Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Docement Productions on January 10. 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Can Western civilization survive? One wonders. It is mostly the small things that fuel the disquiet. An illegal immigrant sets a woman on the F train in Brooklyn on fire, and all that the fellow passengers can think to do is to record her immolation on their cell phones. An Ivy League graduate guns down a health insurance CEO and is promptly lauded by millions of young people. A tattoo parlor near my office offers to ink the image of Luigi Mangione into the skin of young women swooning over the handsome killer.
Let me grant that these events are nothing like Attila sweeping into Italy in the year 452. Or the Battle of Tours in 732, where Charles Martel defeated the forces of the Muslim caliphate led by Abd al-Rahman al-Ghafiqi, thus saving Europe from Muslim subjugation. Or the Battle of Vienna in 1683 saving Europe from the Ottoman empire, once again rescuing Western civilization from Muslim conquest.
Today’s newsworthy stories of moral confusion certainly bear no comparison to pivotal moments in history when Western civilization stood on the brink of extinction. And yet one wonders.
Civilization has stood on the precipice of elimination before. But it has also arguably fallen over that edge on several occasions—shattered—and reassembled itself though with some irreparable losses. World War I brought an end to an unprecedented century of relative peace and progress and bequeathed a profound loss of confidence.
An apt memorial of that time was T.S. Eliot’s despairing poem, The Hollow Men, which famously concludes, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”
World War II saved Europe from the malignancy of Nazi domination but shifted the center of Western civilization from Europe to America. The Cold War enslaved half of Europe and allowed communism to gain an ideological foothold in the other half, weakening the ideals of Western freedom nearly everywhere.
In view of this long history of near civilizational catastrophes—and the list could be much longer—what right do we have in 2025 to ask whether Western civilization can survive? It has survived the Huns, the Black Plague, the Death Camps, and the Gulag. Is something more devastating than these on the horizon?
I would say yes, but that the perils we face are of a different order. Military conquest by a hostile power that hates Western civilization is not entirely off the table. China has designs. Iran has the bomb. Radical Islam has an insatiable desire to destroy not just Israel but the whole of the West. The atrocities of October 7, 2023 and September 11, 2001 revealed different perpetrators, same war. Russia means us no good. There are existential threats embedded in each of these, but more because of our cultural weakness than because of the prowess of our adversaries. We have far more to fear from Muslim immigration than we do from Muslim terrorists. We should keep the European situation firmly in mind.
The precipice this time is defined less by external foes than by a death wish in our culture.
Bewildered Impotence
I live and work in Manhattan. New York City is a front row seat to civilizational decline, not least because it is a front row seat to post-World War II Western civilization. It was one of the settings for the enormous success of commercial enterprise and manufacturing of that era as well as the fluorescence of art, music, literature, dance, fashion, and intellectual achievement. The network television industry was centered here as well as the nation’s most important newspapers. New York drew ambitious and creative people who spurred one another, and it was an engine of assimilation for millions of immigrants. The rise of psychoanalysis as a cultural force in America and the formulation of therapeutic culture were first of all New York City developments. New York provided, as well, the setting for important cultural divergences including Partisan Review, the Beats, the Greenwich Village folk scene, and Bob Dylan. New York was also the center of American Jewish life, and a key center for post-War Catholic and Protestant thought.
The echoes of this era survive in the city, but most of the original force has dissipated. Manufacturing has long since moved elsewhere as the costs far outpaced the benefits. I had until recently an automated shoeshine machine made in 1947 by Uneeda Corporation at its facility in midtown, about two blocks from my current office. The company served the hotel industry with heavy-duty products. It is of course long gone. The most prominent commercial enterprises in midtown today are cannabis shops. Immigrants scrambling for jobs have been replaced by illegals living in hotels that have found it more profitable to rent to the state, which is committed to housing a population that lives on government largess supplemented by shoplifting, street crime, and begging.
These are not today’s incarnations of long-standing ills. They entered Manhattan life suddenly enough that everybody noticed the transformation. When illegal Guatemalan immigrant Sebastian Zapeta-Calil set fire to a woman on the F train, fanned the flames with his coat, and sat down to watch her burn to death, he enacted an extreme version of the contempt that members of this “community” have visited on the legal residents of New York since the invasion began. New York is among those cities that now styles itself a “sanctuary”—which is to say a sanctuary for the lawless at the expense and suffering of everyone else.
On Christmas Eve, two days after Zapeta-Calil was busy on the F train, a woman in Grand Central Station was slashed in the neck and a man slashed in the wrist by Jason Sargeant, a young man with three prior arrests for criminal mischief, fare beating, and assaulting a police officer.
The random violent crimes occurring throughout the city is exacerbated by the fact that New York City police are overwhelmed and demoralized by the disinclination of prosecutors to pursue cases and judges to hold felons accountable. We are in a city where the rule of law currently counts for very little.
