The Autumn of Western Civilization

Dangerously jaded and cynical, the West is rudderless and adrift in existential crisis.

Bret Stephens just published an excellent column in the Wall Street Journal. His argument is that since we no longer require students to take Western Civ courses in school, we’ve raised an entire generation without much admiration or appreciation for Western culture and civilization.

Other civilizations, like Russia, China and the Islamic World, know what they are and believe in their own moral superiority. The West no longer does; we no longer believe we are worthy of influencing the world.

The West — and, for clarification, I mean the US, Canada and Western Europe — has become so obsessed with its historical misdeeds and flaws, and unappreciative of its unique virtues and accomplishments in the grand scheme of human history, that it is reluctant to assert its moral authority to lead in the world. This is not just a criticism of Barack Obama, either, although this was a core conservative critique of our 44th President, the first president that didn’t seem to believe in American exceptionalism as it was traditionally understood since the end of World War II, meaning that the West and its values should reign supreme in the world. With Obama, you got the sense that he never felt comfortable asserting Western moral leadership in the world — when he did, it was reluctantly and accompanied with qualifiers and reassurances that America didn’t think it was better than any country; e.g. we’re only acting in our immediate security needs. Obama went to great lengths to make clear that no one nation or civilization’s values and morals were superior to another’s, including his own.

The problem, however, is bipartisan; Trump might be the President most explicitly indifferent to Western moral values. His foreign policy is centered not on asserting Western moral leadership in the world but instead in looking out for #1 — America First. It may sound like American exceptionalism, but it’s not, as it has little interest in spreading our values and way of life. Trump is quite clear where he stands on that matter: in an interview earlier this month, Trump brushed off concerns about Vladimir Putin’s thuggish reign in Russia by saying, “You think our country is so innocent?” Trump has no interest in asserting moral leadership in the world and promoting and defending western values where they are absent or criticized, and that leaves an opening for other rising and ambitious civilizations like Russia and China, as well as the resurgent Iranians.

The West seems only able to masochistically focus on its past sins and imperfections — “We’re so guilty and morally compromised. Just look at all the bad we’ve done: slavery, Hiroshima, Iraq, Vietnam and beyond . . . We don’t deserve to lead the world.” Meanwhile, over the weekend, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s Foreign Minister, called for a “post-West world order” in a speech. The only atmosphere in which he could express such a sentiment is one in which the West utterly lacks the will to defend itself and its values on the world stage. The fact that Lavrov was bold enough to express such a goal is a dire warning sign to the decadent West: our world order is crumbling.

In reference to Lavrov’s comments, Bret Stephens had this to say:

Mr. Lavrov understands something that ought to be increasingly clear to American and European audiences: The West — as a geopolitical bloc, a cultural expression, a moral ideal — is in deep trouble. However weak Russia may be economically, and however cynical its people might be about their regime, Russians continue to drink from a deep well of civilizational self-belief. The same can be said about the Chinese, and perhaps even of the Islamic world too, troubled as it is. The West? Not so much.

Russia, China and the Islamic World don’t believe they’re perfect or that the histories of their civilizations are devoid of wrongdoing; they know they’re not without sin, but the crucial difference between them and us is that they don’t believe their past sins preclude them from asserting their values and moral authority around the world. They aspire to shape the world in their image, as they see fit, and they do not feel their causes are undermined by their past sins. We do, and it’s crippling.

But it’s not just our moral self-loathing and cynicism that is the source of malaise and stagnation in Western civilization.

Often, world superpowers just get tired of running things. Britain did after its long period of supremacy. By the end of World War II, Britain was more than happy to hand over the reigns of global hegemony to the US, and we were eager to accept them. But after Iraq, Afghanistan and the larger Global War on Terror, Vietnam, the Cold War and the Panic of 2008, we are no longer willing and able to take on the financial, military, cultural and diplomatic burdens of running the global order. And it’s not just America that has grown indifferent: most European NATO members regularly fail to fulfill their financial and military obligations to NATO, meaning they’re unserious about protecting themselves, and assume the Americans will take care of any and all security crises when they arise. Western Europeans would rather maintain their generous welfare states than spend on military. They’ve essentially become, collectively, our Continental protectorate. And this is to say nothing of their self-destructive and delusional immigration policies in pursuit of their multicultural fantasies.

