The West has become alarmingly vulnerable to a collapse of its civilization. The past half-century has seen the rise of increasingly militant anti-Christian secularism; cultural, moral and religious relativism; nihilism; the penetration of Cultural Marxism throughout Western education systems, media and the judiciary; and a gathering demographic collapse as fertility rates of native Westerners are in many countries below replacement rate – as urged by the narrative of “overpopulation.” And a culture of death – abortion and euthanasia – is bidding to replace a culture of life.
There has also been a rapid expansion of Islam within Western countries, facilitated by massive immigration of “refugees” and illegals.
Most Western countries now contain many people who have become pessimistic about their own culture, while having in practice no foundational values at all. There is a plague of permissiveness and “feelings” rather than facts – a cloying sentimentality and an epidemic of virtue-signalling. There is also a huge attack on the ethic of competition, the work ethic and the pursuit of excellence. We see gathering cultural and social decline, eloquently described by writers such as Theodore Dalrymple.
And in most recent years, we now find ourselves faced with a threat to our national security from an aggressive and hostile Chinese Communist Party which wants China to take over as the world hegemon and is using all manner of infiltration, cyber, and other asymmetric war tactics to achieve this aim. Meanwhile, our Western militaries waste time and energy on woke rubbish. The situation is truly serious.
Here are just a few books that are worth reading about what the West is doing to itself: fighting its own culture.
SUGGESTED READING
Allan Bloom: The Closing of the American Mind. Simon and Schuster, 1987.
Tammy Bruce: The Death of Right and Wrong – Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values. 2004.
Melanie Phillips: The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle Over God, Truth and Power. Encounter Books, New York 2010. ISBN 978-1-59403-375-9.
Douglas Murray: The War on the West. Harper Collins 2022. ISBN: 9780008492793
Diana West: The Death of the Grown-up – how America’s arrested development is bringing down Western civilization. St Martin’s Griffin, 2008. ISBN 978-0-312-34049-0
Michel Walsh: The Devil’s Pleasure Palace – The cult of critical theory and the subversion of the West. Encounter Books 2017.
Glenn Beck: Cowards: what politicians, radicals and the media refuse to say. Threshold Editions 2012. ISBN 9781451693478
Patrick Sookhdeo: The New Civic Religion: Humanism and the future of Christianity
Patrick Sookhdeo: The death of Western Christianity: drinking from the poisoned wells of the cultural revolution
Lyle Shelton: I kid you not – Notes from 20 years in the trenches of the culture wars. Connor Court Publishing, 2020. ISBN: 9781925826951
Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt: The Coddling of the American Mind: how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure
Victor Davis Hanson: The Dying Citizen : How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America. Basic Books 2021
Theodore Dalrymple: Life at the Bottom – the worldview that makes the underclass. Ivan R. Dee, Chicago. 2001. ISBN 1-56663-382-6
Theodore Dalrymple: Our Culture, what’s left of it –the mandarins and the masses. 2007. ISBN 9781566637213
Theodore Dalrymple: Spoilt Rotten – the toxic cult of sentimentality. 2010 . ISBN 978-1-906142-61-2
Theodore Dalrymple: Not with a Bang But a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline. 2009. ISBN 978-1-906308-10-0
