MB Civic

Sorry – my last attempt seems to have come out wrong. Her goes again:

In 1900, most westerners were confident and optimistic, full of pride about their civilisation. Since then, the west has made enormous strides in economic, scientific, military, political and social terms. Yet the earlier confidence has gone. 

stopped believing in the ideas that drove earlier generations to improve the world. Six main ideas made the west, century after century, progressively successful, powerful, and attractive – Christianity, optimism, science, economic growth, individualism and liberalism. Are these ideas past their sell-by date?

Christianity: western secular values, above all the gods of consumption, have trumped Christian ones. Doubt is rampant. And Christians today are deeply divided. Yet perhaps we need not worry. Christianity transformed the west. It was the world’s first individualised, activist, self-help movement. Ordinary people were encouraged to clean up their act and given God’s help to do so. Everyone had a “soul”; individual human dignity and responsibility were greatly enhanced.

Today many of us do not believe in the soul or Christ. In a way, however, we all still believe the Christian message. We believe we have a self, just like we have arms and legs. With the idea of the soul safely transmuted in the idea of the self, Christianity has permanently changed the west. The modern self-help movement best exemplifies the central Christian innovation – personal responsibility. Christianity’s crisis does not threaten the west. But the attacks on the other five ideas do.

Optimism: the importance of optimism in driving success – of individuals, of whole civilisations – has been greatly overlooked. Optimism comes from three Greek and Christian “myths” – the myth of autonomy, the myth of progress and the myth of human goodness. Creation is ultimately good. So, too, are people – God’s creation.

We have stopped believing people are good. After 1760, our stories began to feature bad heroes – egotistical people, amoral or immoral. The last century confirmed a dim view of human nature – Freud’s ideas, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, two world wars, horrific and hateful societies. A diminished view of people facilitated these horrors.

Optimism and pessimism, however, are fancies, not facts. Only if we recover belief in human goodness can we resume building a better world.

Science: science is pre-eminently western. It arose through belief in a perfect, rational Creator, and in our ability to figure out the perfect universe that God created.

Since 1900, we have lost our faith in science. Superstition and mumbo-jumbo abound. Science seems to have become weird. It portrays a baffling and inscrutable universe, ruled by mystery, uncertainty, random chance. Also, the dark side of science has emerged. Monstrous weapons. Poisoning the planet. Yet science is still fundamentally benign and rational. The microworld might be weird. But scientists still follow the scientific method – reason and investigation. The challenge to understanding is greater, but logic and research still hold the key. We cannot give up our trust in rationality and science, for the best forms of civilisation depend utterly upon them.

Growth: the west’s stunning economic advance over the past 1,000 years, and especially the last 200 years, has made mankind an ecological success and the west dominant. Victories over hunger and disease are unprecedented. Yet, if non-western countries eventually reached western consumption levels, the damage to the environment would be multiplied 12 times. The planet cannot cope with that.

Happily, a new factor is emerging – the “personalised economy”, driven by imagination and intellect, not capital and hierarchy. Growth today can be increasingly “weightless” – we consume software and services rather than hunks of metal. In the last century the US economy grew to 20 times its earlier size, but the weight of output stayed roughly the same. Averting ecological suicide requires growth using far fewer finite resources.

Individualism: this has always been the west’s most striking characteristic. Now many inside the west are worried by individualism. Our highly atomistic society makes it easy to feel a failure. Every civilisation has had self-made people. Ours is the first to foster millions of self-destroyed people. Yet selfish individualism is a recent heresy, a contradiction. Historically, individualism has advanced higher standards of personal behaviour, with community building, with leadership. We have stopped requiring that.

If we do not demand truly responsible individualism, from our leaders, role models and ourselves, our civilisation will disintegrate.

Liberalism: the greatest threat to the west comes from liberalism’s decline and from the “liberal imperialists” and neo-conservatives so influential in America. Also from the “ultra-liberals”, the relativists who see nothing special about western liberal society, who deny personal responsibility and incubate the “victim mentality”. But the greatest threat to liberalism is that few still believe passionately in it. Liberalism’s successes have blunted its appeal.

Western civilisation has reached a fork in the road. Down one road lie cynicism, aggression, indifference, neo-conservatism and ultra-liberalism. Down the other lies a recovery of nerve, confidence in ourselves and our culture, unity within and between America and Europe, a society of individuals held together by self-improvement, striving, optimism, reason, compassion, equality and mutual identity. The road chosen will determine whether our civilisation collapses or reaches its destiny.

 

Richard Koch, an author, and Lord Smith, former UK culture secretary, are co-authors of Suicide of the West (Continuum)