Decline Of Western Civilization Quotes

What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.

Osbert was the only one who didn't seem suspicious. He was so interested in the Decline of Western Civilization that he missed the version of it taking place under his nose.

I believe in courtesy. It is the way we avoid hurting people's feelings. She thought that maybe, just maybe, western civilization was in decline because people did not take time to take tea at four o'clock.

The only crime is pride.

Western civilization was declining too fast for comfort, but too slowly to be very exciting.

The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.

The death of the spirit is the price of progress. Nietzsche revealed this mystery of the Western apocalypse when he announced that God was dead and that He had been murdered. This Gnostic murder is constantly committed by the men who sacrificed God to civilization. The more fervently all human energies are thrown into the great enterprise of salvation through world–immanent action, the farther the human beings who engage in this enterprise move away from the life of the spirit. And since the life the spirit is the source of order in man and society, the very success of a Gnostic civilization is the cause of its decline. A civilization can, indeed, advance and decline at the same time—but not forever. There is a limit toward which this ambiguous process moves; the limit is reached when an activist sect which represents the Gnostic truth organizes the civilization into an empire under its rule. Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.

The distinctive conditions that generated Western excellence are set to continue deteriorating so long as selection does not favor heroes, geniuses, and saints, but rather “Last Men” whose quest for personal happiness likely cannot sustain a civilization in the long run.

If kissing is man's greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the distinction of being man's worst folly, and no doubt the three combined long ago, the one growing out of the others, to foster civilization and lead Western humanity to its present state of decline.

The rise of the West is, quite simply, the pre-eminent historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is the story at the very heart of modern history. It is perhaps the most challenging riddle historians have to solve. And we should solve it not merely to satisfy our curiosity. For it is only by identifying the true causes of Western ascendancy that we can hope to estimate with any degree of accuracy the imminence of our decline and fall.

Western Civilization is in the crisis it is because we have sacrificed more profound values than the immediate and quantifiable consequences we tend to associate with the pursuit of our material interests. Among these are peace; liberty; respect for property, contracts, and the inviolability of the individual; truthfulness and the development of the mind; integrity; distrust of power; a sense of spirituality; and philosophically-principled behavior. But when our culture becomes driven by material concerns, these less tangible values recede in importance, and our thinking becomes dominated by the need to preserve the organizational forms that we see as having served our interests.

Perceptive observers saw civilization thinned to a mere veneer, with barbarism surging just beneath the surface, straining for release.

Also, a large swath of our intellectual culture is loath to admit that there could be anything good about civilization, modernity, and Western society.

Most of the evils attributed to civilization and progress—such as social inequality and subordination, murder, theft, rape, vandalism, and conquest—are found concentrated in the conduct and effects of war. Therefore, in a neo-Rousseauian world view, war itself constitutes one of the principal products of Western progress, and the precivilized condition and the non-Western world before European expansion must have been idyllic and peaceful. As ever, when faith in the myth of progress declines, the myth of the golden age finds new adherents. THE

If the patriarchal system, when compared to primitive systems, seems to represent a “lesser” degree of structuralization, then Western civilization since the decline of the patriarchal system can be said to have been governed by a principle of decreasing structuralization or destructuralization during the whole of its historical course—a tendency that can almost be seen as an ultimate aim. A dynamic force seems to be drawing first Western society, then the rest of the world, toward a state of relative indifferentiation never before known on earth, a strange kind of nonculture or anticulture we call modern.

Personally I am advocating such an objective—to make Israel the center of the new civilization (not less!), taking into consideration the evident decline of the Western (and Eastern as well) civilization….

The West is and will remain for years to come the most powerful civilization. Yet its power relative to that of other civilizations is declining. As the West attempts to assert its values and to protect its interests, non-Western societies confront a choice. Some attempt to emulate the West and to join or to "bandwagon" with the West. Other Confucian and Islamic societies attempt to expand their own economic and military power to resist and to "balance" against the West. A central axis of post--Cold War world politics is thus the interaction of Western power and culture with the power and culture of non-Western civilizations. In sum, the post--Cold War world is a world of seven or eight major civilizations. Cultural commonalities and differences shape the interests, antagonisms, and associations of states. The most important countries in the world come overwhelmingly from different civilizations. The local conflicts most likely to escalate into broader wars are those between groups and states from different civilizations. The predominant patterns of political and economic development differ from civilization to civilization. The key issues on the international agenda involve differences among civilizations. Power is shifting from the long predominant West to non-Western civilizations. Global politics has become multipolar and multicivilizational.

The message of this chapter has been that the advance of civilization often acted to undermine early democracy. It did so whenever new or improved technologies reduced the information advantage that members of society had over rulers.

I must also leave you to analyze the cultural decline of Western art and literature. In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as a priest and ends as a clown or buffoon. Examples of buffoonery in twentieth-century art, literature and music are many: Dali, Picasso, John Cage, Beckett.

Whoever has known the spiritual beauty of the Under­ground Church cannot be satisfied anymore with the emptiness of some Western churches. I suffer in the West more than I suffered in a Communist jail because now I see with my own eyes Western civilization dying. Oswald Spengler wrote in Decline of the West: You are dying. I see in you all the characteristic stigma of decay. I can prove that your great wealth and your great poverty, your capitalism and your socialism, your wars and your revolutions, your atheism and your ­pessimism and your cynicism, your immorality, your broken-down marriages, your birth-control, that is bleeding you from the bottom and killing you off at the top in your brains —can prove to you that there are characteristic marks of the dying ages of ancient states—Alexandria and Greece and neurotic Rome. This was written in 1926. Since then, democracy and civilization have

In 1803, the liberal political economist Francis Jeffrey identified the middle class or “middling ranks” as the social stratum in which this progress took place. The reasonable, sober, polite, and industrious manners of the middle classes (in French, la bourgeoisie ), Jeffrey argued, form the cutting edge of civilization’s moral, economic, and social improvement, which trickles down to the other ranks of society.

