The Culture of Personal Excellence

Yesterday I wrote a bit about the definition of an Enlightenment Culture, and the fact that we stand at a historical turning point between a world-wide expansion of Enlightenment principles or a collapse into tribalism, blind nationalism, and barbarism.

So, it's important to consider not only the Enlightenment side of a culture, but the durability and robustness of the Western countries that form the backbone of the Enlightenment movement.

It is vitally important that Britain, France, the USA, Australia, Germany, and Canada are able to stay the course, maintaining stability and prosperity as Enlightenment Democracy and Civilization continue to expand through the world. Here, we're not so much looking at whether a country is CIVILIZED, we're looking at whether it is ROBUST.

Focusing on one element of what makes a nation robust: the culture of personal excellence, productivity, and personal adherence to laws.

In Western Democracies in general, and the USA in particular, a culture of personal excellence appears to be declining into a culture of personal pleasure. This focus on having luxuries and leisure (and indeed the types of leisure chosen) is replacing the culture of hard and honest work, and replacing the culture of obedience to laws and basic morals. Decadence, in other words, is on the rise.

Let's take a look at a couple of indices of this trend.
One of the headlines in today's news on Yahoo is as follows:

TOKYO - Nintendo said Friday it will replace 3.2 million straps for its popular Wii computer game controllers after receiving a rash of reports that the device flew out of the hands of players.

That's a front page headline, folks.

Let's look at crime statistics. I'm looking at http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
for these numbers, which span from 1960 to 2005. The numbers show crime by type per 100,000 inhabitants, so they have already been adjusted to account for changes in population. The recent trend is a reduction in crime, which generally seems to have topped out in 1991. As one example, there were 9.8 murders per 100,000 inhabitants of the USA in 1991. By 2005, that rate has dropped to 5.6. Looks good, yes? It does, until you take note that the same number in 1960 was 5.1. A more dramatic example is aggravated assault, down from 433.3 per 100,000 in 1991 to 291.1 in 2005. But in 1960, that number was 86.1. Aggravated assaults per 100,000 population has more than tripled over the last five decades. Larceny has doubled. Rapes have tripled. Robbery has doubled. Although we have improved matters in the last fifteen years, the overall trend shows a gradual increase in crime over the years, fluctuating up and down as it rises.

It is, however, worthy of note that the recent trend seems to be a decline in crime rates. The fall of a civilization is not an irreversible process, and we seem to have been on the right track since 1991.

It is clear that obesity levels in the USA are dramatically on the rise, although I haven't been able to get to any specific numbers. Many reliable secondary sources refer to the increase, however.

I've cited here three examples of decadence: (1) use of leisure time that (a) involves no physical exertion, human contact, or "product," (2) respect for property rights and persons, (3) lack of exercise. I do NOT consider religious activity or the lack thereof to be an index of decadence. Probably more on that in a later blog. There are major omissions here: literacy rates and work ethic, for example. I couldn't find any statistics on these that I considered reliable.

That's it for today. Tomorrow, I think I'll be focusing on the more positive side of this key moment in history - the rising tide of democracy and the influence technology has in terms of increasing several indices of civilization and robustness of cultures.