In an earlier post, “Cultural castration” I made the point that expecting Islam to moderate itself would be the equivalent of asking it to castrate itself. This is part two of the argument.

Those in the West, who dream about the reformation, and therefore moderation, of Islam, are hoping for a religion pretty much like ours. Non-political and mostly irrelevant.
The neo-communists, in their infinite arrogance think that they will be able to control it once their shared goal, the destruction of Western civilization, is accomplished.
Liberals just want to live in the moment, for the moment, hoping that the moment will never go away.
Politicians are in denial about the reality of the Ponzi scheme they created, while the liberal left is too busy compensating for their perceived historic sins to understand that their self flagellation is nothing short of suicide.

Whatever we think of the West, it must be acknowledged that it had to do something right to get where we are now. We are richer, we live longer, better and healthier than anybody in history. Not just the people of the developed world. Everybody. Even people in the most miserable places on the planet have a better life than their great grandparents had.
The world owes its well being to Western civilization.
Yet, the West is in the process of castrating itself, slowly killing everything that made it successful in the first place:

• The rule of law and the protection of the rights of the individual
• Personal responsibility and a strong civil society
• Rationality and humanism
• Equal rights
• Self-directed individual morality as the foundation for universal morality
• Protestant work ethics

….and we could go on to the personality values fostered by the above: individualism, the encouragement of forming one’s own opinions, standing up for our values, curiosity and the drive for discovery, the drive for personal and social improvement and so on.
All of these good things are slowly getting destroyed.

Positive rights are replacing negative ones, individual rights are becoming group privileges.
Personal responsibility is getting replaced by victimhood mentality and civil society by communities of political expediency.
Dogmatic consensus is replacing the scientific method and humanism gives place to socialism.
Equal rights are turning into group rights and the oppressive drive toward equal outcomes.
Universal morality and its free expression is turned into the amorphous blob of postmodernist relativism and oppressive speech-codes of groupthink.

Whatever the causes are, they all are rooted in arrogant complacency and delusional denial.
The complacency of liberalism
The denial of economic realities and
The arrogance of cultural superiority

Complacency

After the fall of communism, Francis Fukuyama declared “The End of History,” asserting that we reached the end of societal evolution. The belief in permanence of the liberal democratic world order prevents Western civilization from the proper assessment of the dangers it may face.
George Friedman’s book, “The Next 100 Years” provides a fascinating glimpse into history and the future of geopolitics, but has no room to discuss technological and demographic disruption, the potential economic collapse of advanced social democracies or civilizational conflicts. In a way similar to Fukuyama’s, it assumes that the world will go on the way it did for the past 100 years.
This otherwise interesting panel discussion at Georgetown University on terrorism and counterterrorism confines the discussion of the problem to politics, intelligence and policing but avoids culture, economy, migration and demography.
All of our problems, it seems, are framed within the blinders of particular issues.

Denial

As I pointed out several times already, Western democracies are nearly bankrupt.  Socialist welfare states are not sustainable. Immigration will not solve their problems. Trying to accommodate and appease immigrants from incompatible cultures will eventually make the economic problems worse while creating cultural impediments for actual solutions.
Socialist economics is slowly pushing us toward the precipice of irreversible decline.

Arrogance

One of the things that always offended me about communists is their condescension. The arrogance of their righteous superiority. I have the same unease looking at the racist overtones of political correctness, multiculturalism and identity politics. The inconsiderate, virtue signaling selfishness. Leftist do not have what it takes to actually understand the issues they claim to care about, but their aggressive indignation is suppressing debate, making it impossible to find actual solutions.

Complacency, denial and arrogance did not just kill the creative dynamism of Western civilisation, it effectively castrated it.

We keep talking about the symptoms of our problems as if they were the causes.
Muslims are not the cause of our problems. Neither are demographics, politics, the economy, immigration, technological disruption, racism, globalization, climate change or any of the particular problems we can think of.

The “West” is not a race. “The West” is not a culture. The “West” is not an ideology.
The West is a civilization, the success story of certain ideas and the actions, attitudes and social arrangements those ideas inspired. Without those ideas, morals and attitudes the West will most certainly fall.

Ideas, attitudes and the cultural self-confidence they inspire are the balls of a civilization.
They are the things that give life to a civilization and allow it to propagate itself. Now, in the West, we are effectively cutting them off.

It is true that we are living better than ever, but so were the Romans in 200 AD.
It is true, that we are richer than ever, but so was Venezuela and Zimbabwe 30 years ago.
It is true, that we are more tolerant and inclusive than ever before, but so was Berlin in the 1920s.

The sperm count of Western men has declined 59.3% since 1973.
This may be a sign. Maybe nature can read the zeitgeist.