Western Universalism - what's the big deal?

[sanman]

Sanjeev Sanyal Exposes Global Ratings Conspiracy And Western Echo Chambers

[ricky_v]

https://brusselssignal.eu/2024/12/is-it ... perialism/

Imperialism is making a comeback, which is why I decided to turn this column into a three-part series to put forward my argument as to why that is the case. The often eccentric but also insightful Nassim Nicholas Taleb of “Black Swan” fame (the book about probabilities, not the movie about ballet) recently defended Turkey’s policies towards Syria on economic grounds:


That being said, the idea that countries with centuries of experience in governance should take direct or indirect control over areas that have shown themselves time and again to be incapable of self-governance might not be the worst idea. In fact, in the often-announced multipolar age it might be inevitable.

While I still remain sceptical about the concept of multipolarity, for this would require at least one other country that is equal to the United States in its capabilities, I do think that there will be regional powershifts allowing for regional hegemons to arise. We see this currently happening in the Middle East, and what Taleb is enthusiastically referring to is nothing but a 21st century version of Ottoman imperialism.

In a recent party speech, Turkish President Erdoğan talked openly about his ambitions to “revise the outcome of World War I and annex Syrian territories (formerly Ottoman provinces) into Turkey.” Contrary to Western Europe, where a post-modern and post-nationalist mindset is still dominating the elite mindset, the rest of the world is moving on to a neo-imperialist mindset.

Not all of these “imperialisms” will look the same, but they will all have the same characteristics of pursuing spheres of interests at the expense of neighbouring countries. Russia, for example, is following its traditional playbook of territorial expansion – a strategy as old as Peter I, who also happens to be Putin’s role model. The invasion of Ukraine had many motivating factors from Moscow’s point of view, but as Putin made clear in an essay he himself wrote on the “Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” there is a clear imperialist motive. The same goes for Russian meddling in Central Asia and the Caucasus as well as the desire to establish military bases in the Middle East and Africa.

China, on the other hand, appears to pursue its traditional model of imperialism via a modern version of the tribute system. Beijing barely ever directly intervenes, but it creates financial dependencies, known as debt-trap diplomacy. China is the world’s largest bilateral creditor, and it would be naïve to believe that Chinese money flows without any strings attached. The Belt-and-Road initiative is a scheme to shield China from sanctions via the creation of resource pipelines (both metaphorically and literally) and make the global South dependent on China. This is a global version of the tribute system made fit for the 21st century: The tributary system was the framework through which China managed its foreign relations from around the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911/12).


The world is not moving closer to a happy family of “multiple poles” but a world of renewed imperial conflict, and Europe has not yet found its role or purpose in this emerging world.

[A_Gupta]

How does India achieve its national objectives such as Vikasit Bharat amidst all the neo-imperialist fighting?

[ricky_v]

that is a difficult question to answer, A_Gupta ji; i have always believed that internal policy making is influenced by the features stated in the directive principles of state policy, summarising from co-pilot:

The Directive Principles of State Policy (DPSP) are guidelines and principles set out in Part IV of the Indian Constitution. They are not enforceable by any court, but they aim to provide a framework for the governance of the country. The main objective of these principles is to ensure social and economic democracy and to provide a just and equitable society. Here are some key aspects:

directive principles of state policy
The Directive Principles of State Policy (DPSP) are guidelines and principles set out in Part IV of the Indian Constitution. They are not enforceable by any court, but they aim to provide a framework for the governance of the country. The main objective of these principles is to ensure social and economic democracy and to provide a just and equitable society. Here are some key aspects:

Key Principles
Economic and Social Welfare: The state should promote the welfare of the people by securing and protecting a social order in which justice, social, economic, and political, shall inform all the institutions of national life.

Minimizing Inequality: The state should strive to minimize inequalities in income and eliminate inequalities in status, facilities, and opportunities.

Right to Work, Education, and Public Assistance: The state should provide the right to an adequate means of livelihood, equal pay for equal work, and free and compulsory education for children.

Promotion of Health: The state should work towards raising the level of nutrition and the standard of living of its people and improving public health.