Being “civilized” had originally meant living under Roman, or “civil,” law; but at the dawn of the Renaissance it had come to denote a way of life and law distinct from that of barbarism. It included prohibitions against murder, incest, and cannibalism; belief in a transcendant creative divinity; respect for property and legal contracts; and essential social institutions such as marriage, friendship, and the family.

This isn’t the first time we’ve been warned of certain ruin. The experts have predicted civilization-ending aerial gas attacks, global thermonuclear war, a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, a Chinese razing of half of humanity, nuclear powers by the dozen, a revanchist Germany, a rising sun in Japan, cities overrun by teenage superpredators, a world war fought over diminishing oil, nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and weekly 9/11-scale attacks.

It became a commonplace to say, as we do today, that a market economy depends on people pursuing their own self-interest. But self-interest to a student of civil society such as Adam Smith did not mean avarice or greed. Those were the typical antisocial attitudes of a more primitive state of economy and society, in which the fear of material scarcity is genuine and real. Instead, self-interest in a civilized or “polite” society involves the rational desire to provide goods and services at a profit to an equally self-interested consumer

The technological primacy of Western civilization, it can be argued, owes a sizeable debt to the fact that in Europe recourse to magic was to prove less ineradicable than in other parts of the world.61 For this, intellectual and religious factors have been held primarily responsible. The rationalist tradition of classical antiquity blended with the Christian doctrine of a single all-directing Providence to produce what Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’ – the conception of an orderly and rational universe, in which effect follows cause in predictable manner. A religious belief in order was a necessary prior assumption upon which the subsequent work of the natural scientists was to be founded. It was a favourable mental environment which made possible the triumph of technology.

The central values of civilization are in danger. Over large stretches of the earth’s surface the essential conditions of human dignity and freedom have already disappeared. In others they are under constant menace from the development of current tendencies of policy. The position of the individual and the voluntary group are progressively undermined by extensions of arbitrary power. Even that most precious possession of Western Man, freedom of thought and expression, is threatened by the spread of creeds which, claiming the privilege of tolerance when in the position of a minority, seek only to establish a position of power in which they can suppress and obliterate all views but their own. The group holds that these developments have been fostered by the growth of a view of history which denies all absolute moral standards and by the growth of theories which question the desirability of the rule of law. It holds further that they have been fostered by a decline of belief in private property and the competitive market; for without the diffused power and initiative associated with these institutions it is difficult to imagine a society in which freedom may be effectively preserved.

Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hates, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity." But the firm and its partner newswire, the Associated Press, wanted Hayes in office, for several reasons. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union Army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the 1870s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news. (It's later competitor, the United Press, which would be founded on the U.S. Post Office's new telegraph lines, did not yet exist.) The Associated Press took advantage of its economies of scale to produce millions of lines of copy a year and, apart from local news, its product was the mainstay of many American newspapers. With the common law notion of "common carriage" deemed inapplicable, and the latter day concept of "net neutrality" not yet imagined, Western Union carried Associated Press reports exclusively. Working closely with the Republican Party and avowedly Republican papers like The New York Times (the ideal of an unbiased press would not be established for some time, and the minting of the Time's liberal bona fides would take longer still), they did what they could to throw the election to Hayes. It was easy: the AP ran story after story about what an honest man Hayes was, what a good governor he had been, or just whatever he happened to be doing that day. It omitted any scandals related to Hayes, and it declined to run positive stories about his rivals (James Blaine in the primary, Samuel Tilden in the general). But beyond routine favoritism, late that Election Day Western Union offered the Hayes campaign a secret weapon that would come to light only much later. Hayes, far from being the front-runner, had gained the Republican nomination only on the seventh ballot. But as the polls closed his persistence appeared a waste of time, for Tilden, the Democrat, held a clear advantage in the popular vote (by a margin of over 250,000) and seemed headed for victory according to most early returns; by some accounts Hayes privately conceded defeat. But late that night, Reid, the New York Times editor, alerted the Republican Party that the Democrats, despite extensive intimidation of Republican supporters, remained unsure of their victory in the South. The GOP sent some telegrams of its own to the Republican governors in the South with special instructions for manipulating state electoral commissions. As a result the Hayes campaign abruptly claimed victory, resulting in an electoral dispute that would make Bush v. Gore seem a garden party. After a few brutal months, the Democrats relented, allowing Hayes the presidency — in exchange, most historians believe, for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. The full history of the 1876 election is complex, and the power of th

Despite the empire’s problems, however, its former emperor had succeeded in making Byzantium a shining beacon of civilization. The architectural triumph of the Hagia Sophia had only been possible by sophisticated advances in mathematics, and it soon spawned a flourishing school dedicated to improving the field. In Byzantium, primary education was available for both genders, and thanks to the stability of Justinian’s rule, virtually every level of society was literate. Universities throughout the empire continued the Aristotelian and Platonic traditions that were by now over a millennium old, and the works of the great scientists of antiquity were compiled in both public and private libraries. The old western provinces under barbarian rule, by contrast, were quickly sinking into the brutish chaos of the Dark Ages, with recollections of advanced urban life a fading memory. Literacy declined precipitously as the struggle to scratch out an existence made education an unaffordable luxury, and it would have disappeared completely without the church. There, writing was still valued, and remote monasteries managed to keep learning dimly alive. But throughout the West, trade slowed to a crawl, cities shrank, and the grand public buildings fell into disrepair.

