Part II: Western civilization’s decline and the rise of Russophobia

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OPINION

By Michael Kakooza, PhD (Wales)

In Part I of this article, the phenomenon of Russophobia was discussed. The position was taken that Russophobia had substantially little to do with the reality of Russia and the Russians, but rather, exposed a lot about the ideological and moral condition of the metanarrative of Western civilization. The author posited two critical arguments. 

First, it was argued that Russophobia constitutes a pathology that is a paranoid projection of an ideologically and morally discredited metanarrative of Western civilization, that, for a historical time, had previously functioned as a privileged and justificatory grand framework for Western imperial ambitions. 

Secondly, the argument was made that in order for Africa to effectively strive for an authentic Continental transformation, engagement with Western colonial and neo-colonial legacy should clearly recognize and critically take note of the existential crisis within Western civilization.

The second part of this article broadly explores the progressive erosion of the foundations of what had once served as a privileged metanarrative of Western civilization, focusing on three critical intellectual developments that, in my view, were expressive of an ongoing fundamental ideological and moral subversion. 

These are: first, the publication of Oswald Spengler’s 2-volume work, The Decline of the West (1918, 1922); secondly, the release of the report, The Postmodern Condition (1981) by François Lyotard; and thirdly, the mainstreaming of the concept, “Post-Truth”, into Western ideological discourse in 2016. I argue that each of the three intellectual developments discussed were indicative of fundamental subversive and eroding currents that shook the ideological and moral stabilities and certainties of the metanarrative of Western civilization.

In the place of a civilizational foundation underpinned and stabilized by consensually accepted morals and values, there now reigns a dysfunctional and anarchic climate of ideological and moral polarisation.  This is well illustrated by a complexity of paradoxical situations, four of which can be broadly distinguished.

The first one is the paradox of what I would call the anti-West/ Western exceptionalism phenomenon.  This describes a dominant intellectual antipathy towards the Western cultural heritage, as sustained in the cultural theory studies departments of Western universities on the one hand, and the sustained posturing of exceptionalism and superiority, projected in the Western media, on the other.  The second paradox is that of Wokeism/Cancel Culture. 

There is the quasi-dogmatization of Woke ideologies (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) in the name of an all-embracing social justice activism on the one hand, and the intolerance of dissenting views to Wokeism, as seen in the cancel culture on social media platforms, on the other. A third paradoxical situation is the human vs environment debate. 

On the one hand, this paradox is driven by an aggressively nihilist orientation, exemplified by the cynical enactment of anti-life legislation and practice (examples include decriminalization of abortion at any stage of gestation, so-called gender affirming surgeries, physician assisted suicide), and the all-urgent need to protect the environment narrative, framed negatively as a destructive consequence of human activity, on the other. 

A fourth paradoxical situation is seen in the militarism/ diplomacy debate. There continues to be a coarsening of the political discourse with increasingly strident militaristic rhetoric on the one hand, and the surrender of classic Western forms of diplomacy on the other.

From a Western civilizational perspective, the year 1918 may be seen as marking a watershed moment, a moment of geopolitical change and paradox. This was the year when what was then called The Great War [subsequently to be called the First World War after the Second War broke out in 1939] between the European imperial powers was ended, with a historically-unprecedented shocking tally of military and civilian casualties (including those from the colonies) as well as war wounded, estimated at an aggregate figure of 40 million. 

Further to this obscene human cost of war, there followed an outbreak of the Great Influenza pandemic (1918-1920) caused by the H1N1 subtype of the influenza A virus, which has gone down in history as the deadliest pandemic to date. Politically, historical European imperial monarchies were overthrown (Russia, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Germany), and in Russia, a year earlier, the first experiment in political Marxism had been initiated under Vladimir Lenin. 

Paradoxically, however, it should not be forgotten that much of Africa, and the parts of Asia, including the Indian sub-continent, continued to chafe under the Western colonial yoke. The economic might of the British Empire, about which it had been said that the sun never set, had taken a terminal hit owing to the war drive, and the USA was set to succeed in the following decades to the position of economic leadership of the West.