Furthermore, the apparent paralysis of the public is not apathy. It is closer to cowardice. Some say it is the lesson people have drawn from the recent trial of Daniel Penny, the ex-marine who wrestled with a violent felon, Jordan Neely, on a subway in May 2023. Neely had declared he was ready to kill passengers. Penny intervened by putting Neely in a restraining hold; Neely died sometime after Penny released him. For this, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg decided to charge Penny with second degree manslaughter. A jury acquitted Penny of all charges, but the message was clear: the governing powers take a dim view of Good Samaritans. The Penny case doesn’t cause bystanders to be idle, but it reinforces their timidity.
Intervening to protect innocent victims in New York bears the likelihood that the Good Samaritan will face the full force of the law.
This is amplified by race. Neely was black; Penny white, and the knife-wielding Jason Sargeant in the Christmas Eve stabbing is also black. Rightly or wrongly, New Yorkers recognize that black criminals are now accorded a special exemption from ordinary enforcement of the law.
This catalog of a handful of urban crimes, of course, can be duplicated in most American cities and cannot be taken by itself as any kind of evidence of civilizational decline. Except that it is evidence of something new: not maniacs and murderers, who have always inhabited the margins of society, but a social system so lacking in self-confidence that it looks on these matters with bewildered impotence.
The Cannibals of Bronze Age England
Archeologists working on Charterhouse Warren, a Bronze Age site in southwest England, recently discovered the skeletal remains of 37 men, women, and children killed in an ancient massacre. Half of the victims were children or adolescents. The site being only partially excavated, the archaeologists report that the total death toll is probably much higher. Many died from crushing blows to their heads. The bodies had been systematically butchered and defleshed—the bones scraped—unmistakable evidence that the victims were eaten before their remains were tossed into a deep pit.
This grisly event took place some 4,000 years ago, but it still shocks. Cannibalism is among the few taboos left which contemporary Western people find truly compelling, and at the same time the idea of cannibalism continues to fascinate Western culture. From Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” the 1973 movie Soylent Green and the 2022 movie The Menu, to the 2023 Broadway musical revival of Sweeney Todd, we entertain ourselves with the peculiar horror of people eating one another.
If we define a civilization by its ideals, we must pay attention to what people agree is totally unacceptable. These days, substantial numbers of Westerners find ways to excuse the barbarities of the October 7 atrocities inflicted by Hamas in Israel, elevate the assassin Luigi Mangione to the status of folk hero, treat the sexual mutilation of children as an act of humanity, and exalt virtually every kind of perversity as personal empowerment.
Today, there are organizations and institutions that harvest the unborn by the hundreds of thousands and find a profitable role for the corpses of many in medical and pharmaceutical labs. Our civilization successfully masks the horror of this as an antiseptic process that serves the public good. Cannibals, of course, also regard themselves as serving the community. So too the advocates of assisted suicide and euthanasia.
An Age of Consent
While many men and women still adhere to monogamy, hardly any sexual practice is strictly proscribed in contemporary society. Polygamy, “polyamory,” prostitution (AKA “sex work”), anonymous coupling of all sorts, are openly practiced. Made to order pornography such as “Only Fans” offer career opportunities to the shameless. Are there any boundaries here? I suppose the decision by the University of Wisconsin La Crosse to fire its president, Jim Gow, after he was found to have featured himself and his wife in pornographic videos is testimony to some faint boundary. But that Gow thought to make the videos in the first place is testimony to how fragile those boundaries are.
A similar ambiguity appears in the now infamous case of Dominique Pelicot in France. He confessed to drugging and raping his wife, Gisèle, and inviting 49 men over a period of years to rape her as well. The courts convicted all the men of the heinous crime, but we are left to ponder how any of them could have participated. That the husband found so many accomplices says something about the precipitous decline in basic decency when it comes to sex.
Then there is Lily Phillips, the British Only Fans star, who filmed a “documentary” of herself having sex with one hundred men in one day. No laws were broken, but it is hard to imagine both Phillips’s moral deformity and that of the male volunteers.
The sexual revolution did leave one boundary intact and indeed elevated it to first principle. That boundary is “consent.” Anything is permissible providing all parties agree. Consent, however, turns out to have ambiguities of its own, as has become clear from the multitude of cases in which, after the fact, the participants disagree. A whole campus industry has arisen in the United States since 2011, when the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights “interpreted” Title IX to allow campus authorities to bypass due process to “convict” and expel men on the basis of a woman’s claim that the man did not obtain her consent before having sex with her. Many of these men went to court to pursue their defenses that the sex was consensual.
In an age of promiscuity, the doctrine of consent is no guarantee of moral clarity.
The doctrine of consent also fails when it comes to juveniles. Here a stigma remains mostly intact. Pedophiles are not happy with that, and in an effort to win respectability have begun to advertise themselves as MAPs—minor attracted persons. The public at large and the law have so far not bent to this new effort to define deviancy down, but it may be a matter of time.