Growing up I had been ambivalent about being Chinese, occasionally taking pride in my ancestry but more often ignoring it because I disliked the way that Caucasians reacted to my Chineseness. It bothered me that my almond-shaped eyes and straight black hair struck people as “cute” when I was a toddler and that as I grew older I was always being asked, even by strangers, “What is your nationality?”—as if only Caucasians or immigrants from Europe could be Americans. So I would put them in their place by telling them that I was born in the United States and therefore my nationality is U.S. Then I would add, “If you want to know my ethnicity, my parents immigrated from southern China.” Whereupon they would exclaim, “But you speak English so well!” knowing full well that I had lived in the United States and had gone to American schools all my life. I hated being viewed as “exotic.” When I was a kid, it meant being identified with Fu Manchu, the sinister movie character created by Sax Rohmer who in the popular imagination represented the “yellow peril” threatening Western culture. When I was in college, I wanted to scream when people came up to me and said I reminded them of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, a Wellesley College graduate from a wealthy Chinese family, who was constantly touring the country seeking support for her dictator husband in the Kuomintang’s struggles against the Japanese and the Chinese Communists. Even though I was too ignorant and politically unaware to take sides in the civil war in China, I knew enough to recognize that I was being stereotyped. When I was asked to wear Chinese dress and speak about China at a meeting or a social function, I would decline because of my ignorance of things Chinese and also because the only Chinese outfit I owned was the one my mother wore on her arrival in this country.

LAST DAYS’ LAWLESSNESS There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. . . . 2 Timothy 3:1–4 It’s certainly hard to argue we’re not living in the last days as described in the Bible. Everything in these verses matches up with our current circumstances; there’s a never-ending road of examples lately. Our culture, and Western civilization as a whole, has been declining for a long while—but things can look especially grim today. We do seem to live in evil times when evil is celebrated—whether it’s in the brazen rejection of the Gospel or in the unashamed brutality of terrorist groups like ISIS. A surprising number of our fellow Americans don’t like the word “evil.” They’re always voicing the need for “tolerance” or “understanding”—or what you and I would call “moral relativism.” But these same people sure are keen on trying to legislate “evil” away when it comes to issues like guns, as if gun control laws (that only the good guys will follow) are a solution rather than an added problem.

He was sick of the excuses and the lies. He was tired of the evasions and the untruths, of people refusing to stand up and speak the truth and take responsibility for their own actions. It seemed to him like yet another symptom of the decline of Western civilization; of chaos; and climate change; and environmental disaster; and war; disease; famine; oppression; the eternal slow slide down and down and down. It was entropy, nemesis, apotheosis, imminent apocalypse, and sheer bad manners all rolled into one. People were not returning their library books on time.

This “filtering down” is not a mechanical process in which ideas of intellectuals just happen to come to the attention of the general public. It is instead a conscious effort on the part of intellectuals to alter Americans’ perceptions of the world and of themselves, an effort, among other things, to weaken or destroy Americans’ attachment to their country and to Western civilization.

Plotinus. He is without doubt the most important and influential thinker to appear between Aristotle and Saint Augustine. Yet we know almost nothing about him. His life is an enigma wrapped in a mystery. He declined to tell his disciples any details about his life. He even refused to have his portrait painted or a bust made of his likeness.

It has not been bad values, false doctrines or wrong ideas so much as it has been bad operational thinking that has been responsible for the decline of the West in the 20th century. Thinking today for survival must be operational, not legalistic, moralistic, normative or doctrinal. The only economic, natural or other so-called laws that are valid and useful as bases for calculation may more accurately be termed operational imperatives. Thinking about current problems and challenges, to be useful, must turn around determinable possibilities and calculable probabilities, not legal, moral, or value certainties. What creates a legal certainty is a legal opinion. What creates a religious, a moral or a value certainty is faith. What the fate of western civilization and the survival of the human race in the nuclear age depend on is accurate calculation as to what is operationally possible and probable, and not as to what is morally certain. There is little that is operationally certain about the future but a great deal that is calculably probable.

for Aristotle the world we make for ourselves continually reflects that constant striving toward improvement. In that sense, Aristotle is the first great advocate of progress—and Plato, creator of the vanished utopia Atlantis, the first great theorist of the idea of decline.21

That insanity is a form of freedom became the basic assumption of Foucault’s most widely read work, Madness and Civilization (1961). The dichotomy is significant; in the precapitalist West of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, Foucault claimed, insanity was understood to be part of the human condition, even an ironic comment on man’s pretensions to autonomy and power. Then the classical age defined madness as the enemy of reason and hence the enemy of humanity, requiring rigid and brutal segregation of the insane and other “deviants” in asylums and hospitals. That process of “confinement,” the categorizing, segregation, and exclusion of what seems foreign and hence threatening to the rationalizing self, defined for Foucault the Enlightenment mind and all of modern civilization. All of modern society is, for Foucault, a prison with modern man its inmate.

The historical pessimist sees a decaying or decadent present systematically undoing the achievements of the past. The Nietzschean cultural pessimist sees the present as simply an extension of the same corrupt and meaningless values of the past; true cultural health, he concludes, requires the rejection of both. The imminent collapse of a decadent civilization is not a tragedy but a cause for celebration. It clears the way for something new and unprecedented, a rejuvenated cultural order built on an entirely new principle.

