Is the West Living in the End of Days?

An apocalyptic vibe seems to have settled over the West. Signs and portents abound: The Covid plague and the Russo-Ukrainian War have unleashed two of the Four Horses of Revelation. For those not terminally “woke,” gaudy transexuals performing for prepubescent school-children, and credentialed medical doctors poisoning and mutilating healthy children and young people bespeak the moral idiocy that typically marks civilizational collapse. A self-created energy crisis threatens to turn off the heat and lights and all the other amenities of modern civilization. And cities rife with murder, daylight plundering of stores with impunity, junkies shooting up near schools, excrement polluting the sidewalks, and the mentally disturbed roaming streets and subways summon up images redolent of rough beasts whose time has come round at last.

What we’re really talking about is that staple of historiographical pessimism, what in 1918 Oswald Spengler called the Decline of the West. Since then many moments of Western decline have come and gone. But is this time different? Are we finally facing the end of the most sophisticated, wealthy, and powerful civilization in history?

Our geopolitical rivals certainly think so. Putin’s Russia, Xi’s China, and Khamenei’s Iran watch our cultural degradation, hedonistic lives, intolerance for physical and psychic discomfort, obsession with even low risk, and dwindling faith, and calculate that we no longer have the nerve or convictions to maintain our global dominance…And why shouldn’t they think we are declining, when for decades many of our own cultural, intellectual, and political elites and institutions have turned against those defining goods?

They have banished faith from the public square; redefined marriage, sexuality, and the two sexes themselves; polluted our schools and universities with illiberal doctrines and intellectual higher nonsense….Such catalogues of decline typically are accompanied by explanations of why. As far back as ancient Athens, the corruption of the citizenry’s character by wealth and leisure has explained the erosion of civic virtue like courage, service, and duty that brings on decline and defeat.

For example, in the direct democracy of ancient Athens, citizens could vote to spend public money on themselves through state subsidies and stipends. According to the historian Theopompus, this redistribution of money made 4^th century B.C. Athenians “less courageous and more lax.” Rather than spending money on the military to check the ambitions of Phillip II, “the Athenian people thoroughly squandered their state revenues. . . .

Another standard cause of civilizational decline is the abandonment of religion….but without a transcendent authority to buttress our virtues, principles, and rights given not by other flawed men, but by “nature and nature’s God,” as our Declaration of Independence put it, our defining principles, morals, and laws are cast adrift. Especially in an open and free society, every ideal, good, virtue, or principle becomes negotiable and relativistic, mere subjective preferences and tastes for which most people are not likely to fight, kill, and die.

The central importance of religion is the argument of Russia and Iran, who contrast their regimes–– founded, whether sincerely or cynically, on faith and religious observance––with the Christophobic West. The perceived heathenism of America and Europe has been a constant theme both in jihadist exhortations, and in Vladimir Putin’s sermons and rationalizations for his brutal invasion of Ukraine….Meanwhile, the West’s circulation of sordid images and preposterous cultural fads like transsexualism only make our rivals’ claims about our lack of faith and moral corruption more plausible.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-the-west-living-in-the-end-of-days/