What does this mean for the human future? Is the decline of the West a harbinger of apocalyptic troubles ahead for the world, with the arrival of Singularity and Artificial Intelligence and the rise of authoritarianism in China, Russia, and elsewhere (Xi Jinping: "The East's risen, the West's declined.")? Or is the present moment a harbinger of new beginnings and a new period of peace, prosperity, and super-abundance for all humanity and the wider world? Whatever the outcome, there are unmistakable signs that the West, its lead society the American republic, and the faiths that made them both, are all in a serious condition. They have lost their essence and their soul, parts of them are in free fall, and as their enemies see the situation, they are in the process of terminal decline. If this is so, the decline of the West, the most powerful of the many carriers of globalization in history, carries titanic implications for the entire world and for the human future.

For those with eyes to see, the present time is heavy with its prospects for the future, and careless in such a time we cannot afford to be. Would that much of our situation were other than it is, but whatever the day in which we live, we must rise to meet our time as our time meets us. Only so can anyone hope to serve their generation well, especially in a generation that by any standards is historic. But even before the essential and urgent question, What is to be done? we must raise the equally important question, What is actually happening? What is the story in which we find ourselves now and in which we are playing our part?

Strikingly, while the West faces strong and implacable enemies from the outside, the most vehement and radical enemies are assaulting the West from within. The waning of the West is due in part to a Western war on the West, for the animating spirit in much of the West today is passionately adversarial to what the West has stood for -- and sometimes in the most surprising quarters such as the once-conservative worlds of the corporations and the armed forces. Commentators reach for analogies such as "own-goal politics" and a "circular firing-squad culture war without any end." But the war on the West is recent and only part of the problem. The real causes of the decline lie much deeper and go back much earlier. Today these causes are philosophical, ethical, cultural, economic, and technological, but it would be a cardinal mistake to overlook the deepest cause of all -- the deteriorating condition of the roots of the animating force that once made the West the West. This happens when the faiths that gave vitality and unity to Western civilization become enervated and are contested or rejected entirely as they have been.

Whatever the standpoint and the perspective people take, what is certain is that the West, and America as the lead society of the West, now face a critical moment and a critical contest. They will either experience a genuine and profound renewal of their ideas and ideals, or they will replace them with different but equally powerful ideas and ideals, or they will decline beyond hope of recovery and take their place as the latest entrant in the select circle of history's former civilizations. All but one of the great civilizations of history are to be found mainly in ruins and in museums, and it appears that the West as the present exception may be about to join them

The West is on the wane, but this essay is neither a eulogy nor a twenty-first century "Dover Beach." I am not a declinist, and I write with the conviction that, because we humans are free, we are not fated. Renewal is as possible as decline, though a far more arduous task, both intellectually and politically. The challenge of the decline of the West presents choices, rather than inevitabilities. As such, it can offer prospects of a new world to come, and not just an old world on the way out. Matthew Arnold's famous and much-quoted poem "Dover Beach" was brilliant, if premature. His "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the sea of faith in the nineteenth century need not be the last word. The tide that recedes comes in again. Twilights lead on to mornings.

Yet history, of course, is not cyclical like tides and twilights. Human freedom and responsibility, human choices and their consequences are much more than cycles, more than the swings of a pendulum, and they are never fated or purely determined. "It is what it is," people mutter today, but the truth is, it is what we make it through our choices. Far from a eulogy, this is an assessment of the factors that once made the West, factors that will be critical to the outcome of the crisis of the West, and that could even be critical to the renewal of the West. The challenge for the West is not simply to discern the moment. The questions facing the West are a multitude that are inextricably bound up with the ideas, ideals, and faith that created it. These questions must now shape the answers that must be pursued if the Western twilight is not to end in night but in a dawn worthy of the best ideals of the West. Renewal is as possible as decline, though highly demanding because of what it requires and the major obstacles it must overcome to answer the deepest hopes of humanity in the global era.

The world is wider than the West

There are two common attitudes that shut down any concern about Western civilization from the start. The first stems from the confidence of those whose focus is global rather than regional. They claim that a grand and unstoppable global reordering is already underway, led by the post-war post-nationalism that created the European Union, the emergence of the liberal world order, and now supported by the digital revolution, with the coming era of superabundance for all in the wings. It is time, these people say, to be citizens of the world rather than advocates for any nation or civilization. Today, this claim is usually associated with the "Great Reset," heralded by Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum at Davos, and his 2020 call for a post-pandemic resetting of global affairs." But it was introduced earlier by the Club of Rome, and it is supported by a host of other global Titans such as George Soros and Bill Gates, and at a different level well captured by John Lennon's "Imagine." The roots of the claim are long standing, with a string of earlier champions from Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC, to Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century, to H.G. Wells at the dawn of the twentieth.

The state of the West, according to the current globalist or universalist proponents, is neither here nor there. To them it is a red herring that diverts people from seeing the historic progress of humanity in our brave new global era. Whether the West is in decline or on the road to renewal is irrelevant, they say. To globalists, universalists, post-nationalists, supra-nationalists, progressive trans-nationalists of all kinds, and all who see themselves as "citizens of everywhere" (and nowhere) rather than "citizens of somewhere," humanity overall is progressing rapidly and well, and the possibility of superabundance for all is within reach. They look past the West to a world government and bureaucracy that H.G. Wells, a century ago, called the "Global Republic," the "Global Commonwealth," the "world directorate" -- all summed up in the "One World Government" of popular fears. Progress, the globalists say, is undeniable, though not universal. As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker puts, it, reflecting on his book Enlightenment Now, "progress does not mean that everything gets better for everyone, everywhere, all the time. That would be a miracle, that wouldn't be progress."

