According to Samuel P. Huntington, we can divide the world into eight “major” civilizations: Chinese, Japanese, Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox, Western, Latin American, and African. Without going into too many details, that divide is cultural in its nature, with religion being the primary factor for that divide.
For a better understanding of this civilizational divide just think how alien it feels to be a Westerner in Japan, the culture, the religion, the history, the writing, the values, the beliefs, it’s all an entirely different world for someone from Amsterdam, Melbourne, London, LA… that’s because you’re in a completely different civilization.
Although all of these different civilizations have modernized, thanks to, in no small part, the technologies developed by the West, they haven’t Westernized to the point that they have lost their culture, and that culture is what distinguishes one civilization from other.
The West, which has been dominating the world scene since 15th century, is just one of the civilizations, albeit one that currently dominates the world with its ideas and values, like the already mentioned liberal democracy, free markets, dollar as a reserve currency, the SWIFT banking system that everyone is forced to use, to name but a few examples. But the West as a civilization is showing all the signs of an ideology in decline.
You see, coming back to those patterns and recognizing them, one of the most commonly repeated patterns of history when looking at societies a whole is a cycle. By this I mean a cycle of a rise and fall of different civilizations, empires, city-states…Since the ancient times, this cycle repeats itself and goes like this: conquest, ascendance to power, consolidation, expansion, degeneration, and conquest/foreign invasion.
Every great society in the past has gone through the same pattern of ascendancy to power, peak power, and then inevitable decline and eventually being replaced as a dominant power. The full cycle might last for a thousand years, and the decline might take hundreds, as it did with the Roman Empire, but it’s unstoppable due to human nature and changes within the society.
In this last stage of degeneration, the civilization in power shows some obvious signs of decay. It becomes politically corrupt, its institutions unnecessary complex and a burden to its citizens, inflation rises, environmental problems persist due to over-extraction of resources, and too much is spent on the military rather than dealing with the day-to day-problems of its citizens, migration pressures from outside the borders increase…
The population eventually loses its faith in their once mighty civilization, its culture progressively decays and, as it does, the civilization inevitably declines, collapses or gets invaded, conquered and absorbed into another one. The cycle restarts as another civilization becomes the dominant force …
Now circle back at what’s happening today with the EU and the West as a whole, maybe we can precisely translate the historical model to today’s hyper-globalized world, but, to my mind, the West ticks a whole lot of boxes of a civilization in decline.
Everything happening in the EU today is just symptom of that greater decline and loss of power, progressive cultural decline and migration/demographic replacement just being the last stages of the “decline” phase, as seen many times before in history. As the saying goes “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
The US and its allies, the EU among them, have been expanding their empire, extracting resources from undeveloped countries, bringing democracy and a free market economy around the world, waging wars against anyone who challenges their power. As you would expect from a dominant civilization, but the age of relative “stability” for people living in the West is slowly but surely coming to an end as we’re seeing the decline of that power, the creation of an increasingly multipolar world and the remaking of the world order.
That’s the big picture, and as its power and culture progressively decline, in the coming years we’ll be seeing more and more tensions between the civilizations, namely Chinese and Arabs/Muslims challenging the West, and tensions between the different cultures living within the West itself.
Your daily life might not change much immediately as these are processes that last for decades but as they do, we’ll just keep on adjusting to the new normal. Stabbing rampages in Paris, London or Munich, well that’s just the way the things are now. The Chinese government covertly attacking democracy in Australia, well, that’s worrying but normal. Fining citizens of Canada for “mis-gendering” gender-neutral people, well that’s just outrageous but normal…
Yet again it all makes sense when we realize where we are in the cycle, we can’t do much about it except prepare for the various social/cultural/environmental/geopolitical disruptions that might be headed our way, whether you’re living it the West or not. Due to our global economy and interconnectedness, these potential crises far too easily translate to any place in the world.
Link : https://permacultureapprentice.com/the-decline-of-the-west/