The convictions last fall of activists Zachary and William Zulock, a married couple in Georgia, provide a capstone. The Zulocks were each sentenced to one hundred years in prison for “routinely” raping their two adopted, special-needs sons—brothers aged nine and ten—making videos of the abuse and inviting other Atlanta pedophiles to rape the children as well. The depravity in this instance would be hard to exceed.
The Diminished Family
The sexual revolution evolved into sexual pandemonium. But the danger to Western civilization is not the existence of rampant deviancy, the “toleration” of it, or even its “Love is Love” celebration. It is rather the demoralization of the traditional family. The family is the cornerstone of our civilization and was once firmly recognized as the foundation of all civic virtue. That is because the family is reproductive in a quadruple sense. Not only do husband and wives have children, but those parents teach their children what it means to be a father and a mother. Boys learn masculinity; girls learn femininity. The family thus reproduces the ethos to make new families. The family also connects to other families that make up family-centric communities.
This is the briefest of sketches of the anthropological reality, but it should be familiar since it is precisely these dynamics that have been vehemently denounced for the last half century; first by radical feminists and then by queer theorists. They have taught Americans that the family is the deep source of oppression, and it is only by smashing its normative values that women and gays can be free. The hatred of the family in its traditional form is the central doctrine of women’s studies in college. Room can be made, however, for “families of choice,” which refers to voluntary alliances that wish away the importance of actual kinship.
Slavery
Among the most complex core values of Western civilization is the ideal of freedom. We may not be able to say with any ease what “freedom” is, but we know its opposite: slavery. And we might be tempted to say that like cannibalism, slavery is one of our great taboos. But a moment’s reflection is all that’s needed to set that aside. Not only was slavery widely practiced in the West up the 19th century just as it was elsewhere in the world, but it was also not even regarded as a social or moral ill until the agitations of abolitionists began in the mid-18th century. If slavery is morally anathema today, it wasn’t yesterday, which suggests that its status as a core value is a transformation of the West, not a defining element.
But are we truly rid of it? It depends on what we make of the numerous forms of human bondage that persist in the shadows. Using humans as chattel hasn’t gone away so much as it has been re-labeled and redefined. What do we make of the young women brought to Epstein’s island to serve the politicians, celebrities, and other guests Epstein sought to entrap? What do we make of the trafficking in children that has been an integral part of America’s open border during the Biden presidency? And how we classify the roughly 10 million Americans who regularly use addictive drugs such as heroin? Addicts are not literally slaves, but they are plainly not “free” in any meaningful way.
The Caldron
Can Western civilization survive? We have reason to worry. The external dangers are real, but the more profound dangers arise from our cultural descent. Those of us who call out that danger are often met with the terse rebuttal that ‘every generation in every age thinks society is going to the dogs. Foretelling catastrophe is a perennial delusion. Get over it.’
Such skeptics have a powerful point. Cultural pessimism is as old as the hills. People fear the inevitable changes in cultural fashion and generational interest and mistake these as civilizational doom. There is no sure way to refute that diagnosis.
There is, however, the reality that civilizations do not last forever. The Egypt of the native pharaohs lasted about 2,500 years. The Assyrians not nearly as long. If we conceive the West as the amalgam of Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Christian tradition, Western civilization might plausibly claim something like a 3,000-year longevity. But Western civilization in a form that we moderns might recognize is a younger thing. If it is defined as a social order centered on individual rights, scientific inquiry, rule of law, and the pursuit of progress, it is very young indeed. Take the very long or the very short view or something in between, our civilization is an historical phenomenon in the fullest sense. It didn’t always exist, and it won’t always continue.
So it seems fair to ask what could mark the end of it? An errant asteroid the size of dinosaur-killing Chicxulub could do the job. Incompetent leadership could do it as well, and we have had our share. But our present danger—or so I have argued—is much more a matter of our losing sight of any reason to continue. The values that brace people for the necessary sacrifices and personal discipline that make civilization possible are now seen by far too many people as obsolete and rather annoying. Still others define themselves by their nihilist rejection of those values, or by deliberately inverting them.
Deep down this arises from hatred of the religions that made us. Judaism and Christianity are seen—or better said, felt—as oppressors that must be overthrown to secure the absolute freedom that the postmodern secular world covets. That freedom, unbeknownst to many who aspire to it, however, is a death wish. It is Sebastian Zapeta-Calil watching the woman burn. It is the invaders of Charterhouse Warren proud of their full stomachs. It is Lily Phillips rolling in her degradation. It is a society that dreams of liberation but delivers itself to tyranny. There is a way back, but will we choose it?
Image: King John III Sobieski Sobieski sending Message of Victory to the Pope, after the Battle of Vienna 111 on Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