Equal Justice and Free Legal Aid: The state should promote equal justice and provide free legal aid to ensure that opportunities for securing justice are not denied to any citizen by reason of economic or other disabilities.

Environmental Protection: The state should protect and improve the environment and safeguard the forests and wildlife of the country.

Promotion of International Peace and Security: The state should foster respect for international law and treaty obligations and encourage settlement of international disputes by arbitration.

Purpose and Importance
Guiding Governance: They serve as a guide for the state to establish and maintain a just society.

Policy Formulation: They help in the formulation and implementation of policies that aim to achieve socio-economic development.

Constitutional Objectives: They reflect the ideals that the Constitution aims to achieve, such as democracy, social justice, and equality.

While these principles are not legally enforceable, they are crucial in shaping policies and laws that promote the overall well-being of the citizens.

Would you like to delve into any specific aspect of the Directive Principles of State Policy?

as far as the internal mechanisms are considered, india will fulfill the above based on political compulsions, and should in theory, work out as business- as-usual

vikasit bharat on the other hand:

vikasit bharat stated goals
The Viksit Bharat 2047 initiative is a comprehensive vision plan by the Government of India to transform the country into a developed nation by the year 2047, marking the 100th anniversary of its independence. The initiative focuses on various aspects of development, including economic growth, social progress, environmental sustainability, and good governance1.

Key Goals of Viksit Bharat 2047
Economic Growth: Enhance productivity and resilience in agriculture, promote employment and skilling, and boost manufacturing and services.

Social Development: Ensure inclusive human resource development and social justice, with a focus on the four pillars: Yuva (Youth), Garib (Poor), Mahila (Women), and Kisan (Farmers).

Infrastructure Development: Improve urban development, energy security, and infrastructure.

Innovation and Research: Foster innovation, research, and development to drive technological advancements.

Environmental Sustainability: Protect and improve the environment, and promote sustainable practices.

Regional Development: Implement plans like Purvodaya for the all-round development of the eastern region of India, covering states like Jharkhand, Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal, and Andhra Pradesh.

Global Partnerships: Encourage international cooperation and partnerships to achieve development goals.

The initiative aims to create a prosperous India in harmony with modern infrastructure and nature, providing opportunities for all citizens to reach their potential.

Does this align with what you were looking for, or is there a specific aspect you'd like to know more about?

vikasit bharat and the dpsp, imo, are aligned in their overall outlook, with vb the stated goal, and the dpsp the mechanism to reach it.
now, in this interconnected world, it is always possible that decisions of a country influence outlook outside the said country's borders, but if we are speaking of formulating / refining the internal machinery, and considering that we have been dealing with imperialistic tendencies of many friedns and foes all the time, this neo-imperialism should not adversely affect india's goals

[Haresh]

Not sure where to put this,
Admin Please move if required

I study the collapse of empires... here's why wokeism will be the downfall of America

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech ... erica.html

[ricky_v]

current climes from the views of a christian site

https://www.wordonfire.org/articles/are ... democracy/

In 1930, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset published the book for which he is best known, The Revolt of the Masses. Though he wrote a century ago and his focus was on Europe, it is hard to imagine a book more relevant to life in Western democracies in general and the United States in particular. He warns that democracy has overrun its proper bounds and for that reason, we face a crisis, so much so that we may be in the last stages of modern democratic government.

Although the Constitution begins “We the People,” in a healthy democracy that does not mean everyone should try to govern. In a true democracy, Ortega y Gasset explains, a large majority of the citizenry recognize that self-government is limited, given that most are incapable of taking the reins of government, nor should they try.

But when Ortega y Gasset says the masses have revolted, he means that the majority of the country is no longer willing to recognize the men and women of excellence needed for leadership. These masses, he explains, are made of mediocre men and women who “demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are.” The people of the masses are “mere buoys that float on the waves.”


