Is western civilization really falling?

A few months ago, Paul Robert Craig published a column telling us that Western Civilization is Ceasing to Exist.” Craig is one of several conservative and libertarian writers that we here at The Price of Liberty look forward to reading. They not only refuse to pull punches, but they often demonstrate that they understand the spiritual and moral aspects of our current situation. Not just the usual political, geographic, social, economic, and technological elements, as too many people do.

Is he right in this? Western Civilization has existed in some form for 600 years. There have been many crises, many challenges, many attempts to not just change but destroy it. Many of those have been internal, and some have come close to causing the system, the mental and social construct to go away. Are we losing civilization?

Or are we simply seeing another metamorphosis of the civilization? Again, we have a hard time agreeing on just what Western Civilization. Or for that matter, civilization!

Western Civilization has survived the collapse of empires. A lot of empires have risen and collapsed in the last 600 years. Western ones. The Spanish. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The Austrian. The German. Even the Russian and Communist empires (if we can consider St Petersburg/Moscow a Western power, and it is). And most recently, the British. (And the French – though that is subject to debate.)

Are the last two Western Empires next on the block? Two, you ask? Yes, for the European Union is as much an empire as the American one, today: Brussels as much an imperial capital as DC is today, or London or Paris in the past.

But on to what the good Mr. Craig is writing. Why does he say we are “losing civilization” in his column? Here is a list, which is something we might call a Baker’s Dozen ™ of attacks on civilization, or at least on American culture and society:

• Growing risk of nuclear war
• Rising police state (behavior protected by the Constitution is criminalized)
• Unity replaced by a “Tower of Babel” [diversity leading to disunity]
• Fomented race and gender hatreds
• Destruction of soil by chemicals resulting in decreased food value of plants and animal products
• Introduction of GMO into the food chain
• Corruption of science and education
• Rejection of inherited culture (literature, art, music, morals, behavior)
• Panicked adoption of policies to deal with perceived threats (climate change, COVID, etc.)
• Reshaping of society driven by ideology (“Great Reset” etc.)
• Weaponization of diseases, weather, etc. (possible population control and “saving the planet”)
• Rejection and assault on religion: especially christian religion
• Increased encouraged and sometimes forced modification of human bodies

It is a long list. And it is a frightening list.

But is it a civilization-ending list?

Have we not seen these things before? If not precisely the exact same attacks, very similar ones? Western Civilization has faced, and in theory (at least) survived them. Many. The threat of Islamist Ottoman Turks. The Black Death. Hitlerism. Russian Communism.

Is this any worse than those? Is there such a combination of threats that not just the remnants of the former American republic, the United States, is at risk, but American, and Western, Civilization is collapsing?

And a second area of investigation: WHY are these Fifty States and the rest of the globe-straddling civilization facing this? What is behind it?

Dear reader, what do you think?

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