Your ray of sunshine to start the week.

Not really. Rather, a dissertation on the virtues needed by a society lest it fail.

Sounds an awful lot like some of the things said by the founding fathers. Well worth the read.

An excerpt:

  "Harvard economic historian Niall Ferguson notes that one of the striking features of the history of past civilizations is “the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of cause.” The fall of the Roman Empire took only a few decades. No one foresaw the implosion of the Soviet Union. Today, it is hard to envision how the 17-nation euro-zone, born in such fanfare, can muddle through in its current form.

Adam Garfinkle, editor of The American Interest, writes, “I don’t know of any great power in history that lost its foothold or decayed because of external reasons; internal social dysfunction was to blame.” Certainly that was Gibbon’s diagnosis of the fall of the Roman Empire.

I understand Garfinkle to mean that human capital is crucial. The term usually refers to the educational attainments of the population. But it means more than that.

Less quantifiable – but no less crucial – is the moral character of a people. Russia, for instance, cannot hope to remain a world power with alcoholism rates that have left the average 15-year-old Russian male with a lower life expectancy than his Cambodian counterpart.

Riots in France and England in recent years have revealed the growth of a large underclass nearly devoid of any traditional virtues. There is nothing in the lives of the members of this underclass, and particularly those of the young, to give them any dignity. Each welfare payment is experienced as a wound, even as the recipients take those payments as their due for the humiliation thrust upon them by the state.

Theodore Dalrymple, who worked for more than a decade as a prison psychiatrist in England, is the leading chronicler of this underclass of people characterized by their incapability of accepting any responsibility for their lives; for whom life is something that just happens to them, and about which they can make no decisions.

He describes the “cities of darkness” that encircle Paris, housing “a population that derives the meaning of its life from the hatred it bears for the other ‘official’ society in France. This alienation... is written on the faces of the young men, most of them permanently unemployed, who hang out in the pocked and pot-holed open spaces between their dwellings. When you approach them to speak to them, their immobile faces betray not a flicker of recognition of your shared humanity...”

Six hundred thousand Britons have reached the age of 26 never having worked a day; 17 percent of British youth are neither in school nor working nor in training programs. They have never tasted a morsel of food or worn a garment paid for by money earned. But far from breeding gratitude, welfare has only left them with a sense of entitlement to more, as reflected in last summer’s riots.