Ortega y Gasset calls this dangerous condition “hyper-democracy.” In a hyper-democracy, excellence is scorned; indeed, for middling men and women, excellence is a threat to a distorted idea of equality: “Who are you to say that anyone is better than me?” In a hyper-democracy, not only do the masses consider themselves capable of leadership, they also self-assuredly believe they have the right to impose their will on everyone else. The quality of political discourse degenerates and meaningful discussion is replaced by abuse and violence. Social media makes a bad situation worse by solidifying and confirming these pedestrian opinions, further homogenizing the masses.

Democracy, however, is the flip side of a polity, where everyone demands a right to steer the ship of state, qualified or not. It’s really even worse than it sounds. Ortega y Gasset explains that governing is not just a political act, because our public life is “intellectual, moral, economic, religious; it comprises all our collective habits, including our fashions both of dress and of amusement.” When democracy begins to degenerate, violent protests, chaos, and anarchy are the consequence. Eventually, the country is willing to accept tyranny to put things aright because anything is better than chaos.

The political lesson of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is not a warning about tyrants. It is rather a disquieting portrait of how easily the emotions and attitudes of the populace are manipulated, first one way, and then the next.

Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, in his early nineteenth-century astute observations on the United States, Democracy in America, writes that Americans, having formed a new country across the Atlantic, think they have escaped tyrannical government—but they have not. Rather, America has traded one form of tyranny for another. This condition, he explains, is the “tyranny of the majority,” and it is far more oppressive than any tyranny in Europe. Tocqueville marvels at how effective the majority is in shaping public opinion and disallowing competing ideas. Freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are at risk. He also notes that the cultural tastes of a democracy may become banal.

The American founders designed a republic because they knew that democracies are never secure. This is explained, among other places, in Federalist Papers #9 and #10. John Adams—never one to mince words—wrote to a friend, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” The founders feared mob rule: They saw it too often in the history of Greece, Rome, and the Italian city-states.

There is another ******** of democracy that has appeared in our day, the “pseudo-majority.” It may look like a genuine majority, but it is not. It operates in at least two different ways, and in both, the mainstream media is complicit. In The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and company reach the Emerald City, they are confronted by a terrifying, all-powerful, fire-breathing, smoke-belching, supersized, mechanical Wizard of Oz. But then little Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal that “The Great and Powerful Oz” is just an ordinary man, and a rather shy one at that. The mass media, promoting the opinions of “the elite,” operates in a similar fashion. They choose what we will hear and how we will hear it, claiming they represent “public opinion,” regularly trotting out polls that tell us how to think. We dare not disagree for fear of ridicule or worse. Opponents are shouted down and inundated in a cesspool of cancel culture. They are a noisy new Wizard of Oz when, in fact, they represent far fewer than they would have us think.

Does that mean a democracy? There seem to be two paradoxical objections to religious faith in today’s democratic regimes. One is that life has been so comfortable for Christians that too many are complacent. As Ralph Wood observes, the Church is no longer “visible.”

No one wants to live under communist oppression. Roman Catholicism, however, thrived in Poland during the Cold War. In a nation of around thirty million, approximately eleven million came out to see Pope John Paul II when he visited the country in June 1979. That is a third of the country, a staggering number.

The reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union are manifold and complex; Poland was the first Soviet domino to fall, followed by Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Today, in the US and Europe, Bishop Robert Barron notes that for every one person who joins the Church, six or seven abandon the faith; about half of the young people who are raised Catholic are leaving the Church.

Today, the Catholic Church in democratic Poland is in decline.

[ricky_v]

extending the trite repeated classification of the world's division into a varied multitude of x and y, i believe that there are only 2 types of countries that exist
1. those who trace their lineage from the roman civilisation and are practicing- systems, methods of governance, administrative setup, divisions of power, line of thought for contemporary polity, degree of realisation and freedoms of the people
2. those who do not

that would make 4 types of rome in existence
1. the traditional rome
2. the materialistic rome
3. the off-kilter alternate history rome
4. the rome grafted onto and in syncretism with a preexisting system - a colony, or a colony of a colony

the distinction is necessary for otherwise owing to the necessary sheer dominance of the materialistic rome, countries would be classified under it

in florid terms, the war for humanity, or rather the first war till the age of globalisation has one clear winner: the roman civilisation and those who trace lineage from it

this system has held true after being tested in many different ways, so i would also state the following dictum

