June 11, 2025

Fath Ali Shah Qajar Firman
(فتحعلى‌شاه قاجار)

Wednesday:
My views on Western civilization – June 11, 2025

Western civilization has dominated and shaped the world for the past 7-5 centuries, and many things that modern man takes for granted, such as democracy, nationhood, and "freedom", are artifacts produced by this civilization. But western civilization didn't begin in the 14th, 15th, or the 16th century, but it did begin to dominate the world at that time, setting in motion enormous technological progress and a fundamental change in how man views himself as a part of the universe. Western civilization has its roots in Ancient Greece, long before the 14th century, but you may go much further back in time than that if you will, and it will not satisfy everyone to set a precise date or time as to when Western civilization began; in a sense it was always here. Today, in this 21st century however, Western civilization is completely dominating the world, outshining everyone else, but don't let this fool you, for the Western world has formed a hegemonic power structure in the world that is in profound decline, and the peak of western power was the 20th century, not the 21st century.

    There are surely many forces besides the philosophical and philological traditions from ancient Greece that came together in the seemingly sanguine confluence of the Western world, but I would be remiss if I failed to mention the Christian faith as well, because it has been central perhaps more so than anything in else in the transcendence of the Western tradition. This confluence however, is no more, instead Western civilization is much more resembling a stream, quite in line with the hegemonic nature of this late Empire of European supremacy, and at the core of Western decline is the victory of the material and the acceptance of the beastly nature of man as something good and quite moral, as opposed to the noble man ascending to the transcendental plane and becoming one with the all. There is no longer any Christian tradition left to speak about, not even the orthodox, and as such, Western man in particular has joined the brotherhood of the beast and left behind his high regard for the noble and the sacred, departing the otherwise high quality of the tradition of skillful means in western tradition.

Motif of Moses
(מֹשֶׁה)

    The East is rising as a force opposing the decay of the west, but Eastern civilization has also been contaminated by the corruption of the west, and is operating under the rules set by the western hegemony, and in that regard, it can surely be true to say that colonialism never truly ended, a grave mistake in the first place. This dynamic: that the Eastern world very much works as something that can be described as complementary to the Western world has been the case for a long time, and the crucial difference between the two lies in the fact that Eastern civilization is far more esoteric and inward, compared to that of the exoteric and outwardly western tradition, something that has made the West far greater in recent times than the east, but also something that has doomed Western civilization to a death of decay from corruption.

    Western civilization makes itself far more apparent in a parasitical fashion, because it constantly imposes itself, where it is not welcomed, and this is due to two things: western mans need to make himself the hero, and to proselytize the good message of Messiah, more commonly in the form of the "white man's burden"; and because he is constantly looking out for ever more material solutions to the human condition. Christianity, while being strictly opposed to idolatry has inadvertently made western man fall in love with himself, by enabling him to commit idolatry in the worst form, and while all men are surely equal under God, western man takes that concept further and declares all men equal in the material domain. The only achievement of western man is in the end, the victory of the material and the rejection of the source and the transcendental, and this is something that western man has deemed necessary to impose on the whole world, thus rendering most of the world slaves to their material conditions.

    In the end, what has been the great achievement of Western civilization? This question has to be asked here at the end of the western tradition, as the chaos of entropy is imminent and the close of the Kali Yuga makes itself ever more apparent. I will not answer that question, since I don't have the complete answer, but these are at least some of my thoughts on Western civilization, as nothing but a tradition doomed to fail, because it upheld man and the material above the moral domain, and claimed the moral as falling within the dominion of the primal and the beastly. The so-called "survival of the fittest" should pretty well sum up the achievements of the western tradition, as western man continues to destroy everything western in the name of spreading the torch of liberty and "enlightenment" to people that are far more transcendent than himself, the beast. In the end, the western tradition had to tear itself down.

Reginald Drax – June 11, 2025.