Is Western Civilisation Collapsing?
Whatever you think about the current state of our culture, one thing is clear: we don’t agree about anything. While responses to the war in Europe have brought a degree of unity around a desire to protect what matters, we are profoundly divided on almost every issue. Not only that, but the divisions are differences of kind rather than of degree. Viewpoints on gender, race, abortion, education, freedom, speech, and on and on, are not just disagreements beneath a single banner of general agreement on collective values, but totally different perspectives on how we even view the world or source our values. Politically left and right don’t even define what it means to be a human person in the same way, and cannot comprehend the opposite side’s position. Like humanity after the tower of Babel, we are speaking different languages.
Not only is there political division, but culturally we are more abject than we have ever been. Art has become so utterly swamped by commerce and celebrity that, like frogs boiling in water, we seem unable to notice. Cultural phenomenon like ‘The Kardashians’ or ‘Love Island’ that began with the premise of “this is total trash, these people are awful, but it’s so entertaining” and that were watched with a degree of irony and ‘guilty pleasure’, have become stripped of the…
