Note to readers: This is the second of a three-part series. I call this second installment “The Fall of Western Civilization.” The first installment, called “The Rise of Western Civilization,” is HERE.

Religious animal sacrifices may soon be conducted by your neighbor in his backyard on the other side of the little fence you share, or perhaps in the condo down the hall from yours. Try not to let the animal’s screams bother you — that would be racist.

You see, there’s a small town in Michigan called Hamtramck. For generations, it has been an enclave of Polish immigrants and their descendants. They danced to polka music, ate pierogi, and so on. They were Polish-Americans. They blended right in — as well as our Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans and Chinese-Americans.

Then the town was taken over by Muslim immigrants. The Muslims wanted to sacrifice animals in their backyards as part of their religious rituals. They do that by slitting their throats and watching them scream and convulse as they bleed to death while they (the Muslims, that is) shout Allah Akbar!

These Muslims not exactly trying to blend in.

These backyard spectacles were against local ordinances in Hamtramck. But the city council this week voted 3-2 (you can guess the ethnicity of the majority of 3) to change the ordinance, despite objections that such backyard animal sacrifices are inhumane, unsanitary unsightly and noisy.

The slitting of the animals’ throats will usually be done by a butcher, they say, but the residents are also allowed to perform the task themselves because some of them complain that they are too poor to hire a butcher.

Apart from the grotesqueness of this, I have several practical questions.

What sort of butcher makes house calls? And how does that change anything — does the butcher bring along an anesthesiologist? And if the residents are too poor to afford a house-calling butcher to sacrifice the animal, how are they supposed to afford the animal itself? Is it possible that they will just “find” the animal somewhere in the neighborhood?

Ah, but I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

The point of Part 1 of this series was that, just as large parts of Roman culture derived from Greek culture, large parts of our own culture derive from Greco-Roman culture. We’re still living in the Greco-Roman age.

Unfortunately, we’ve expanded on some of those Greco-Roman values. That sounds like a good thing, but it’s not. In fact, it’s the reason for our demise. Here’s how it happened.

If a little democracy is good, as Athens taught us, then we foolishly thought a lot must be even better – right?

If picking up some menu tips from the barbarians and learning to wear funny scarves are good, then inviting them all in – to trash and replace our philosophy and religions – must be even better — right?

If showing compassion for people lacking merit is good, then we should abolish merit altogether, right?

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Let’s take these in order. Democracy is like medicine. A little might be a good thing, but a lot can poison you. Right now, the biggest illness of the West is an overdose of democracy. Stated simply, too many people vote, they’re the wrong people, and they vote for the wrong people.

There’s a reason that the Left always seeks to expand the voter rolls, and it’s not to improve democracy. It’s because the Left hates the West, and they know that the ignorant people they will newly enfranchise with voting rights are easily manipulated into sharing that hate.

Voting rights for 18-year-olds? C’mon. Today’s 12^th graders have the education of 10^th graders from 30 years ago, and typically have never held a job. That’s a good reason to raise the voting age by at least two years, but instead we lowered it by three, from 21 to 18.

The net result is that today’s first-time voters have five years less education than the first-time voters of their parents’ generation. (Don’t try to explain this to those youngsters. You’ll lose them on the 3 + 2 = 5 part.)

As for philosophy and religion, no religion has been as successful or made its adherents as successful as the Judeo-Christian religions. Those religions teach a combination of merit-based achievement and forgiveness for failure, which opens the door to endless opportunity. (I’m not talking about the opportunity for eternal salvation, but that too.) You can try, and try again. If you develop merit and learn from your failures, you will be forgiven and you will succeed.

You will. It’s right there in the Bible, from Job to Jesus.

The idea of earned second chances sounds obvious today, but it’s not obvious at all in most of the world outside Judeo-Christian cultures. In most places at most times, it was one-strike-and-you’re-out. And often, you weren’t even allowed that one strike – you didn’t even get to bat.

As for foreigners – the barbarians – the Greeks were not especially welcoming. The Romans were a bit more cosmopolitan. They sometimes used native administrators for controlling local matters. But when they did, the local administrators always answered to Rome on important matters.

More often, the local administrators were Romans, even in far-flung provinces. (Pontius Pilate is the most famous today. He did defer to the locals on the decision he is best known for, but that decision was a minor one, he thought.)

The notion that they should abolish their borders and invite the barbarians into Rome, or Greece, on the Panglossian notion that “diversity makes us stronger,” would be utterly foreign – barbaric in both senses of the word – to Romans and Greeks.

Abolishing merit? We did that because merit is “inequitable.” Fools and barbarians are ill-equipped for it. In today’s math:

ill-equipped = inequitable

The abolition of merit certainly did produce more equality among people. Ill-equipped people lacking merit are deemed “equal” to the ones possessing it because we stopped trying to measure it.

But in a system that does not measure or reward merit, only a fool would think people will still strive to be meritorious. And so, the culture as a whole will have less of it.

Principles or merit, liberty, limited democracy and common values served Greco-Roman culture for a long time – about 2,500 years, if you include the subsequent Western culture that grew out of it.  

But alas, we’ve abandoned those tested principles that got us here. Some of that abandonment was well-intentioned; we wanted to help people we deemed “less fortunate” (but who often were really less worthy).

Some of that abandonment was intentional – a deliberate attempt to undermine our culture by people who hate it (and would probably hate whatever culture they were born into).

Now, we’re past the tipping point. The West has not only welcomed fools and barbarians, but under DEI we’ve favored them. Many of them vote, and they demand a share of what our culture has earned over the course of 2,500 years while simultaneously demanding that we forsake that culture.

So, the West is lost. America is well on its way, and Europe is already there.

That leaves a question. Lost to whom or what? Who or what will take our place?

Note to readers: The third and final installment of this three-part series will come in a few days. Stay tuned!