EMERITUS PROFESSOR REX AHDAR: Is Western Civilization worth defending?

Is Western Christian Civilization something to be proud of, something worth defending? I believe so.  Let us begin with Samuel P Huntingdon in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) at 311:

All civilizations go through similar processes of emergence, rise and decline. The West differs from other civilizations not in the way it has developed but in the distinctive character of its values and institutions. These include most notably its Christianity, pluralism, individualism, and rule of law, which made it possible for the West to invent modernity…

Western Civilization is, in the eyes of many, teetering dangerously at the precipice of a long and perhaps rapid decline. (Tool masterfully present this in their 13-minute masterpiece, “Descending” (Fear Innoculum (2019)). For Prof Niall Ferguson: “we are living through the end of 500 years of Western ascendancy” (Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011) at xv). Not everyone sees it so. Professors Peter Heather and John Rapley in Why Empires Fall: Rome, America and the Future of the West (2023) console readers (at 162) that “the modern West doesn’t yet find itself in the ‘last chance saloon’ that faced the Roman West in the late 460s.”. Perhaps they are correct. To quote Huntingdon again (at 303):

The overriding lesson of the history of civilizations . . . is that many things are probable but nothing is inevitable. Civilizations can and have reformed and renewed themselves. The central issue for the West is whether, quite apart from any external challenges, it is capable of stopping and reversing the internal processes of decay.

Those who would defend against the Barbarians at the gate, not to mention seek to reverse the more insidious and intangible “internal processes of decay”, do exist. But it is fair to say that the ranks of public intellectuals who are prepared to engage in the deeply unfashionable exercise of defending Western civilization are thin. We have the likes of Douglas Murray (The War on the West (2022)), Niall Ferguson, Yoram Hazony (Conservatism: A Rediscovery (2022), Tom Holland (Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (2019)), John Milbank and Adrian Pabst (The Politics of Virtue (2016)), Michael Walsh (The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West (2017)), Nigel Biggar (Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2023)) and so on. It is a list that peters out quite quickly.

It is hard to defend something that one is not proud of. Michael Walsh (at 6) inveighs:

Chief among the weaknesses of Western man today are his fundamental lack of cultural self -confidence, his willingness to open his ears to the siren song of nihilism, a juvenile eagerness to believe the worst about himself and his society and to relish, on some level, his own prospective destruction.

In short, “Western Civilization appears to have lost confidence in itself” (Ferguson at 17-18). It might be that Western man has succumbed to dependency, comfort and security (pandemic lockdowns did not help) and, in doing so, developed what New Zealander Professor Kenneth Minogue called “the servile mind” (The Servile Mind (2012)). “You will own nothing and you will be happy”, as Klaus Schwab prophesied.  Or it might just be that the enemies of the West are many and powerful and dissolve the courage of all but the most stubborn.

Who then are the opponents of Western Civilization? They are legion. The attacks come:

(1) as they always have, from the neo-Marxists (or ‘New Left’) and Critical Theory activists, along with their fellow travellers and ‘useful idiots’. The “long march through the institutions”(Rudi Dutschke and Herbert Marcuse)---bureaucracy, mainstream media, law, academia, schools, social services, language itself, human resources departments, the police, the military, and most recently, giant transnational companies---is well documented (see Walsh, Devil’s Pleasure Palace and Christopher Rufo, America’s Cultural Revolution (2023)). The rights of free speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and other key democratic institutions are, to the cultural Marxists, mere out-dated totems or shibboleths for the oppressive, hegemonic, ruling class to advance their agendas.

We can add (2) the radical Islamists and political Jihadists who now have considerable influence in Western Europe. Conservatives such as Sir Roger Scruton, The West and The Rest (2002) and Christopher Hitchens warned us about this, as did Douglas Murray (The Strange Death of Europe (2017) more recently. This seismic shift was aided by advocates of multiculturalism (more useful idiots) who successfully eviscerated the traditional policy of assimilation (now a dirty word).

In some countries, such as New Zealand, Australia and Canada, we encounter (3) the anti-colonialism, indigenous detractors. The First Nations peoples, or at least a vocal minority, are trenchant critics of the colonisation process. In their neo-Marxist rhetoric, the European colonisers bequeathed a Western society that is structurally (a favourite word) tilted against the indigenes:  at worst, this amounts to cultural genocide, or at the very least, denigration to second-class citizen status.

We ought not forget about (4) the Greens, with their anti-free market, anti-GDP productivity and anti-technology approach, tinged with a neo-Pagan re-sacralization of Nature. The momentous achievements of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Reason and objective truth, empiricism and the scientific method, are all very well but there’s a planet to save.

Lastly, there are (5) the globalist elites who seek to dissolve the nation state and re-mould and corral its slumbering citizenry into a controllable, surveillance, ‘smart’ society assisted by AI algorithms and a CCP-like ‘social credit’ system. The World Economic Forum and its ‘Great Reset’ is perhaps the most visible expression of this global totalitarian impulse.

These five groups sometimes work alone or, when the opportunity presents itself, forge strategic alliances. The Greens idealize and romanticise the indigenous peoples as early ecologists; the hard Left and the committed Islamists are united in their hatred of Israel; the globalist elites draw from the unholy Left to mandate the politically-correct ESG criteria for businesses, utilities, banks and insurance companies to abide by.

The neo-Marxists, the Islamists, the indigenous activists, the Greens and the Globalists---the list is, sadly, not exhaustive---represent the modern counterparts of the Goths, the Visigoths, the Franks, the Vandals and the Huns. Those who would defend the West have a job on their hands.

Emeritus Professor Rex Ahdar, Faculty of Law, University of Otago