Much of the 19th century’s optimism, rooted in the triumphs of technology, evaporated in the embers of World War I. So when a German mathematics teacher, Oswald Spengler, published The Decline of the West in 1918 he found many readers shared his pessimism. Shortly thereafter Georges Bernanos, a war veteran, said: “Christianity is dead. Europe is going to die. What could be simpler?” Nevertheless, when I began teaching history 60 years ago most universities’ general education requirements still included two semesters of Western Civilization. Little did I imagine that in 20 years Jesse Jackson would lead Stanford University students in a march chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go!” He and his followers were, in fact, merely fulfilling Fulton J. Sheen’s prophetic words in 1974: “we are at the end of Christendom,” meaning “the economic, political, social life as inspired by Christian principles.” Still more, he declared: “we have seen it die.” Some certainly think so.
Dambia Moyo, an Oxford-educated Nigerian economist, explained why she thought it died in How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly and the Stark Choices Ahead (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, c. 2011; Kindle Edition). Years ago I read and reviewed Moyo’s Dead Aid—a persuasive critique of various programs designed to help Africans that actually did much harm—and I think her analysis of the West’s decline worth pondering. Economists rarely write fluently, and Moyo’s text takes patience to work through. But her main points are clearly made and should give us pause. However glibly economists following John Maynard Keynes have declared we can endlessly borrow money because we are borrowing from ourselves, there is always a payday someday. How long we can put off the coming collapse no one knows. But the West cannot survive the economic policies it’s pursued for a century. And the author believed China would soon become the world’s economic superpower. She says the West (and especially the United States) lost its way because of how it “viewed, stored and wasted its capital. The West’s behaviour over the last fifty years has been like that of a profligate son, squandering the family wealth garnered over the centuries—frittering it away on heady indulgences and bad investments” (p. 14). In short, we lived far beyond our means, borrowing to spend, going into debt rather than paying our bills.
This became painfully evident when the housing market collapsed in 2008, exposing economic folly at its worst. In the 1930s FDR’s New Deal sought to help folks own homes, and “policymakers inadvertently launched a fifty-year culture of debt and spawned a generation that set their economies firmly down a path of economic destruction” (p. 36). Emboldened by government guarantees, banks unwisely loaned money and debtors generally evaded the consequences of their spendthrift ways. “The 2008 housing crisis is the West’s worst bubble since the Great Depression, not simply in its impact on the financial sector but because of its reach into the real economy – people’s jobs, companies and the governments themselves. The true scale of the fallout is yet to be felt. What the world is less willing to acknowledge is how the US government has presided over and continues to create and foment the worst kind of bubble: a bubble in an unproductive asset financed by bank debt (the housing bubble)” (p. 60). What the bubble revealed was “Debt, as a way of Western life, has become an addiction” (p. 49). Consider, for example, President Joe Biden’s solution to the student loan quagmire—just “forgive” the debts and keep on loaning more students more money!
Millions of older folks depend on the government for their retirement income. We in the U.S. expect Social Security to care for us in old age. However, Moyo says: “Forget Bernie Madoff, forget Allen Stanford, the biggest Ponzi scheme has got to be the looming car crash that is Western pension funds. And like any well-run Ponzi game, its results will be devastating. It will all end in tears.” Sadly: “Governments across the Western industrialized world have, through pension funds, successfully sold their citizens something that they can never possibly finance.” (p. 79). The truth regarding these funds remains unknown because of “deliberate obfuscation” involving “accounting trickery” concealing the actual debt we owe.
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Many of us who taught courses in Western Civilization sought to transmit the rich cultural and intellectual history of the West to our students. Rooted in the Hebrew, Greek, Roman, and Medieval worlds, the West nurtured the liberal arts and their cultural traditions. We generally took the stance of Cicero in regarding history as historia magistra vitae, a discipline providing life-lessons worthy of study and implementation. That rich treasure trove is now threatened by revolutionary movements seeking to erase history in order to establish progressive ideologies. Thus in the progressive schools following John Dewey history was replaced by “social studies” and classical languages disappeared. Alarmed by such developments, Frank Furedi, a British scholar, has written The War Against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for Its History (Cambridge: Polity Press, c. 2024; Kindle Edition). Prompted by riots in Portland, Oregon, in 2024, he argues “that the stakes in this conflict could not be higher. For when the past is contaminated, it becomes near impossible to endow people’s life with meaning in the present. The aim of this book is to explain why the War Against the Past must be defeated” (p. 6).