Roma semper vincet

Rome will always win

[ricky_v]

excellent article, would recommend reading in full, is about recivilisation, i might have gone overboard with the bolding and the underlining

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025 ... ilization/

https://archive.is/S0Iu3

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama caused a stir by publishing an article in the National Interest titled “The End of History?”. A State Department and Rand Corporation analyst at the time, Fukuyama confessed that he was feeling something out of the ordinary. “We may be witnessing,” he said, “not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such.” Did this fill him with dread? Not really. Post-history was not brought on by catastrophe but, fortunately, by the apotheosis of what he called “the Western idea.” And apparently, liberal democracy is the Western idea. The “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” had not, therefore, come like a thief in the night, but rather, like a liberal technocrat.2

It is telling, though, that Fukuyama made his move by channeling a feeling. For whatever his critics said, his idea matched the Western mood circa 1990, which could accurately be called euphoria. What Fukuyama hailed as the preordained triumph of liberal democracy quickly became an axiom. His sense that liberal ideology had not just outlasted Soviet communism but had transcended the whole realm of “ideological struggle” took root in Washington, and then in London and Berlin. His notion that “we have already emerged on the other side of history” spread rapidly in Western policy circles.4 Many liberals, especially in the up-and-coming Boomer generation, felt that they had truly won the great game of history.

History culminates in liberal states because Fukuyama shares a widely and deeply held conviction that liberalism is not just one ideology among many, nor for that reason do liberal states merely realize one historically contingent form of governance. On the contrary, liberalism is held to be a historically necessary expression of the human essence, namely a desire for freedom and dignity.6 This is a desire which not only Soviet-style communism but illiberalism tout court could never hope to satisfy.


If only liberal states can satisfy the desire that drives history, then what more concretely is that desire? Recognition.7 It is an archaic individual thirst for recognition which finally matures into the modern political “struggle for the universal recognition of rights.” The social contradictions which make history are nothing but the shifting objective formations of this primitive desire to be recognized. Fukuyama’s hope is that late liberal states realize a political culture which is so “universal” and so “homogeneous” that “all prior contradictions are resolved” within it.8 Once the desire that makes history is satisfied, post-history can finally begin.
Of course, post-history is no paradise. Fukuyama never denies that war has a future. What he concludes is that there is no real possibility of future ideological conflicts between great powers. Post-history promises the world a pacified liberal core of democratic states. The social contradictions and ideological conflicts of history are all relegated, in this view, to liberalism’s ever-diminishing periphery.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama’s name has functioned as a cipher of liberal hegemony. It symbolizes the force or hubris of liberal ideology, depending on your politics. As such, critics have been calling time on him for decades. The “end of the end of history” has been a recognizable genre since 2002 at the latest.9 Not all his critics actually break with his ideological framing, however. In a 2003 column published by National Review, for instance, the “end of the end of history” just means that Fukuyama’s liberal core must defend itself more vigorously against one of its illiberal peripheries. Since “Iraq is the central front of the war against terrorism,” we read, the Iraq War is a necessity.10 The idea here is obviously not that a return of history will draw liberal hegemony to a close. Rather, history is summoning Fukuyama’s liberal core to deploy its power more aggressively. One more push to reach the true end of history!


But one thing is clear. When Fukuyama states that we are embroiled in a “global fight” between liberal and illiberal alliance structures, he is renouncing his own end of history.14 For that is the one thing that post-history, or permanent liberal hegemony, was supposed to save us from.

quite a couple of poignant points

Let us step back from contemporary geopolitics and ask: what lies behind Fukuyama’s original thesis, which so effectively captured the Western zeitgeist for a whole generation?

The sources of the liberal “end of history” are twofold and linked: G. W. F. Hegel’s 1807 masterwork The Phenomenology of Spirit, and a hugely influential set of lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology delivered in Paris in the 1930s by Alexandre Kojève (or at birth, in Moscow, Aleksandr Kozhevnikov).15 Fukuyama makes frank and extensive use of both Hegel and Kojève, though it is worth pointing out that, in both cases, he basically limits himself to the works just cited.

