So many people warn about the West’s determination to destroy itself. Edward Feser’s warning is particularly vivid. ‘Whom the demons want to destroy, they first make mad.’ A man claiming to be woman … and taken seriously …
Western cultural suicide as apostasy
Edward Feser, The Catholic World Report, 18 December 2021
The modern West has abandoned the Faith, and lost, along with it, even the natural virtues, along with these supernatural gifts. The higher one has been raised, the further he has to fall.
In his classic book Suicide of the West, James Burnham famously characterized liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide.” I’ve been meaning for some time to write up an essay on the book. This isn’t it. But Burnham’s thesis came to mind when reading Michael Anton’s essay “Unprecedented” in the latest New Criterion, because the phenomena Anton cites clearly confirm Burnham’s analysis.
Ours is a civilization in decline, and at a rapidly accelerating pace. That isn’t new in human history. But the precise manner in which it is disintegrating seems to be unprecedented, which is the reason for the title of Anton’s essay. What has effectively become the ideology of the ruling classes, which goes by many names – political correctness, “wokeness,” “critical social justice,” the “successor Ideology,” the baizuo mentality, and so on – manifests a perverse self-destructiveness and nihilism that, as Anton argues, appears sui generis.
This ideology, now embraced wholeheartedly by our elites and propagated by them in all the major institutions of society, teaches hatred of their own country and their own civilization as somehow uniquely malign and oppressive. It encourages foreigners and immigrants to regard the United States and the West in general with the same hostility. Affluent left-wing whites have also adopted an ethnic self-hatred that is unparalleled in history, enthusiastically embracing the demonization of their “whiteness” as the source of all evil in the world. Yet these forms of oikophobia or hatred of one’s own are prescribed by them only for Westerners and white people – non-Westerners and non-whites, however bloody or oppressive the histories of their own people, are encouraged only ever to celebrate their heritage.