In George Orwell’s masterpiece, 1984, Winston Smith (the book’s protagonist) anticipated this war: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” Instead of trying to tell what happened in the past with reasonable fairness, we now have professors and journalists who specialize in “accusatory history” or “grievance archaeology.” Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States—widely used as a text in the nation’s schools—-perfectly illustrates this endeavor. The point is not to tell the truth and develop students’ minds but to mobilize mobs to trash anything slightly racist or colonialist. Thus removing statues of Robert E. Lee was likened to getting rid of a rabid dog that needs to be slain. A loathing for one’s ancestors, a guilty conscience for planetary pains, is cultivated. Many elementary schools now lament the injustices resulting from “white privilege” and seek to shame kids for their skin color. The late great Margaret Thatcher saw this development quite clearly, saying: “‘We are witnessing a deliberate attack on those who wish to promote merit and excellence, a deliberate attack on our heritage and our past, and there are those who gnaw away at our national self-respect, rewriting British history as centuries of unrelieved doom, oppression and failure—as days of hopelessness, not days of hope’” (p. 16).
To show how and why this contempt for the past developed, Furedi explores its “long gestation.” The progressive movement, arising in the closing decades of the 19th century, generally tried to untether itself from the past in order to birth a fresh new and much improved world. American progressives wanted to change things and were sure they could improve most everything they touched, be it politics or religion or education. John Dewey embraced Darwin’s theory of naturalistic evolution and urged discarding “the whole past two thousand years of philosophical discourse, with its search for a permanent and unchanging reality.” So too “New Liberals” in Britain, “Social Democrats” in Sweden, and thousands of socialists and communists and fascists all shared the same commitment to utopian schemes. Doing so led them to write “negative histories” condemning tradition and heroic figures in a past, which “is haunted by evil; its influence is malevolent, and the sway it exercises over present-day society is implicated in oppressive and exploitative behaviour” (p. 96). Furedi deems this a “Year Zero ideology” determined to clean the slate and write an entirely different story for mankind. This was early evident during the French Revolution, with its revolutionary calendar and more recently Pol Pot declaring year zero as he began cleansing Cambodia in 1975. “Advocates of Year Zero frequently practice what the Romans characterized as damnatio memoriae: the erasure of history” (p. 99).
Leading the charge to re-write history are writers obsessed with racism. Ancient Greeks are denounced as evil because they owned slaves. Never mind that slavery in the ancient world had nothing to do with skin color! Since Aristotle thought slavery resulted from natural inequalities separating men, he is condemned for his “‘heinous views’ as if he was a 21st-century Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan” (p. 107). He’s further condemned because “he is regarded as one of the founding figures of Western civilization through the ages. Taking him down by contaminating his reputation is not unlike the ‘condemnation of memory’ by Roman practitioners of damnatio memoriae” (p. 108). They make slavery the major factor in American history, as is evident in The New York Times 1619 Project that has been adopted by many schools. To Furedi this project “is designed to contaminate the tradition and foundation that underpins the American way of life” (p. 109). The chief scribe for the 1619 Project, Hannah Jones, believes that: “’The white race is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.’ Her reference is not simply to the white people who settled America in the 17th and 18th centuries. She added that the ‘descendants of these savage [white] people pump drugs and guns into the Black community, pack Black people into the squalor of segregated urban ghettos and continue to be bloodsuckers in our community.’ An unceasing record of wickedness connects the white settlers who arrived on the shores of America in 1619 with their descendants today’” (p. 110). Jones received a Pulitzer Prize for her fulminations, and folks like her see most all history as a story of exploitation and oppression of indigenous and enslaved peoples.
