The shape of everything - family, work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to the body to kin to duty - all of it will be up for grabs.
And when an old culture built around a sacred order dies, there will be lasting upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics to the level of the soul.
Many of them are still beautiful - intact cathedrals, Bach concertos - but they are ruins nonetheless. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Suggested reading The end of secularism is nigh “The West”, in other words, was born from the telling of one sacred story - a garden, an apple, a fall, a redemption - which shaped every aspect of life: the organisation of the working week the cycle of annual feast and rest days the payment of taxes the moral duties of individuals the attitude to neighbours and strangers the obligations of charity the structure of families and most of all, the wide picture of the universe - its structure and meaning, and our place within it. “Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.” “There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church,” explained the medieval historian Christopher Dawson in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War Two. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a particular religious story. It is at the same time a simpler, more ancient and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. The West is a lot older than liberalism, leftism, conservatism or empire. And for the kind of post-modern leftist who currently dominates the culture, the West - assuming they concede it even exists - is largely a front for colonialism, empire, racism and all the other horrors we hear about daily through the official channels.Īll of these things could be true at the same time, but each is also a fairly recent development. For a conservative, it might signal a set of cultural values: traditional attitudes to family life and national identity, and probably broad support for free-market capitalism.
For a liberal, the West is the “Enlightenment” and everything that followed - democracy, human rights, individualism, and that dynamic duo, “science and reason”. But what is “the West”? It depends which tribe you ask.
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