Refuting Decline

There are secret joys in criticism. All writers know this. Anyone taken to journaling, writing, or merely speaking, has felt the ignoble pleasure in damning the world, while silently exempting ourselves.

Maturity will normally restrain this sensation, but tales of inevitable decline let us indulge in its delight. They tempt the mind with doctrines of doom—condemning the nation to something inevitable, while giving the author a false sense of distance and immunity. It is no wonder that fatalism now fills our politics: progressives warn of rising sea levels; conservatives tell of moral decay. Each party promising only different means to the same ill-fated end: decline. And once decline is admitted, hopelessness becomes practice.

The belief that America is inevitably unraveling can be heard in predictions that sound like therapeutic rants, or in essays that treat our nation’s decline with an eerie objectivity. Both miss that America’s future is our own; that we can’t separate ourselves from her destiny—for better or for worse.

Before declaring that we are doomed, any American should know that “decay” won’t be studied but felt, not explained but experienced; America’s decline won’t be limited to our capital but housed within our own spine. If America is now sinking we are not watching from the shore but standing on the ship. The citizen is always connected to his nation in this way. Let us then be friendly critics of America, who offer humble correction without damnation.

When inevitable decline is theorized, all persons and events are singularly viewed as marching toward that moment. With every fact being filtered through the theory, the theory seems correct. And by assuming its inevitability, the author slowly falls in love with what they fear; and they tell their tale of how America will unwind with an almost sadistic pleasure, led along by the promise that they may predict their own nation’s downfall.

This is improper for citizens. We should not be shareholders in America’s misfortune. Christ told his followers to rebuke their parents, but we are never to enjoy the act. The prophets wept, and the judges tore their clothes when Israel sinned. Sons and prophets may be called to rebuke, but they are not condemning a far-off land; far from it, families and nations are the very enlargement of ourselves. As the son is bound to his parents, and the prophet to his people, the citizen is tethered to his nation. Our finitude denies us the luxury of abstracting beyond these attachments of place and time. They strip us of the ability to speak, write, and think as passive observers or lucky foretellers of the events to come. Burke, echoing Erasmus’s mistranslation of Euripides, said, spartam nactus es; hanc exorna. “Sparta is yours; now adorn it.” As for us, Americam nactus es; hanc exorna. “America is ours; now adorn it.” This is our land; these are our laws; that is our government. So it has been for our ancestors and so it should be for our children. Therefore, let any critique of our nation be offered as Burke instructed: as a son tending to the wounds of his father: with reverence, caution, and sorrow at the state of our beloved.

Ironically, those who speak of national decline often increase its odds. They should not call inevitable what they hope to avoid. A good captain, assigned to a daring mission, would tell his crew of the danger before them, but he would not dare add that history damned them to destruction. No, the captain would explain the risk, perhaps even vividly; but he would follow it up with words of hope and courage. And he would insist upon this hope even as enemy cannons made submarines of their ships. Call him a fool, an idealist, or even a liar, but he is above all a student of human nature, who knows that our wills are yet captives of fate, and that a people with no will, will be swallowed by their fear and call it their fate.

Hope matters—it breathes new life into the will. I do not doubt that America has real problems, many of which are new, but that should never shake our cautious optimism about the future. We are yet to take our place among the once-great empires of history. There are threats that we must address; but may we do so with the manly virtue that places no problem outside the scope of wise men and a good God. It is our duty to bear this Great Depression of the spirit with honor and courage, refusing to see decline as our destiny. Trends, strong though they be, are not providential, and our wills, weak though they seem, are not fictitious.

To insist upon inevitable decline is not only paralyzing, more importantly it is wrong. There is a dynamism, and dare I say providence, still living within us that will not easily be lost. But let us assume the fatalists are correct; that a new darkness will soon fall upon us. How then shall we live?

If China will eclipse us, if debt will shackle us, if atomization will unwind us, if climates will destroy us, if foreign powers will outdo us, let us walk through decline with our dignity, defined by an unwillingness to turn against the land that tirelessly offered us stability. So if another Edward Gibbon comes along in the year 3,500 to document The Decline and Fall of the American Republic, let us leave him with no evidence of a frenzied death. He will surely tell of our vices, but may our stern patriotism force him to preface any theory of decline with stories of noble citizens who honorably cared for their nation and withheld undue criticism, even as destiny ran her course.

Caleb Knox studies government and political theory at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia.