What Will Succeed Western Civilization?

Thought-provoking piece at Gates of Vienna speculating about what will replace Western Civilization when it becomes exhausted.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

The Rise of Eastern Civilization

by Baron Bodissey

The West may eventually rebound from the current financial crisis and return to more or less its normal baseline. On the other hand, it may not; this could well be the beginning of a permanent decline, and the end of Western ascendancy. It’s still too early to tell.

To use an analogy from evolutionary biology, the last four hundred years — the heyday of Western Civilization — have been characterized by “punctuated equilibrium”. Decades of relative stability and coherence are punctuated by sudden bursts of chaos, violence, turbulence, and irrationality. Each discontinuity that breaks the equilibrium has its own interior logic, and after it runs its course, another stable period begins. The punctuation resolves into a new equilibrium based on an emergent balance of forces and political entities, different from the one that preceded the upheaval.

For Western Civilization, the punctuations of the last 250 years may be defined as follows:
1789-1815           The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The new equilibrium was ushered in by the Congress of Vienna with Metternich as the architect.
1848           The year of revolutions. In the aftermath of 1848 the two great ideological strains of modern times — socialism and nationalism — were born. The equilibrium that followed was ultimately unstable, and led to the cataclysms of the 20th century.
1914-1945           The Great Wars. Our most recent equilibrium was structured by the formation of the United Nations and the long standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union.
The second of these equilibria — from 1848 to 1914 — was the peak of European power and cultural influence, the great flowering of Western Civilization that spread across the globe.

The most recent punctuation, the one that ended in 1945, severely weakened the cultural fabric of the West, guaranteeing that we would eventually face the next crisis. A new discontinuity seems to be upon us now, a perfect storm formed by convergent political, cultural, and economic winds.

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When the next punctuation has run its course, there’s no guarantee that the West will retain its ascendancy in the aftermath. As Conservative Swede has often pointed out, there are manifold signs of spiritual and civilizational enervation in all Western countries. All of our political systems have been infected in varying degrees by the postmodern Marxist virus that manifests itself as Political Correctness and Multiculturalism.

This blog [Gates of Vienna] focuses on the struggle of the West against Islam, but Islam is the symptom, not the disease itself. Islamic culture is a parasite upon the wealth and benignity of Western Civilization, and cannot survive without it. The petrodollars are a large part of the problem, but the main issue is a severely diminished cultural resistance that grants the Islamic virus an opportunity to take hold throughout the West.

When the West falls, Islam will fall with it. The civilization that rises to replace us will not share our Multicultural fastidiousness, and will deal with the Muslims in whatever manner seems expedient when the time comes.

And who will our replacements be?

Three articles from today’s news stories offer us some hints. The first one is from AKI:

Go here to read the whole thing and the three articles with commentary that may surprise you as much as it surprised me.  Gates of Vienna