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From the FT:-
Declinism is in fashion. From the conservative writer and gadfly Jonah Goldberg this week comes Suicide of the West. The cover story of the impeccably centrist Foreign Affairs asks: “Is Democracy Dying?” Most experts the magazine polled said it wasn’t, but an alarmingly large minority thought it was. For Patrick Deneen, a hostile critic from the Catholic right, liberalism’s game is already over, as he recently explained without regrets in Why Liberalism Failed.
Since Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West first appeared in Germany 100 years ago, you might think that an old publishing standby — the centenary — was at work. You’d be wrong for two reasons. One is that democratic liberalism does indeed need serious repair, giving defenders much to be concerned for. The other is that declinism has always been with us.
If Goldberg’s lurid title sounds familiar, you are not imagining things. Collective self-immolation is a cherished image in prophetic oratory. In 2010 Thilo Sarrazin had a best-seller in Germany is Destroying Itself, as did Eric Zemmour four years later in Le Suicide français. Nor were either of those titles new. Back in 1964 James Burnham of the conservative US weekly National Review promised readers a “definitive analysis of the pathology of liberalism” in Suicide of the West.
The political centre is also prone to bouts of civilisational nerves. In 1957, the theorist of nationalism, Hans Kohn, wrote in Is the Liberal West in Decline? that people were “coming to believe that everything is breaking down”. Soon after, British diplomat David Ormsby-Gore penned an anxious-sounding Must the West Decline? Both were corrective and reassuring in intent.
By the 1970s the question marks had vanished and tones darkened. American political scientist Samuel Huntington, writing with a Japanese and French colleague, worried in The Crisis of Democracy that inflated expectations and administrative overload were making western nations ungovernable. In The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism neo-conservative Daniel Bell saw personal liberties and insatiable consumerism undermining the virtues and disciplines on which capitalism depended.
Since then, bookshop shelves have rarely been free of spirited essays claiming that this or that western nation was washed-up — or wasn’t. For declinism invites anti-declinism as in George Bernstein’s The Myth of Decline: The Rise of Britain Since 1945 and Josef Joffe’s The Myth of America’s Decline. More recently, Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now) and Hans Rosling (Factfulness) stress humanity’s global progress.
Arthur Herman noticed that higher-level cycle in The Idea of Decline in Western History, a study of the pessimistic strain in historical narratives with which people have tried to make sense of their times. For Herman, the pessimists were more often wrong than right.
The flaws and follies of declinism are easy to spot. That shouldn’t be undue comfort to anyone worried by the state we’re in. Declinism is unoriginal, speaks in sermony tones and has sloppy intellectual habits. True enough, but the deeper trouble is that it’s a distraction. Declinism appeals to speculative trends we can’t be sure about and a future we can’t see. Its scarifications distract us from urgent repairs needed for democratic liberalism here and now.
Edmund Fawcett is the author of ‘Liberalism: The Life of an Idea’
I know you won't believe me but for most people in most places most things are getting better day by day, here's Hans Rosling's lad pointing it out