Those who hold such optimistic views of global progress today are mostly secularists and materialists, like Wells, Soros, and Pinker. They are commonly driven by a twin-engine motive, one negative and one positive. Negatively speaking, "Ruin" with a capital R, which was seen earlier as the ruin of war, is now the ruin of the "permacrisis" and the converging "polycrises," such as nuclear war, population increase, pandemics, climate change, and human extinction through Artificial Intelligence. These dire crises, dubbed "the Davos harms race," create the spectre that gives urgency to their apocalyptic "or else" style of proposals. Positively speaking, "Progress" with a capital P is the confidence on which they rely as they drive their way forward to their goals. They might not agree with the radicals who make war on the West, but their eyes are focused elsewhere. As they see things from a worldwide perspective, global trends in science, technology, economics, medicine, and inclusive politics are lifting humanity out of the mire of poverty, backwardness, and superstition. People across the whole world are living longer, enjoying better health, and expanding the areas in which they are making more choices about their own lives. The global trends are onward and upward, and while the prospect of global superabundance is in view, the state of the West is irrelevant.

In sum they argue, humanity as a whole is on the march, and that is what counts. If the world seizes the post-pandemic opportunity, the globalists say, global progress, prosperity, and peace can be the order of the day, regardless of any particular civilization or region of the world.

No one should be blind to the import of such global trends and advances. The enrichment, improved health, and longer life that come from the expansion of the world economy, are of course to be welcomed. In my lifetime alone, China, the land of my birth, has made material strides that can only be described as stupendous, but -- and a critical but -- all under an iron fist and without any accompanying progress in freedom or any recognition of the spiritual. No one should be blinded by such dazzling advances. As we shall see, uncritical globalism and universalism are fast becoming a new and improved form of imperialism and a monstrous threat to freedom and the human future. They are creating a gigantic pincer grip -- one claw coming from Xi Jinping's expanding autocracy in China and his "Global Civilization Initiative," and the other claw coming from the centralized interventionism of the Global Resetters in the West.

Our brave new globalists should remember that almost all the advances they herald are the gifts of the West, the progress they highlight is developing along materialist lines only, it is far from even and stable globally, and like all forms of empire-building, the constant focus on the global at the expense of the local carries the seeds of authoritarianism. Besides, there is an inherent link between secularism and authoritarianism, deal-making "transactionalism" at the expense of human rights will only favour the world's ruling elites, and materialism with no place for the life of the spirit is the ultimate flat earth view of life. In sum, it remains to be seen how the globalizing trends will fare if the faith, the spirit, the ethics, the humaneness, and the culture that once nurtured them is no longer given a voice in the world. Both the absence of faith and the character of the alternative ideology -- secularism in the West and nationalism and communism in China -- will prove decisive in shaping the kind of culture that develops.

Communism and fascism are often seen as fundamentally different extremes, with one anchoring the left and the other anchoring the right. They actually share important resemblances, above all in their common roots in the French revolution, their commitment to the power of the state, and their inevitable totalitarian imperialism. What differs is not that they are on the left or the right, but the unifying principle of their totalitarianisms -- class for the communists and nation for the fascists. Hitler, the grand exemplar of the right, was a great admirer of the French revolution, the cradle of the left. But it is important to see that, while communism is in some respects a Christian heresy, fascism is a direct and explicit repudiation of Judaism and Christian faiths that made the West. Fascism is therefore a fateful return to the pre-Christian and pagan understanding of life and power. Germany's National Socialism stands as a warning of what can happen when the brilliance of education, science, technology, and economics outstrip morality and are pressed into the service of an ideology and a party that serves only their own power.

The monstrous can be reborn. Berthold Brecht's warning in "The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui" still stands. "This was the thing that nearly had us mastered; Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men! Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, The bitch that bore him is in heat again."

One foundational issue that must not be lost in the global discussion is sovereignty, the personal freedom and responsibility of citizens that is the heart of human self-government, local rule, and genuinely thick democracy. Yet where is sovereignty to be located and grounded today? Can it still be anchored in the individual person, the family, and the local community (as in notions such as "subsidiarity" and in movements such as "the front porch republic," "Save the parish," and George Washington's favourite biblical vision of each person and family living freely and peacefully "under their own vine and fig tree")? Or is the classical vision of domus, urbs et orbis (household, city, and world) to be completely overruled by a global expertocracy, a super-galactic directorate, or by some AI Superintelligence that will think and make decisions for us all? Do the globalists even try to understand personal freedom, citizenship, and self-government, let alone have the philosophical basis for believing in them and building them? Will the globalists' material progress fare as well under authoritarianism as it has under liberal democracy? What is to stop the trend toward all-coordinating, bureaucratic centralization and surveillance, morphing from a soft despotism to a hard totalitarianism, even in the West? Why is there is already such a growth of centralized surveillance and state control in democratic societies and such a growth of autocracy around the world, not in the number of autocracies but in size and reach of the major ones? (For example, Russia, the largest country in the world; and China, still the most populous until overtaken by India.) And crucially, what is the condition of such essential counterweights to the overreach of the state as the family, the church or synagogue, and the school? Can these and other institutions of civil society even hope to survive without the faith that inspires them and puts a clear limit on the reach and control of the all-commanding state?

Questions such as these mount on many sides, and the deeper we explore them, the more crucial the historical and contemporary role of the West and its leading faith become, even in the possibility of Western decline.

Has the West really awakened?

The second common attitude that ignores any concern for the state of the West is the position of those who dispute that there any crisis exists. They point, for example, to the unity shown by the West in response to President Vladimir Putin's "Rape of Ukraine." Putin's Russian invasion in 2022, with the tacit support of China's Xi Jinping, was unprovoked, brutal, destructive, and horrendously evil. To be sure, its Hitler-like features and the war-crimes violations of humanity shocked Europe and the West out of their complacency, and many people were assured by the unity and resolve that the West had not shown for decades. Yet that is hardly the assurance we need about the state of the West. Being shocked awake by an external enemy is one thing and demonstrating a deep and inspiring vision of what once inspired the West as a civilization is quite another.

