NR | 1 h 5 min | Documentary | 2023
Anyone who compulsively engages in self-criticism and only remembers their worst mistakes rather than their greatest accomplishments would probably be diagnosed by psychiatrists with alarmingly severe depression.
Yet, this self-defeating mindset has increasingly taken hold on a national scale here in America, largely with the media’s blessing. Filmmaker Gloria Z. Greenfield explains how the indoctrination campaigns of “woke” activists and radical academics have rotted away the confidence of the West in the documentary “Civilization in the Danger Zone,” which opens in New York theaters on April 21.
The Western world’s self-loathing didn’t just happen. In 1964, conservative icon James Burnham warned of the free world’s lack of resolve in his classic book, “The Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism.” Although the fall of Soviet communism seemed to herald the triumph of the West and invalidate Burnham’s alarm, the long-term trends identified by Greenfield’s expert commentators continued unabated.
The film’s on-camera scholars argue the campaign to undermine the principles of American democracy began in earnest with the sexual revolution of the late 1960s, which weakened the primacy of the family unit as the foundation of society. With the national culture growing increasingly secularized, religious institutions, such as churches and schools, no longer serve as the unifying forces that they once were. Therefore, as family and religious identity weakens, so does national cohesion.
These social and ideological trends also hold practical implications, especially the resulting decline in birthrates in the United States and our allies. Among Western democracies, only Israel has been immune to this projected demographic shortfall, both among its religious and non-Orthodox populations.
Indeed, the Jewish people’s ability to maintain their identity in the face of opposition, oppression, and even occupation, becomes a model to study in Greenfield’s documentary. Greenfield and company also remind the audience this is a perilous time to be disunited and irresolute, given the mounting threat posed to liberal democracy by Xi Jinping’s increasingly hostile and territorially ambitious Chinese communist regime.
Prominent conservative commentators such as Victor Davis Hanson and Frank Gaffney also address the questions raised by the film, along with Dave Rubin, who is also a well-known conservative and who happens to be openly gay. Indeed, given the voices Greenfield assembles, it’s hard to dismiss “Civilization in the Danger Zone” as Evangelical Christian polemics.
Frankly, its scope is broader than that. Admittedly, it assumes a broad overlap between Judaic and Christian values, but Greenfield and her cast of commentators are completely unconcerned with partisan political controversies. Names such as Trump or Ocasio-Cortez are never mentioned at all. Instead, they focus on historically defining figures such as Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson.
In fact, Larry P. Arnn of Hillsdale College offers some much-needed second thoughts regarding Jefferson. While he makes no defense for the Founding Father’s slave ownership, he reminds us Jefferson was one of the prime movers behind the Northwest Ordinance, which forbade slavery in the newly acquired Ohio River territories. That kind of nuanced perspective on history is largely absent in current cancel culture debates.
“Civilization in the Danger Zone” certainly has a point of view, but it makes all its points in a highly measured, reasonable manner. Greenfield also organizes the material with admirable economy, given the highly manageable 65-minute running time. In some ways, the thesis harkens back to the “clash of civilizations” discourse prevalent in the 2000s but updated for the era of wokeness. (To be clear, the term “woke” is used by both liberals and conservatives to describe a number of more radical progressive ideologies, including critical race theory, social justice, and gender theory.)
The documentary’s underlying question deserves serious thought: How long can a nation survive when its younger generations hold its founding principles in contempt?
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