At the heart of this endeavor is “anachronism,” defined as an “error in chronology; the placing of something in a period of time to which it does not belong.” It is what the French historian Lucien Febvre termed the historian’s “sin of sins.” Yet hundreds of modern historians sin with abandon! Militant feminists scout out incidents of sexual discrimination and equate Roman matrons with American housewives. Scholars finding their own “identity” in race or ethnic roots discover the evils of racism wherever they look. Icons of the West’s literary masterpieces are dismissed if they even slightly differ from today’s cultural standards. “Shakespeare’s plays have also become the target of the anachronistic temper that aims to reinterpret and rewrite his text in accordance with the ethos of decolonization” (p. 147). A UCLA Shakespeare scholar who wrote White People in Shakespeare claims “that ‘Shakespeare’s poems and plays actively engage in “white-people-making.”’ Indeed: “‘Shakespeare provided the cultural resources white people have drawn on over the centuries to ‘define and bolster their white cultural, racial identity, solidarity, and authority’” (p. 149). Anachronism slips easily into “presentism”—what C.S. Lewis deemed “chronological snobbery”—when we forget “the principle of historical specificity” in order to become Monday morning quarterbacks. Lyn Hunt, a former President of the American Historical Association, labeled it a stance of “temporal superiority.’” Said she: “‘Presentism, at its worst, encourages a kind of moral complacency and self-congratulation. Interpreting the past in terms of present concerns usually leads us to find ourselves morally superior’” and rather than “learning from history” and we look for “lessons” rather than enlightenment. “‘Presentism encourages a narcissistic mode of consciousness that flatters its practitioners for being enlightened and ‘aware’, unlike those who inhabited the ‘bad old days’” (p. 158). The past becomes a white board upon which we can splash our current concerns.
After carefully examining a variety of important topics—language, racial identities, education, etc.—Furedi concludes: ‘The harm done by the vandalization of the past is all too evident in the contemporary world. Young people, growing up with a weak and troubled sense of connection with what preceded them, are the human casualties of the War Against the Past. The imposition of the condition of historical amnesia contributes to the perpetuation of a mood of cultural malaise. Trapped in a presentist quagmire, Western society, which once prided itself in its orientation towards the future, has turned on itself. Winston Churchill was right when he stated that ‘a nation that forgets its past has no future’. To recognize this is also to recognize the existence of an additional virtue, the importance of which is most obvious when it is least present: the virtue of having a clear sense of the traditions to which one belongs.” (p. 333).
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A more optimistic take on the state of the West is provided by Spencer Klavan in How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for 5 Modern Crises (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, c. 2023; Kindle Edition). He acknowledges that there are many signs of “civilizational collapse” but reminds us that there have been many such eras throughout the history of the West. But Christians should never lapse into despair, either with themselves or their civilization. Powerful cultural forces may push us to despise the past, but we need a healthy historical perspective to give us “knowledge that might help put our present crises into context.” The crises he examines include reality (choosing objectivity or relativism), the body (accepting it as given or trying to remake it), meaning (what makes life worth living), religion (is there actually a transcendent realm), and the regime (who ought govern the nation). “To jettison the best thought of ages past is to leave ourselves fumbling through an eternal present.” So we need to overcome our “chronological chauvinism” and give “sustained attention to the great works of Western culture” that will enable us to deal with the crises we confront (p. xvii). Are thinks the “people who will preserve Western civilization, no matter how perilous its future, will be people like you, the reader of this book” (p. XXVIII).
A decade ago media folks began tossing about the phrase “post-truth.” This indicated a relativistic approach to reality. You have “your truth” and I have mine, but there’s no actual truth. Words don’t describe reality. They’re used to impose our will upon our world. Common sense realists have always assumed we can know things that are separate from us. Relativists, following the prescriptions of Nietzsche, recite mantras such as: “Believe women.” “That’s my truth.” “Elevate black voices.” One’s personal feelings are preeminent and demand acceptance. Martin Heidegger dubbed this “the unconditional dominion of subjectivity.” This position is as ancient as the Sophists in Athens (such as Protagoras) who taught students how to speak persuasively, manipulating crowds by any means possible. Plato would report that another Sophist, Thrasymachus, said: “justice is nothing other than what is good for the powerful.”