Putin miscalculated and reunited NATO and the West to some extent. But to this point the response from America and the West has been neither strong enough nor united on the elemental civilizational issues and the convictions necessary to sustain resistance. It is far from the renaissance the West needs, so it may not prove enduring. Indeed, a huge irony was evident in the situation. The invading dictator and his supporters, such as Moscow's Archbishop Kirill, claimed to be fired by a living sense of history and faith. They justified their actions by their resentment against their humiliation by the West in the Paris Treaty of 1856 at the end of the Crimean war, and by echoes of ancient religious myths about "Holy Russia," "the Russian way," and the "third Rome." So, they issued a national call to "sacrificial heroism," to Pan-Slav talk of being "saviours of humanity," and to defending "spiritual civilization" against the "decadence," the "double standards," and the "hypocrisy" of the West. As a sixteenth century monk, Filofel, had stated the "Third Rome doctrine" after the cities of Rome and Constantinople had fallen, "two Romes have fallen, the Third stands, and there shall not be a fourth." To be sure, Putin's version of the myth was twisted, manipulated, and entirely self-serving, but it resonated powerfully as a cover for his base and brutal blitzkrieg, whereas much of the West responded in almost purely secular terms.

That sort of thinking is why it is said in Europe that "the East is the West, and the West is the non-West" -- by which is meant that much of Eastern Europe, which knew what it was like to live under communism, is in favour of traditional Western ideas and ways of life, including the importance of faith, the family, and freedom, whereas much of Western Europe believes it has graduated beyond all that. In America, a similar division can be seen between the elites and ordinary people. Clearly, the reflection and the soul searching across the West must go much deeper than the recent trumpeted unity.

What in fact is "the West" that is the target of the attacks? Russia, it is said, is European but not Western, whereas Japan is Western but not European. Israel, similarly, is Middle Eastern but thoroughly Western in the midst of the Middle East. Does this mean, then, that the West is simply a matter of representative government, the rule of law, respect for private property, a free market economy, and a stable environment in which to do business? Is the West simply a matter of the best of Western art and literature and all that was once taught as "Western civ"? Or is the West more than that? Is the West not also about ideas and ideals such as human dignity, human rights, freedom, justice, truth, open debate, or have these ideals been betrayed so badly that they dare not even be named? What of freedom of religion and conscience, freedom of speech, and freedom of assembly? And what of the faith behind them all, which would mean, not that Israel is Western but that the West is essentially Jewish and Christian?

How, then, is the West doing in grounding and transmitting these ideals and in living out these ideals in daily life, and transmitting them to the next generation? Do these ideals still need roots, and nutrients, or can they be just asserted, and left floating in the air? Has the West become a cut-flower civilization? Are Western ideals in fact solidly grounded in the ideas that Westerners espouse today, and are they even aware of the faith that once made the West? Do they understand how the West came into being? Has the West satisfactorily examined its conscience and redressed the wrongs in its record over such evils as slavery, imperialism, nationalism, and colonialism? Ironically, some of the most trenchant diagnoses of Western weakness and decay come from the enemies of the West such as Putin and Xi, whose critiques augment those of critics from within the West. This massive overall assault from without and within is what strengthens these autocrats in attacking the West and believing that Russia's and China's time has come.

In short, the problem of the West is the West. Along with the lessons of history, the criticisms of Russia, China, Iran, and countless Western radicals offer mirrors that, however much distorted, can help the West to see the precipice on which it stands and what needs to be remedied and restored. Nothing short of a genuine renewal of the roots will be sufficient to turn the tide.

Is "civilization" more than self-congratulation?

There is considerable debate over the term "civilization," which has itself been caught up in the heated anger of anti-Western wrangling. A "culture" is simply a way of life lived in common, but is the term "civilization" only a matter of a powerful culture giving itself a pat on the back? I am not using the word as a compliment, but in the straightforward sense of a culture and way of life that becomes distinguished for both its excellence in some areas, its expansion in terms of reach, and its extension over time. Put simply, a civilization is a society and its way of life that rises high enough, spreads far enough, and lasts long enough to merit the term civilization. The West has been described as the most powerful civilization in human history, not as a matter of moral achievement -- indeed, much of its worldwide expansion was highly immoral -- but because of the immensity of its global impact. But the West is at a critical juncture today. The West is on the wane for internal reasons, and if it is to be renewed and not to decline, the West must re-examine its history, its identity, its ideals, its successes and failures, and its conscience. What made the West the West, what defines the West today, and what does that mean for the West and for the world? Such issues form the civilizational moment and the civilizational contest now facing the West, and they are the theme of this book.

Too many Westerners show no inclination to think about these things at all. But no one should be so foolish as to hurry past the grand inquiry that our civilizational moment raises and forces us to face. Only the fool or the blind fail to take note of the precipice on which they are standing. The questions of our time run deep, and they need to. What is the ultimate reality behind all reality in the cosmos? What are our ultimate allegiances to be? And what, therefore, is the vision of life that should inspire us, the master story of history that should shape us, and the ground of the foundational trust that is our confidence -- the "we" behind the word "us" being nations and civilizations as well as individuals? Where does ultimate sovereignty lie -- in God, in individuals, in the nation, or in some version of the New World Order? Without a comprehensive and constructive vision of life, there can be no unity, only disintegration. Without an overarching master story, there can be no prophetic interpretation, only be conflicts and confusion. Without solid grounds of trust, there can be neither entrepreneurial risk taking nor partnership and collaboration, only suspicion and envy, and at the end of the line, nihilism and despair. And without a profound, rational, and responsible faith, there can only be faltering and decline.

Thus, we are compelled to see that the decline of the West raises ultimate questions that are profound yet unavoidable, not only for the West but for the entire world. How humanity across the world today reads this civilizational moment, and how we as individual humans each respond to this civilizational contest in our daily lives and critical choices, will be the key to how we engage the world of our time. The fact is that by the very standard of the faiths that made the West, what is seen from one perspective as mere decline could from another perspective be seen as judgment. If God is God, as the West once believed, then the West has not only forgotten God, the West has provoked God. One could argue that that the evidence of such judgment would be the way in which the ripened grapes of wrath are causing Western minds and strategies to reel and stagger at so many points.