It is against this paradoxical background of geopolitical change, structural collapse of historical European power centres, and imperial rule that Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) published his ominously-titled tome, The Decline of the West [original German title: Der Untergang des Abendlandes] in two volumes (1918, 1922).

Spengler envisaged history as a cyclic evolution and demise of historical civilizations in succession, in which all of those very same civilizations follow the natural life cycle of living organisms, and are all subject to the stages of birth, growth, maturity, decline and eventual death. 

He argued:

"Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man. Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age." When a Culture enters its late stage, Spengler argues, it becomes a 'Civilization' (Zivilisation), a petrified body characterized in the modern age by technology, imperialism, and mass society, …  

Much as the quality of intellectual rigour of Spengler’s work continues to be a subject of academic debate, The Decline of the West sounded an unmistakably ominous note of cultural pessimism that was already in sync with existing philosophical trends, such as thoughts of the nineteenth-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), who had expressed himself thus about the rise of secularism in the West and the corresponding fall in Western Christian religious practice:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

An example of the dechristianized ethos that has eroded the Judeo-Christian pillar of the Western meta-narrative is in the radical shift in symbolic significance of the flag of the European Union, which has a circle of 12 gold stars against a blue background. 

At the time of EU flag’s formal adoption on December 8, 1955, the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Catholic Church, its principal designer, Arsene Heitz, a devout Catholic, revealed that his inspiration had come from the Book of Revelation: “a woman clothed with the sun… and a crown of twelve stars on her head” (Revelation 12:1).

Seventy years later, however, the official EU website is strikingly silent about that biblical/ religious association of the EU flag’s symbolism, and is content to describe the symbolic significance in the following clichéd secular humanist key:

It symbolises both the European Union and, more broadly, the identity and unity of Europe. Much more than an institutional emblem, it stands for the values and shared identity of millions of Europeans united in their diversity.  It features a circle of 12 gold stars on a blue background. They stand for the ideals of unity, solidarity and harmony among the peoples of Europe.

Returning to Spengler, it is interesting to note his critical observation on what he, at the time, considered to be the destructively coercive power of the media in his day:

“Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery (the media) that hardly anyone can attain the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed”

Regarding the power of propaganda, Spengler declares:

“What is truth? For the multitude, that which it continually reads and hears.”

Spengler’s work could be argued to have played a subversive role in puncturing the integrity of what was being upheld as a unified and credible metanarrative of Western civilization. It preceded the excesses of the Second World War, the dehumanized Nazi ideology, and the Truman Administration’s decision to drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

These atrocities, unparalleled in human history, all served to destroy the pretensions to moral superiority of the metanarrative of Western civilization. By questioning not only the bases, but also the sustainability of the metanarrative of Western civilization, Spengler relativises the metanarrative’s claims to ideological and moral truth by posing uncertainty, doubt and anxiety.

In The Post-Modern Condition (1981), Francois Lyotard argued that the continued claim of legitimacy for sources of knowledge in modern Western society rested on unstable foundations. 

According to Lyotard, the historical credibility and cohesiveness of the Western metanarrative had been anchored on two narratives, namely, the narrative of emancipation (hero of liberty) and the speculative narrative (hero of knowledge).  The latter narrative was concerned with rational scientific endeavour, while the former concerned the arts, human rights, religion, …

For Lyotard, however, modern science and the emergence of technology in modern post-industrial Western society, together with the rigorous application of the scientific method, were playing an increasingly prominent role in the determination of what could objectively be described as knowledge. 

At the same time, what fell outside the bounds of the empirically verifiable was increasingly being discounted as knowledge. This growing dichotomy between objective knowledge and other forms of knowledge not resting on scientifically-proven bases created an internal tension, incoherence and contradiction between the two narratives, highlighted above.  It is this internal tension, incoherence and contradiction that served to undermine the integrity and credibility of the meta-narrative of Western civilization. 

