by David Virtue, VOL
The West, the Churches, and the Faith Betrayed
Muggeridge saw it. Solzhenitsyn named it. Melanie Phillips is living it. Os Guinness traced it to the root. And the churches, God help us, have joined the demolition crew.
Civilizations, we are told, fall to barbarians at the gate. The truer and more terrible story is that they open the gate themselves, hand the barbarian the torch, and applaud the blaze as an advance in lighting.
Malcolm Muggeridge understood this better than any man of his generation, and he was my friend. He said it with a mordant glee that never quite concealed the grief beneath it: whereas every previous civilization had been brought down by attacks from without, ours had achieved the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, then paying, out of the public purse, to broadcast their destructive creed far and wide. What is called Western Civilization, he wrote, is in an advanced state of decomposition, and another Dark Ages will soon be upon us — arriving so gradually, through the steady erosion of our values, that we should scarcely notice the lights going out.
He was not describing a foreign invasion. He was describing a suicide.
The prophet nobody wished to believe
Muggeridge had the credentials to say it. He had gone to Moscow a believing socialist and come home having seen the famine the fellow-travelers refused to report. He had spent a lifetime in the newspapers he came to distrust. When he warned that the West was dreaming up its own dissolution in the minds of its own intellectual elite, he was not a crank shaking his fist at modernity. He was a man who had watched utopia devour its children and had learned the price of the lie.
His diagnosis was moral before it was political. The West, he saw, had contrived to manufacture its own boredom out of its affluence, its own impotence out of its appetites, its own vulnerability out of its strength — and, having decided it was too numerous, had labored with pill and scalpel to make itself fewer. He gave us the unforgettable image of Western Man as a weary old brontosaurus, educated into imbecility, keeling over into extinction. It was meant to sting. It still does.