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National Review September 15, 2003 Civilization The August of Our Discontent The Thin Veneer of Civilization: Eternal lessons from a hot and hairy month by Victor Davis Hanson

RELATIVELY simple breakdowns in power transmission, and accordant human lapses, plunged millions on the East Coast into darkness. The lifestyle of postmodern man in sophisticated New York was reduced-in seconds-to that of his 18th-or 19th-century forebears, Stylish executives, with alligator brief-cases and cell phones, on their way home to the suburbs in Connecticut, were felled-forced to nap, for the night, on dirty sidewalks astride the homeless. The age-old banes of nature-darkness, heat, distance-cared little for our professionals' hard-earned entitlements, and gave them no class preference or exemption from the elements when the aegis of the modern power grid vanished. Without civilization's veneer of civility and technology, we really can be reduced to mere animals in constant search for food, shelter, and security.

In France, meanwhile, Mother Nature this summer has killed some 10,000 people by primeval heat: three times the toll of September II. The French chattering classes will claim the culprit for the heat wave is global warming caused by the energy-guzzling Americans. Or maybe they will plead that they are paying penance for their selfless prior rejection of wasteful air conditioners-proof not of their stinginess, but of their ecological sensitivity and resistance to American-style technology.

No matter. The recent scorcher is still a reminder that tens of thousands survive hour-by-hour thanks solely to the lifeblood of electricity, and can die without cooling machines that can artificially lower the temperature by 30 degrees. In contrast, impoverished Yemenis or Congolese, by their very poverty and daily ordeal, are better equipped to deal with nature's heat waves in their airy ramshackle homes than are Parisians in apartments and shops.

French socialism 's key boast, that at the end of history the benevolent state can do what selfish individuals cannot, was belied by the mundane forces of the weather. While medical workers, the young, and the middle-aged flocked to the beach to seek relief, thousands of their elderly and immobile relatives left behind were dehydrated alone in their homes-out of sight, out of mind, as far as their vacationing progeny were concerned: L 'Etat, not moi, was supposed to handle the crisis. But nature warns us again that even the most sophisticated Europeans cannot always escape such age-old precepts as: Children are born precisely to ensure that parents do not die, like these French, in their dotage, alone and in misery. And, as the no-nonsense wisdom of the Greeks had it: We change the diapers of our toddlers with care so that they will do the same for us when we are enfeebled a half-century later. 

CHILDREN OF PRIVILEGE

There is a similar denial of reality where I live, in California. Despite our great ports, tourism, beautiful weather, massive industries-and the nation 's highest income and sales taxes-the citizenry finds its collective credit worse than that of the average errant suburbanite who has maxed out his credit cards. All the fancy suits in Sacramento really cannot convince tight-fisted Wall Street bankers to give their money to those who may well not pay it back-an elemental law of commerce as old as the trapezoidal money-changing tables in ancient Piraeus.

Over the past five years, it seems, our state government operated on the assumption that we could create utopia by fiat, simply by writing checks for more and more health care, education, police, and prisons. After all, we are Californians, the inheritors of a grand and sophisticated state, and thus by birthright deserving of special compensation. In our infinite arrogance we presupposed, first, that the money would appear ex nihilo, and second, that cash in and of itself could solve our very human problems. That Californians simply have not paid for the services they have charged-and, worse, fooled themselves into thinking they either should not or will not have to-is left unsaid. That the crisis involves core values and social assumptions about human nature, and thus may be deeper than the ability of government per se to fix it, is not even contemplated.

The same paradoxes of civilization are seen in a more sinister context in the Middle East, where a sophisticated and modern society like Israel's is racked by suicide killers right out of the Dark Ages. That such murderers cannot manufacture the SUV s they so habitually drive on their errands of death, the cell phones that facilitate their awful plans, or the videos that capture the last testaments of mass murderers matters little. After all, for such leeches of civilization it only takes a modicum of cunning and little skill, rather than real education or intellectual accomplishment, to strap on imported explosives and blow up women and children. Dismembering a child is easier and quicker than nurturing and educating him; exploding a bus involves less work and training than building it. The prevention of such barbarism-sophisticated policing, electronic security, preservation of human rights and civil liberties while hunting down stealthy killers-is the fruition of centuries of civilization, but can disappear in moments when confronted with elemental nihilism. In contrast, the parasitic arts of Hamas are pre-civilized. Indeed, its killers accept that asymmetry and see it as a great asset in their struggle to destroy the Jewish state.

Some of our civilization's most accomplished men and women surrounded the late Sergio Vieira de Mello--himself degreed, idealistic, selfless-and were incinerated in a second in Baghdad. With great personal courage, they had flown into the inferno, to draw on decades of their formidable educations and good works to help those without commensurate cultural and social advantages. And it was all for naught: They were wiped out in a second by a gang of two-bit fascist thugs, who needed only access to some rusty Soviet bombs and an old truck.

What do all these most recent calamities have in common? They are warnings of the fragility of our increasingly complex civilization, in this its greatest, but also most vulnerable, age. The sudden loss of power, an unexpected wave of heat, financial meltdown, and suicide-murdering all remind us that there is no simple law ensuring that we are entitled to our present affluence and security. Only hourly vigilance preserves us against age-old natural enemies and the recrudescence of human barbarism.

There are plenty of other lessons here. One is the danger of hubris, which, as if by divine law, invites nemesis. Many of our elites were hyper-critical, from the sidelines, over the lack of progress in restoring power in Baghdad. From their easy slurs it was clear how ignorant they were of the physical ordeal involved in stringing power lines and fixing generation plants after years of abuse; repair workers have even been shot at. The New York blackout should remind them that it is difficult enough amid peace and decades of prosperity to ensure to 50 million people light and cool air when they flip their switches. Even the most sophisticated pundits at the New York Times have not a clue how to jump-start a generator or climb up a high-voltage tower to repair cable. They should keep those challenges in mind when they expect instantaneous perfection abroad; it is hard enough ensuring it at home, where it is 90°, not 130°.

