Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

The West’s real crisis isn’t war. It is the weakness within

The West appears to many not only to be declining, but to be flailing around like ‘an ineffectual angel beating its wings in the void’.

The rather clumsily executed war, sorry, combat operation, in Iran has resulted in an exponential increase in the number of doomsayers talking endlessly about the “decline” of the West. It appears that the situation has resulted not only in lots of missiles, bombs and drones being launched, but also assorted intellectual or pseudo-intellectual objects being hurled in the air on television and YouTube. 

Perhaps it is time to take a deep breath and attempt to clear the sullied air a bit.

The origin of the expression “Decline of the West” goes back to the German historian Oswald Spengler, who published the first volume of his eponymous book in 1918 and the second volume in 1922. Spengler can be seen as an intellectual descendant of the German Romantic Movement. He was a great admirer of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Among other things, Spengler believed that our Indic civilisation was “ahistorical”. That, in his opinion, was not a bad thing. It might actually be a sign of civilisational health—or so he seems to have thought!

Spengler viewed civilisations as akin to natural organisms subject to the impact of seasons. Civilisations, according to him, went through four stages or seasons—spring, summer, autumn and winter. His principal obsession was with the “decline/downfall” of Western civilisation, which he thought was heading into its winter in the 1920s. Spengler was fashionable for a time, especially in Germany, where the pessimism of the soul has always had its spokespersons. As Marxists and post-modernists took over Western academia, Spengler disappeared from the reading list.

Even those not of the Marxist persuasion made the case that instead of declining, the West was booming and blossoming, especially after 1945 and even more so after 1991. This was when the Francis Fukuyama thesis became popular. Not only was the West thriving, but all other civilisations had no choice but to become like the West. Bill Clinton, possibly a Fukuyama acolyte, predicted that China would inevitably become like the West.

Just three decades later, things look very different. 9/11 represented the first invasion into the very heartland of the empire. It provided a warning sign. 2008 may have been when the West as we know it, peaked. The fall was pretty rough as Western economies imploded. 

The economic crisis was exacerbated by two never-ending wars in which the West got involved in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Russia, which had been dismissed as a “petrol station” pretending to be a country, managed to improve its economy even as it boldly embraced “non-western” Russian orthodoxy. China proved Clinton wrong by getting richer and more powerful while diligently refusing to imitate the West. 

Clinton turned out to be........

© ThePrint