Garvey explained to his audiences that Europe was teetering at the edge of economic bankruptcy. In America bread riots and mob violence were imminent as whites prepared to throw blacks into “economic starvation.” Four hundred million black Africans, he told his Harlem listeners, were now organizing to reclaim their heritage. “The fall will come,” Garvey announced at a rally in 1919, “a fall that will cause the universal wreck of the civilization we see.” A mighty apocalyptic struggle was about to break out “between black and white on the African battle plains.”61 Garvey lingered lovingly over the vision of a global race war, of black against white and white against yellow—although he held out the possibility that blacks might help whites out against the resurgent Asian empires of Japan and China in exchange for political freedom. However, the destruction of white civilization would provide blacks with the tools they needed—science, technology, and weapons of war—to create their own empires. A mighty African nation would emerge from his vast and bloody Armageddon, in which “the Negro must be united in one Grand Racial Hierarchy.”62

It cultivated the same hatreds (industrial capitalism, soulless liberalism, cultural degradation) as its academic mentors, and many of the same goals. There was, however, one important difference. Radicals like Eckhart, Rosenberg, and Hitler were willing to contemplate direct action to overturn what they saw as a sick civilization, not just talk about it.

Susan Sontag did in 1967, that “the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, the emancipation of women … don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought on the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

While Egypt gave the world its astronomy and science, China its art, and Mesopotamia its religion, the sole contribution of Nordic civilization was the factory. “As a system of culture,” Du Bois announced, white civilization “runs chiefly to marvelous contrivances for enslaving the many, and enriching the few, and murdering both.”42

However, all of these “progressive” goals now require the unraveling of Western hegemony. Western civilization, once the driving force of human progress, is now treated as its greatest obstacle.

This opened up the possibility that physical and mental traits that had allowed man to adapt to a savage environment, whether in the remote past (of the Neanderthal hunter) or in the present (of the Watusi warrior), could inadvertently be passed on to his modern civilized descendants. The Darwinian zoologist Henry Maudsley explained this with the chilling observation that there is “truly a brute brain within the man’s,” making it possible to “trace savagery in civilization, as we can trace animalism in savagery.”10 Nineteenth-century biologists called this brutish survival “atavism,” after the Latin word atavus , or remote ancestor. Atavism taught that every organism had certain “lost” characteristics that were ready to reappear under certain conditions and would then be passed on to offspring. Atavistic theory had existed before Darwin, but his theory of evolution only seemed to confirm it, as did Mendelian genetics later on.

Nordau’s theories gave a new twist to the question of how man’s biological evolution and society’s historical evolution intersected. A fourth and disturbing possibility now presented itself: even healthy human specimens living in advanced civilized society would, unless corrective steps were taken, degenerate into a lesser physical and moral type.

By the time Freud published Civilization and Its Discontents, in 1930, humane and liberal values seemed to be flickering out all across Europe. Degeneration’s greatest nightmare—an uprising of the debased, criminalized masses, the triumph of primitive delusion and passion over reason—seemed about to come to pass. The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction. Freud added in a postscript a year later, “But who can foresee with what success and with what result?” Two years after that, in 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany.

For primitive societies in Toynbee’s schema, the depredations of an empire such as imperial Rome or Victorian Britain presented a stark choice: between “being carcass or vulture.”51 But Toynbee suggested that civilization itself, already in the stage of disintegration, also faces a fateful decision. It must either abandon its imperial ambitions and risk complete internal collapse and revolt by its hungry underclass, or transform itself into an all-encompassing universal state. The universal states like imperial Rome form the most spectacular stage of Toynbee’s process of decline, “when a disintegrating civilization purchases a reprieve by submitting to forcible political unification.” But even with its vast colonial empire and its sweeping claims to universal dominion, the declining civilization remains split along an inner and an outer axis.

Modern civilization’s mindless energy and power, symbolized by the mighty turbine he had seen at the Chicago Exposition, stood in opposition to the spiritual serenity of the past, symbolized by the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary. “All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres.” However, Henry Adams refused to allow Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres to be printed, except privately, until after his death. He made the same decision about his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. Like Burckhardt, he could see no cure for the ills he had diagnosed except resignation and withdrawal. In the face of the clamoring forces of modernity, he decided, “beyond a doubt, silence is best.

Development, even in its modest sustainable form, had become a Western curse on the rest of the world. An environmentally sound society in Ehrlich’s terms meant explicitly rejecting what he saw as all the key values of Western society: growth, affluence, and private enterprise, along with “racism, sexism, religious prejudice, and xenophobia.” “Unless these divisive traits can be managed,” Ehrlich warned, “they could cripple attempts to develop the global cooperation needed to create a new civilization.”25 “A new civilization”: Ehrlich’s vision of the future now reflected modern ecology’s call for a new cultural order to replace its old, moribund predecessor. The passing of the West, ecology’s more radical proponents in the seventies and eighties announced, would open the doors to a vital, holistic human community rooted in a “new” organic vision of nature. That radical revision culminated in the influential Deep Ecology movement, which described itself as “going beyond the so-called factual scientific level to the level of Self and Earth wisdom.

Just as Grant borrowed heavily from Houston Chamberlain, so did Stoddard borrow heavily from Grant in The Revolt Against Civilization, adding generous doses of Lombrosian-style statistical surveys to prove that the new immigrants were systematically undermining the racial future of America.* Stoddard’s Nordic type exhibited a remarkable fusion of neo-Gobinian and specifically American virtues. Nordic man was “at once democratic and aristocratic…. Profoundly individualistic and touchy about his personal rights, neither he nor his fellows will tolerate tyranny.” He was naturally averse to degeneration: “He requires healthful living conditions, and pines when deprived of good food, fresh air, and exercise.” His racial purity becomes the key to progress as well, since “our modern scientific age is mainly a product of Nordic genius.” All the nations with high infusions of Nordic blood were, according to Stoddard, “the most progressive as well as the most energetic and politically able.89 But Stoddard also dared to confront the paradox that underlay the Gobinian confrontation between cultural vitality and civilization. Even as a healthy racial stock generates society’s material wealth and cultural attainments, Gobineau had claimed, its openness to change and diversity sows the seeds of its own destruction. Ultimately the people discover that “their social environment has outrun inherited capacity.” The Anglo-Saxon heritage cannot sustain itself in the future without its racial stock. (Grant was also a keen eugenicist.) “The more complex the society and the more differentiated the stock,” Stoddard insisted, “the graver the liability of irreparable disaster.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau drew up the definitive balance sheet of civilization and barbarism for the late Enlightenment. Originally a native of republican Geneva and a self-styled lover of political liberty (in 1762 he published The Social Contract), Rousseau attacked virtually every “progressive” aspect of his own century. Everything his predecessors had praised about the civilizing process Rousseau subjected to a harsh and critical analysis. Refinement in the arts and sciences, politeness in social relations, commerce and modern government were not improving men’s morals, Rousseau proclaimed, but making them infinitely worse. Luxury, greed, vanity, self-love, self-interest were all civilization’s egregious by-products. “Man is born free,” he wrote in the first sentence of The Social Contract, “and is everywhere in chains”—the chains imposed by civil society.

