"What Do We Do With Suicidal Cultures?"

David P. Goldman has written at length about how some cultures reach a stage where they become nihilistic and suicidal. He has more to say on the topic in this recent article. The problem is, we in the West do not know how to analyze, let alone deal with, suicidal cultures.

We simply do not understand the world in which we live. That is why we mistook the terminal decline of Muslim civilization for an opportunity to extend Western democracy to the Middle East. That is why we mistook Russia’s desperate efforts to revive its old nationalism as an antidote to cultural despair for a replay of Munich in 1938. These have had baleful consequences: we destroyed an ugly but efficient system of governance in the Middle East and left chaos in its place in Libya, Syria and Iraq. We undid one of the premises of Cold War victory, namely keeping Russia and China apart, and stood godfather to a new Sino-Russian alliance. And we did this systematically and deliberately, because we think the wrong way.

In doing so we demoralized a generation, .... We have lost the confidence of the American public in foreign interventions through overreaching. Our blunders helped elect Barack Obama, the gravedigger of America’s influence in the world.

As we look at what has happened to black communities during the last 40 years, it may be fair to characterize it as a suicidal culture. And, as Goldman has pointed out in his earlier writings, suicidal cultures tend to strike out.