The rise of the modern West

My first ten years of life were lived far from the West -- in the extreme chaos and violence of China in World War Two and the horrifying reign of terror in the early years of the Chinese revolution. Literally millions died around our family in the Japanese invasion, during the war and in the great famine of 1943, including my own two brothers. Tens of millions more were to die as Chairman Mao's ruthless, insane, and evil policies gathered pace. At the climax of the Chinese revolution in 1949, we were living in Nanking (Nanjing today). The city had been the capital of Chiang Kai-shek's "free China." It had been brutalized in the Nanking massacre, the savage "rape of Nanking" in 1937, and it had suffered further in the long hard years of war. But for all these catastrophes, the evidence of Nanking's former glory was still stunning -- the Ming Palace, the Drum Tower, the Porcelain Tower, the great city wall, the tree lined avenues, and the SunYat-sen Mausoleum. Nanking had been China's capital under four different dynasties, and under the Ming dynasty in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it was the capital of a united China and the most powerful and prosperous city in the world -- until the emperor himself moved the capital to a rebuilt Beijing. No one surveying the horizon from the emperor's throne in Nanking would have thought that China could be rivalled by anyone at the time, least of all by any power at the other end of the great Asian landmass.

Yet that is exactly what happened. At what was considered the rocky outcrop at the

north-western end of the great Asian landmass, and in what people considered a cultural backwater, Europe rose to dominate the world, including China. "What happened?" the Chinese asked more recently, as they began to recover their power and their self-respect. What was the secret of Europe's rise to dominance from the sixteenth century on? Was the sudden rise due to Europe's armies, its political order, its economy, or the rule of law? No, the Chinese scholars concluded, these were all factors, but the leading reason was Europe's "religion." Others entered the discussion. The reason had to be more precise. Western "religion," the Christian faith, was not European in origin. It was Jewish through and through, and therefore Middle Eastern, but it had grown to be the official faith of Rome, declared so by the Emperor Theodosius in 380 AD. The conversion of the barbarian kingdoms over the next centuries created Christendom and brought the Christian faith to the whole of Europe. But for all the influence of its fearless explorers, sailors, traders, and missionaries, Christian Europe had never dominated the world. What happened in the sixteenth century was that revolutionary burst of the Christian faith known as the Protestant Reformation. The Reformation, historians have said, the ideas of the Reformation, boosted by the invention of the printing press and the accessibility of the Bible in the hands of common people, "created the modern world."

Debates still swirl around that conclusion. The Christian faith had already united and inspired Europe for more than a millennium, the Catholic Reformation was also powerful in the sixteenth century, some of the results of the Reformation were unintended, and sometimes they were the opposite of what the reformers themselves must have had in mind. And of course, the Reformation divided Europe fatefully, even if it was the third Christian schism, following the Great Schism between the Orthodox and the Catholics in 1054 and the Papal Schism between 1378 and 1417. But out of all that ferment, there is no question that Europe and then America and the West rose to dominance and, for better or worse, have led the world for the past five or six centuries. Today, in spite of its current weakness and divisions, the United States still stands as the lead society in both the West and the world.

Only barbarians

Before the rise of Europe, the great civilizations of the world were held to be mainly in Asia, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and South America -- the Sumerian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Assyrian, the Babylonian, the Persian, the Greek, the Roman, the Mayan, and the Aztec. Europe was never in contention. For a start, Europe has no natural, physical, or racial focus of unity like that of China and India. It was simply a vast territorial homeland for a restlessly wandering variety of tribes and barbarians. Barbarians, indeed, were at the roots of Europe and we Europeans must never forget it. There had certainly been a growing sense of unity in Europe after the conversion of the barbarian kings, gathering force and speed decisively under the Emperor Charlemagne, and consolidating after the repulse of Islamic invaders and the reforms of the great monastic movements under leaders such as St Benedict and St Gregory. The birth of the great universities such as Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, the magnificence of the twelfth century cathedrals, the profundity of medieval philosophy, and the soaring beauty of the sacred music were an indication of what Europe was accomplishing, but Christian dominance in Europe did not mean European dominance in the world.

Yet what then became Western civilization over the last five hundred years has been described as the greatest and most powerful civilization in all history, because of its global reach and impact and its proud and confident doctrine of progress. Partly, this this was the result of Europe's extraordinary intellectual and artistic prowess -- for example, Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, Mozart, and Beethoven. But mainly the worldwide impact was due to Europe's "great exports" -- the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the development and applications of science, technology, and the market economy. The combined power of all these innovations has woken the world from the past and transformed whole societies and the lives of billions of people -- empowering even the enemies of the West today. No people or generation in all history has ever seen such a powerful tide of progress, with so many believing it was destined to go onward and upward forever.

A rising chorus of decline

Today, however, two facts are almost beyond question. First, the West has dominated the world over the past half millennium; and second, since the mid nineteenth century there has been a swelling chorus of voices that have signalled the decline of the West and the end of Western dominance as a civilization. If Western greatness was unequalled, the rapidity of Western decline has rarely been equalled either. Never, for example, have so many major empires collapsed in a single generation as the European empires collapsed after the two great wars of the twentieth century.

Many commentators described Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebration on June 22, 1897, as the supreme symbol of the zenith of the European phase of Western civilization. A seventeen-carriage grand imperial parade on a beautiful summer day demonstrated the power and glory of Great Britain and Europe. A quarter of the earth's surface lay under the rule of the Queen-Empress's nation alone and her majesty's royal navy ruled the waves. Yet only days later, Rudyard Kipling celebrated the occasion in The Times with a poetic warning, "Recessional." Within four years, in 1901, the Queen herself was gone. A few years later, her dinner partner at the celebration, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated, setting off the first of the cataclysmic twentieth century wars. The greatness of the nineteenth century -- the century hailed as the busiest, most enterprising, and most progressive century in all history was over.