Rousseau reversed the poles of civilization and barbarism. His paeans of praise for primitive man, the “noble savage” (not his term) who lives in effortless harmony with nature and his fellow human beings, were meant as a reproach against his refined Parisian contemporaries. But they were also a reproach against the idea of history as progress. “All subsequent progress has been so many steps in appearance towards the improvement of the individual,” he wrote, “but so many steps in reality towards the decrepitude of the species.” Ownership of property gave birth to competition and exploitation; complex social interaction gave birth to pride and envy. The arts made men soft and effeminate. Human beings became physically weak, unhappy, and highly strung. Worst of all, the progress of civil society brought not political freedom, but its opposite. It “irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established for all time the law of property and inequality … and for the benefit of a few ambitious men subjected the human race henceforth to labor, servitude, and misery.” He concluded one early essay with this ironic prayer: “Almighty God, deliver us from the Enlightenment, and restore us to ignorance, innocence, and poverty.

The nineteenth century faced an ambiguous legacy. On one side was civil society theory, teaching that human society makes men better. On the other stood Rousseau, proclaiming that it makes them worse.

For Hegel, modern Europe gives us the spectacle of man’s progress both as a subject—as an autonomous rational and ethical being—and in terms of his objective relations with others in civil society. Both of these branches of his progress culminate, neatly enough, in the emerging nation-state. As one prominent critic has said, Hegel is the father of the historical theory of the nation, as well as of historical progress.40 Hegel believed that any remaining discrepancies in commercial society—all the issues that worried Rousseau, Malthus, and others about inequalities of wealth, runaway self-interest, and the loss of human purpose—would be finally and definitively resolved by this national state. “The state power,” he explained, “is the achievement of all.”41 Greed and poverty disappear. People become participants in a solid, stable “ethical social realm” ( Sittlichkeit ) created by the expansion of the state’s powers and its professional and enlightened civil servants. They learn that freedom and reason are not at odds, as Rousseau had warned, but one and the same: “In the ethical social realm, a human being has rights insofar as he has duties, and duties insofar as he has rights.” In Hegel’s exalted view, this is what history teaches, reason confirms, and the state makes possible.

Buckle published his History of Civilization in England (1857). Buckle argued that “the progress Europe has made from barbarism to civilization” was due entirely to the growth of man’s knowledge and mastery of the world around him, by which he meant science and technology. Other earlier yardsticks of progress, such as the refinement of manners or the growth of politeness, were now set aside or forgotten. Buckle’s Progress is first and foremost the imposition of man’s rational control over his material environment.

Le Bon claimed that when individuals assemble in the street or at a political meeting, they spark in each other a mass reversion to a primitive state: “By the mere fact that he forms part of an organized crowd,” Le Bon wrote, “a man descends several rungs in the ladder of civilization.” By himself, “he may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, he is a barbarian”—and becomes capable of the sort of irrational and brutal actions that characterize a street riot or lynch mob. “He possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity,” but also the “enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.”41 Since modern urban life and democratic politics create a wealth of opportunities for this kind of mass reversionary behavior (what another theorist, William Trotter, would call “the herd instinct”), enormous dangers loomed ahead for European industrial society. As Le Bon explained, echoing Jacob Burckhardt, “the advent of power of the masses marks one of the last stages of Western civilization … Its civilization is now without stability. The populace is sovereign, and the tide of barbarism mounts.”42 Therefore, the “true” character of mass democracy required a new approach to politics. Traditional parliamentary or legal institutions can no longer control the masses, Le Bon warned. What the crowd looks for, in its atavistic way, is instead a leader, a single powerful figure who can direct its irrational energies to constructive ends.*

Race was the central fact in world history, Du Bois announced in 1897, and “he who ignores or overrides the race idea in human history ignores or overrides the central thought of all history.” Du Bois’s African Volksgeist would enjoy a final triumph over white civilization, rather than succumbing to the same social and economic demands.29

His first book, Black Faces, White Masks (1954), asserted that Western civilization repressed not only its own passions, as Freud had said, but those of the peoples it colonized as well. White Europeans sensed the vitality and cultural health of the nonwhite races, particularly blacks like Fanon himself, and therefore placed them in a subordinate position. Whites then trained the nonwhite intellectual to think of his own culture as inferior and lacking in “civilized” values. By accepting this denigration of his own culture, the nonwhite intellectual in effect denied his own humanity. He became a neurotic, Fanon explained in clinical detail, and permitted the white man’s unconscious fears of vitality to dictate his own life choices.

