Commentary
It would be hard to find a civilization anywhere that has delivered more to its inhabitants than the modern West, from freedom of choice to prosperity to security to dazzling cultural opportunities, with Bach, hip-hop, and “
Ghost Chickens in the Sky” all just a click away. But also hard to find one less self-assured and resolute mentally, morally, or militarily. What on Earth, or some other locale, has happened to us and what can we do about it?
By now the attempted suicide of the West is painfully obvious. As Avi Abraham Benlolo recently
wrote regarding Hamas, “By attempting to force Israel into a ceasefire with a madman with an end-of-time plan, the international community reveals an utter weakness that is undermining western civilization.”
It’s not the first time, of course. Even now, to read Jean-François Revel’s 1983 screed “How Democracies Perish” about the credulity and worse of Western Cold War policymakers is to tremble with rage. And let me be clear that self-criticism is one of the great strengths of the West.
It’s a crucial reason we carom perilously from success to success while our enemies march staunchly from failure to failure. No matter how wise or necessary a policy may be, there’s always someone in a free society calling it stupid and evil, often a state-funded professor, forcing us to explain and examine our own conduct. But it can feel, today especially, that self-criticism has turned from a source of strength to a catastrophic weakness, as
the best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.
There’s a haunting quotation I owe to Curtis R. McManus’s screed “Clio’s Bastards,” from Karl Jasper’s 1949 “The Origin and Goal of History”: “In the West, it is the ‘exceptions’ which break through the universal [and] in this is rooted the perpetual disquiet of the West, its continual dissatisfaction, its inability to be content with any sort of fulfilment.” And again, rightly so… up to a point. It is a glorious strength of the West that it can be based on strong traditional families without throwing others off roofs, hold to Christian values without imposing orthodoxy via the state, and so on.
Or can it?
Today, on the family, we are entering a demographic disaster that not even millions of immigrants holding very different values can prevent. Yet our politicians are committed only to the exceptions and scorn even to praise, let alone assist, the universal.
On the economy, one finds a similar inversion. Instead of cherishing the free-market cornucopia and skimming its plenty to help the less fortunate, we get
apocalyptic rhetoric about mobs burning down Versailles if we don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
On security, our politicians
strut and preen about helping allies while hollowing out our military and even winking at disloyalty. And they deny crime is rising, while disarming the law-abiding.
As for our heritage, we topple statues of Sir John A. Macdonald and Queen Victoria, as if any other society, in history or even today, has come close to our achievements in abolishing slavery and embracing difference. Why do we hate ourselves so for living up to our ideals, and praise others who despise them, that we rename Toronto’s Dundas Square “Sankofa” when Dundas was an abolitionist and the Asante were
major slave traders, and fund UNWRA but won’t arm Israel?
In bafflement at the Cold War version of this deformation of free inquiry into malice, Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky complained: “The term ‘liberal’ in the American context does not mean anything definite, or anything similar to traditional European liberalism. In fact, it’s nothing but an extreme mental aberration best described by the Russian saying: that it is like a dog in reverse because it barks at its own folks and wags its tail in front of a stranger.”
Ouch. But enough doom and gloom. Now for the good news. Self-criticism works both ways, targeting our achievements and defenders, but also our flaws and critics. Including at
a conference I’m helping organize this July in Red Deer, Alberta, called “Decline of the West: Our Fate or Our Choice?” My contributions, at least, will follow my usual approach of avoiding optimism, a psychological condition and generally fatuous, and instead embracing hope, a theological virtue.
Our speakers will run through all the problems and pull no punches. But we’re looking for solutions, not rage or self-pity. We’re determined that even now, with rough beasts rocketing toward Bethlehem, we shall stand like Horatius on the bridge and defy the enemies of liberty and decency, foreign and domestic. We believe that liberalism, in Bukovsky’s classical sense, has not died and is not doomed. And we hope you’ll join us, in person or virtually.
Ideas have consequences. Let us choose ours wisely and defend them boldly.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