Hegel is more than The Phenomenology of Spirit, and Kojève is more than his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.16 But Fukuyama’s notion of the end of history is drawn from a certain reading of both those works in near-total isolation. As a result, his concept of history owes much to what Hegel calls “world-historical individuals.”17 This is an idea that takes us back to the year 1806, the year in which, crucially, the Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist.

Hegel had a transformative experience in 1806. In the Prussian university town of Jena, where he held the unremunerated post of “extraordinary professor,” Hegel caught sight of Napoleon on horseback within the surge of his Grande Armée.18 At a time when many Europeans viewed Napoleon as the Antichrist, one who had imposed mass conscription to levy an army capable of inflicting casualties on a scale never been seen before, liberal-minded intellectuals saw the charismatic emperor as a vehicle chosen to purvey the ideals of the French Revolution across the continent and, ultimately, into Russia.19 Hegel agreed, but he saw something even deeper: world history on the march.


It is not entirely clear that Hegel saw the French Emperor, spreading Enlightenment ideals at the barrel of a cannon, as the beginning of history’s end. He liked to say, rather, that Napoleon’s task was to “finish the novel” that the Jacobins had begun.20 In any case, Fukuyama’s other authority, Kojève, identified the figure of Napoleon with the end of history. What is more, Kojève saw Joseph Stalin as Napoleon’s esoteric heir. He hoped the Georgian autocrat could finish the job in Moscow that the Corsican had started in Paris.


Kojève speculated that the “total integration of history,” in other words, the end of history, had been realized in the Napoleonic liberal order. It then fell to Hegel, after his revelatory sighting in 1806, to state that history must end and had ended in the new form of “self-consciousness” that Napoleon forged in his politics of universal recognition, which was also, logically, a universal politics of recognition.23 Liberté, égalité, fraternité, or else.

What Kojève understood, and what most doctrinaire liberals have misunderstood, is that liberalism is not just the gentle, negative ideology portrayed by a certain number of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers. It is a set of hard-edged abstract ideals that drive relentlessly toward a “universal and homogenous” mode of government and culture. To Fukuyama’s great credit, he recognized this. “The end of history,” he wrote in 1989, is “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”


Fukuyama starkly opposed his vision of the end of history to “an ‘end of ideology’ or a convergence between capitalism and socialism.” In his telling, liberalism does not converge; it conquers. Post-history is made possible by the “total exhaustion” of illiberalism and by liberalism’s “ultimate triumph.”27 Though rarely acknowledged by his partisans, Fukuyama’s end of history hypothesis highlighted the fact that Western liberalism is a totalizing ideology that seeks to dominate all. And in 1989, he was a true believer in permanent liberal hegemony.

In the mid-2020s, Fukuyama’s liberal core is beginning to feel like an undemocratic periphery; indeed, a new term has been coined, “undemocratic liberalism,” which serves as a very apt description.28 All that remains of the end of history’s liberal triumphalism is what Jean Baudrillard once called “triumphal illusionism.” The cool Etats-Unis in which Baudrillard encountered “the only surviving primitive society,” as he put it in a 1986 text, America, feels more and more unironically primitive. The “mindless luxury of a rich civilization” is harder and harder to find in New York, Milan, and Paris. The “great world powers” of the collective West are less and less seen, by citizens or rivals, as great, or as world powers.29

Perhaps the decisive error that Fukuyama made was in linking liberalism and democracy. They are not even in the same ideational category. Democracy is a form of regime while liberalism is a political ideology. What is more, democracy vastly antedates liberalism. Liberalism as a political ideology can be traced back to the English Civil War and John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government.30 Democracy, on the other hand, can be traced right back to the 6th century BC and the Athenian reforms initiated by Cleisthenes.31

