Death by a Thousand Cuts
How The West Fatally Ignored History
For every bit of time there ever was, it takes just as much for it all to change.
Like molasses slowly thinning in the heat of day, then slowly thickening again in the cool of night, the reversal or dissolution of the status quo requires an equally powerful catalyst or counterpart. This is the story of the Western world’s fall from grace.
But given what these physics of time demand, who is its equal adversary? And if it is its own people paving a path to self-destruction, do they have anywhere to run?
A quick change appears to contain more power, but it only transmutes the same power of a slow change, quicker. One hard blow to the head may pose the same threat as one hundred, weaker, consecutive blows, each harmless on its own. But by chipping away at existing matter to replace it, the same can be said of understanding or dismantling ideas. They, too, have towered higher over time inside cultures and psyches. Just as it takes a lifetime for a life to be complete, history requires eternally powerful agents to crystallize or dissolve it, and eternal wisdom to understand it. Time passes as history unfolds, but what happens in between can glide under our noses before it is sniffed out.
How to know where we are, as we rub the heels of history and sculpt the formlessness of the present into the statues of tomorrow?
This oft-improvised theater of time can swell to a crescendo as quickly as it halts to pin-drop silence, and on its largest scale, it can build or destroy a civilization. But it is not always the atomic bomb that quiets the kingdom; sometimes it is the slow burn, emanating from an invisible self-combustion, stoked by the apathy and nihilism lying deep in the hearts of the asleep and the bitter, that brings it all down. This fire is, at times, accompanied by parasites that gnaw away at people’s already-hot, softened flesh from the inside out. At least a bomb is obvious—it asks people to count their blessings!
The slow decline of the West has been documented, while it has happened, for over one hundred years. In the mid-late 1800s, blurring the line between great philosophy and fiction, Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky shared the belief that “crippled religions,” i.e., political ideologies, would vie to fill a God-shaped hole in the human heart. The certainty of group-oriented totalitarianism would provide the ritual, the chaos of self-serving hedonism, the rapture.
The following, bloodiest-ever century proved them correct, thanks to such self-destructing beliefs, the idolatry of dictators fueled once more by their citizens’ projected, utopian lust for comfort and power. This didn’t only happen because of sheer, top-down brutality, but most effectively because of massive psychological coercion. Believe in certain ideas and swallow the lies whole. Violence justified by ideas made to seem more compelling than the truths about humanity, which were held as self-evident just years prior.
In 1918, Oswald Spengler published The Decline of the West, proposing a theory of “inevitable cycles of growth and decay” that could decimate nations through decades-long culture shifts more pernicious and nebulous than war. The current conversation on Western decadence and confusion was spurred by books like Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence and, most recently, Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe. They warn of boredom, repetition, exhausted art, mass migration, and, perhaps most of all, loss of faith and tradition.
"The peoples of the West,” Barzun writes, “offered the world a set of ideas and institutions not found earlier or elsewhere… it has pursued characteristic purposes - that is its unity - and now these purposes, carried out to their utmost possibility, are bringing about its demise."[
The foundation of the West was generally established by the Logos of Athens, the institutions of Rome, and the spirit of Israel. All three created a breeding ground for the conception of the divine individual— the embodied idea that the individual alone has the capacity for divine revelation, transformation, and application, to live out the Imago Dei—the image of God. Jesus Christ manifests exactly this, as God personified, asking his followers to imitate Him. With that, the belief that God made us in His image, as shepherds of the intelligible Good, capable of discerning and beckoning Heaven or Hell, forms Western civilization. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution would have been impossible without it.
Those great, intellectual epochs were positioned among dark periods, but perhaps none darker than the 1900s. And the irony which further obscured the problem of the day was that, as the West unraveled spiritually, it burgeoned technologically. And this technological prowess created an economic cushion that, in turn, created an illusion that divinity was not necessary but accessory. The spiritual void was filled with wickedness, as weapons of warfare advanced to detach and distance us from our violent, once-prayerful hands.
As economic prosperity increases and technological safety nets abound, it is easy to relax our defenses. In terms of spiritual warfare, temptation is harder to resist when it is not identified in the present but thought to be left in the past. But the moment you relax is the moment you are vulnerable, like catching a cold after a big life event. The virus moved in after WWII. We were vigilant to attack it, though, and re-establish individual sovereignty, but nowadays that accomplishment appears somewhat forgotten.
The virus that scourged the belly of the West in the 1900s was not altogether eradicated despite the best attempts of multicultural liberalism to inoculate us against WWII’s ethnic nationalism. It has mutated and adapted. This infectious idea bears the same principle, one antithetical to the divine individual, and it has projected itself away from the ethnonationalism of World War II and onto new group identities like race and gender.
As if the caustic ‘othering’ of WWII soldiers was any different than that of social justice warriors who other themselves by grouping based on immutable characteristics. The cry of oppression based on class struggle that Marx purported is eerily similar to the one that many of today’s university students bemoan. We didn’t squash the bug. And maybe it was impossible, like the cockroach emerging from a radioactive testing site.
So, if we must live among bad ideas, then what should we do about them? Well, we can start by disarming them, identifying when and why they rear their heads in our psyches. Familiar within ourselves, we can then locate them when they appear elsewhere, manifested in the broader world. In their place, remember the ideas that formed the birthplace of the West. Remember where we came from and reidentify with the principles that built these walls. But also infuse them with the new vision you possess, the eyes that have never before seen.
The identity crisis of the West will not be solved by simply reverting to the olden days. That would be too easy. We ought to work with what we have in front of us, just as they did, to meet the needs of the day. There are everyday opportunities to treat your neighbor as yourself, as a fellow divine individual, while using novel technology to solve novel problems. Knowing how we got here and what ideas continue to shape and reshape history to the present day, however, we can point out residue from a past that was thought to be dead. History is alive.
It may take a day of the sun’s power, or a week’s worth, or a month’s, to revive what has been latent, dry out the detritus, and nourish the new. But even if it takes ten more years to reverse the last decade of decay, it will be worth it.
Editorial note: This is Jake’s 2nd essay for the Multilevel Mailer. Below is his first.
The Kids are All Right
Editorial note: Jake MacCallum is an elementary school educator and a master’s student of counselling psychology from the East Coast of Canada. He writes about moral psychology and cultural shifts as they happen in plain sight.