver through (if you were an average Roman), and corrupt. Toward the end of the Republic, the legal system was completely undermined; wealth bought convictions against the powerless and acquittal for the powerful (Cicero made his name by deft legal argumentation in the employ of the wealthy), to the point that most Romans had zero confidence in the legal system anymore. They perceived the law and constitution as arbitrary and capricious, easily manipulated by the wealthy and powerful (sound familiar?).
…At that point it was only a hop, skip and jump to despotism. Romans became more easily swayed by charismatic demagogues who promised bread (Welfare! Free healthcare!) and circuses (Free cellphones! Free college!), starting with Marius, and ending when Ceasar declared himself Dictator for Life, then his nephew Augustus declared himself Emperor (or “First Citizen” as he liked to call himself; he wanted to placate the Senators, but they had no power anymore so it was all for the consumption of the masses), and the Republic, the constitution, was dead.
Meanwhile, Roman culture, because of all the wealth of conquest, had become increasingly decadent; Patrician families that prided themselves on the Spartan virtues of their ancestors who founded the young Republic no longer cared as they hosted lavish parties, week-long games, engaged in petty gossip and sniping with each other, lived among multiple vacation houses, and generally partied like it was 199 B.C. while the destitute Plebe masses barely scraped by in the slums of Rome, or enlisted and toiled in the Legions (the only real way out of poverty for most freeborn Romans at that time). But they LOVED all the pomp, circumstance and drama among the wealthy, because it was SOOO entertaining (celebrity culture, anyone?). While all this was happening, Rome even had its own version of the “rear-guard” conservative faction (exemplified by Cato the Elder) who advocated a “return to the old Roman virtues”, kind of like a cultural Conservative today who longs for a past America where most people were outwardly religious and agreed on a common Judeo-Christian moral and ethical framework, and the Protestant work ethic. You look around today and America has completely fractured into various cultural camps that have little common moral and ethical overlap.
Yes, when Steve mentions Rome, all I can do is shrug and shudder…what comes next for us??
@Steve Sailer
"Did heavy metal poisoning cause the 1960's?"
I believe the opposite. I bvelieve the 1960's, when women were emancipated, gay rights came iinto play, etc, was the time when Humanity finally rid itself of the brain damage from generations past. I mean, until the development of antibiotics, humans were riddled with parasitical and pathogen infections, and many of these affected the brain.
When I look at something like slavery, I na only understand it under the prism of a massive brain infection. I cannot fathom enslaving a fellow human being and treating him worse than a dog. For em to do that, I would need to be on drugs or something that would cause massive change to my behavior, like a toxicoplasma infection or something. My normal Self could never be that callous towards my fellow human beings.
The 1960s were the time wben, a generation or so after mass vaccination against infections and such, human beings finally came to their senses and become more compassionate to their fellow human beings.
Now seriously, Steve Sailer, your articles are becoming more and more disgusting. Equating liberalism with heavy metal poisoning is a new low for you. Yeah, because owning slaves, having separate public bathrooms for people based on their skin color and such and thinking it's normal for a man to beat his kids to a bloody pulp if he feels like it, all things that were considered "nornal" before the 1960's, are all things that indicate a more well-functioning brain than wanting na equalitiarian society where people are treated by the contente of their character rather than by race or gender.
Leftist radicalism caused the crime waves, black and white, of the 1960s-1970s. You had commies, including anti-racists, working pretty hard in the 1930s-1960s (e.g., the Civil Rights movement, which led to such things as racial integration, Watts, etc.).
(Similarly, right-wing radicalism from the 1940s-1970s led to the subsequent "shift to the right," with its stagnant wages, financial disasters, and banking failures during the 1980s-2010s.)
Also, what is "The 60s" really supposed to stand for? Crime waves, like fashions, come and go. The unique distinguishing feature of the 1960s, I think, is the fact that a handful of vocal people opposed the Vietnam War while silent millions agreed with them to an extent, with all that this implies (e.g., more use of or discourse about narcotics as a means of blocking out the sick reality; rejection of the scientific-business mindset that built war weapons including nukes; etc.). Opposition to the Vietnam War wasn't necessarily evidence of brain damage.
Nick Diaz: at least Steve in his Taki article basically ridicules the lead theory, and largely confined his discussion to crime rates, not to the general tenor of the 1960s.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheUnfettered
Says it in a nutshell. When rules begin to be discarded like so many used tissues, chaos takes hold. "Follow your bliss", "Fight the power/By any means necessary", and "You're not the boss of me!", were the preeminent ideals of the 60's and we're still dealing with the results. When parents ceded control (whether to intrusive government, the pursuit of selfish interests or pure lack of concern), the children went feral. Feral children grow up to be feral adults, who will in turn raise feral children (most of whom will pursue short-sighted and/or haedonistic ideals to the obvious conclusion.)
Post a Comment