There had certainly been fin de siècle worries about Europe's decadence and decline in the 1890s, such as the French poet Charles Baudelaire who put the blame on the advance of technology. Such was the chaotic ferment of ideas in Vienna that Karl Kraus described the city as "the testing ground for world destruction." Before that, other distinguished voices expressed alarm at the state of the West, included Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Russia, Jacob Burckhardt in Switzerland, and the brothers Henry and Brook Adams in the U.S. (The West, Henry wrote was barrelling down towards "ultimate, colossal, cosmic collapse.") Suddenly, these scattered voices swelled to a strong chorus in the new century, climaxing in the grand narratives of Oswald Spengler The Decline of the West, Arnold Toynbee A Study of History, Pitirim Sorokin Social and Cultural Dynamics, Philip Rieff My Life Among the Deathworks, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn Warning to the West.

The horror of the First World War was merely the harbinger of the hurricane of history that the twentieth century became. The so-called "Great War" was soon overshadowed by the dark series of the twentieth century's atrocities, but it stands as the watershed event that shook the pretentions of European civilization forever -- both the Christian dimension, through the horrifying violations of human life, dignity and ethics, and the Enlightenment dimension, through the flat-out contradiction of the claim of human Progress. Western civilization's "innocence" (aka Europe's self-righteousness) was called into question once and for all. Gertrude Stein called the generation that followed the "Lost Generation," and in his first book This Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald described his contemporaries as having "grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in men shaken."

Thus, the ominous drumbeat of the nineteenth century voices of decline and doom was amplified by the carnage and horror of the two World Wars, the emergence of total war and the slaughter of civilians, the rise of totalitarianism, the horror of the revelations of the death camps, and the menace of nuclear destruction and environmental degradation -- summarized for many by Europe's "terrible Gs: guillotines, gas chambers, and gulags.

Thanks to the West, humanity must now forever stand "post-Auschwitz," "post-Hiroshima," and "pre-Singularity." Our double human capacity for evil and for destruction has been demonstrated beyond deniability. QED. For the most monstrous time in all history, the "end times" rushed forward and thrust their face into the present, utopian dreams and apocalyptic nightmares seemed to materialize faster than ever and almost to morph into each other, and the possibility of the human extermination of the human race has become an enduring staple in our thinking by day and our nightmares by night.

How could Marx's Russian and Chinese heirs and imitators, who each promised to make their parts of the world anew, justify the killing tens of millions of their fellow-countrymen in the name of a secular European ideology? But how could Europe's most advanced, educated, and cultured people coldly design and carry out the holocaust, the industrial murder of six million of their fellow-human beings, the Jews? Could Europe ever deserve to be called civilized again with ideologies as evil and cruel as communism and fascism in its account? If total war was humanity's gravest menace, could humans solve the problem of war before war solved the problem of humanity? The twentieth century West had severed the reality of a human being from the ideal of being human, perhaps forever. Western morale was deflated if not ruined, and in the eyes of many, the moral leadership of the West could never be the same. If the West was envied for its prosperity, power, and progress in the nineteenth century, and viewed as relatively virtuous, at least in its own eyes, it became irredeemably wicked after the twentieth century, and certainly so in the eyes of the revolutionary left and much of the world.

Et tu, America

Today, the chorus of decline and assault now includes the United States within its scope. America was once considered exempt from the run and rules affecting other Western nations, at least in American eyes. Wasn't the U.S the "new order of the ages"? Hadn't the New world stepped forward as a "super-Europe" to rescue the Old world from itself? Didn't the American dream make movements such as radical socialism unnecessary? Wasn't "exceptionalism" the mantra by which Americans could ward off all fears and misgivings that America would decline in the end like everyone else? America's modern identity was formed in response to its leadership of the free world against a range of European empires in the First World War, fighting one dangerous European dictatorship in the Second World War, and another equally dangerous European dictatorship in the Cold War.

But now America is accused of all the dark sins and attributes of imperialism itself, and America is accused by many Americans themselves. The Vietnam and Iraq wars and American atrocities such as the My Lai massacre and the tortures of the Black Sites in Baghdad were the American equivalent of the Great War for Europe. The age of innocence, self-righteousness, and the Norman Rockwell salt-of-the-earth image of America was over for good. Today, America's entire past has been revised, and large swathes of the American intelligentsia have joined the cultural Marxists in recasting their own American history in the harsh light of the radical left's critique. Thus, America is gaslighting itself. It is torn by its greatest crisis since the Civil War, set in train by radical ideas adopted uncritically from Europe. With today's ageing, weak and uncertain leadership under President Biden, a president in his dotage, America looks to be suffering from the same malaise as much of the rest of the West. If anything, it is declining at an even faster rate, with more bizarre examples of madness and decadence, and with an even more disastrous outcome. Indeed, if current indications of paedophilia and sexual anarchy are the bellwether, America is sliding fast into a decadence and culture of death that is creating its own Weimar period.

If America's present crisis is part of the overall crisis of the West, this is no time for American parochialism. Nor is it time to be chanting deceptive mantras about American exceptionalism. The present civilizational moment challenges Americans both as citizens of the lead society of the West and, in the case of American Jews and Christians, as heirs of the faiths that made the West. They must each enlarge their horizons, stretch the borders of their thinking, and venture beyond the comfort of their customary histories. In particular, the world cannot afford American myopia and American isolationism. America's similarities and differences from the rest of the West are important. But the issues America faces are deeper than simply Republicans versus Democrats, conservatives versus liberals, or the latest round of America's fifty year-long culture wars. This is not the time to be chanting deceptive mantras about American exceptionalism. To be sure, many American issues are distinctively American and quite different from those facing other countries in the West. But at the same time, America is part of what Winston Churchill called the "English-speaking peoples," and Adolf Hitler attacked as the "Anglo-Saxon nations," which are clearly and essentially Western.

In short, no one can understand and resolve America's present crisis without understanding the source of the crisis and the possible outcomes of the wider crisis of the West. While America is very much American, America is also a Western nation, and like all of Western civilization many of America's issues can only be understood and resolved in the light of their common sources in shared Western history and their common future.

