The West has lost its way because it has abandoned its conception of history

A few weeks ago marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 11 September attacks. A quarter of a century – an era. And the fact that seems most worth noting is colossal, of historic significance, and yet it appears to have been entirely overlooked. Perhaps this is precisely what is most disturbing. The fact is simple and is as follows: the West no longer believes it is on the right side of history. After being so deeply wounded at what represented the beating heart of the West, and following an initial reaction of pride driven by the desire to ‘export democracy’ (that is, an entire system of values), and thus to demonstrate that there is a ‘master path’, a path that can be defined as ‘right’ for the world—that is, for the greatest number of its inhabitants—the absolute relativism denounced by Benedict XVI, which had taken root in academic circles during the 1960s and 1970s, has taken hold of our thinking.

The idea that the world was steadily moving towards freedom, democracy and open markets – in which the globe was truly a ‘common home’ governed by international law, good neighbourliness and free trade – has faded. If this is not the twilight of the West, it is certainly the twilight of an idea that has defined it since the Second World War (and which has shaped much of its historical trajectory over the last three hundred years). The prospect of a single, rational guiding principle – one that, through liberal democracy and globalised capitalism, aimed towards an ever more open world – is no longer the driving force.

What might be termed the ‘pro-Western camp’ has, in recent decades, largely been on the defensive, seeking to ward off ‘woke’ attacks but offering nothing new. It has relied on reaction, which, however, is insufficient. There is, in fact, another, far more significant issue: faith has been lost in the idea of History as a progressive movement towards the better – that is, towards a greater ‘reason’, or the realisation of what makes sense. This latter idea, so vital to the progress of humanity and to Western (and world) history, has essentially been branded as a ‘colonialist’ notion, and therefore one to be discarded, because it was based on the primacy of the West and its ‘logos’ – that is, the view of the world as something that could be rationally understood and improved in a direction shaped by a shared rationality. This has been replaced by a sort of ‘transversalism’, or relativism, in which every civilisation, when all is said and done, was considered to have the same value as any other (it is a more complex idea, but ultimately identical in its premises to the Five Star Movement’s ‘one person, one vote’ principle). A lazy, bored and demeaning idea, befitting a distracted tourist.

We are clearly experiencing a major period of decline. Before we start tearing our hair out, however, we need to take a look at what is happening around us. The West is no longer capable of projecting an image of strength, nor a radiant one. We are no longer, as a cultural community, a titanic force capable of shaping the future of humankind on Earth and propelling it towards the stars (consider Musk, for example, and his SpaceX as a sort of delusion). Human action – that is, what lies at the heart of Western civilisation alongside rationality, and which can be summed up in the West’s single guiding word, ‘logos’, which Goethe’s Faust indeed translates precisely as ‘action’ – is viewed in a negative light. The actions of the Western individual are now reduced to being polluting, violent, aggressive, colonising, and so on. Yet it is upon these grotesque concepts that the dissolution of the idea of being ‘on the right side of history’ is built.

The West is now largely fearful because it feels completely at a loss as to its own identity. The usual questions of the existential crises that every individual faces sooner or later are now the questions plaguing an entire historical construct rooted in classical Greece 2,500 years ago: who are we, where are we going, what do we want? It is something utterly unprecedented, and we are right in the thick of it. One might say, in passing and tragically, the most dramatic thing of all: only a catastrophe can break this deadlock. This term, ‘stasis’, means stagnation, paralysis or standstill; yet in its Greek origin, ‘stasis’ denoted the deepest civil discord, the most radical conflict, leading all the way to the catastrophe of civil war. To avert all this, we must first and foremost confront this momentous landscape and begin to recognise it, to call it by its proper name.