Part of the problem is the fact that us Westerners have been in control for so long we’ve taken it for granted: we don’t know a world in which we are not the preeminent superpower on earth. We feel like we can shirk many of the burdens and still maintain the benefits. We deride those who still seek to assert American leadership and values in the world as “neocons” (who are not entirely undeserving of their poor reputation, to be sure) and say we’re tired of being the “world’s policeman.”

Another part of the problem is complacency on a civilizational scale brought on by our relative prosperity and security: once you’ve reached the mountaintop, as America and the West did both after World War II and with finality at the end of the Cold War in 1991, there is nowhere else to go but down. We are the richest, most powerful, safest civilization on earth: we have nothing to strive for anymore. I’m talking about in comparison to the rest of the world — of course we had our civil rights and equality battles over the past century, but relatively speaking, we Westerners enjoy more equality, personal autonomy and dignity than any other civilization on earth. Again, we’re not perfect, but our economies are freer and fairer than most any others. We as a civilization no longer have any aspiration to achieve, no struggle pushing us to greater heights. Our overarching civilizational goals are realized already; we have it all. The only thing we can do is maintain our current role and protect what’s ours. We’re in the maturity stage as a civilization; we’re not hungry for anything.

Think about it: what is the consensus view in the West on anything? There’s no consensus on the War on Terror. Many in the West want to aggressively go after terrorists, but many others have no stomach for such fights, and, at any rate, believe our foreign meddling is the biggest cause of terrorism anyhow. Immigration? The rising populist right in the West sees mass immigration and the globalized economy in general as a mortal threat to Western Civilization, challenging the elite consensus that we ought to be full-steam ahead on globalization and open migration. We’ve become ambivalent on free trade, too, which used to be a foundational value of Western economic orthodoxy.

So what do we want from the rest of the world? Basically for everyone to mind their own business. Stop the violence and squabbling. Give us a break, will you? Let us rest for a bit; let us have a few minutes without having to worry about what’s going on in the most far-flung corners of the globe. We want a break, a vacation, from being responsible for everything on this planet. We simply want the global status quo — which favors us — to maintain itself indefinitely, but we no longer desire to work to maintain it.

No longer do we feel unworthy of imposing our values on the rest of the world, we no longer have any energy or desire to do so, either.

In the West, we’re so ashamed of our history — and this is Stephens’ main point — that we don’t even think it’s worthy of teaching our students:

There was a time when the West knew what it was about. It did so because it thought about itself — often in freshman Western Civ classes. It understood that its moral foundations had been laid in Jerusalem; its philosophical ones in Athens; its legal ones in Rome. It treated with reverence concepts of reason and revelation, freedom and responsibility, whose contradictions it learned to harmonize and harness over time. It believed in the excellence of its music and literature, and in the superiority of its political ideals. It was not ashamed of its prosperity. If it was arrogant and sinful, as all civilizations are, it also had a tradition of remorse and doubt to temper its edges and broaden its horizons. It cultivated the virtue of skepticism while avoiding the temptation of cynicism.

And it believed all of this was worth defending — in classrooms and newspapers and statehouses and battlefields.

We’ve since raised generations to believe none of this, only to be shocked by the rise of anti-Western politics. If you want children to learn the values of a civilization that can immunize them from a Trump, a Le Pen or a Lavrov, you can start by teaching it.

I agree with Stephens here that we should make efforts to rekindle younger generations’ passion for Western civilization and belief in our exceptionalism and values. But it’s not a panacea; it may help, and is, at any rate, a no-brainer as far as school curriculum goes. All students should learn the history of Western Civilization — and not that self-loathing, identity politics-centric garbage they teach in electives, where main point of the class is to foster anti-Western sentiments. Universities in the West should teach our side of the story, not Howard Zinn-style, anti-West screed. If you want to learn history from another perspective, take that class as well. But all students should learn our history from our perspective.

But making Western Civ mandatory again will not save us.

We’ll only appreciate what we have is when it’s gone.

The word for what we are is “jaded.” Here’s the definition: “tired, bored or lacking in enthusiasm, typically after having had too much of something.” Western Civilization has grown jaded, burnt-out, and cynical.

There is no reversing our cynicism and jadedness, either; there are no obvious, easy solutions to get us interested in asserting ourselves globally. There is no way to make ourselves hungrier for societal advancement and glory and power than the Russians and the Chinese and the others. We’re the haves, they’re the have-nots. They have an inherent hunger, we’re inherently satiated. There is no way to replicate or artificially produce that hunger that drives civilizations to ascend beyond their current states. And, at any rate, we already have it all: there’s really not a lot we can aspire to. We have everything to lose and little to gain.