Its character would be familiar to any reader of Werner Sombart or Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. True black Kultur rejects all white bourgeois standards, since “the values of that class are in themselves anti-humanist” and racist; in fact, any black person who adopts “American middle class standards and values” ceases to be black.34 It rejects liberalism with its mealymouthed belief in compromise and interracial unity, and it rejects capitalism, looking instead to build a community based “on free people, not free enterprise.” Black Power also reflected the Garveyite perspective that blackness could be a vehicle for mass mobilization and the destruction of a decadent white civilization. Carmichael urged blacks to “create new values” in Heidegger’s sense. Like his counterparts in the German revolution on the Right, Carmichael saw his own era as “a time of dynamism” in which new forms of authority and power must be substituted for old. The rise of the Black Power movement would sweep away the “outmoded structures and institutions” of the past, Carmichael predicted, including racism. Its motto would be “Modernization, not moderation.”35

The Frankfurt School proclaimed that Western civilization had been built around a deliberate degenerative strategy: that of crushing man’s vital instincts through the rational control of nature, oneself, and others. The modern West’s chief characteristic was its essential lifelessness. As Marcuse later put it, Nietzsche’s “total affirmation of the life instinct” represented a “reality principle fundamentally antagonistic to that of Western civilization.”4 Liberation on the Frankfurt School’s terms, therefore, meant giving up a view of life that stressed man’s ability to use logic and reason to arrive at truth and his need to accommodate himself to a reasonable and natural social order in order to be happy and free. Instead, human beings had to look to a deeper and more “negative” consciousness, in short, a Nietzschean consciousness. The Frankfurt School created a new cultural hero, the “critical” writer/teacher/intellectual. A direct descendant of the Romantic artist, he would use his typewriter or classroom to attack and expose the contradictions and evils of modern Western civilization. “Under the conditions of late capitalism,” Horkheimer wrote in 1936, “truth has sought refuge among small groups of admirable men”—meaning himself and his friends. Later on, those same “admirable” critics would act as carriers of a new cultural pessimism, stemming this time from the political Left rather than the Right.

The most essential requirement of a Pan-Africanist history, like an Aryanist or Pan-Germanic history, is a moment of pure origin from which all subsequent developments derive their character, whether as triumph or decline. Diop turned Negritude and older Pan-Africanist elements into a complete theory of civilization, with the diffusion of a vital and superior black culture to the rest of the world. Diop divided humanity into two types: southerners (Negro-Africans) and “Aryans,” which included Semitic peoples, Mongoloids, and American Indians. Aryans formed patriarchal societies, characterized by the political suppression of women and a lust for warfare. They celebrated materialism, individualism, and pessimism. Southerners, by contrast, were matriarchal, creating a unified community of free and equal people who were creative and idealistic and who lived by the rules of social collectivism instead of competitive capitalism. In every aspect

This is the legacy of the African continent to the nations of the world,” George James says in Stolen Legacy, which “laid the foundations of modern progress.” Later, the Greeks and other whites managed to steal all these civilized skills from the African man, leaving him in darkness. When he heard this, the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger asked skeptically, “How does one lose knowledge by sharing it?

The notion that social groups are never merely aggregates of their members, and that “we must study the history of the [social] group, its traditions and institutions, if we are to understand and explain it as it is now,” once propped up Romantic nationalist history and universal histories of civilization from Hegel to Toynbee.3 Now it has become dogma among feminists, proponents of African-American studies, and other minority group-identities. Without it, in fact, much of the multiculturalist program would collapse under its own weight.

Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century liberalism was in a sense the culmination of that humanist tradition. Undeniably, it generated its own forms of orthodoxy and complacency, which prompted a backlash. What Tocqueville in 1853 already sensed in Gobineau’s ideas has now largely come to pass. Modern pessimism has done more than just counterbalance excessive optimism regarding the future; it has managed to wreck our faith in the idea of civilization itself. Our real problem is not that our popular culture is filled with obscenities or trivialities, but that no one seems able to present the necessary intellectual grounds for an alternative.

Refined manners were closely connected with the second important virtue of civilization, the rise of politeness, a word with the same root as “polished” and “finished.” The third Earl of Shaftesbury, English moralist and philosopher, used the term to describe people as well as objects, and saw it as the happy result of modern urban life: “We polish one another, and rub off our corners and rough sides by a sort of amicable collision.” These multiple contacts teach us that we must treat others with respect, or civility, and that we owe a due regard for their interests as well as our own.20 Politeness was more than just a question of good manners (as we would say today). It opens up our true nature as rational, social, and moral beings.

The first was the refinement of manners. Manners formed a society’s collective character or virtue. “Manners,” Edmund Burke exclaimed, “are of more importance than laws” in the secure foundation of human society. “They aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”18 Voltaire made them the principal subject of history itself. As men become more rational, and as their society’s horizons become less narrow, their manners lose their earlier parochialism. Society’s tastes in literature and the arts become, in a word, civilized (in fact, the French simply translated the English word “refinement” as civilisation ). Refinement of manners brings a tolerance for those of different political and religious views: no more Inquisitions or religious wars.

Cultures are organisms," Spengler explains, "and world-history is their collective biography." Like any other vital organism, then, each culture goes through the stages of youth, maturity, and decline. "Culture is the prime phenomenon of all past and future world-history." "Every Culture has its own Civilization...The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture....Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again." Thus, while the culture is a period of ebullient creativity, the civilization that inevitably follows is a period of reflection, organization, and search for material comfort and convenience. For example, classical Greece was the culture; imperial Rome the civilization. From the beauties of Greek poetry to the imperialism of Roman law, we now live in the civilization of Western ("Faustian") culture and cannot avoid the consequences. Among these Spengler foresaw the "megalopolis," the city of faceless masses, the omnipotence of money, and a new Caesarism.

