Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Western civilization arose in the 8th century B.C. Greece. Some 1,500 city-states emerged from a murky, illiterate 400-year-old Dark Age. That chaos followed the utter collapse of the palatial culture of Mycenaean Greece.
But what re-emerged were constitutional government, rationalism, liberty, freedom of expression, self-critique, and free markets – what we know now as the foundation of a unique Western civilization.
The Roman Republic inherited and enhanced the Greek model.
For a millennium, the Republic and subsequent Empire spread Western culture, eventually to be inseparable from Christianity.
From the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf and from the Rhine and Danube to the Sahara, there were a million square miles of safety, prosperity, progress, and science – until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD.
What followed was a second European Dark Age, roughly from 500 to 1000 AD.
Populations declined. Cities eroded. Roman roads, aqueducts, and laws crumbled.
In place of the old Roman provinces arose tribal chieftains and fiefdoms.
Whereas once Roman law had protected even rural people in remote areas, during the Dark Ages, walls and stone were the only means of keeping safe.
Finally, at the end of the 11th century, the old values and know-how of the complex world of Graeco-Roman civilization gradually re-emerged.
The slow rebirth was later energized by the humanists and scientists of the Renaissance, Reformation, and eventually the 200-year European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Contemporary Americans do not believe that our current civilization could self-destruct a third time in the West, followed by an impoverished and brutal Dark Age.
But what caused these prior returns to tribalism and loss of science, technology, and the rule of law?
Historians cite several causes of societal collapse – and today they are hauntingly familiar.
Like people, societies age. Complacency sets in.
The hard work and sacrifice that built the West also creates wealth and leisure. Such affluence is taken for granted by later generations. What created success is eventually ignored – or even mocked.
Expenditures and consumption outpace income, production, and investment.
Child-rearing, traditional values, strong defense, love of country, religiosity, meritocracy, and empirical education fade away.
The middle class of autonomous citizens disappear. Society bifurcates between a few lords and many peasants.
Tribalism – the pre-civilizational bonds based on race, religion, or shared appearance – re-emerge.
National government fragments into regional and ethnic enclaves.
Borders disappear. Mass migrations are unchecked. The age-old bane of antisemitism reappears.
The currency inflates, losing its value and confidence. General crassness in behavior, speech, dress, and ethics replaces prior norms.
Transportation, communications, and infrastructure all decline.
The end is near when the necessary medicine is seen as worse than the disease.
Such was life around 450 AD in Western Europe.
The contemporary West might raise similar red flags.
Fertility has dived well below 2.0 in almost every Western country.
Public debt is nearing unsustainable levels. The dollar and euro have lost much of their purchasing power.
It is more common in universities to damn than honor the gifts of the Western intellectual past.
Yet, the reading and analytical skills of average Westerners, and Americans in particular, steadily decline.
Can the general population even operate or comprehend the ever-more sophisticated machines and infrastructure that an elite group of engineers and scientists create?
The citizen loses confidence in an often corrupt elite, who neither will protect their nation’s borders nor spend sufficient money on collective defense.
The cures are scorned.
Do we dare address spiraling deficits, unsustainable debt, and corrupt bureaucracies and entitlements?
Even mention of reform is smeared as “greedy,” “racist,” “cruel,” or even “fascist” and “Nazi.”
In our times, relativism replaces absolute values in the eerie replay of the latter Roman Empire.
Critical legal theory claims crimes are not really crimes.
Critical race theory postulates that all of society is guilty of insidious bias, demanding reparations in cash and preferences in admission and hiring.
Salad-bowl tribalism replaces assimilation, acculturation, and integration of the old melting pot.
Despite a far wealthier, far more leisured, and far more scientific contemporary America, was it safer to walk in New York or take the subway in 1960 than now?
Are high school students better at math now or 70 years ago?
Are movies and television more entertaining and ennobling in 1940 or now?
Are nuclear, two-parent families the norm currently or in 1955?
We are blessed to live longer and healthier lives than ever – even as the larger society around us seems to teeter.
