Something is wrong, and practically everyone can sense it.
Since the end of the 20th century, the West seems to have been lurching from one crisis to another: warfare and humiliation in the Middle East, the failure to export liberal democracy abroad, financial collapse and anemic recovery, terrorism, and, latterly, the pandemic, supply chain problems, and warfare in Europe and the Middle East. The globalized world of the late 20th and early 21st centuries is receding. Immigration is at an unsustainable level. We can no longer take for granted that multiculturalism naturally produces harmony, as we were constantly told in the 1990s.
Partisans of the New Right constantly speak of American decay and Western stagnation, while those of the New Left prophesy imminent and irreversible calamity brought on by climate change. Traditional conservatives feel disgust at contemporary liberalism, and blame it for the dissolution of the family, the decline of religion, and social atomization. Others think that liberalism has not gone far enough, and look forward to a utopian trans-humanist future. But many on both sides fear that liberal democracy is tottering on the brink of tyranny.
Words like “decline,“ “doom,” “disorder,” and “end of the world” now regularly appear in the titles of books and articles. And even the disconnected elites of the World Economic Forum talk about what they call a “polycrisis.”
What is anyone going to do about all this? Nothing, it seems. As long as Western elites hold Western civilization in contempt, there will be no improvement.
“Contempt” is not too strong a word. Toward the end of the 20th century, Western elites began to derive their prestige and status not from attachments to local culture and tradition, but from rejecting them. There was no greater disgrace, they thought, than being “parochial.” Pride in your town or neighbourhood above all other places became synonymous with narrow-mindedness. Love of country or attachment to national history were tantamount to bigotry. Finding meaning and truth in religion was all right, as long as it wasn’t Christianity. All Western institutions were racist and had to be changed unrecognizably, or abolished altogether. Turning one’s back on Western culture was a sign of virtue and enlightenment, and, in extreme cases, alternatives to Western civilization were encouraged not to enrich, but to destroy it.
The result is an increasingly homogeneous, uncultured international elite who move comfortably around one another’s national capitals at odds with a much larger population of others who live basically as they always have but who feel increasingly alienated. Worse, ordinary people are constantly told that they need to change: move to a big city, embrace constant economic and social upheaval, give up the old religion and morality, and so on.
But what seems good for the elite is not good for everyone else. Perhaps the most obvious example is the dislocation caused by outsourcing. Some people got rich, but many others saw their jobs eliminated and their communities destroyed. Likewise, elites may delight in constant social and moral upheaval, but no one else does. Most people want and need order, structure, and permanence.
Those principles are absolutely necessary for civilized life and the transmission of culture, and unless they can be restored, Western civilization will continue to drift downstream until it is lost at sea. That outcome would be tragic, and possibly as destructive as the disintegration of Roman civilization in Western Europe, or the collapse of the Chinese Han dynasty at roughly the same time.
What we need ideally is a new elite—one that cultivates respect, instead of contempt, for the values of ordinary people; one that seeks stability and order instead of chaos. This may be a tall order, and it may not be possible in the short term. Elite interests may be too deeply entrenched, though they should be warned that they will suffer the most in the event of collapse because they have farther to fall. And yet I see few, if any, signs that change is coming.
Nevertheless, despite the perception of gathering gloom, we should remember that civilization has overcome stagnation and collapse many times before, even after long intervals of disorder. We should be confident that recovery is always possible. There are always enclaves, however small or remote, that keep the fire going. We can think of the Chinese scholars who kept the Confucian tradition alive amidst post-Han chaos, the Benedictine monks who preserved and copied classical texts after the fall of Rome, or the Sufi mystics who safeguarded Islamic piety after the destruction of the Caliphate by the Mongols in 1258.
The question for us is: Who will play a similar role now?