Lyotard unveiled yet a further existential crisis when he demonstrated that science was not in the ideological and moral position to take over as a reliable substitute for the stabilizing role earlier played by the meta-narrative in providing for a firm cultural and social foundation. The nature of science is such that it is ever-developing dynamically, crossing and even transgressing borders of disciplines as scientific knowledge expands, and holds a multiplicity of frequently conflicting, positions, all defended by scientific evidence.

There has emerged in Western civilization a particular form of existential crisis that I could call the crisis of scientism.  This means that beyond recognizing the limitations of an all-encompassing belief in the power of science, there is the more profoundly destabilising realisation that Western civilization, with its attendant cultures and values, cannot simply be premised and sustained on the cold objective rationality of empirical knowledge alone.

In summary, Lyotard presents the postmodern condition in the West as one of instability, fluidity and uncertainty, one in which meaning and context are conditional, provisional and circumstantially-determined.  The metanarrative is unsustainable and no longer credible; individual mini-narratives have got to be negotiated and re-negotiated.

Commenting on the Western postmodern condition, Pope Saint John Paul II, a celebrated Western philosopher in his own right, observed:

Recent times have seen the rise to prominence of various doctrines which tend to devalue even the truths which had been judged certain. A legitimate plurality of positions has yielded to an undifferentiated pluralism, based upon the assumption that all positions are equally valid, which is one of today's most widespread symptoms of the lack of confidence in truth. ... Hence, we see among the men and women of our time, and not just in some philosophers, attitudes of widespread distrust of the human being's great capacity for knowledge. With a false modesty, people rest content with partial and provisional truths, no longer seeking to ask radical questions about the meaning and ultimate foundation of human, personal and social existence.

In 2016, the well-respected Oxford English Dictionary (OED) selected the term “post-truth” as its Word of the Year, for which it gave the following definition:

Originally, US Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. 

Though the timing of OED’s choice appeared partisan-driven and was considerably influenced by the US presidential election of the same year, in which the opposing party presidential candidates, Clinton and Trump, ideologically weaponized what they called fake news, the very coinage of the term, “post-truth” points to an already existing cultural malaise in the West. 

In an article on the subject of post-truth, Vittorio Bufacchi (2020) observed:

Post-truth is a murky concept, but it should not be confused with a lie. Post-truth is much more devious and dangerous to the democratic fabric of our society. The prefix “post” in post-truth refers to the claim that a specified idea has become redundant and therefore can safely be discarded. Post-truth is the belief that truth is no longer essential, that truth has become obsolete.

Post-truth is a deliberate strategy aimed at creating an environment where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion, where theoretical frameworks are undermined in order to make it impossible for someone to make sense of a certain event, phenomenon, or experience, and where scientific truth is delegitimized.

The condition being described here is not the simply the recognizable fallible human one of truths, half-truths, lies and outright falsehoods that continue to mark the fortunes of every human community from the family right up to the globalist organization.  What is important for the reader to take on board is that the post-truth condition is one of ideological and moral relativism and subversion. In this kind of condition, there is no moral compass that provides for a stable reference of meaning and context. 

Indeed, claims of stable meaning and context would be cast as tyrannical and totalitarian.  All opinions, thoughts, decisions and judgments are not only legitimate options, but their binding nature is validated subjectively. Further, they are temporary in scope, inconsistent in style and approach, and do not claim legitimacy from externalized structures of power and authority.

Is it any wonder that in such a state of affairs it is possible for a sexual health centre to come up with and justify a list of 72 gender “identities”, subverting the binary gender principle enshrined in the natural law, as recognized and respected by all civilisations and cultures in human history to date?

Indeed, regardless of eccentricities of his leadership style, US President Trump’s spirited reiteration of the binary gender principle during his 2025 inauguration speech signalled a welcome return to order and sanity:

“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”

The above discussion on three intellectual currents in the West have sought to trace the progressive subversion and resultant erosion of the ideological and moral justifications of what had been a consensually-owned and privileged meta-narrative of Western civilization.

It is against this landscape of an eroded and discredited Western civilizational landscape that I discuss selected illustrations of Western Russophobia in Part III of this article.

The writer is a Consultant/Trainer – Strategic Management

Read Part 3 of this four-part series this Friday - You don't want to miss it!