If we are to make the ordinary man aware of the spiritual uity out of which asll the separate activities of our civilization have arisen, it is necessary in the first place to look at Western civilization as a whole and to treat it wit the same objective appreciation and respect which the humanists of the past devoted to the civilization of antiquity. This does not seem much to ask; yet there have always been a number of reasons which stood in the way of its fulfillment. In the first place, there has been the influence of modern nationalism, which has led every European people to insist on what distinguished it from the rest, instead of what united it with them. It is not necessary to seek for examples in the extremism of German racial nationalists and their crazy theories, proving that everything good in the world comes from men with Germanic blood. Leaving all these extravagances out of account, we still have the basic fact that modern education in general teaches men the history of their country and the literature of their own tongue, as though these were complete wholes and not part of a greater unity. In the second place, there has been the separation between religion and culture, which arose partly from the bitterness of the internal divisions of Christendom and partly from a fear lest the transcendent divine values of Christianity should be endangered by any identification or association of them with the relative human values of culture. Both these factors have been at work, long before our civilization was actually secularized. They had their origins in the Reformation period, and it was Martin Luther in particular who stated the theological dualism of faith and works in such a drastic form as to leave no room for any positive conception of a Christian culture, such as had hitherto been taken for granted. And in the third place, the vast expansion of Western civilization in modern times has led to a loss of any standard of comparison or any recognition of its limits in time and space. Western civilization has ceased to be one civilization amongst others: it became civilization in the absolute sense. It is the disappearance or decline of this naive absolutism and the reappearance of a sense of the relative and limited character of Western civilization as a particular historic culture, which are the characteristic features of the present epoch.

The Decline of Western Civilization Part II

That title had been succeeded by X’s first two albums, Los Angeles and Wild Gift (the latter of which was named album of the year by the critics of the Los Angeles Times); the soundtrack for the wild, intimate 1980 L.A. punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization (directed by Biggs’s then wife, Penelope Spheeris); The Blasters; and The Record, the debut of the ultra-provocative, tongue-in-cheek quartet Fear. Chris D.’s Ruby subsidiary had issued A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die and the Gun Club’s debut, The Fire of Love.

Jarret's people have been known to beat or drive out Unitarians, for goodness' sake. Jarret condemns the burnings, but does so in such mild language that his people are free to hear what they want to hear. As for the beatings, the tarring and feathering, and the destruction of "heathen houses of devil-worship," he has a simple answer: "Join us! Our doors are open to every nationality, every race! Leave your sinful past behind, and become one of us. Help us to make America great again." He's had notable success with this carrot-and-stick approach.

Colonialists respect nothing. They would take creatures royal in their primitive beauty, serene in their ignorance, and noble in their qaked simplicity, and would twist them out of shape, distort their minds, contaminate them with their own ideologies and abstractions.

Tm merely trying to do my job. God, Scholscher, how can we talk of progress when we’re still destroying, all around us, life’s most beautiful and noble manifestations? Our artists, our architects, our scientists, our poets, sweat blood to make life more beautiful, and at the same time we force our way into the last forests left to us, with our finger on the trigger of an automatic weapon, and we poison the oceans and the very air we breathe with our atomic devices. Perhaps this madman Morel will succeed in rousing public opinion. By God, I feel I could join him in his maquis. We’ve got to resist this degradation. Are we no longer capable of respecting nature, or defending a living beauty that has no earning power, no utility, no object except to let itself be seen from time to time? Liberty, too, is a natural splendor on its way to becoming extinct. I’m speaking for myself to get it off my chest, because I haven't the courage to act like Morel. It’s absolutely essential that man should manage to preserve something other than what helps to make soles for shoes or sewing machines, that he should leave a margin, a sanctuary, where some of life’s beauty can take refuge and where he himself can feel safe from his own cleverness and folly. Only then will it be possible to begin talking of a civilization. A utilitarian civilization will always go on to its logical conclusion-forced labor camps. We must leave a margin. And besides, let me tell you . . . There's nothing to be so proud of, is there?

You know why? Because I thought you were different from us. Yes, I thought you were something special, something different on this sad earth of ours. I wanted to escape with you from the white man’s hollow materialism, from his lack of faith, his humble and frustrated sexuality, from his lack of joy, of laughter, of magic, of faith in the richness of after-life. In fact, I wanted to escape from everything you’re learning from us so quickly, from all the things people like you, Monsieur le depute, are daily injecting into the black man’s soul. Soon there’ll be no Africa left: people like you, Monsieur le depute, for all their talk of national independence, will deliver Africa to the West forever. You’ll, accomplish that final conquest for us. Of course, to achieve that, people like you will have to exercise a tyranny and a cruelty compared to which colonialism will soon appear as child’s play — and in the name of Marx and Stalin, you'll accomplish that conquest for us. For it is our fetishes, our pagan gods, our prejudices, our racism, our nationalism, our poisons that you dream of injecting into the African blood. . . . We’ve never yet dared to do it, but under the name of progress and nationalism, you’ll do the job for us. You’re our most rewarding fifth column. Naturally, we don’t understand this: we’re too stupid. We’re trying to fight you, to destroy you, to prevent you from delivering Africa to us forever.

Another reason I wanted to write this book is that many young men today - especially young Christian men - are looking at the present state of our nation with disgust. They see what’s become of Western civilization and its “elected” officials, getting fat and wealthy off the backs of those who work, and who do absolutely nothing to stop its decline. The more cynical among us perceive that the decline they fail to stop may be, in fact, their intention. Feeling powerless and isolated, many men begin to look deeper into past political movements and eventually realize that even if Fascists weren’t always very nice, at least they didn’t tolerate Drag Queen Story Hour. It’s an understandable journey - perhaps even an inevitable one. I believe those on that path should be treated with empathy and grace, acknowledging why they feel the way they do and not - as is almost universally common - dismissing them entirely or accusing them of holding beliefs they don’t.

