We have abandoned the taboos that held us together
BY PAUL KINGSNORTH December 29, 2021
Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist and essayist
A century ago, as the Great War raged, Oswald Spengler wrote that “Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion.” The Decline of the West, Spengler’s grand, ambitious, poetic theory of Western downfall — well underway, in his telling, by the time he began writing — has had its followers, detractors and imitators ever since. It has also, in recent years, had something of a renaissance.
Decline is in the air, mingling with the smoke of burning forests in Greece and the shocking footage coming out of Afghanistan. Much of what Spengler wrote about the West’s dissolution — which he predicted would make itself fully known in the 21st century — has proven prescient, and he hadn’t even heard of climate change or the Taliban. You would have to have a strong will — the kind which old Oswald admired — to deny, as nations angrily fragment, the gulf stream stutters, the supply chains choke up, that he might have been onto something.
Unorthodox Truth 