Civilizational moment

What is meant by a "civilizational moment"? When Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister of Britain in the 1960s, someone once asked him what he thought was the worst thing about politics. "Events, my dear boy, events," the unflappable Edwardian gentleman replied. Today, in the global era, a blizzard of events is coming at us from all sides and with an unprecedented speed under the impact of fast-life and what Emil Brunner called the modern "time-disease." If ever the world felt it was living under the spell of the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times," it is now. Two additional factors have added both urgency and gravity to the tsunami of events. From one side, the immense force of the truly global world, with its scale, its speed, and its simultaneity, exerts enormous pressure on the traditional importance of the national and the local. And from the other side, the pressure of both history and the awareness of the oncoming future stretch the challenge of human imagination and accountability to the breaking point. We are living in a civilizational moment and a civilizational contest

A civilizational moment is a critical transition phase in the rise, course, and decline of a civilization when a civilization loses its decisive connection with the dynamic that inspired it. Such a moment must then issue in one of three broad options: a renewal of the dynamic that inspired the civilization in the first place, a successful replacement of the original dynamic by another, or the decline of the civilization and perhaps the birth of a new and different civilization later in time and elsewhere in the world. In sum, the issue for a civilization in a civilizational moment is its vision of ultimate reality: Is the civilization in living touch with the ideas, ideals, and inspiration that created it and that it needs to continue to flourish? Or, with its roots severed and no replacement in place, is it about to decline and die?

Such civilizational moments are transitional and ripe with several possibilities, so they are fraught with tension and turbulence, and often with conflicts, wars and revolutions. They are what the Chinese called a "period of the contending states," what the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt in his prophetic study Force and Freedom called "an era of wars," what Arnold Toynbee called "a time of troubles," what Pitirim Sorokin called "dies irae, dies illa -- that day, the day of wrath and impending doom," and what Leon Kass calls a "civilizational contest." As the horizon darkened in the nineteenth century Europe, Burckhardt noted that "the established political forms of the greatest civilized peoples are tottering or changing." Little did he realize that four great empires were soon to collapse -- the Hohenzollern in Germany, the Habsburg in Austria-Hungary, the Romanov in Russia, the Ottoman in Turkey -- and the greatest of all the empires, the British, was well advanced in its sunset years. Such times are always critical in the history of particular civilizations, but that significance is magnified exponentially in our now globalized world. The outcome of the present civilizational moment and contest will be momentous not only for the West but for humanity and all future generations.

The cancelled factor

There are many excellent histories of the West and the crisis of Western civilization. Tom Holland's Dominion is a recent, best-selling example, along with Niall Ferguson's Civilization and Douglas Murray's The War on the West. There are also classics on the role of religion in the rise of the West, such as Christopher Dawson's Religion and the Rise of Western Culture and Emil Brunner's Christianity and Civilisation. We now have excellent surveys of the many prophets of Western decline, such as B.G. Brander's panoramic Staring into Chaos. This essay does not attempt to cover those grand perspectives. It focuses on one factor that many of the greatest thinkers agree will surely be the key to the outcome of the crisis: religion, which in the case of the West is the Christian faith growing from its roots in Judaism. There is no question that the Christian faith was the ultimate allegiance and the view of ultimate reality that most Westerners knew. In sum, it was the conviction of the supreme Presence of the one true, transcendent God and what faith in God made possible that made the West.

Historians Lord Acton and Christopher Dawson both argued repeatedly that "religion is the key to history." In Progress and Religion, Dawson explained, "Every living culture must possess some spiritual dynamic, which provides the energy necessary for that sustained social effort that is civilization." If, then, the Western crisis is in part a spiritual crisis, the solution needs to include the spiritual dimension. Put more strongly, an increasing number of people are beginning to appreciate that the Western crisis is essentially a spiritual crisis. Earlier, Edmund Burke had claimed that "religion is the basis of civil society." The question now is whether Jews and Christians are still in touch with that truth and that reality, and if so, whether their present faith will prove strong or weak, and constructive or irrelevant as the civilizational moment unfolds.

Without identifying the role of faith, for better or worse, any history of the West would be incomplete. But history is not the only reason why faith must not be left out of the discussion. In the case of Western civilization, there is no alternative to an open acknowledgment of the powerful role of faith in the rise of the West, in the purported decline of the West, and in suggestions about the potential renewal of the West. It would not be true history without it. No one should be under any illusions about this point today, especially when wildly distorted and censored histories are at the heart of ideological conflicts. In today's secularized climate, the crucial role of faith is often the shunned factor. And if considered, it is often the despised and cancelled factor. The European Union, for example, is notorious for its miserly appreciation of its own debts to its Christian origins. Religion is mostly discussed in polite intellectual circles only in terms of its scandals, its weaknesses, its steady disappearance (the rise of the "religious nones," and the like) and its contribution to political conflicts and to terrorism. In sum, faith is not likely to receive the attention it deserves and requires, yet without understanding faith -- for better or worse -- any Western understanding of the crisis of the West will be faulty and inadequate for its absence.

The reasons for this neglect, as we shall see, are part of the overall conflicts within the West today. But the point is clear: the full crisis of the West cannot and will not be understood properly unless critics take the place of faith seriously and accurately -- for two elementary reasons. First, faith is the decisive factor because it is a matter of what people believe to be ultimate reality and a matter of their ultimate allegiance to that reality. Second, to the degree that the crisis of the West turns out to be the result of the crisis of faith, to that degree the role of faith will be crucial to the solution. Our concern here is the crisis of the West as a civilization, but as Walter Russell Mead points out in his magisterial book The Arc of a Covenant, the same difficulty of dealing with faith with intellectual integrity is also true when dealing with many other issues such as nuclear disaster, extreme climate change, cyberwar software, and genetic modification. Difficult as it is to bring religious and ethical convictions to bear in thinking about domestic and foreign policy, "some understanding of and sympathy for the worlds of religion and spiritual hunger remains indispensable for serious policy making." Considering the gravity of the global challenges facing humanity, to take them seriously is to be braced to face up to the question of ultimate reality. At such a moment, anything less will always turn out to be trivial and inadequate.

