The specter haunting the West today is a self-loathing that is at once nihilistic and fanatical. Yes, friends of ordered liberty must be wary of various forms of political authoritarianism and collectivism. But the more fundamental threat today is that nearly the entire intellectual class in the Western world bristles at the suggestion that we, in the freest, most prosperous, most self-critical societies in the history of the world, have been bequeathed a patrimony that is worth preserving.
They would have us genuflect before the empty abstraction of the “Other” in faraway places, no matter how barbarous and unfree. The Other’s misdeeds are neglected or simply forgotten since, in this contagion of self-contempt, the West must have a monopoly on evil. (Consider the unwillingness of the Howard Zinns or Noam Chomskys to admit even the most elementary truths about the totalitarianism that was the scourge of the 20th century.) By committing themselves to dogmatic cultural and moral relativism, they undermine the capacity to judge between noble and base, better and worse, and good and evil, and undermine too the resolve to preserve those aspects of our tradition that are truly worthy of preservation. Quite strikingly, as this process of civilizational erosion has unfolded with alacrity over the last half century, we have lost even a minimal sense of what constitutes the West as the West. Put another way, the very concept of the West is no longer an essential part of our political or cultural self-understanding, and is no doubt more or less alien to the recent graduates of colleges and universities.
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