Is the West doomed?
There can be no doubt that Western civilization has seen better days. To say this much is a truism.
While the subject of civilizational decline invites a great deal of theorizing and debate, and much of it is certainly fascinating, the fact remains that we West-men and -women have a considerable problem on our hands.
What is that problem?
To be sure, we are confronted with interlocking crises: socioeconomic inequality, inflation, and worsening standards of living; an academic-indoctrination complex that prioritizes dogma over truth; mass migration; terrible physical and mental health; a weaponized court system, and feckless, worthless elites who enable all of the worst tendencies in the heart of mankind.
But I will submit that there is a common element that underscores all of these problems: the failure of morale, of belief… a failure we might, with Nietzsche, describe as the death of God.
Let us agree at the outset that complex problems having to do with socio-economic, political, and technological forces will require complex solutions well beyond the scope of anything I intend to write here.
For our purposes here, I will deal with one, and only one, aspect of the death of the West: the failure of the post-Christian and arguably post-liberal West to orient itself toward a powerful, life-affirming system of belief capable of creating a flourishing, aesthetically accomplished civilization.
All art and all gods are acts of metabolism: the artist and the holy man alike conjure against chaos, mediating and making sense of the human experience through symbols and sacra—in other words, imposing meaning.
After diagnosing the problem, I will proffer my own solution, my own conjuration of symbolic form against chaos, my own act of meaning-making.
Dead Gods and Dying Civilizations
Where is the god of the West?
What cathedrals hymn his praises in prayer-forms of stone, with flying buttresses and vaulted arches?
What artworks pay homage to his glory in sculpted marble or magnificent paintings?
Where is the fire kindled in men’s hearts, the forked lightning that illuminates their souls?
Where are the doers of great deeds, the men who bestride the world like a colossus as they conquer it?
To ask these questions is to know the petty, anxious, infantile, craven spirit of our Lilliputian age.
The denizens of the post-West are consumers, not citizens. They must profess allegiance to the shallow and empty values of the bureaucratic-managerial dispensation—part nanny state, part shopping mall, all of it soulless.
Author Jack Donovan has written about this problem in his brilliant book Becoming a Barbarian, in which he describes our current state of being, with its HR-mediated values of ‘everyone play nice and be good office drones and consumers’ (my framing) as the “Empire of Nothing.”
As Donovan explains, the core of the Empire of Nothing is an unholy marriage between the needs of global capitalism—namely profit, and interchangeable human capital—and the moral universalism of modern governments, NGOs, and the like.
He even describes these two forces as egregores, collective archetypal representations: Father Mammon and the Mother of Exiles. Together, they represent the world in which we find ourselves: consumption and profit on the one hand, and mawkish, mollycoddling moral universalism on the other.
Notably, the Mother of Exiles has an egalitarian morality, one that abhors standards of excellence and any talk of winners and losers.
This egalitarian morality functions as a kind of analgesic or cope, allowing post-Western consumers to feel good about themselves even if they fail to win in the game of capitalism.
It also allows them to tell themselves that they are good people: after all, they have all the Correct Thoughts and mouth all the Correct Platitudes.
Donovan’s full analysis is well worth your time, but for now I will simply observe that we have arrived at the pith, the quick, the very heart of the problem: since the West can have no higher aims beyond profit-making on the one hand and a shallow, infantile, contemptible egalitarian morality on the other, the West cannot stand for anything.
And if you cannot stand for anything, if you cannot make any meaningful distinctions, and above all if you cannot demand accountability and standards, then there is no basis for nobility and no basis for higher art.
The result is the post-West as we find it. It is a place where politics revolves around entitlement, and overgrown children loot, riot, and topple statues of great generals, statesmen, explorers, and conquerors.
Sexual deviants and degenerates are celebrated, the traditional family is derided, and people are categorized as “victims” or “oppressors” based on nothing more than their continental population of origin.
As Jack Donovan explains in A More Complete Beast, the moral problem of the West is that it has adopted what Nietzsche called “slave morality,” a morality of resentment that Donovan prefers to call anti-Noble morality.
The West is immured in a life-denying psychological stew of childish ressentiment of everything beautiful and successful, coupled with overwrought guilt and hysteria over the West’s supposed social and environmental sins.
This is the problem. What is the solution?
The Path to Nobility
One of the more paradoxical lessons I have learned in life is that sometimes, failure can be a gift.
A problem that you fail to solve can be an unbeatable obstacle… or it can be an opportunity for growth and change.
And when it comes to problems, there are people who find a way… and there are people who find an excuse.