Yet, the West historically is uniquely self-introspective and self-critical.
Reform and Renaissance historically are more common than descents back into the Dark Ages.
But the medicine for decline requires unity, honesty, courage, and action – virtues now in short supply on social media, amid popular culture, and among the political class.
I’m sort of oldish (76) so I’ve experienced otherwise in the past and know the differences between what I lived through before and our current circumstance. I’m surprised we are still on our feet at all given our decline in everything except consumerism, cynicism, and delusional thinking since when I grew up. (Okay, you can now all dismiss me by calling me “boomer” but what I’ve said above is true. You had to be there.)
Thank you. I agree completely with you. I am about your age. Of course, there has always been good and bad, vice and virtue. But before the second half of the 1960s, it seemed as though polite society and virtue were emphasized, as was quest for the discovery of truth. You could even discern that in pop culture, such as movies, which create memories. Today, philosophical deconstructionism, postmodernism, and Cultural Marxism have transformed society into accepting all “truths” and behaviors, except of course those earlier values that were predominate before, influenced by Judeo-Christianity and the 18th Century Anglo-Scottish-American Enlightenment. How did this happen? People believed, and “The oracles have failed us.” – Plutarch
Yup, I’m pushing 82 and agree with you 100%. I’ve been predicting for years now that we are on the path of Rome’s demise. President Trump is doing a good job of trying to resurrect religion and correct our school systems, but that will take more than one term. We need someone to follow in his footsteps, and we need to vote out a bunch of losers in Congress.
No doubt the Dark Ages can return. I often worry about that. In fact the general ignorance of the public makes one feel like we are already in the Dark Ages.
We are unfortunately. And, I am 84. Easy to see the problems.
In short supply, indeed. And, as an aside, I hope VDH will stop going on Megyn Kelly’s show. She has proven herself to be a vile coward cozying up to Jew haters and even more broady, those who seem to hate the West. (Usually the two go hand in hand.)
With Muslims running around on multiple continents, many unchecked, you can bet we are running headlong into the next dark age. Personally I can’t wait. Trump finally listened to the various Christians groups and launched Christmas day attacks on the Jihadists in Nigeria after warning the government that all the foreign aid will be cut off if they don’t do something about the Muj scumbags forming a caliphate in central Africa.
And the rate that mini-caliphates are materialising in Europe and in the U.S. in several states it will be time for some serious house cleaning in Minnesota, Michigan and Texas before long.
The Muslims and their Leftist enablers must be sent packing and deported.
Have you armed up yet for Christmas and New Years?
“some serious house cleaning”—who are you trying to kid? I am not convinced our administration understands the severity of the problem we face. No nation in the West appears to have the cohanes to do what is required to stop the inevitable slide into the dark ages of a barbaric global caliphate. We have lost our moral foundations rooted in a Judeo-Christian worldview which is the only way to stop it. It would take national Christian revival occuring in multiple nations at the same time. The West has chosen a life or death bet to pursue pluralism and multiculturalism which communism, globalism and Islamism are using to obtain their own goals. Only the return of Jesus the Messiah will bring this to an complete and final end.
OK Arnie. Have fun waiting for Jesus.
In the meantime I will take care of things as best I can while you count your rosarie beads and do nothing. I ain’t waiting around for 2000 more years.
Reparations:
People who were not slaves demanding money from people who were not slave owners.
What could possibly go wrong?
Even the great VDH swims in the waters of the post-war consensus.
“Critical race theory postulates that all of society is guilty of insidious bias….”
Not all of society. Only white, western Christian societies.
“Salad-bowl tribalism replaces assimilation, acculturation, and integration of the old melting pot.”
There is no tribalism unless there is a people sharing culture, language, history, etc. Therefore, there is no “salad bowl tribalism.” Avoiding tribalism is the point of the post-war liberal consensus – but ONLY for peoples of European descent. Everyone else is invited to plunder and destroy the European races while maintaining their own tribalism.