From the French debacle, we learn that abstract theorizing on the cheap not only is not the same as concrete action, but, in fact, often is used as intellectual and psychological cover for the embarrassing, retrograde appetites that center around selfishness and pleasure. After listening to recent French moral strictures in the U .N .over Iraq, few would ever have guessed that an entire country would, in its miserliness, forgo air conditioning for its elderly and abdicate responsibility for them in order to cool off in the beach breeze. That some Frenchmen still lingered on the beach after learning that their dead grannies in ad hoc air-conditioned morgues had at last found the cool relief that they had lacked in life was the coup de grace.

We must always keep in mind that we are human, not divine, and should not be lured by our temporary success in overcoming ignorance, disease, and the elements into thinking the task is largely finished as we near the end of history. The last five years in California remind us of just that dangerous complacency. We borrowed money, sold bonds, passed absurd new laws, and ignored problems, assured that a future upswing in the economy or even vaguer natural forces would automatically correct what we could not. A recent newspaper headline here blared: "Officers to take cut." That is what we say when our state highway patrol accepts a 2.7 percent salary increase rather than a promised 7.7 percent pay hike at a time of a $38 billion annual deficit. Come to California to appreciate the words of the Roman historian Livy: "We can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies needed to cure them." 

NEMESIS

How, for example, were millions of illegal aliens to assimilate into California's culture, if not by the hard challenges of legality, integration, and intermarriage? Instead, our Right saw cheap workers, our Left plentiful new constituents, as both ignored a growing apartheid society where the unskilled, the illiterate, the non-English-speaking, and the illegal were somehow in the hundreds of thousands magically to transmogrify themselves into California suburbanites. Most Californians without special agendas simply thought that their new n1aids, nannies, and gardeners, fleeing the misery of Oaxaca, would be delighted to remain second-class "citizens" at $10 cash an hour--only to be shocked and hurt that their workers really did age, get hurt or sick, and have children, and so might need five times the amount of entitlements that they had contributed in taxes to find a semblance of the life of their more affluent employers. Better to shrug, pass surreal laws like providing driver's licenses to those here illegally, allow separate graduation ceremonies in our colleges, and hope that the demagogues on both sides will not whip up the state in the midst of an election.

The conundrum in Jerusalem and Baghdad should dispel the romance of Western elites that all cultures are more or less equal, or that our own past sins explain horrific homicide bombing and the dressing up of toddlers in "suicide" vests. Asymmetrical, fourth-dimensional, unconventional-call it what you. want; warfare is predicated on inequality. The divide is not just that the non- West cannot fabricate weapons like our own or even maintain them when they are purchased or given. Nor is the disequilibrium solely due to the Western military tradition itself-singular ideas of group discipline and personal freedom-that ensures motivated soldiers who can wield such sophisticated weapons. Instead, the inferiority on the battlefield goes hand in glove with a larger anger over the absence in the Middle East of affluence, safety, liberality, freedom, and modernization. I think the Palestinian fury at the ever-creeping Israeli fence is not merely that it slices a few kilometers here and there off from the old boundaries. After all, thousands of Jewish settlers will find themselves on the wrong side of the barrier and probably be forced to give up their land and flee westward. The rampart is a final testament that the Israelis want nothing to do with those on the West Bank, and that the Palestinians will be cut off from their supposed enemies forever, no longer able either to benefit from them--or kill them.

Captives to envy and hatred, a sizable minority in the Middle East realizes that its culture can neither defeat the West militarily nor emulate its success. So the minority lashes out; but is the illiterate psychopath in Baghdad really the equal of the kind and humane Mr. Vieira simply because he can blow him up in the blink of an eye? Does the ability to tear apart in a moment what was created over a decade earn concessions, guilt, or blackmail payments from wealthier and ever more scared Westerners, who so much wish to believe that their education and wealth should earn them a pass from the rage of the nemesis? These are questions our own elites seldom wish to ponder.

Consider the even more controversial radical disconnect in the recent horrific scenes broadcast from Jerusalem and the West Bank. In Jerusalem, men and women of all ages rushed, crying, amid the detritus to find a spark of precious life among the parts of disemboweled infants and children; in the West Bank's rubble, only young males rushed about-pulling out the corpses of terror masters, screaming in sorrow but also defiantly howling about further blood to come. Death, to be sure, was in both places; but these differences are significant.

An increasing number of Americans grasp this cultural abyss and have quietly decided to cast their lot with civilization. They may disagree over the road map or Iraqi reconstruction, but they are beginning at last to see that there is a real moral difference between those who are building schools in Baghdad and those who are blowing them up, between the civilians who are trying to tear apart women and children in buses and the soldiers who seek to kill such killers. The Guardian may pontificate about the harshness of Israeli detention and the absence of habeas corpus for the detained of Hamas, but even its biased reporters really do know which side is packing explosives with rat poison and nails to rip apart infants and which is not.

The recent depressing news from this lazy August should remind all Americans that our civilization is only as viable as we in the here and now work to maintain it. Before we assume that our enemies are just like us and are troubled and confused rather than intent and murderous, we must not feel too wealthy or too educated to use force to defeat them, especially when appeasement in the past has not brought peace, but only greater aggression. Western civilization is admittedly increasingly complex and impersonal. I suppose at times it uses our resources inefficiently. And it can be arrogant and insensitive to the Other. But unless we realize that it is still far better than the alternative, and requires our daily appreciation and watchfulness, there is no reason that it cannot vanish in an instant. That is the real lesson of this most awful August 2003, when we saw glimpses of its demise. NR