Politics provides another reason why faith must not be censored and cancelled in the debate. Stated negatively, a culture assumes a cult and a political order always turns out to be a commentary on what is considered the nature of humanity and what is humanly possible. "What is government itself," James Madison wrote famously, "but the greatest of all reflections of human nature?" Despotism and autocracy, for example, go hand in hand with a low view of human worth, and a low view of human worth makes authoritarianism inevitable. Stated more positively, human freedom assumes and requires a high view of human dignity and worth, and therefore a strong view of faith to undergird freedom and a strong respect for institutions such as the family, the school, and the church or synagogue, which cultivate the faith needed to make freedom possible and lasting. Finally, philosophy too must play its full part in the debate and take faith seriously. The reason is obvious. Philosophy is simply thinking about thinking, whether it is good thinking or bad thinking. The question of what is believed to be ultimately real is therefore basic to philosophy -- especially when what is believed to ultimately real is the well spring of a civilization and the first resort to provide needed Archimedean leverage in the crisis of the civilizational moment.

Yet faith has largely been "cancelled" in serious discussion today, not only by secular thinkers, but even by many religious believers, if unwittingly. Secularists dismiss faith as "epiphenomenal." They regard it as an ornament on the superstructure of society rather than foundational to society's very existence. And many Christians no longer discuss faith publicly in terms of its ultimate reality, but instead they talk purely in human and secular terms, relying on psychology and sociology to give credence to their arguments. They should be under no illusion: the full psychological and sociological machinery of analysing religion, with all its soaring theories and its trunk loads of statistics, from Auguste Comte through Sigmund Freud and Max Weber to the giants of thought today, is vital and significant, but it is never more than an assessment of the merely human and secular side of religion ("Gallup says," Pew research shows").

What such academic disciplines omit entirely is the ultimate and supernatural reality that faith claims to be about. If the claims of faith are true as its believers hold, then faith is an ultimate allegiance that speaks truly about ultimate reality. For those who believe, the ultimate reality must remain the supreme factor in thinking and in all human affairs. For those who believe, the ultimate reality must never be left out of the equation. Incomprehensible though it may be to many people, and impolite and incorrect though it may be to say in certain circles, if faith in God was in any way behind the rise of the West, then faith or absence of faith in God is also bound to be a factor in the decline or the renewal of the West. Thus, God, or at least faith in God, must never be left out of the discussion. Weak or powerful, absent or present, faith is the decisive issue for the West today.

To be clear

The notion of "the West" has come into focus again after Putin's invasion of Ukraine and the companion threats from China, Iran, and North Korea. Yet while there has been a surge of talk of "Europe," the "West," and their need to stand for "freedom" and "democracy," it remains to be seen how deep, how united, and how enduring this concern proves to be. No one should forget that both the strength and the weakness of a civilization are always internal before they are external. They are spiritual, moral, and cultural before they are economic and military, and they must therefore do full justice to the place of faith.

Russia's despotism and Chinese totalitarianism have become a problem only because Europe, America, and the West have not addressed their own problems in the light of their own identity and character. America's ordered freedom, for example, was once the bold answer to history's extremes of anarchy, which is all freedom and no order, and authoritarianism, which is all order and no freedom. America today shows little awareness and even less stomach for defending what are considered such theoretical niceties. America appears content to stagger uneasily between semi-anarchism and semi-authoritarianism. Americans need to pay urgent attention to first principles. The conclusions we come to in our time will be critical for the future of the West and for the future of individual nations in the West, supremely America. In sum, let me put forward a straightforward observation, a question, an assurance, a warning, and a reminder:

The observation: The West is now largely opposed to the faith that made it, and the intelligentsia in its lead society America are increasingly opposed to both the faith that made it and to the revolution that made it. These facts cannot but be consequential.

The question: What do these facts mean for the West, for America, for the faith in question, and how we are to live responsibly in our time in the light of the conclusions we reach? If there is a negative shift in convictions about ultimate reality, what will it mean for Western ideas and ideals? What will it mean for the foundational need for a high view of being human? For those with eyes to see, the present civilizational moment is history's wake-up call to the West. Ignore it and the decline will be irreversible.

The assurance: When I talk of the renewal of the West and of renewing the Jewish and Christian contribution to civilization, I am emphatically not advocating a post-liberal return to any notion of neo-Christendom, the revival of Roman Catholic integralism, or a revamped Russian Orthodox doctrine of the "Third Rome." I personally am strongly opposed to any conservative coalition that could easily become authoritarian. Vladimir Putin's spurious advocacy of "Christian values" and Patriarch Kirill's advocacy of Putin's war clearly demonstrate the fallacy of the maxim that my enemy's enemy is my friend. There must be no cosying up to autocrats on either the right or the left. My own strong preference is the truly liberal vision of "ordered freedom," emphasizing freedom of conscience and a pluralistic "civil public square," in clear contrast to a "sacred public square" and a "naked public square," as outlined in my earlier book The Global Public Square.

The warning: Like the greatest of the great civilizations of the past, Western civilization has had a towering impact for better or worse. To turn from the Jewish and Christian faiths that made Western civilization possible, and to turn to alternatives that are unable to replace their vitality and their high view of humanity, would be an act of historic folly that spells the end of the West and a dark day for the human future. No society that ignores such foundational truths of the Jewish and Christian views as human dignity, truth, words, conscience, covenant, freedom, justice, and peace can hope to build a society worthy of humanity.

The reminder: A civilizational moment, while necessarily including an accurate understanding of the past and the present, is ultimately about the future. As such, it challenges us as humans to be clear about first principles before we think of solving problems. Global transformation is a fundamental quest of our time, but how is it to be pursued and ordered? What if globalism turns out to be the fashionable slipway for the autocratic imperialism that is the age-old curse of humanity under dictators of different kinds? What if this empire building has simply been given a fresh global impetus by the Enlightenment's proposal of an empire of reason and Kant's dream of "perpetual peace"? Philosopher kings and technocratic experts look far more benevolent than Emperors, Tsars, Caliphs, and Popes, but their blueprints are no less designs for all-encompassing empires. What is beyond question is that globalists and the Global Resetters go wrong from the start by beginning with problems, not principles. They begin with grand global problems, such as war, population, pandemics, and environmental disaster, and inevitably they arrive at grand global solutions, grand global organizations and institutions to solve them, and in the end grand global governance.

