Roger Kimball, the editor and publisher of monthly literary review The New Criterion, has assembled a collection of essays on the troubles facing Western civilization. Perhaps “troubles” is too weak of a word, but it seems fitting in regard to the title of the book: “Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads.” After reading The New Criterion’s 10 essays, that question is glaring: Where next?
The reason I suggest “troubles” as a fitting descriptive is because the essays do not suggest an inevitable demise of the West, but rather a possible demise. This collection of thoughtful prose is a benefit to the reader in that it provides various perspectives regarding the origins of Western civilization, how it has progressed, how it has digressed, and ultimately what will end it or revive it.
The 11 authors (the first essay is written by Allen C. Guelzo and James Hankins) point readers toward the many directions in which we have been taken over the course of the past 2,000 years, though more specifically in the past century.
Just as historians have dissected the many reasons that the Roman Republic fell, these authors—some are historians themselves—have dissected what has led to the decline of the West. The collection is a testament to the varying degrees to which some of the more informed and brilliant minds agree and disagree on what has led to this decline.
It is also a credit to Kimball that he would include two opposing views on the comparisons between the Roman Empire’s decline and that of the West.
When Edward Gibbon wrote his famous narrative, “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” he was given the gift of historical hindsight to surmise what led to that fall. His work is a timeless examination on how nations—republics specifically—fall apart.
The authors note clearly in all 10 essays that this one is struggling to maintain balance. There are many reasons: decadence, the embrace of differing and at times destructive ideologies, the purposeful misconstruing of democracy and “mob frenzy,” an untrustworthy legacy media, mass immigration, the dismissal of assimilation by immigrants and a citizenry that heralds that dismissal, a disconnected and increasingly overbearing government, the ever expanding authority of unelected officials within a representative democracy, an abused middle class, the consistent condemnation of America’s history and heroes, and the dismantling of respected institutions.
Comparisons to Rome and Elsewhere
The comparisons with the Roman Empire are plentiful and obvious even without reading “What Next?” But as Conrad Black states in his essay, “The Indispensable Country”: “All of the many flippant comparisons to the decline of the Roman Empire are nonsense,” and “Rome’s long sway as the greatest secular power in the known world for over six hundred years has almost no relevance to the United States.”So must we look elsewhere for proper comparison? Yes and no.
Authors in the collection make many references and comparisons to the Roman Republic, but they also make other comparisons, like to ancient Greece, but more pointedly, to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
Ruling Elite
In his essay, “The Specter of Chinese Civilization,” Angelo M. Codevilla writes: “What is now America’s ruling culture has been gestating and marking Americans for more than half a century. The effects are all too obvious, and in some senses are worse than what the Soviets inflicted on the Russian people.”All in one essay, America is compared to communist China and Soviet Russia, and—as far-fetched as it may seem—it is fitting because of the “ruling culture” that America has perhaps not embraced but rather simply allowed and often enabled.
As Anthony Daniels states in his essay, “A Popular Form of Monomania”: “The disasters of Nazism and Communism did not halt the search for transcendence by means of ideology.” And that ideology originates from what James Piereson calls “diversity ideology” in his essay.
It is an ideology led by “activist elites,” who now control America’s institutions that promote “democratic aspirations and cohesion” in order to “undermine” them, according to James Panero in his essay, “Going Under With the Overclass.”
But knowing the results of Nazism and communism, why would any group, elite or otherwise, pursue such ideological ends? In one of the most apt analogies in the collection, Kimball, in his essay, “Highways to Utopia,” makes the suggestion that much like King Cyrus the Great of Persia, they do so simply because they can. They do it for past grievances, whether personally affected or not, and whether those grievances have been atoned for or not.
Just as Cyrus, after the Gyndes River swept away one of his white horses, “decided to punish the river by having his slaves cut 360 channels into it, stanching its flow to a trickle,” Kimball states, “This we have done to ourselves, applying mental tourniquets to the arteries that fed us from the past.”
He further quotes from Soren Kierkegaard by writing that this modern spirit “leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance.”
Unhealthy Republic
Kimball’s collection gives us a wealth of healthy perspectives about our unhealthy republic and the West in general. Though Black has a more positive outlook than the others, suggesting that “America remains the indispensable country” and will “accelerate through” this “crossroads in the world’s affairs,” perhaps it is Kimball’s suggestive essay title that answers the collection’s title question of “Where Next?”
Sir Thomas More coined the term “utopia,” which comes from the Greek word “ou-topos” meaning “no place.” Perhaps this ongoing struggle is leading exactly nowhere. A more frightful thought—and this seems to be the overarching warning from the essayists—is that wherever our destination, once we arrive, there will be nothing left.
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