Kotkin:
“Hey-hey, ho-ho, Western culture’s got to go.”
– Slogan from 1988 Stanford University
protest led by Jesse Jackson.
In the
aftermath of San Bernardino and Paris massacres, our cognitive leaders – from
President Obama on down – have warned Americans not to engage in what Hillary
Clinton has described as “a clash of civilizations.” But you can’t have a real
clash when one side – ours – seems compelled to demean its traditions and
values.
Leaders
in America and Europe don’t want to confront Islamic fundamentalism, or other
nasty manifestations of post-Western thinking, because they increasingly no
longer believe in our own core values. At the same time, devoted to the climate
issue, they are squandering our new energy revolution by attempting to
“decarbonize,” essentially leaving the field and the financial windfall to our
friends in Riyadh, Moscow, Tehran and Raqqa.
Western ethos deconstructed
As the
great 15th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun observed, societies that get rich
also tend to get soft, both in the physical sense and in the head. Over the
past two centuries, Western societies, propelled by the twin forces of
technology and capitalist “animal spirits,” have created a diffusion of wealth
unprecedented in world history. A massive middle class emerged, and the working
class received valuable protections, not only in Europe and America, but
throughout parts of the world, notably East Asia, which adopted at least some
of the Western ethos.
The
current massive movement of people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia to
Western countries suggests the enduring appeal of this model. After all, people
from developing countries aren’t risking their lives to move to North Korea,
Russia or China. The West remains a powerful beacon in the “clash of
civilizations.”
Yet a
portion of these newcomers ultimately reject our culture and, in some cases,
seek to liquidate it. They do this in countries where multiculturalism urges
immigrants to register as “victims,” and not indulge in Western culture, as did
most previous immigrant waves. After all, why assimilate into a culture that
much of the cultural elite believes to be evil?
Perhaps
the biggest disconnect may involve young immigrants and their offspring,
particularly students. Rather than be integrated in some ways into society,
they are able, and even encouraged, not to learn about “Western civilization,”
which is all but gone from campuses, with barely 2 percent retaining this
requirement.
The
dominant ideology on college campus – “cultural relativism” – leaves little
room for anything other than a nasty take on Western history and culture. Many
students, whether of immigrant parentage or descendants of the Mayflower, have
only vague appreciation or knowledge of Western civilization, making them
highly vulnerable to such pleading. They often go through college now with only
the vaguest notion of our history, the writings of the American founders, the
philosophy of the Enlightenment, our vast cultural heritage or the fundamental
principles of Christianity or, if you will, Judeo-Christianity.
This
extends beyond religion to the very basics – like respect for the First
Amendment – that underpin our social order. Two in five millennials, according
to a recent Pew Research Center survey, believe the government “should be able
to prevent people from saying ... statements that are offensive to minority
groups.” A third of millennials opined that government should prevent speech
“offensive to your religion or beliefs.”
The
media and much of the nonprofit world share this perspective. For all the talk
about Rupert Murdoch – the aging last remnant of contrarian journalism – and
the Koch brothers, the cultural wars have been entirely won by the far larger,
better-funded and protected progressive media and nonprofit establishment. In
virtually every part of the West, more traditional values, from the primacy of
the family to religion and belief in the efficacy of market capitalism, are
being undermined, with increasingly disastrous results.
Psychological deindustrialization
Over a
decade ago, the British historian Martin Weiner proffered his theory of
“psychological deindustrialization” to explain the decline of the British
capitalist class. In Weiner’s estimation, the great 19th century industrial
expansion of that remarkable island nation lost its momentum as the scions of
the capitalist class lost their taste for manufacturing, preferring the
comforts of country estates, the clubby world of London and high-minded
charity.
In the
West today, the children of the rich, and often the rich themselves, embrace
causes, notably climate change alarmism, that work against the whole ethos of
progress and mass affluence. Now many of these people – notably in Silicon
Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood and other centers of absurd wealth – are
determined to “save” the planet by regulating and taxing the middle class back
to the 19th century. That this effort is led by groups like the Rockefeller
brothers, who owe their fortunes to black gold, is ironic, to say the least.
In this
intellectual climate, it is no shock that at the recent Paris climate
conference, Western capitalism was blamed entirely for climate change. This has
sparked the demand for “climate reparations” without a thought that, over the
past two decades, this same capitalism has helped a billion people out of
poverty, mostly in the developing world.
The
blame-the-West-first trend extends well beyond environmental concerns.
Disbelief in the system of democratic give and take to address climate change
reflects views on a whole set of issues, from feminism and gender to race. No
surprise that draconian proposals to address the climate “crisis” often see
little need to deal with Congress, legal due process, even free speech.
So,
rather than address how to improve the environment without eviscerating our own
middle class, we expend enormous energy on peripheral issues like transgender
rights, often exaggerated claims surrounding “a war on women,” and whether the lives
of African Americans matter more. A writer in a recent article in the New York
Times, cogitating on racial privilege, opined, “For me, whiteness is not an
identity but a moral problem.”
Such
attitudes have been around a long time. It’s been almost a half century since
the late Susan Sontag opined that the “white race is the cancer of human
history,” for everything from eradicating “autonomous civilizations” and
upsetting “the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very
existence of life itself.” But in 1966, when these views were first expressed,
they were in a minority, even on campuses. Today, they have evolved into holy
writ.
As such
views have become mainstream, it’s not surprising that there is little
interest, at least in the culture’s higher circles, in protecting the Western
heritage, even when under direct assault. One painful example is the pathetic
nonresponse to the gradual genocide being carried out in the Middle East
against Christians. Threatened with the abolition of the West’s dominant
religion does not seem to motivate mainstream Christians often more worried
about the evils of Islamophobia and climate change than mass killings of their
own co-religionists.
Long-term implications
A
society that no longer believes in its core beliefs cannot prevail against
rivals who, although less wealthy and far less technologically advanced,
embrace their core ideals. A West that rejects (and sometimes is unaware of)
its own heritage cannot overcome those who, for religious or national reasons,
have a powerful belief in theirs.
Some
people in Western countries are reacting to this abandonment of culture and
heritage. Unfortunately, many of them are attracted to demagogues like Donald
Trump or Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s National Front whose anti-immigrant
xenophobia now has potent analogues in countries from the eastern frontier of
Poland, Slovakia and Hungry to seeming secure reaches of Scandinavia. Given the
cultural dominance of the relativist Left and the post-Christian nature of the
culture, none of these movements will likely do more than make noise and
inspire “tut-tuts” among the intelligentsia.
Ultimately,
we can only confront the challenge from authoritarian forces – whether in the
Middle East, China or Russia – when we once again embrace our cultural values
as important and worthy of protection. Our opponents – and that’s what they are
– may be fundamentally weaker than us, but can count on the advantage of belief
in their destiny. To save ours, Western culture needs to stay, not be put away.
