Is the West Slipping Away?
Review: How the West Was Lost by Ben Ryan
What does the future hold for the West? Its perceived decline is not only a well-worn literary genre, but also a matter of lively contemporary interest, not least for the populations of Western countries.
Ben Ryan’s contribution—How the West Was Lost: The Decline of a Myth and the Search for New Stories (Hurst, 2019)—shares its title with an influential 2011 book by the economist Dambisa Moyo. But where that work focused on economic decline, Ryan’s concern is with the modern West’s lack of shared meaning and common purpose—a theme that has provided the subtext for numerous bestselling works in recent years. In the UK, notable examples include Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe (2017) and The Madness of Crowds (2019) (reviewed here on Arc by Esther O’Reilly), which looked in turn at different surface manifestations of the existential crisis gripping the West. Similarities end there, however: Ryan situates himself in contradistinction to Murray, and his book generally reflects the left-liberal consensus of Britain’s political and media mainstream. Where the author differs from many contemporary British commentators is his more positive attitude toward Christianity, and this, combined with the search for meaning and his approach to framing foundational values, makes How the West Was Lost vaguely reminiscent of Justin Welby’s Reimagining Britain (2018), a book Ryan doesn’t mention.
Ryan’s style is digestible, and his approach bears the hallmark of Theos, the think tank where he was based while writing this work. His analysis draws on a wide body of social research, and shows the influence of an ecumenical mixture of religious and secular thinkers. While sources are cited in endnotes, How the West Was Lost is not primarily an academic text but a contribution to a wider public conversation. Its expansive thematic and geographic scope is intellectually ambitious; especially considering the book was published before the author’s 30th birthday. Ryan approaches his task with verve, but clarity is sometimes sacrificed in the pursuit of scale, resulting in a somewhat low-resolution image of a very complicated scene.
When writing about the West’s contemporary malaise, an author might be expected to provide a case history, examine the symptoms and diagnose the ailment, and suggest a cure. This book’s three sections roughly correspond to that scheme, as Ryan discusses the decline of traditional society; analyzes the impact of neoliberalism and immigration on social cohesion and Western values; and concludes by suggesting how we might improve our situation.
To orient the discussion Ryan defines “the West” as an “idea” or a “purely intellectual construct.” But construing it as an “imagined community” or abstract “ideal” can cause one to gloss over the fact that specific social institutions and practices helped to create “the West,” and that these in turn are bound up with the history and culture of specific nations. A satisfactory definition of the West must account for institutions such as the market economy, limited government, the rule of law, common law customs, and freedom of speech—each of which helped give rise to the political, cultural, and social arrangements that came to characterize Western countries. These practices were then carried to other parts of the world by West European (mainly British) people in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, and in some places new nations and states came to be established on their basis. If we view the West merely as an intellectual abstraction, rather than a historical phenomenon, we flatten the important differences between the Anglo-American, French, and continental traditions, and “the West” loses many of the connotations that distinguish it in the popular imaginary.
Ryan suggests that “to be Western is to be defined by three connected ideas.” These are:
1. The dream of a moral endpoint, and inevitable progress towards it.
2. The three republican values of the Enlightenment; liberty, equality, and fraternity (or, perhaps better, solidarity).
3. Universalism: the belief that the first two features could be fostered in any society of the world.
One can certainly see that each of these ideas influenced the development of Western thought and Western societies. But as an exclusive triumvirate of values that define the West, they are inadequately motivated. The obvious objections are not considered, and the whole debate about the foundation of the West — a question which might sustain a life’s work in itself — is opened and closed within a few pages. Collectively, this trinity of values make for a decidedly Whiggish worldview, one that will feel unfamiliar to many observers, not least philosophical conservatives who might feel they have something to say about what it is “to be Western.”
Ryan carefully emphasizes the central contribution of Christianity to Western ideas about conscience and liberty. This point remains under-acknowledged in British public life, although the argument is now better-known thanks to Tom Holland’s Dominion: the Making of the Western Mind (2019), as well as earlier works such as Sir Larry Siedentop’s seminal Inventing the Individual (2014). Sir Larry’s influence is duly acknowledged, as is that of Ryan’s indefatigable Theos colleague, Nick Spencer, whose relevant works include The Evolution of the West (2016). But if we allow that the values of the modern West have a sizeable intellectual and moral hinterland, and that they did not emerge from the mind of Enlightenment philosophes as did Athena from the head of Zeus, then we should also credit the influence of Western thinkers who were skeptical about utopian idealism and cautioned that there were limits to the application of universal principles. Some of these thinkers are very closely associated with the idea of “the West” in the public mind. The Marquis de Condorcet and Thomas Macaulay helped shape ideas about “the West”—but so did David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke.
