Danny Randell: Western Civilisation is already dead
What are you going to do to revive it?
Western civilisation is dead, to begin with. And if you’ve any doubts whatever about that, allow me promptly to disabuse you of them.
Most Western countries spent the 1990s and early noughts celebrating the supreme triumph of our ideas over those of the former Eastern Bloc. The West was richer, freer and better educated, and the proof of the pudding was in the eating: our ideas had made it possible for Boris Yeltsin to be astonished by an ordinary supermarket aisle.
Thus, the end of the twentieth century was marked by optimism. Racial tensions were low. Communities were safe. Houses were affordable. And a century-long experiment in state education had proved a remarkable success. The West was happy, healthy and wealthy — but we were not wise. We traded wisdom for hubris and allowed self-conceit to drive us towards increasingly insensible policies that have eroded our civilisational wealth and well-being. Instead of looking to the past with humility to see what worked, we looked to the future with fatuous idealism, trading our inheritance for a mess of pottage that might be variously described as an enormous experiment in living or, in less oblique terms, as liberalism unleashed.
Today, inter-ethnic strife is unsettling our societies, heinous crimes are commonplace, and cities across the West have become global villages, while housing has become increasingly unaffordable. Our education system is largely an indoctrination factory for insensible ideas and incorrigible self-hatred.
Our downfall was set in train well before the 1990s. Indeed, for this period to have appeared as the apogee of Western life, there had to be some residual glue holding everything together. But as the following paragraphs should make clear, a return to those halcyon days — for some, at least — is now impossible. The residual glue is gone.