Victor Davis Hanson Ping !
Let me know if you want in or out
...good reading.
Aha, I get it. The Dutch zeitgeist is that of the communitarian culture of the polter, thus, presumably, making it a poltergeist.
Makes about as much sense as any of this nimrod's bizarre historical 'analysis'.
I read his other book. PC diversity-cultural equivalency-evil white men claptrap.
Let me know if you want in or out
Hanson is not only brilliant, but he hangs out in seminars with Jack Goldstone, one of the few sociologists I can stomach. Goldstone has an incredible article I require in my classes called "Cultural Orthodoxy, Risk, and Innovation." He argues that western traditions of competition, property rights, willingness to take risk via acceptance of failure, religious toleration and individual rights all made the West rich. It's a complex piece, but very powerful and when you combine it with VDH, you pretty much have the explanation for why the West kicks butt.
I enjoyed Guns, Germs and Steel. I thought Diamond makes some excellent points, although I got very tired of his one-sided moralizing. He somehow always manages to work in a moral denunciation of any expansionism by white men, while merely reporting the no doubt equally genocidal expansionism of other groups.
Both Diamond and VDH are correct, in their different ways.
Diamond shows that without the tools and resources necessary to built a civilization, it won't get built.
VDH is correct that the mere presence of potential resources doesn't generate advancement. That requires a cultural orientation capable of using them effectively.
This screed is nothing more than a barely veiled attempt to degrade Western Civilization. It has become so vile in the academy that the mask can now be purely symbolic. The mask is merely a mannerism - it is not meant to conceal anything
I keep wanting to write a book that contrasts this period of learning with other decadent periods, say the Scholastic period or the early Georgian. Certainly these clowns today are in pursuit of substances as rare as phlogisten and alkahest
This is not history: It is modern alchemy. (I would wager, however, that the "author" would take this as a compliment.)
What a wholly ignorant, uncivilized and brutish lot have taken over our schools. Can we survive it?
It is like watching a orangutan with a rare oboe in its hands.
These people haven't th faintest clue about what a civilization is or what it is for. They think it is about tastes in coffees.
Was a good book. Not a perfect one.
My profile is my counterpoint to the entire genre of "civilizational environmentalism." The most extreme example to refute it is the mere existance of places such as Australia. Even the US, to a great degree, as alluded to above via the San Diego - Tijuana juxtaposition, refutes it. Both the US and Australia had "underdeveloped" and "primitive" characteristics prior to European settlement. And now? They are shining cities on hills within the context of the 2500 year thread of Western Civilization. We are as such IN SPITE of the environment, and BECAUSE of overt participation in the greatest thread of Civilization ever the grace God's Earth!
btt