It’s not the failures but rather the great successes of the West which have left it as a hollowed-out and collapsing civilization, that is, our successes as individualists and our successes in nurturing our individualistic inclinations and pushing them ever further at the expense of our communalistic inclinations.
It’s not hard to understand.
- Human being is both individual and communal and both of those parts of human being start with traits encoded in genes and then refined by the development of a human being in a specific context within a particular culture. (The genes evolve, of course, within a total environment which includes culture which leads many to talk as if we are pure individuals but are subject to selection within an environment which includes cultures and communities and, thus, leads us to act as if we have communal being as well as individual being.)
- Different ethnic groups subject to different evolutionary histories, cultural and `natural’, lie on different points on a spectrum from individualistic to communalistic. A community will itself have a spread of traits so that some strong individualists might be born into the most communalistic of peoples.
- Northwestern Europeans are radically individualistic as opposed to, say, Chinese who are radically communalistic. (Actually, it is apparently more accurate to say the most strongly communalistic of Chinese, and a few other peoples, are those who have been rice-farmers for centuries.)
- It would seem that the genes and culture of Northwestern Europeans have evolved in unison over the past millenia or better.
- The thinking class of those northwestern Europeans, and some other Europeans as well, had developed within the priesthood and also, more freely, among the laity once education was more widely available. That thinking class seems to have been still more inclined to radical individualism than their fellow-Europeans and they developed political and economic ways of thought which assumed that it was a metaphysical truth that human being, if not deformed by culture, was radically individualistic. This started with Hobbes’ observation of the nearly sociopathic inclinations of many of his fellow Englishmen and his missing observations of rice-farmers in the south of China. Locke and Smith and Jefferson and Rousseau and Mill (both father and son) and the Classical Liberals in general, most especially the ones proudly bearing the label `Libertarian’, glorified what was a good trait so that it seemed good to make individualistic traits strongly dominant, and sometimes absolutely dominant, over any communalistic tendencies.
- European political and religious leaders, unlike those of most regions and most certainly unlike the Confucian rulers of China, enhanced their power by weakening other forms of human community, even the family. The Catholic Church, though biased toward the less radical individualism of Italian culture, also was guilty in treating human communities as nominal entities, as mere gatherings of individuals. Though partially true in corresponding to an imbalance in the human being of Europeans that reinforced the evolution and development of a still greater imbalance of individual over community, though some communities claimed the right and had the power to control individuals.
- The result was the war of all against all seen by Hobbes. Europe became a continent filled with unbalanced, murderously competitive communities of closely related peoples fighting themselves and those other peoples to whom they were closely related. Those peoples, once they had achieved what seemed to be high states of civilization, waged a prolonged war of extraordinary brutality; starting in 1914 and calming down for periods, but fully active again in some regions by the early 1930s and for much of Europe by 1939 or so. After the Cold War and its proxy wars in Asia and Africa and Latin America, the Europeans started actively fighting each other again in the Balkans, often to the profit of American politicians and arms-manufacturers, in the 1990s. Sociopaths had come to almost complete power over political and economic and cultural institutions.
- Along side these ultimately pointless wars, the West had to endure a prosperity of an deeply unattractive type. Westerners gave birth to start-up companies more often than to babies and the babies who did come were often raised in institutions or by women who spoke Spanish as their primary language.
- We in the West have passed on our moral rot, of the radical individualistic species, to some other peoples who seem to have had inadequate defenses. Maybe they also were inherently unbalanced in the direction of individualism over communalism?
Peter Frost has published another frighteningly insightful article about the ongoing self-destruction of the West and the spread of our moral disorder to some other peoples. In A Faustian Bargain?, he discusses the Parsi, a once proud and prosperous people who are non-breeding themselves out of existence as a result of their adoption of Western understandings of the good life. Please read it. It really is frightening to a thinking man.
Technicians, including many who present themselves as deep thinkers in the fields of economics and politics and sociology, tell us that our ways of life, our political and economic and cultural infrastructure, needs some fixing up. Replace a few support beams, put up a few more walls to keep the government out of some rooms, and throw on a coat of paint. In fact, the West is rotting, has been showing signs of decay since at least the 1800s. The West showed florid disease symptoms in the American War Between the States and the brutal and criminal war against the Filipino people, in the events of 1914 through 1945—both the wars and the economic collapses, in the political and financial corruption of the United States (existing from before the War Between the States but developing to absurd levels over the 20th century) and the turn to a brutal and criminal imperialism. Even the most ordinary observations in our towns and urban neighborhoods should tell us of demographic problems and of decreasing moral order in the youth of the best of families.
It would be evil to even try to rebuild the West as it once was. It would be an act of rebellion against God, an effort to push the Body of Christ out of the way so that we men can climb back up the ramp of decay to build another civilization subject to the same sort of decay as we’ve seen in recent centuries. It was a good experiment and the age of Enlightenment and a seemingly healthy form of radical individualism produced some darned good science and music and literature and art, even some interesting philosophy and theology. The experiment went bad, though not how or when most traditionalists imagine.
We are so many herds of individuals with no internal structure to those herds, no lasting relationships. Each head of Western human animal can move freely about inside the herd and form relationships as he wills at the time.
That herd isn’t part of the Body of Christ, though once it was the major part of the Body in its pilgrim, mortal life. That herd is marching toward the permanent grave and not toward Heaven.
Am I saying the typical American or European of northwestern European descent is a radical individualist? To this point, I have at least implied that to be true. Now it’s time for me to make an important correction.
Our rebellion against reality, against God the Creator of this reality, is soft and half-hearted. We can’t ridicule what is holy in our traditions because most of us are more individualistic than, say, Chinese but not nearly as individualistic as Hobbes and Locke would have us be, not nearly as individualistic as the Mills were and would have us be. We want our communities, strongly bound in their own ways though perhaps a bit more weakly bound than those of Chinese and certainly African tribal peoples, but we’ve been taught to desire the fruits which might come to a courageous Bohemian. We’ve been seduced into inappropriate ways of life by those who are even more radically individualistic than the great majority of northwestern Europeans. We’re destroying ourselves and only a small number of men and women are benefiting, those men and women who are radically individualistic to the point of sociopathy.
Though I strongly criticize the tendency of modern men of the West to develop certain traits into sociopathological conditions, though the West probably has a disproportionate number of men and women who have sociopathological tendencies, on the whole, the individualism of the peoples of northwestern Europe is a good and useful trait so long as it isn’t developed to an extreme and so long as economic and political and cultural systems of an individualistically inclined people aren’t forced upon other peoples. The Body of Christ is going to be a complex melding of valid human traits, in their various manifestations along spectrums of possibilities. We need team-players and we need healthy individualists.