24/08/2023
The Collapse of the West - part 2
Of course reading Macintyre is a totally different experience from flipping through pages of Fadi Lama’s book – profound philosophical reflection vs forecasts based on graphs of GDP growth. Still all those publications point to problematic phenomena within the Western civilization. It is worth noting that there are thinkers who contend the opposite, for instance Steven Pinker in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” or late Hans Rosling in “Factfulness”. It is also worth recalling that apart from the authors above many other writers in the past anticipated the demise of the Western spirit or predicted the crisis of modernity (e.g. Fiodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt or Charles Taylor).
Twilight of civilization is best detected by people abandoning their spiritual inspiration, husbands not loving their wives, mothers not caring about their children, youths not respecting the elders, education losing its meaning, virtue becoming neglected. Institutions matter a lot. However if passion is gone they turn to soulless edifices of former glory. Some people indicate that it is too early to talk about the lack of spirit in the West. The capacity to reinvent itself is still present. There are thinkers of various ideological perspectives, they debate and pit their approaches against each other. Moreover, it looks like we are at the brink of making a breakthrough in using the achievements of digital revolution in a much wilder fashion. The ways of rendering our world safer, richer, more affordable, climate friendly, etc. are being discussed. In such new world Fadi Lama’s the Money Powers would lose its exceptional privileges. It is too simplistic, however, to conflate the West with the Money Powers. The West is still passionate about other things, not only about the money. As Charles Baudelaire wrote:
“Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.”
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