Thus, whether the globalists' motive is the dream of universal reason or the hope of universal peace and prosperity, they move inexorably towards a revived imperialism and a New World Order that is indistinguishable in principle from that of a Pharaoh, a Caesar, a Holy Roman Emperor, or a Führer. After all, the real evil of Hitler's "nationalism" was his refusal to remain a nation. Hitler's German nationalism was an ill-disguised bid for German imperialism. Allied with the globalists' apocalyptic style of alarmist thinking based on "Our way, or ruin," the result of the globalist endeavours is an inevitable shrinking of human freedoms and a stifling of humanity's genuine diversity. Unless globalism is thought through with far greater care, the disdain for nations and the rush to the global at the expense of the national and the local will be a massive reinforcement of the authoritarian trends already powerfully at work in our world.

There can be little doubt that for our brave new Global Resetters, the name of the game is control -- global control, or else. The logic is clear and grim. The chaos and conflicts of the world must be brought to order, or else. The world must be brought to heel if is not to drive us towards hell. In short, there must be universal control if there is not to be universal chaos, so total control becomes the price of human survival. Considering the gravity of the present "polycrises," they say, no extreme scenario is off the table. If the issue is saving the world, the end justifies all possible means. Thus, regardless of the idealism and utopianism they may still profess, their will to power and their drive to dominate (St Augustine's libido dominandi) takes over in practice. There is no time to lose, they urge. Leaders who understand the gravity of the hour should act without delay, with no consideration for principle, history, shame, or irony.

How else could it be that only a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Americans across the board celebrated the decisive triumph of democracy and market economics over communism and socialism, President Biden and many of his party are now pressing forward in the reverse direction? In the name of the Great Reset, ridding the world of fossil fuel, saving the world from climate change, and "building back better" (a slogan borrowed shamelessly from Davos), they are hurrying America towards what has patently failed elsewhere: a most unAmerican command economy and a centralized society, replete with the promise of national digital currency -- all to be ushered in with little or no debate, or else.

It is time to buck the fashionable disdain for nations and nationalism as if they were nothing but "Christian nationalism" and "white nationalism." Protestants were once stoutly opposed to Catholic empires, and Americans were once equally opposed to European empires. It is time to bring in history and reaffirm the key importance of the nation in the Jewish story and in the story of the Reformation and of the English-speaking world in particular. While nations and nationalism can go badly wrong (above all, ironically, when nations want to be more than nations and grow imperial), nations are a vital alternative to empires, and national ordering is a vital alternative to imperial ordering as a vital guarantee of a critical level of human self-determination and self-government. Properly understood, the independence of a nation as a unit complements the equal importance of the independence of personal self-government and the independence of local rule. Often, only a nation can be the guardian of the shared ways of faith, language, culture, law, tradition, and defence that are distinctive and precious for a people. For the globalists, of course, all such notions are rubbish. The nation is yesterday's unit and a drag on tomorrow's world. For jetsetters, nations are flyover territory. Patriotism is merely nationalism, and nationalism is a dirty word in the global era, so we are all urged to rise to be "citizens of the world" and "post-nationalists" now.

There is certainly a present mismatch between global problems and national solutions, but through foundational errors in response, the Resetters have become intent on pulling the world away from sovereignty at the personal, the local, and the national levels, and replacing these important levels of sovereignty with a centralized global control. Unless this process is halted and reversed, it will end in totalitarianism and the crowning of a future global-era Alexander, Napoleon, or a global Xi Jinping as President of the World for Life. Lip-service to "saving the earth" and "preventing a planetary catastrophe" is a mere fig leaf to cover the underlying bid by the elites for global control. Empire-building is their goal, if often only in the small print.

To be sure, this is no time for alarmism, for stoking fears of the future that globalists hold out when we will all "own nothing and be happy," eating "processed insects" and "printed meat," and living in "15-minute cities." In clear, strong contrast to any alarmism in response to the globalists, it is time to affirm that two of the key political issues of our time are freedom (the vital liberal freedom for humans as individual persons to be fully themselves, and to think freely, speak freely, and live together freely) and sovereignty (so that human responsibility is balanced between personal sovereignty, local sovereignty, national sovereignty, and global sovereignty, and not over-balanced in favour of the centralized and global at the expense of the individual, the local, and the national).

The better way to preserve freedom is to start with principles, not problems -- to think, first, of the foundational principles of a human friendly society, such as human dignity, freedom, justice, peace, civility, and the ideal of living together with our deep differences. The way to proceed, then, is to move from first principles to the best political arrangements for realizing and fulfilling these ideals, and then move to the task of forging practical solutions to the global problems. Pursued in this way, the best solutions will stem from the first principles and they will honour and protect the first principles in refusing to violate their character. Only so can the fundamentals of humanity, freedom, and justice be protected and preserved in the grand global era.

This essay is written primarily for citizens of the West, especially for those who appreciate the role of faith, including those who appreciate the role of faith without sharing it. It is also written for all others around the world who wish to wrestle with the significance of this extraordinary moment in history. Allow me to explore the heart of the civilizational moment by setting out a series of key considerations touching on the role of faith in the West and some of the deeper and less covered issues in the background to our present moment. Too much thinking today is myopic, and too many people's concerned activism is trench warfare with no grasp of the wider battlefield and no vision of what the peace after victory might mean. It is time to include the crisis of the West into the centre of thinking where it should be. It is time to launch a ferment of thought and debate on the best way forward for the world, and it is time to strive with heart and soul for a more free, just, and hopeful human future.

Notes on the setting for the Inaugural conference for the Alliance for Responsible Citizens

Dr. Os Guinness is an author and social critic. He has written more than 30 books and is the great-great-great grandson of Arthur Guinness, the Dublin Brewer.