Is the West in Decline?

If you walk into any bookstore in the UK, you are bound to find several books speculating on the so-called ‘fall of Western Civilization’. Since Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West in 1918, there have been countless iterations, but it seems like now more than ever there has been an increase in these speculations, including Douglas Murray’s The War on the West and Benedict Beckeld’s Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations — both published this year.

A common theme in these texts is the notion that the West has defeated itself. Writer Will Durant once said, ‘a great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within’. According to this view, civilization’s late stages are characterized by decadence, and it is this decadence that, inevitably, causes collapse.

Decadence takes many forms, but the sort of decadence that Murray and Beckeld describe can be summed up in Beckeld’s book title: Western Self-Contempt; i.e. oikophobia:

The simplest way of defining “oikophobia” is to state that it is the opposite extreme of xenophobia. As xenophobia means the fear or hatred of strangers or foreigners, so oikophobia means the fear or hatred of home or one’s own society, oikos being the ancient Greek word for home, house, household (Beckeld)