Embracing the end of western civilization?

(WARNING: The following post has the potential to bring on a bit of brain ache. Let not the price of thinking deter you in your reading. :)

One of the benefits of a cruise is the opportunity to spend some quality time catching up on my never-ending reading list. (So don't be surprised to see future posts addressing the four different books I covered while sailing the high seas last week.)

One of the books (at only 62 pages, you might even call it a booklet) I read was a classic statement by the late British journalist, author, and cultural satirist, Malcolm Muggeridge. It is essentially a coupling of the two inaugural addresses he gave in 1978 during the The Pascal Lectures on Christianity and the University at the University of Waterloo. If you have not been exposed to Muggeridge, I would highly recommend this book as a starter. Not only is it short enough to allow for timely consumption, but this brief introduction to Muggeridge also will provide ample content to challenge your thinking.

I could expend considerable time providing an overview of this book. But my intent here is simply to present  what for me was a novel consideration that has since lodged itself in my mind. What is the future of western civilization? Need we fear it's presumable demise?

In diagnosing the fall of Christendom (what he would define as Judeo-Christian western civilization), Muggeridge quotes extensively from American critic Leslie Fiedler to make his case:

[our weariness with striving to be men is] the more desolating because there’s no God to turn to. God has been abolished by the media pundits and other promoters of our new demythologized divinity. We continue to insist that change is progress, self-indulgence is freedom and novelty is originality. In these circumstances it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Western man has decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down. Having convinced himself that he is too numerous, he labours with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer, thereby delivering himself sooner into the hands of his enemies. At last, having educated himself into imbecility and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over, a wear, battered old brontosaurus, and becomes extinct.

After setting the stage with Fiedler's quote, Muggeridge goes on to say,

You might think that was a somewhat pessimistic way of looking at things, but it isn’t really. I conclude that civilizations, like every other human creation, wax and wane. By the nature of the case there can never be a lasting civilization any more than there can be a lasting spring or lasting happiness in an individual life, or lasting stability in a society...In these circumstances why should anyone expect Christendom to go on forever or see in its impending collapse a cosmic catatstrophe?

(If you're so inclined, you can read his full statement here.)

I wonder, is Muggeridge right in his prophetic assumption that our Western civilization is in decline? And, more to his point, is that reality something we should fear?

Comments

[Ben]

Pessimistic it may be and I can see that if you take the current moral decay, fleeing from God society we seem to live in, you could talk yourself into this doom and gloom as a potential reality. Generally speaking, the life lived today in western civilization is "comfortable" and without true toil and strife. Arguably more comfortable than any other previous generation with regard so our standard of living. So heaven and the promised after life to come seems more like a nice landing to a short, pleasant life lived in the 21st century. Future generations will probably have a different perspective on the promised after life. Total absence of law, a nuclear holocaust, unfathomable death/starvation/famine would make heaven that much more sweet. Reading through the old testament seems to be Muggeridge's prophecy already played out - multiple times. What urgency does his prediction leave us with? Speaking of our urgency to grow the kingdom’s future inhabitants.