The crisis of western civilisation

Faith in the West has collapsed and, amazingly, people have been slow to rise to defend it

etween 1935 and 1975, Will and Ariel Durant published a series of volumes that together were known as The Story of Civilisation. They basically told human history (mostly western history) as an accumulation of great ideas and innovations, from the Egyptians, through Athens, Magna Carta, the Age of Faith, the Renaissance and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. The series was phenomenally successful, selling more than two million copies.

That series encapsulated the western civilisation narrative that people, at least in Europe and North America, used for most of the past few centuries to explain their place in the world and in time. This narrative was confidently progressive. There were certain great figures, like Socrates, Erasmus, Montesquieu and Rousseau, who helped fitfully propel the nations to higher reaches of the humanistic ideal.

This western civilisation narrative came with certain values — about the importance of reasoned discourse, the importance of property rights, the need for a public square that was religiously informed but not theocratically dominated. It set a standard for what great statesmanship looked like. It gave diverse people a sense of shared mission and a common vocabulary, set a framework within which political argument could happen and most important provided a set of common goals.

Starting decades ago, many people, especially in the universities, lost faith in the western civilisation narrative. They stopped teaching it, and the great cultural transmission belt broke. Now many students, if they encounter it, are taught that western civilisation is a history of oppression.The first consequence has been the rise of the illiberals, authoritarians who not only don’t believe in the democratic values of the western civilisation narrative, but don’t even pretend to believe in them, as former dictators did. Over the past few years especially, we have entered the age of strong men. We are leaving the age of Barack Obama, David Cameron and Angela Merkel and entering the age of Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Abdul Fattah Al Sissi, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump.

Premodern mafia states

More and more governments, including the Trump administration, begin to look like premodern mafia states, run by family-based commercial clans. Meanwhile, institutionalised, party-based authoritarian regimes, like in China or Russia, are turning into premodern cults of personality/Maximum Leader regimes, which are far more unstable and dangerous.

Then there has been the collapse of the centre. For decades, centre-left and centre-right parties clustered around similar versions of democratic capitalism that western civilisation seemed to point to. But many of those centrist parties, like the British and Dutch Labour Parties, are in near collapse. Fringe parties rise.

Finally, there has been the collapse of liberal values at home. On American campuses, fragile thugs who call themselves students shout down and abuse speakers on a weekly basis. In America, the basic fabric of civic self-government seems to be eroding following the loss of faith in democratic ideals. The faith in the West collapsed from within. It’s amazing how slow people have been to rise to defend it. There have been a few lonely voices. But liberalism has been docile in defence of itself. These days, the whole idea of western civilisation is assumed to be reactionary and oppressive. All I can say is, if you think that was reactionary and oppressive, wait until you get a load of the world that comes after it.

David Brooks is the author of The Road to Character. He also teaches at Yale University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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