I don't think this is pointless, but I could be wrong

Found a folder named "New folder" on my desktop. It was empty, so I deleted it. The folder below it, "New folder (2)", also empty, also got deleted. Likewise for the one below that, "New Folder (3)".

The next desktop icon I came to was my "Toynbee, Asimov, and Civilization" folder. It contained this image file from an old Google search:

I saved that screenshot months ago because Spengler, Asimov, and Toynbee fascinate me. So now I looked up the Google Book. A search within, for "Asimov", didn't turn up anything that caught my eye. But in the Table of Contents, this entry did:

A search for ricardo duchesne, the fall of universal history turned up a two-page excerpt from chapter 7 of the Palgrave Advances book at Springer, and at Brill a largely similar two-page excerpt from chapter one of Ricardo Duchesne's The Fall of Western Civilization and the Rise of Multicultural World History. Note that the one refers to the fall of an approach to history, and the other to a fall of civilization. Both, however, refer to "the rise of multicultural world history".

That topic interests me, the rise of multicultural world history. But I know little about it (which is of course why I'm looking now). I do think it relates to current attitudes about the phrase "the Dark Ages". Current attitudes? Well, Britannica says the use of the words "dark age" implies a "pejorative" "value judgment" about "intellectual darkness and barbarity".

In our time, of course, intellectual darkness and barbarity are still not widely admired, so pejoratives are still applied, in our time and about our time. In our time, too, we have President Trump, an extraordinarily fine example of intellectual darkness and barbarity. And pejoratives are applied.

You could say that since the time of Reagan, maybe Goldwater, intellectual darkness and barbarity have been on the rise. Sure, but then you have to admit that it's a process, a process of change, change toward what in our time is best called a new "Dark Age".

That reminds me of this from the historian M. I. Rostovtzeff, on the fall of Rome:

What happened was a slow and gradual change, a shifting of values in the consciousness of men. What seemed to be all-important to a Greek of the classical or Hellenistic period, or to an educated Roman of the time of the Republic and of the Early Empire, was no longer regarded as vital by the majority of men who lived in the late Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages. They had their own notion of what was important...

The thinking of Trump and his merry band differs from that of today's liberal. A shifting of values is in progress.

I'm talking about a way to understand the world, a way that could help resolve differences.

//

So anyway, Duchesne writes of the fall of "universal" history and the rise of "multicultural" world history. And as I said, I know little of all that. But I was interested enough to spend the morning in search mode. Wikipedia says Duchesne's

main research interests are Western civilization, the rise of the West, and multiculturalism.

That sounds like exactly the right combination of interests to answer the questions I wish I knew enough to ask. And then Wikipedia adds

Duchesne's views on immigration and multiculturalism have been described as racist and white nationalist...

And that caught me by surprise. I'd have thought the Euro-centric "universal" history would be the racist one, and the "multicultural" history would be free of all that baggage.

But Duchesne's thinking, at least according to Martin Hewson, is moving toward post-multicultural history. So, not multicultural thinking with its assumed natural freedom from the racist baggage.

Again, Wikipedia:

Duchesne also criticizes some conservatives for advancing the idea that Western political identity is based only on universal liberal democratic values that are true for all human beings. He argues that liberalism is uniquely Western and that Western identity is also deeply connected to the ethnic character of Europeans. More recently, Duchesne has argued that civic nationalism is consistent with a strong collective sense of ethnic national identity. The Enlightenment's cosmopolitan "promotion of peaceful relations among nations and opposition to the slave trade," he has written, should not be interpreted "as a call for a globalist, race-mixed order in the West." He has criticized Isaiah Berlin, among others, for promoting the idea that Johann Gottfried Herder was the original advocate of multiculturalism and racial diversity inside Western nations, arguing instead that Herder was a promoter of the value of distinctive nationalities in the world peacefully co-existing alongside each other in a multicultural world order.

The last part of that paragraph reminds me of Hayek in The Road to Serfdom:

Neither an omnipotent superstate nor a loose association of "free nations" but a community of nations of free men must be our goal.

And I think Duchesne on Herder is the only statement I've seen that expresses Hayek's idea better even than Hayek.

//

I find the Wikipedia article disappointing:

Duchesne has been accused by some of poor scholarship and of holding white nationalist or racist views. Historian R. Charles Weller has described Duchesne's anti-immigration stance as bearing "an uncanny resemblance to white nationalist and racist anti-immigration laws of the interwar period aimed at maintaining a white majority".

Maybe. I dunno. But I know that this excerpt is not about Duchesne and his ideas. It is about other people and their criticism of his ideas. Or rather, their interpretation (or misinterpretation) of his ideas, and criticism thereof.

If you tell me what Duchesne said, I can begin to form my own evaluation of it. If you tell me that what Duchesne said was racist, then all I know is what you think of it.

Me? I tell you what I know

• Spengler, Asimov, and Toynbee fascinate me.
• The "rise of multicultural world history" interests me.

even if I don't know much about the topic.