The world is changing. In the West, we are no longer the same as we once were and doubt our right to be here. Sensing our weakness, “barbarians” from afar multiply at our borders (i.e. along the Rio Grande and in the Balkans). Harbingers of chaos, they crowd together and push to get inside. Of course, they are not deterred by a few dithering sentries. Dispossessed and coveting, they know very well where they are going; on the other side of the fence, they see a fat, docile cow waiting to be milked — and slaughtered. The pressure increases year by year. Rome is about to fall for the third time.

Telltale signs of what lies ahead are open to study everywhere in the West — on both sides of the Atlantic. The boundless optimism of yesterday, say, the early 1990s, is like the distant echo of hearty laughter. What we take for granted today — freedom, safety, and prosperity — we might have to fight to keep tomorrow.

In the outside world, e.g. the capitals of the so-called “BRICS” countries, preparations are made to end the hegemony of the West. Sure enough, we have paid indulgences for our alleged sins of colonialism for almost a hundred years. However, we should not expect forgiveness or pity on that account. In case we think that we have built “goodwill” with the third-world countries receiving foreign aid, we have seriously miscalculated. As far as they are concerned, our wealth is up for grabs.

The happy days are over. As Westerners, we are not marching confidently into the future, but bumping and tottering. Our place in history is threatened. In the shadowland of moral relativism, ideological confusion, and fatalistic cowardice, we have lost our bearings. It is as if we, children of the West, have been spoiled to such a degree that we completely neglect the origin of our success in history. This bodes ill for the future. The West is left open to invasion by those who know the struggle for life (i.e. immigrants by the millions from Latin America or Africa and the Middle East). If we become doubtful and leave a power vacuum, unsure of our own raison d’être, others are more than ready to fill it.

The abolition of the cardinal virtues (i.e. prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance) in the de-Christianized, transitional societies of the West is approaching as a matter of fact. The body of thought that they represent form the sort of philosophical basis on which you may build an orderly society. Pillars of civilization, they have served us well in the past. The history of the European countries, North America, Australia, and New Zealand testifies to this salient point. Regrettably, however, those virtues have nothing like universal validity. Thus, it is not that they have been given to us by God like the laws of Moses. Neither are they derived from human nature as if inherent dispositions embedded in biology. Strictly speaking, they are unique to Western culture. They represent an arbitrary construct of history. Accordingly, they may not be understood, let alone accepted, elsewhere.

Even though we have ourselves formulated the cardinal virtues and lived by them for so long, taking them for granted as the basis of social cohesion, we may also lose them, suddenly challenged in numbers by non-West (and anti-West) foreigners with a culture of their own. That menacing prospect, spelling the conditions of complete alienation and civilizational dissolution, we ultimately owe to our own decadence and imprudence. We have slept on our watch.

Unfortunately, we have long since forgotten our own struggle for survival. If the Westerners of today had any historical awareness of the past, they would know that, since the dawn of time, we have fought against invasions from the East. The wealth and strength, which we have preserved so far, are due to the ingenuity of our ancestors, their courage and care for posterity. However, there is a general reluctance to face the real dangers of today and fight for our home in the West.

For a long time, we have made self-denying decisions in a world of competing cultures. Survival in the long term is determined, not by whimsical standards of hypocrisy, to be sure, but the resolve to prevail. However, we possess neither the stoicism of the pagan Greeks nor the piety of the Christian scholastics. Morally corrupted by popular ideas of guilt and spoiled habits of consumerism, we have become extremely selfish, lazy, and pleasure-seeking. It seems that we live solely for the gratification of the present and give no thought to tomorrow. Our conceited thoughtlessness might cost us dearly in the end.

In fairness, we have but ourselves to thank for our current predicament. The origin of the treacherous attack on our society is the worldview of a nihilistic subculture at our universities, shared by ignorant, undisciplined, and self-aggrandizing students. Seduced into political activism by delusions of social justice and penance, they condemn the rest of us to eternal perdition because of a colonial past.

Our self-inflicted weakness, which is of a moral rather than material nature, exposes us to a determined enemy. It so happens that the threats to the West are piling up: there are the immigrants flooding our lands like the barbarians of Roman times; and there is the imminent threat of military attacks from totalitarian empires in Europe and beyond. In the centuries following the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 A.D. and the Eastern in 1453, brought about by the Huns and Turks, respectively, we had to fight for our identity and resist the danger of complete absorption by immigrant peoples.

After the mayhem caused by broken borders and uncontrolled immigration, a civilization based on reason, courage, and accountability (merit) rather than orthodoxy, savagery, and submission saw the light of day and thrived. As a response to the medieval doomsday mood (reflected in the aberrant ideals of the Gothic style), the classical ideals of antiquity, ranging from literature to architecture, eventually found their way back to the world of the living; the West was reborn.

Integrating Hellenistic-Roman and Jewish traditions, Christian culture laid the foundation for the Enlightenment, the unhampered pursuit of both scientific knowledge and artistic beauty, and an unparalleled progress in technology and industry. It saved a historical reverence for reason and individualism. Aligned with humanist principles — universal human dignity, individual freedom, and the importance of happiness (cf. the ideals of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” in the American Declaration of Independence) — its teachings stood in stark contrast to a dichotomous slave-master mentality endemic to other parts of the world.

A cultural decline and vulnerability to foreign influence, the likes of which have been unthinkable since the last days of Rome, are now evident in the West. Rather than a lack of wisdom and beauty in the church, however, they reflect the crushing victory of secularism in the twentieth century. Despite unrestricted access to knowledge, Westerners in a de-Christianized world behave like suggestible orphans; the denial of God has cut them off from their own lineage and driven them into the arms of ungodly, inhumane, and fraudulent movements such as modernism and totalitarianism (i.e. fascism, socialism).

Thought by some to represent the pinnacle of civilization, but deeply disorientated in moral terms, the so-called “secular society” is but an unstable and intermediate form characterized by unresolved disputes and upheavals. It has replaced godliness (i.e. Christian faith and tradition) and personal freedom, including the freedom of speech, with claims for “universal rights” (i.e. tantamount to unlimited immigration from third-world countries) and “tolerance of the intolerant” (i.e. selectively sparing overtly illiberal movements from criticism by prohibiting “phobic” views and zealously prosecuting violations).

The legacy of the Enlightenment is eroding. What we took to be immutable, the bulwark of our civilization, is crumbling around us. Civil liberties in society come under pressure from, not the government, at first, but those who strive for total domination, willing to exterminate anybody unwilling to submit.

If the anti-Western forces really succeed, it will be ever so quiet in the West. There will be no exchange of ideas between learned men and women. It will be the time of darkness, the time of cruelty and barbarism.

Image: Public domain.