T. S. Eliot memorably said that “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.” As was evident in his famous “allegory of the cave,” Plato shared this conviction. His teacher, Socrates, dedicated himself to refuting the Sophists and arguing for objective of truths, knowing what is real. As portrayed by by Plato, Socrates’ dialogues “inaugurated Western philosophy. We must make it our question too” (p. 17). “At its root, the question is whether there is anything outside yourself” (p. 27). Relativism, confining truth to one’s mind, was (to Socrates and Plato) manifestly shallow and untenable. It leads to nihilism and fantasies. “The nihilism that fueled the Gulag” and the fantasies that fuel utopias, Klavan says, have “engulfed civilizations before, and may do so again.” But “there is a curious thing about the West. The truth that fails in the short term often turns out to be the one that lives for all time. We revere the name of Socrates, and not his executioners; we celebrate Solzhenitsyn and not Stalin. “‘Unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground and dies, it remains but a single grain, with no life.”’ So said Jesus to his followers not long before he was crucified.” An understanding of history should show us that “eternal truths seem, inevitably, to reassert themselves. It is our duty to defend these eternal truths—no matter how often they are denied, no matter how unpopular they become, and, as with Socrates, no matter the cost” (p. 34).
Common sense realists acknowledge that we are “rational animals,” creatures uniquely endowed with both physical and spiritual faculties. Today’s sophists generally deny our spiritual side, our soul. Analyzing it, Aristotle dealt with our uniquely human self-consciousness. We not only think but we know we are thinking. Saint Jerome “called this self-aware part of us the scintilla conscientiae—the divine spark of self-knowledge” (p. 40). We have a given nature. We are embodied souls. Aristotle deemed this reality “hylemorphism—the belief that form (morphē) and matter (hulē) are always (or almost always) intertwined.” This suggests a “union between body and soul that saves us from both pure materialism and pure dualism, a philosophy that conforms to our experience while also providing insight into how to live” (p. 60). Thomas Aquinas took Aristotle’s insights and wove them into Christian philosophy. Facing the sexual confusion amply evident in America, where men pretend to be women and win athletic competition, a return to Aristotle would be a move in the right direction.
In the purely material world examined by scientists such as Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins, there’s nothing meaningful to our existence. We’re tiny bits of matter fitting into a niche illustrating the processes of natural selection. Indeed, says Klavan: “If there truly is nothing beyond nature, both art and life are meaningless” (p. 87). But there’s the “music of the spheres” and we make music! To Igor Stravinsky: “music is a force which gives reason to things” and “probably attended the creation of the universe.”
To find meaning we need to turn to thinkers in the past who actually found it. They refused to believe that matter is all that is and allowed insights from poetry and philosophy to guide them in dealing with matters of ultimate concern. They celebrated artists endeavoring to portray athletes and poets celebrating soldiers. One of the best of the ancients, Plato, wrote the Timeas, a dialogue still worth heeding. In it, “time and space are a copy, a mimēsis, of the infinite timelessness in which the one creator god dwells: ‘time imitates the infinite,’” and “the whole of space was formed in such a way ‘as to be as much like the perfect, rational, living being as possible, in an imitation (mimēsis) of that being’s eternal nature.’ The interlocking revolutions of the heavenly bodies mimic the harmony and order of the craftsman-god himself, moving according to predictable patterns and emulating, in time and space, the eternal rationality of god—who made all things “with the desire that everything should be as similar to him as possible.’” This goes for us, as well, for we are a “microcosm, a miniature model of the vast, mimetic world. When we reason well—when the image of the world in our mind aligns with the truth of the world as it is—we are ‘imitating the unchanging revolutions of God’ within our own souls” (p. 84).
Such insights from ancient thinkers naturally lead us to our need for religion. That many modern folks have no interest in religion doesn’t mean they have no need for it. We need permanent values as well as passing facts. In fact, some astute scientists are “beginning to consider God a perfectly plausible answer to the ultimate questions that precede scientific inquiry” (p. 114). Strangely enough, some high-level scientific speculations sound downright theological! Why does anything exist” Why? From Whence? There is no obvious material reason for the strange “fine tuning” found throughout the universe. It really does seem there is Mind as well as matter. It’s really true “that in the beginning, was the word” and creation came into being. “So it is that Saint Augustine said to God, ‘you do not create in any other way than by speaking.’ I am suggesting that life is a language, from the heavens which declare the glory of God to the strands of DNA which synthesize living creatures into being from primordial sludge” (p. 134). In Augustine and the Bible there is food for the soul that transcends “the pop Epicureanism that some materialists and scientists have settled upon” (p. 135).
Concluding his treatise, Klavan says: If there is one thing I hope you will take away from all these reflections on the current state of the West, it is this: hold on to what is truly real” (p. 175). Hold tightly to your faith in God. Be a good mom or dad, support your church. Tend your soul with care. Ponder permanent things. Doing so will help revive Western Civilization.