Fifty Best Rock Documentaries Chicago Blues (1972) B. B. King: The Life of Riley (2014) Devil at the Crossroads (2019) BBC: Dancing in the Street: Whole Lotta Shakin’ (1996) BBC: Story of American Folk Music (2014) The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time! (1982) PBS: The March on Washington (2013) BBC: Beach Boys: Wouldn’t It Be Nice (2005) The Wrecking Crew (2008) What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (1964) BBC: Blues Britannia (2009) Rolling Stones: Charlie Is My Darling—Ireland 1965 (2012) Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (1967) BBC: The Motown Invasion (2011) Rolling Stones: Sympathy for the Devil (1968) BBC: Summer of Love: How Hippies Changed the World (2017) Gimme Shelter (1970) Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017) Cocksucker Blues (1972) John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band: Sweet Toronto (1971) John and Yoko: Above Us Only Sky (2018) Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s “Imagine” Album (2000) Echo in the Canyon (2018) BBC: Prog Rock Britannia (2009) BBC: Hotel California: LA from the Byrds to the Eagles (2007) The Allman Brothers Band: After the Crash (2016) BBC: Sweet Home Alabama: The Southern Rock Saga (2012) Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm (2010) BBC: Kings of Glam (2006) Super Duper Alice Cooper (2014) New York Dolls: All Dolled Up (2005) End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (2004) Fillmore: The Last Days (1972) Gimme Danger: The Stooges (2016) George Clinton: The Mothership Connection (1998) Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (1997) The Who: The Kids Are Alright (1979) The Clash: New Year’s Day ’77 (2015) The Decline of Western Civilization (1981) U2: Rattle and Hum (1988) Neil Young: Year of the Horse (1997) Ginger Baker: Beware of Mr. Baker (2012) AC/DC: Dirty Deeds (2012) Grateful Dead: Long, Strange Trip (2017) No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005) Hip-Hop Evolution (2016) Joan Jett: Bad Reputation (2018) David Crosby: Remember My Name (2019) Zappa (2020) Summer of Soul (2021)

From Gibbon to Spengler to Toynbee and the Durants, the symptoms of dying civilizations are well known: the death of faith, the degeneration of morals, contempt for the old values, collapse of the culture, paralysis of the will. But the two certain signs that a civilization has begun to die are a declining population and foreign invasions no longer resisted.

Sidonius lives in a world already half barbarian, yet in the year before the Western Empire falls he is still dreaming of the consulship for his son. Why did they not realize the magnitude of the disaster that was befalling them? This is indeed a question almost as absorbing as the question why their civilization fell, for au fond it is perhaps the same question.

Less speculative is the productivity-enhancing learning by doing that occurred during the high-pressure economy of World War II. Economists have long studied the steady improvement over time in the speed and efficiency with which Liberty freighter ships were built. The most remarkable aspect of the surge in labor productivity during World War II is that it appears to have been permanent; despite the swift reduction in wartime defense spending during 1945–47, labor productivity did not decline at all during the immediate postwar years. The necessity of war became the mother of invention of improved production techniques, and these innovations, large and small, were not forgotten after the war.

Overall, it seems that we have to accept that Western civilization will decline. It is, essentially, inevitable.

Since 2000, we have seen a sharp decline in growth in output per person and its two components—growth in productivity and in hours of work per person—after corrections for the ups and downs of the business cycle. Because the basic data are unambiguous in registering a significant and deepening growth slowdown, the book’s title, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, has become a statement of fact.

Single mothers have children largely because the welfare state and other government mechanisms transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to single mothers. (We know this because, as the welfare state has grown, so has the prevalence of single motherhood – and, on the rare times that benefits are curtailed, additional births decline as well.)

Machiavelli’s fusion of Polybius and Aristotle yielded a future of gloom. The Romans had read Polybius to discover how a great empire would be doomed if it failed to keep Aristotle’s balance of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—the One, the Few, and the Many. Machiavelli’s reading was far more pessimistic. Not just Rome, but every free society is doomed from the start. Real republics exist in real time, not on some eternal plane like Plato’s literary version. “All human affairs are ever in a state of flux and cannot stand still,” the Discourses explains, meaning that every society will experience either constant improvement or decline.

There is, however, an obvious problem in imposing, on the basis of eastern evidence, a flourishing Late Antiquity on the whole of the late Roman and post-Roman worlds. In the ‘bad old days’ western decline at the end of Antiquity was imposed on the eastern provinces. Now, instead of all the different regions of the empire being allowed to float free (some flourishing in the fifth to eighth centuries, others not), a new and equally distorting template is being imposed westwards.

Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in anything pertaining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to an end. The Northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities, and of the dynamic force and insistence that had expressed itself in world-historical visions of the future — visions of millennial scope — nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passion yearning to create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and nothing but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it had to give its inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an object. And so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in all modernity, even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of life. There is something of this lie in the entire intellect of the Western Civilization, so far as this applies itself to the future of religion, of art or of philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third Kingdom. For deep down beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this hectic zeal is the effort of a soul that may not and cannot rest to deceive itself. This is the tragic situation — the inversion of the Hamlet motive — that produced Nietzsche's strained conception of a "return," which nobody really believed but he himself clutched fast lest the feeling of a mission should slip out of him. This Life's lie is the foundation of Bayreuth — which would be something whereas Pergamum was something — and a thread of it runs through the entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity of its own existence.

Why is westernization so attractive to Muslims as it is for everyone else? It is irresistible because it is easy. Contemporary civilization is based on self-indulgence while that of Islam require sacrifice, altruism, discipline, self-control and endurance which are difficult. But self-indulgence leads to decadence and decline while the opposite qualities, which Islam demands, lead to superior strength, unity and virtue. If practiced in its right spirit, Islam leads to social integration. Self-indulgent materialism leads to social disintegration and ultimately collective suicide.