To be sure, we all tend to alternate between one and the other depending on the problem, the season of life, and so forth… but over time, one of the two of these is likely to become your fundamental response to life.
I learned this lesson after spending most of my twenties finding excuses. Eventually I became sick of it and spent my late twenties to early thirties learning how to find a way to solve my problems.
Because I was out of shape, I learned how to create a fitness practice. I now work out six days a week (calisthenics, weights, and running).
Fitness has in many ways proved to be the master skill that has helped me with other skills.
The more I have mastered my body by forcing myself to do the unpleasant and difficult work of fitness, the more disciplined and standards-oriented my overall approach to life has become.
Over time, I saw the egalitarian morality of the West more and more for what it is: a philosophy for resentful losers and mediocrities, people who choose to be inferior versions of themselves by refusing to take responsibility for themselves.
And one of the most helpful intellectual and philosophical influences on my thinking in this regard has again been Jack Donovan.
In A More Complete Beast, Donovan explains the life orientation of excellence in terms of what he calls “Noble” morality, his version of Nietzsche’s “master” morality.
Donovan’s books are eminently quotable, and I cannot resist sharing a couple of excerpts:
“The path is not away from ressentiment, but toward a higher ideal. The Noble Beast is not traveling away from weakness, but toward strength and a lifestyle that thrives on strength. He is focused on what he is, and what he is becoming — not “others” or their paths, which serve only as warnings and counterexamples.”
Donovan, Jack. A More Complete Beast (p. 36). Dissonant Hum. Kindle Edition.
“The Anti-Noble man is obsessed with the Noble man and articulates his own values by inverting the values of Nobility. The Anti-Noble man assumes that the mind of the Noble man is merely a mirror of his own jealous psyche.
“However, a Noble mind is not a mirror. It is the sun.”
Donovan, Jack. A More Complete Beast (p. 37). Dissonant Hum. Kindle Edition.
Through self-improvement, I have utterly transformed my life. The name of this doctrine is vitalism, because it is an affirmation of life, of beauty, of excellence, of the Will to Power.
But what, if anything, does this have to do with the future of the post-West?
A Noble God for Noble Men
Western civilization has its roots in the older Classical civilization of the Greeks and Romans, and it is interesting to compare the development of the respective civilizations.
Both civilizations—pagan Greco-Roman and Christian European—produced exemplars of martial virtue. Consider the Roman Republic in the Punic Wars, and the English, French, Normans, Spaniards, Germans, and others in the Crusades, including the Reconquista and the Baltic Crusades.
Both had phases in which they created great art, literature, and philosophy.
And each, in its turn, declined into decadence.
What this suggests to me is that it is less important to convert everyone to the same God, worshiped in the same way.
It is vastly more important to awaken those individuals with the potential for agency to pursue excellence, to embody the Noble state of mind.
This is why I have not spent this essay talking about my preferred archetypal representation of God, or the Gods.
Since you have made it this far, I will tell you that I am an Odinist (or Wotanist) with two crises of faith in my past: I lost both the Christian faith of my childhood and the secular, rationalist faith of my young adulthood.
With that said, many of my friends and family are Christian, including some of the people I respect the most.
I think that on balance, Christianity is a better fit for far more people in the post-West, not least because it is an ancestral faith of long standing for those of us who are Westerners.
My only real grievance against Christianity is this: Christians have, by and large, ceded the broader culture.
Granted, perhaps it was always inevitable that the West would become secular.
Still, it is lamentable that by and large, Christians have fallen back on one of two losing strategies: either retreating into a bubble (as with the Evangelical fundamentalists of my childhood), or else capitulating to the demands of the Empire of Nothing and the mawkish, nauseating cult of the Mother of Exiles.
The vital point here is that the same Gods and the same symbols may be interpreted in very different ways.
In one age, Christians may be bursting with life and vitality, capable of fighting holy wars and creating holy works of art and architecture… while in another, they may be capable of producing nothing more than slick mega-church productions and watered-down versions of popular music, even as an increasing number of them capitulate to the relentless corrosive pressure of the Empire of Nothing.
The difference, as we have seen, is the Noble mindset, which is oriented toward excellence and the will to power. Produce Noble men and -women, and they will produce Noble Gods to worship.
The West may well be dead… but for the willing and the enterprising, there is a vital new life to be won.
Thank you for reading this essay. If you enjoy sword & sorcery fantasy fiction that celebrates a martial-aristocratic, vitalist spirit, check out The Altar of My Fate, book 1 of The Rosteval Saga, and start the epic story of barbarian warriors, arrogant gods, sultry slave-girls, and boundless adventure: