The Recline of the West
Since the 18th century, the very process of innovation was uniquely institutionalised in the West. That is now precisely what is being globalised.
Some commentators fear that the West is in decline or dying or committing suicide. Others look forward to this development. Still others claim there never has been a “West” to worry about. Each may be right about a different appendage of the elephant.
The unipolar moment—the “end of history” in 1989 when the Cold War concluded and the West with its allies seemed triumphant—led to new globalisation, economic gains in the developing world, and an expansion of liberal democracy. Then came Islamist terror, refugee crises, recession, democratic retrenchment, populist backlash, Russian pushback, and the rise of China. Many Westerners now see geopolitical decline and internal disorder, often citing the pernicious ‘P’s: postmodernism on one side, populism on the other, in any case polarisation.
Some observers fear a global decline of civilisation or even of our species. This is not new. In the past we feared the gods would destroy us for our iniquity. The new fear is that the world may destroy us for our successes, from economic collapse to the exhaustion of energy resources, pandemics, climate change, or nuclear war. One could blame the West for producing these. It does have some say on them, but no longer the only or decisive say. Whatever befalls the world will surely befall the West. Dangers of global and Western decline overlap.
Global prognosis is beyond my pay grade. Even Western decline is open to endless conjecture. Since Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West in 1918, the Western sky has often seemed to be falling, only to rise again. In a civilisation that institutionalises change, something is always going up while something else goes down. At some point, the Western sky might really fall, an epochal and not merely cyclic tumble. How are we to predict that?
Prognosis is tough. It’s tougher if you don’t know who the patient is. Prognosticators of Western decline typically have different patients in mind, with different histories. And there have, in fact, been multiple Wests. It is a matter of historical disagreement which of the earlier Wests gets credit or blame for the present. We are glad some of those Wests are gone, and we are right to be. We are afraid some Western traditions will vanish, and we are right about that too.
Arguably the West is at least reclining. This was inevitable, and maybe even desirable. Our task is to distinguish recline from decline, stop lamenting the former, and fear only the decline of the best of the West. But that requires deciding what “the West” is and was. And what its decline would look like.