Nor is there anything particularly democratic about liberalism. The term “illiberal democracy” was introduced in the 1990s to counter Fukuyama’s narrative, but it is hardly a recent phenomenon.32 Historically, liberalism has been an elitist ideology. Napoleon was no democrat; he was a soi-disant emperor. If Napoleon were alive today and ruling France, Fukuyama’s followers would call him a dictator. Hegel was skeptical that democracy was a sustainable way to organize the enlightened liberal society that he thought constituted the goal of world history. In his Philosophy of Right, he even argues that democracy would undermine the very foundations of the rational state:

Liberalism is an ideology obsessed with bringing certain forms or appearances of equality to a society and then driving that society toward “rationalization” along liberal lines. It is only very recently—after the United States ascended to the status of world power after the Second World War—that liberals have come to link their project with representative democracy. This seems like a highly contingent fusion. The actual ideological conflict between Western liberals today and the government of China has very little to do with democracy; it has everything, however, to do with liberalism.

To put it in Hegelian terms, while the non-Western world has always existed in itself, it is again starting to exist for itself. Or in Kojèvian terms, it is both seeking and obtaining recognition. But however we choose to think of this moment, the non-Western world is evidently renewing its claim to a status that it held until the zenith of Western power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.34 And the undisputed center of this emerging, or reemerging, system of states is China.

This is presumably why one of Quesnay’s contemporaries dubbed him the “European Confucius” (le Confucius d’Europe).37
It is worth remembering, too, what Adam Smith wrote in Wealth of Nations: “China is a much richer country than any part of Europe.” Was this an aberration or a chance phenomenon? Not at all. “China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world.”38 Could the nation’s enduring wealth have something to do with its political economy? Not necessarily. Skeptical of Quesnay’s effusions, Smith credits China’s wealth to “the wisdom of nature” more than the sagacity of Peking’s commercial policy

Fukuyama’s views on China strike us today as both provincial and familiar, although the level of confidence is astounding. The historically shallow liberal supposition is by now so common that it barely needs to be summarized: economic liberalization would lead to consumerism, and consumerism would lead to Western-style democratization. This was the hope. In 1989, Fukuyama seems almost to have been under the impression that China was already there:

It seems that the conscious goal of the Chinese state is to fuse the cutting edge of future technological development with the singularly rooted past of its civilization. There is enormous interest in Confucian and other classical texts and a stated conviction that “fine traditional Chinese culture” (中华优秀传统文化) can offer a deeper rationale to the still advancing Chinese way of life.48 In many ways, Confucian philosophy is admirably suited to the modern Chinese state. It endorses the sort of rule by intellectuals that is effectively the system under the current Communist Party bureaucracy.

However shocking it might seem to liberal Westerners, Hegel is echoing a centuries-old European cliché when he writes this:
China has therefore succeeded in getting the greatest and best governors, to whom the expression “Solomonic wisdom” might be applied. . . . All the ideals of princes and of princely education which have been so numerous and varied since the appearance of [François] Fénelon’s Télémaque [in 1699] are realized here.
When Hegel then adds, “in Europe there can be no Solomons,” it would be hard for a twenty-first-century European to object.49

Now, Hegel was himself a rather severe critic of Confucian culture. He concedes that China’s civil machinery is “perfect” and notes that its state administration has consistently “astonished Europeans.” He nevertheless feels that Confucian culture is lacking something that he calls “the element of subjectivity.” To be sure, the Confucian canon features many “correct moral sayings,” but their lack of speculative daring leaves him cold. He ultimately concludes that in China’s premodern political culture “all claims of the subjective heart are absent.”50 Perhaps we could say that, for Hegel, Confucianism is neither personal nor deep.

It was not only Western Christians who saw similarities in Confucian morality.52 We read in firsthand reports that some of Hegel’s Chinese contemporaries “thought that Jesus and Confucius were alike—the one intended for Europe, and the other for China.”53 It is today the Brussels mandarin class, far more than Party members in Beijing, who would be upset to hear that Jesus is intended for Europe.

