Decline & Fall

The 1990s bestseller How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill asserted that Irish monks, after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, preserved essential religious and secular tracts from antiquity through the Dark Ages ensuing from Rome’s collapse. The subsequent reintroduction of these classical texts arguably “recivilized” Europe after centuries of barbarism.

Predictably, human nature remains constant across the centuries, driven by the same primal impulses—ambition, fear, greed, and tribal loyalty—that fuel conflict and upheaval. These enduring drives and emotions ensure that humanity cannot permanently exorcise evil; it persists, resurfacing in ever-shifting forms.

In the twentieth century, Western civilization teetered on the brink of annihilation, barely surviving the twin horrors of Nazism and Bolshevism. These ideologies, shrouded in propaganda myths about “race” and “class”, respectively, unleashed unprecedented destruction, claiming tens of millions of lives and threatening the very foundations of liberal democracy. Yet, survival came at a staggering cost, leaving scars that should have instilled constant vigilance.

Introduce mass immigration. The white working class ‘betrayed’ the hard left when they failed to rise in the much longed-for proletarian revolution, and they failed to rise because they had become too affluent. The Marxist solution was to introduce a new, foreign-born ‘oppressed proletariat’ as a means of enabling Socialism’s march toward total power. The number of Third World immigrants in Britain runs into the millions. This deliberate racial dilution and dispossession of an indigenous people has never happened on such a scale – unless under threat or use of extreme violence.

PROMOTE Conformity in the Guise of Individualism. Has there ever been such conformity among the youth of a democratic nation before? Most young people are politically correct. They have been reared to believe in themselves as individuals, and to hold their own self-esteem (their very high and totally unearned self-esteem) as an intrinsic part of said individuality. But in reality they have been socially engineered into individuals who all believe the same thing.

THE Marxist left/liberals have completed their ‘long march through the institutions’. They claim the varied lunatic policies they enacted were for the benefit of society, but can this really be the case? When viewed through the prism of reality, much of Socialism’s ideology appears to have one aim and one aim only: the total destruction of society. This is not an overreaction by any means — if societal destruction was your bag, would you not carry out the following?

Europe’s war on speech and Hollywood’s corporate implosion signal the end of an era and (perhaps) the beginning of another.

In his brilliant book on the precariousness of Western Civilization, , scholar Spencer Klavan cites an epic historical change that took place in a single moment. It was the Visigoths burning the city of Rome in 410 AD, observed by Saint Jerome. “Who would believe that Rome would fall, she who had been built up by the conquest of the whole world?” Jerome wrote. Klavan captured the irony that evaded even the saint. “But even as he wrote these words, Jerome himself had already completed a Latin translation of the Bible which would serve as a foundation stone of Christendom in western Europe.”

THE West – a metaphor abused and rarely understood – is nearing its end. Its decline is no longer exceptional but emblematic. In fact, credible augurs claim its demise is no more than 20 years away. Democracy, for its part, never truly rose from the grave after its passing more than 2,000 years ago.

What is democracy? On paper, it is an arrangement grounded in unconditional pluralism and unreserved respect for individuals, administered by honest civil servants in an atmosphere of frugality, transparency, uprightness, strictly limited terms of office for all officials – elected or unelected – alongside direct citizenship participation. The individual – not the pack, not the people, not society – is the cornerstone of any community worthy of the name. Over body, property and mind, the individual is the uncontested sovereign. True democracy upholds the indisputable supremacy of the individual over the collective. Yet today it is a chimera rather than the system proclaimed to be in force.

I was on a panel recently talking about work visas and immigration policy. Despite some disagreement about tactics, we agreed more than I expected on policy. Something else struck me, too. We didn’t interrupt each other. We spoke in turn, deferred to each other, and otherwise behaved civilly.

These days, that seems rare. The Left-wing broadcast media is increasingly intolerant of particular views. A recent report from the Media Research Centre, for example, found that the supercilious CNN host Abby Phillip interrupted liberal guests three times but conservative guests 127 times during a “random sample of 10 episodes” of her news show. In that, she was perhaps just mirroring the West more broadly, in which supposedly “offensive” speech on subjects like gender or race is ever-more heavily policed.

I write from a quiet, mountainous part of Central Europe. The scenery is idyllic, and the fall air is crisp. But much as the case has been in my other recent trips to the European continent, the sights I see and the conversations I hear are all underscored by a similar haunting concern: Will there even be a Europe, in any cognizable sense of the term, a century from now?

Europe faces four self-inflicted crises—radical green mandates, collapsing families, unchecked immigration, and rising tribalism—that now threaten Western civilization itself.

Europe is plagued by a number of existential crises. Yet they are all self-inflicted—and by a dominant, therapeutic culture that embraced utopian but lethal bromides.

These suicidal wounds are now nearing the end-stage. Indeed, they are destroying the very civilization that was soon envisioned to be heaven on earth.

The global warming hysterics could not just entertain gradual transformations away from dependencies on traditional fuels and power generation.

Food delivery apps are a harbinger of decline.

The Victorians were obsessed with the idea of the future.

Unlike the dystopias of the 20th century, crafted through the horrors of war and tyranny, the Victorian futurists imagined bright, mechanised utopias where technology delivered fairness, abundance, and joy.

Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) pictured Boston in the year 2000 as a land of equal wealth, credit cards, and benevolent corporations. William Morris, in News from Nowhere (1890), conjured a pastoral Thameside vista where the smog and industry of London was replaced with an artisanal commune in which government and money were no longer necessary.