The West is Doomed

[Muhammad]

This is not a threat of a fundamentalist, or a joke, but this is a diagnosis to the Western civilization given by an American sociologist and philosopher, Japanese-born American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama. He is unlikely to be suspected in having sympathy with the enemies of the West. He became famous worldwide back in 1989 after publishing his scandalous article titled 'The End of History', which was written from liberal Hegelian standpoint. Back then Fukuyama wrote that the end of the Cold War means final and irrevocable victory of the Western liberalism over all known systems of values.

 

Defeating the enemies means end of contradictions, which according to Hegelian dogmas are moving the history. But 10 years go by and Fukuyama writes a totally different book titled 'The Great Disruption'. Charts, diagrams and bibliographies take up about 100 pages of this book. The main subject of the book is that the West is sick with deadly social disease called 'The Great Disruption', whose first symptoms appeared in 1960s. The disease was not gone even in 40 years, it only got more aggravated. The symptoms are the following:

 

- Growth of crime rate. «There was no depression in the period from the 1960s to the 1990s to explain the sudden rise in crime; in fact, the great American postwar crime wave began in a period of full employment and general prosperity».

 

- Family crisis. «Marriages and births declined and divorce soared; and one out of every three children in the United States and more than half of all children in Scandinavia were born out of wedlock».

 

- Depopulation. Fukuyama writes that only the Third World countries are facing a demographic explosion, while «fertility has dropped so dramatically» in developed countries. Longer lifespan will lead to only retirees prevailing in the society, and there will be no one to support them. Artificial simulation of birthrate in France turned out to be costly and inefficient. Immigration caused cultural tensions between 'natives' and 'aliens'.

 

- «A society dedicated to the constant upending of norms and rules in the name of expanding individual freedom of choice will find itself increasingly disorganized, atomized, isolated, and incapable of carrying out common goals and tasks».

 

So what is the reason for this disease, - the American sociologist is wondering? After analyzing many pages of the statistical data he comes to a conclusion that the social disease is caused by family crisis, for family is a key source of the social capital. I.e. it is the family that lays the moral foundation in the citizens, and absence of moral rules can never be compensated by any law. Mothers in offices, children in schools, grandpas and grandmas in the senior houses. But even though offices, schools or senior houses can simulate home, they can never replace it.

 

Fukuyama gets into polemics with the sociologists who believe that family crisis is a conservative myth and who claim that a family has only entered a new phase of its evolution – towards mere cohabitation. The book quotes a sociological fact based on surveying a group of 4,300 Swedish women born between 1936 and 1960. So, the point is that the probability of dissolution of cohabiting relationships when there is a child involved is three times higher than a divorce of a married couple. The reason for this is that cohabiting couples tend not to trust one another from the very beginning. A child with only one parent is deprived of the full upbringing, when the mother has to spent time at work away from the family. Besides, inevitable separation of parents when the union is based on pleasure is always traumatic for the child.

 

But family crisis is still an interim reason. Mr. Fukuyama says that the most convincing primary reason is in cultural shift, when Western values started destroying themselves.

 

«At the highest level of thought, Western rationalism began to undermine itself by concluding that no rational grounds supported universal norms of behavior».

 

The sexual revolution, the feminist movement, and the 1980s and 1990s movements in favor of gay and lesbian rights that exploded through the Western world, as well as biologically informed approaches to psychology and anthropology, had one goal: to legitimize «individual pursuit of rational self-interest». Individualism turned into autism, and freedom into uselessness. Neo’s dialog with agent Smith from Matrix Reloaded (2003) is showing this situation best: where freedom turns out to be the greatest disaster, for it makes the existence pointless.

 

In other words, the West is being devoured by the Kufr (unbelief), and it is not a metaphysical claim, but a sociological assertion. In this context the Jihad (in all its spectra) is actually humanitarian aid, a rescue operation, for the main mission of Jihad is elimination of unbelief and spreading the firm foundation for moral norms.

 

::: By:Alexei Ivanenko, Russia.

[Paragon]

Very interesting article conquest, thanks walaahi