Scarcely anyone today would argue that the future for China is a liberal one. Rather, its future is civilizational. China is not seeking to abolish or suppress its ancient civilization. It aims to revive its traditions and integrate its past with a society of the future. This is a total repudiation of the West’s failed “end of history” mentality. It is a conscious reassertion of history and a strategic embrace of cultural memory. Furthermore, it is a recognition that, outside of a truly eschatological realm, there is no end to history.

For atheists, history ends when the last human being dies, or ceases to be human.55 For theists, it ends when God wills it. But searching for any permanent “post-historical” settlement is a delusion: a dream of the Enlightenment that was taken up, in due course, by Marxists and highly ideological liberals.


China is taking a different path. “Revival of civilization” in the official Chinese (文明复兴), or “recivilisation” in Thomas Carlyle’s English, is a conscious task that will shape its politics and culture in the coming decades. Xi Jinping’s Party is formally committed to “the revitalization, not disruption, of Chinese civilization.” And when the state’s paramount leader says that “the distinctive features of the Chinese civilization” must be honored and handed on, he is not only referring to modern China. He has in mind the “rich foundations” of his country’s “more than 5,000-year-old civilization.”56


The question now is for the West: will it, too, re-civilize? Will its political and intellectual classes honor again the rich foundations of their more than three-thousand-year-old civilization?57 The reality that we are slowly waking up to in the West is that, much like Marxism-Leninism, liberalism is a critical ideology, not a constructive one. The late liberal creed is reducible to a certain number of abstract rules which are now responsible for a cascading sequence of de-civilizational effects in the West.58

The West is in chaos precisely because it listened to clichés put into circulation by the likes of Fukuyama in the early 1990s. Western intellectuals are starting to wake up to our need to re-civilize. They are doing so completely independently, and for very different reasons, than their counterparts in China, but they are waking up all the same. While the main roots of Chinese civilization lie in the traditions of Confucius and his acolytes, the source of our “eccentric culture” is a complex legacy of Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian religion.59


Westerners who hope for re-civilization often have a nostalgic view of what it might look like. They often seem to assume that modern developments, both technological and governmental, will simply vanish as society re-civilizes and that we will then return to the insularity of old‑school village life. But this seems extremely unlikely. The process of re-civilization is undertaken by integrating aspects of one’s ancestral civilization with ultramodern innovations in both government and technology. While libertarian conservatives in the West decry state bureaucracies, the Chinese intelligentsia has realized that these bureaucracies are themselves the tools by which we can inculcate civilization. The law is a teacher—and the bureaucracies bring the law.


Take the example of social media. In liberal capitalist societies, the sole purpose of social media is to generate profit. It is, therefore, no surprise that social media C-suites have discovered what every knave in human history has always known: the best way to rob a man is to appeal to his vices. For this reason, social media has become a vortex-like force of de-civilization. The more efficiently predatory technologies turn people into addicts, the more lucrative they become. In a society focused on re-civilization, vice-inculcating apps would be highly regulated or simply replaced by socially valuable systems.


Or, to be even more ambitious, consider the political economy. Liberal capitalism erodes itself as it forces people to work and consume so much that they do not make time to bear and raise children at sufficient rates to replace the labor force.60 The logical response to this would be to restructure our economies in such a way that creating stable families is given a higher priority than maximizing short-term GDP growth. In practice, this would mean ordering immediate production and consumption in line with what is optimal to achieve above-replacement fertility rates. For this to work, the state would have to take an active role in redistributing income and therefore resources to families and away from more sterile forms of consumption. The state would also have to play an active role in promoting family life as the basic aspirational goal because liberal capitalism, as we can now see, promotes sterile consumption among young people, simply because this maximizes short-term revenues and profits.

Nothing like this could presently be said of Washington or Paris, London or Berlin. It is harder than ever to deny that historically high immigration and de-civilizational effects are linked throughout the West. Fortunately, however, liberalism is not, as Fukuyama claimed, the Western idea.

In the wake of the Jacobins’ terror and Napoleon’s wars, European politicians and intellectuals reacted in astute and hardheaded ways. The West then saw a century of high growth and the “effulgence of recivilisation” (in Carlyle’s phrase).63 After the illusions of the post–Cold War period, we too should hope for an era of re-civilization.