Decivilization in Detroit

Now, no doubt those who believe that race doesn’t exist, that all homo sub-species and human population groups are equal, and that it is intrinsically raciss to notice any statistical differences in behaviors, capabilities, and outcomes will find the juxtaposition of these two graphics to be unfair. Whether that is the case or not, they do, indubitably, represent undisputed historical facts.

One of my more controversial ideas is my time-to-civilization hypothesis, which states that considerably more time is required for a human population group to transition from full savagery to full civilization than is commonly believed. Most people appear to believe that a single generation combined with geographical relocation is sufficient, some even argue that a mere change in physical location combined with exposure to advanced civilization is sufficient to transform a naked, demon-worshipping cannibal into a responsible, productive, voting citizen entirely capable of contributing responsibly to an advanced, civilized society.

My observation is that it appears to have taken around 1,000 years for savages such as the Germans and Britons to make the transition from their first encounters with an advanced civilization, and I have seen little evidence that the formerly savage people of Africa have proven to be capable of making the same transition any more quickly when considered in the collective. Setting aside any intrinsic genetic differences, even an equalitarian perspective logically indicates that there should be observable differences based upon the historically different amount of time the various groups have been exposed to civilization.

While I do not doubt that there are some individuals capable of making speedy and near-miraculous individual transformations, it must be kept in mind that there is a considerable difference between positively participating in, maintaining, and advancing/developing a technologically advanced society. The fact is that there are relatively few members of any society who are capable of helping it advance or develop civilization in the first place. These are an elite, and not only an elite, but a rare and special form of elite that possesses both long time preferences and an amount of concern for the society as a whole.

Without sufficient developers, a society will stagnate, as happened most famously in China. Without sufficient maintainers, a society will decline. And without sufficient positive participants, a society will collapse.

So, what changed in Detroit? What happened to cause it to transform so rapidly from a wealthy, growing, industrial city to a demographically dying region of crumbling buildings increasingly inhabited by human predators and their unproductive prey? We can see the inflection point at 1985, with the surge of borrowing that began under longtime mayor Coleman Young, but the situation didn’t get truly out of hand until 2000.  What changed so dramatically between 1974 and 1985?

The most obvious nd dramatic difference was the change in the population demographics. In 1970, the percentage of non-Hispanic whites in Detroit was 54 percent versus 44 percent black. By 1990, the racial population ratio was 21.6 to 75.7. This removed sufficient maintainers and positive participants from the population and tipped the scale from a society capable of at least maintaining an advanced and civilized society to one incapable of doing so.

Now, there are certainly other factors involved, but anyone who wishes to claim that I am incorrect and make the case for those factors being more important than the demographic one in a democratic society cannot simply cite the existence of those factors,which no one disputes, but prove that they are more fundamentally causal than the rapidly shifting racial demographic. Correlation is not causation, but it is indicative of a possible causation and thereby merits consideration for causative status.

It should be relatively easy to challenge my hypothesis concerning time-to-civilization. One has merely to cite a predominantly African society that has shown itself to be capable of sustaining itself in a highly civilized state without dependence upon outside assistance from non-Africans. Or to cite a non-African society that went from full savagery to full civilization in considerably less than one thousand years. There is no point in simply crying raciss and burying one’s head in the sand; if the mainstream assumption of instant auto-civilization by proximity is wrong, then the consequences will be considerable. If the mainstream assumption is wrong, it will call into serious question decades of social policy and raise significant philosophical questions about the ethics and morality of expecting historically unprecedented collective transformations from large groups of people who may be fundamentally incapable of them.

Is it truly either moral or and decent to, in the name of equality, abandon hundreds of thousands of human beings to a system that predictably caused them to saddle themselves with “staggering costs that today threaten [their] safety and quality of life”?  If it is not right to turn over the keys of a liquor cabinet and a high-performance sports car to a child, how can it be right to place an advanced society under the control of the insufficiently civilized? And perhaps more importantly, how credible is it to claim that the subsequent crash was merely an accident of coincidental correlation.