One advantage of defining the West according to a few verbal criteria is that it gives you an easy yardstick against which to measure political figures and movements who, upon failing to meet the required standards, can be decried as non-Western. Ryan’s criteria lend themselves to the castigation of some of those conservatives and “populists” now attracting support from large sections of the Western voting public. One might, of course, be completely justified in describing political groups of both the extreme right and the extreme left as “anti-Western.” But it is curious to see “populists,” who are among those most likely to speak out in favor of “the West,” labeled “anti-Western” while anti-capitalists are viewed more favorably, and Naomi Klein is commended simply for understanding that galvanizing new “stories” must be “values-based.” If right-wing populists are to be excoriated as “anti-Western,” surely we should also acknowledge that the postmodern left’s breathless criticisms of the West as the sole fount of racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and environmental destruction, are more likely to drive polarization and demoralization than they are to encourage social cohesion.
Understandably, given the state of recent British politics, Ryan spends much time discussing the decline of the European Union, perceiving a relationship between voter alienation and its perceived abandonment of high-flown political ideals in favor of mundane economic prosperity. But the EU and its antecedent organizations have always had economic as well as political objectives, and the portrait of an EU that lowered its gaze from once-lofty ambitions, to focus on tawdry economics, overlooks the extent to which European populations have actively rejected those very political ambitions. Perceptions of a power-hungry EU, keen to interfere in domestic politics, and indifferent to the needs and desires of ordinary people, have stoked widespread fears about the erosion of national sovereignty and democratic accountability.
Ryan is scathing about the role that “populists” have played in exploiting such fears, especially in former Warsaw Pact countries that joined the EU most recently but proved recalcitrant in following Brussels’ lead on certain issues, most notably immigration. Not only in these countries, but across Europe, there is much skepticism about the fashionable assumption that mass immigration poses no threat to Western values, except insofar as Western people might betray those values by greeting mass immigration with insufficient enthusiasm.
Ryan suggests that what we are seeing in Eastern Europe may amount to a turn away from Western principles, evidence of an atavistic desire to “return from” the West and go back to “an earlier model of Christendom in which homogeneous nation-states were protected from outsiders.” But the large-scale movement of people has been politically sensitive and socially disruptive throughout human history, and in our own time it poses difficult questions that need to be discussed without resorting to the anathematization of political opponents, which risks further polarizing our discourse and ceding important ground to extremists. We should also consider that sovereignty might have a special significance in countries that, within living memory, were not only under the sway of domestic dictatorships, but were governed within a trans-national authoritarian rubric where national self-determination was subordinated to the interests of the Soviet Union.
Ryan argues that the three “republican values” of liberty, equality, and solidarity, must be in balance, and that elevating one leads to forms of social and political pathology. When individualism is fetishized, it can weaken social norms and undermine solidarity, and Ryan holds this last value to be the one that is most atrophied in Western societies. He highlights the problems caused by the form of identity politics known as “intersectionalism,” whereby some identities are imbued with “a sacred legitimacy” while others “have been condemned as anathema — as too tarnished by some historic sin ever to be redeemed.” He further explains why one tempting response — to deny the importance of identity altogether — is futile. But the suggestion that “identities must start actively critiquing and challenging one another” is unlikely to bring us somewhere we want to be. He is on firmer ground when arguing for the importance of civil society, and for a reemergence of the community as a locus of discretion and public participation. But it is much easier to motivate civic-mindedness than it is to make a credible case for how this might come about in those areas that suffer most from social anomie, especially in a context where Christian belief and church attendance have declined precipitously (as documented in Chapter 2, “What’s Been Lost”).
The dependency culture of the modern welfare state has led to a denuded sense of personal responsibility across much of the West. In such a context, “community organizing” is no panacea, and can be a euphemism for political activism or “rent seeking” as much as a reference to ordinary people using their initiative to identify and fix local problems. Ryan suggests that social solidarity can be improved by governmental action to reduce economic inequality. But a reemergence of community requires more personal responsibility, not less; and a strengthening of the bonds between people, not those between the individual and the state. In The Road to Serfdom (1944) Friedrich Hayek argued that economic freedom was at the root of Western civilization, motivating it as a prerequisite for personal and political freedom. He went on to explain how well-meaning socialists and reformers help prepare the way for totalitarianism, as attempts to equalize economic results lead to greater political inequality, fewer limits on arbitrary power, and undermine public confidence in the principle of equality before the law. (This is an argument that should give pause to advocates for a “Green New Deal”). Inequality can be addressed by increasing economic opportunities, rather than yet more redistribution by the state; while further expansions of governmental power would mean further inroads into spheres of individual freedom that are already dangerously attenuated. Moreover, the idea we should “fundamentally alter the system” in order to “really address inequality” assumes we have a sufficiently reliable handle on how such seismic alterations will get us there. This is not just a faint-hearted injunction to “be careful what you wish for”: history warns us not to be blasé about such matters.
Clearly, Western societies face a major challenge to strengthen the shared purpose and sense of meaning that can guide them in an uncertain future. But rather than concoct a new “myth” for the West that is sustained by abstract principles alone, we would do better to return to the systems, customs, traditions, habits, and institutions upon which our civilization emerged.
Above all, we need a vision of the West that the populations of Western countries can relate to: a West that is not just a conduit for abstract ideals or general altruism, but their home. If we want to talk about universalism, then we should remember that the closest we have to a universal human aspiration is the desire for home and family. For all our prosperity, many in the West consider this as something beyond their grasp; a fact we ignore at our peril.
