Powerline, a blog started by Minnesota lawyers, remains a daily go-to for thoughtful readers. Scott Johnson, on Labor Day, tells us the hardest-working, most fully employed states are all red states. The top state is…South Dakota, followed by North Dakota, Alaska, Hawaii, and Wyoming. I’d argue about Wyoming’s 5th place. Having lived in Wyoming most of my adult life, I’m amazed it isn’t ranked first.
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It’s little surprise that Michigan—a blue state–is dead last, and that Abdul El-Sayed, an anti-American Islamist, wants to make it worse:
Graphic: X Post
Americans, and particularly those of us living and working in those hard-working states, tend to take much for granted. That’s not due to a lack of intellectual curiosity. It’s mostly because we’re awfully busy with work, raising families, and building our communities. We see the cause and effect in the plenty we enjoy. Hard work, reliability, rational thinking, common sense, honesty, industriousness, loyalty, mission orientation–all the working-class American virtues make prosperity not only possible, but deserved, inevitable.
We leave it to folks like John Hinderaker to notice classicists like the invaluable Victor Davis Hanson to remind us of why we’re so successful:
Because of their invention of systematic reasoning and mathematical science, fewer than two million Greek speakers—divided among 1,500 quarreling city-states in the southern Balkans, the Anatolian coast, and southern Italy, and surrounded by hostile civilizations both more populous and more powerful—were able to create philosophical, architectural, artistic, and literary masterpieces recognized as such today. Through their inventiveness, the Greeks maintained their autonomy and freedom for more than four centuries, despite their small numbers and scant resources. And indeed, through their influence on Alexander the Great and the later Roman Republic and Empire, Hellenism and its rational way of thinking spread throughout the Mediterranean to much of Europe, the Near East, and beyond, radically changing the way millions worshipped, thought, wrote, built, farmed, sailed, governed, and fought.
Charles Murray’s controversial survey of the world’s major accomplishments in science, math, art, and literature found that roughly 85 percent of civilization’s greatest achievements can be credited to residents of Europe, the United States, and other Western nations—common inheritors of the Western tradition of rationalism founded by the Greeks. Likewise, the world’s greatest intellectual and material golden ages—Periclean Athens, Republican Rome, the twelfth-century Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Information Age of Silicon Valley—were Western phenomena.
Why else, even beyond political reasons, would more than five hundred thousand Chinese students be currently enrolled in North American and European universities, while a comparatively minuscule number of Westerners attend their Chinese counterparts? And why, in the recent Times Higher Education survey of the world’s top hundred universities, were eighty of them located in either Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, or New Zealand? Even those few top-ranked non-Western universities found in China, Japan, Singapore, and Korea were established in emulation of the Western tradition of higher education.
Without a comparable tradition of open-ended reasoning, birthed and sustained in a climate of political freedom, it is impossible to envision a version of Silicon Valley in the contemporary Islamic Middle East.
By the same token, it is unimaginable to envision an Oxford, Stanford, or MIT emerging in North Korea, an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos operating out of Pakistan, or an unfettered, uncensored, and unregulated scientific conference held in Beijing or Tehran. [skip]
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Such Western intellectual and material dominance is not likely to be explained, as is sometimes argued, by either geographical advantages, foreign appropriation, or racial differences.
Rather, the answer lies in the unique Western classical cultural heritage of free, empirical, and rational thinking. It was invented in Greece and Rome and transmitted with enhancements through the Middle Ages and the Italian Renaissance, the European and British Enlightenments, and the Industrial Revolution, to the modern Western world and its peoples.
Reason remains the fountainhead of the classical legacy. And the degree to which it still flourishes explains how and why much of the twenty-first-century world works—and why much still does not.
Across the hard-working states, Americans are nodding their heads in agreement, and as Lee Greenwood wrote in “God Bless the USA,” they thank their lucky stars that they’re living here today. And they also thank the very long line of thinkers, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians, engineers, mothers, and plainly hard-working, rationally thinking and reasoning people, whose brilliance began in Greece and eventually ended up in America, where we took it from there.
Without question, America is great in part because we took in the best, brightest, and hardest-working from countries with the same rational heritage. Sharing those common virtues, they gladly assimilated and became Americans. Unrestrained immigration, including letting enemies of Western Civilization into the country and electing them to positions of political power, threatens to undo millennia of real, not Democrat, progress.
Where’s the reason in that?
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
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