“Melting pot” and “salad bowl” are catch phrases of secular liberal pluralism employed to destroy the American people’s culture, language, history, etc. We people of European descent are a tiny minority – probably less than 8% now of the total world population. Without borders and legal protection, we will be “melting potted” out of existence, causing schadenfreude and rejoicing among those who envied and hated us.
The plagued Doctors in their Bird Masks must have scared the pations fearing that they shot too many Birds and the Bird Demons was after them
Can the Dark Ages Return?
Well, they’ve already partially returned in various forms of obscurantism: obscurantism in science, of all places!
* Transgender surgery;
* Sodomy as the norm;
* Lies about COVID and the suppression of effective treatment methods;
* Climate hysteria;
* The utopian idea that all races and peoples are statistically equal, and therefore DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). And therefore, inviting hostile tribes into one’s own country.
Yes, some of this list was (temporarily) reversed under Trump in the USA, but all the forces that promoted this obscurantism remained in place. And… the utopia of peace with Russia through the West’s capitulation to Russia is also obscurantism.
It will actually take a lot less.
North Korea can launch a nuclear warhead and explode it in the low-earth orbiting satellite band. No need for precision. Just get the blast anywhere in the low-earth satellites’ path. Then ALL of those satellites will pass through the radiation and die.
And earth will go back to the dark ages. All technology will become useless.
I see Global Jihad by Immigration (hijrah) sending civilization back to the dark ages unless checked. Imagine ISIS on a global scale. It could happen.
When people say “the United States,” but they are talking about our federal government, I know they have lost the plot. Just over a century ago, our culture was prospering and the federal government had little impact on our daily lives. It took Woodrow Wilson and his spawn to make a cancerous growth of central government the force that allowed anti-religious, anti-social, and anti-freedom activists to poison the American well. And now we risk raising a generation of innumerate, illiterate, and misinformed children to take the reins of Leviathan. God help us all!
As always, Professor Hanson’s piece is superb; but his history, and prognosis of where Western Civilization has been heading, and is now on the edge of the Cliff of national suicide, is not news to me; it just needs to be spread, and taught to, our young.
In college (Middlebury, ’74, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa) I took courses under the superb Prof. Tillinghast, including Dark Ages and the High Middle Ages, and the equally superb (then young!) Prof. Murray Dry–including “Classical Political Science” (Aristotle, Plato’s “Republic,” Hobbes, Locke, and our Founding Fathers who were so profoundly influenced by their intimate knowledge of their writings and warnings).
Some famous, great Thinker–I forget who, now–warned, long ago, that “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
Nothing could be truer, nor a sterner warning in today’s America, or the
Civilized World.
For several years now I’ve seen the frightening parallels between Rome, and our own, present-day civilization. They are almost congruent; and unless stopped abruptly, will have the same outcome: the avoidable, but chosen. suicide of our nation and our civilization, and our timid, weak-kneed surrender to the Barbarians. who are now not just “outside our walls,” or “at the gates,” but literally within them.
Thank you again, VDH, for pointing this out…at least to those of us who will read it, understand it, agree with it, and take action to prevent the otherwise irresistible outcome that the Romans had, and that we are likely to face soon.
Or at least to insist that our children, from first grade through university, be taught this History, and warned.
Regarding Europe, a whole, and some other nations of the West. A Front page Magazine reveals, “Fertility has dived well below 2.0 in almost every Western country.”
In addition to this, facts specifically concerning Europe in another article informs its reader about foreign migrants in Europe that they “are predominately from the Middle East and North Africa, are mostly Islamic and are increasingly ant-Western.” [1]
This of naturally very disturbing, even alarming to some intelligent people, for it takes a few dozen or even in numbers to cause much terrible deadly harm.
The continence of Europe’s grand culture is also put at a risk.
Nevertheless, to put another in perspective, on the subject of an immense number of foreign into Europe and the low birthrate of the indigenous European population , one sensible view on topic may be seen in one of the fables of Aesop which is entitled “The lioness and the vixen.”
In this fable, a Vixen and a lioness were both bragging about their children, as some mothers do. The Vixen boasted that that her has many children and told lioness has only one.
“Yes, that’s true” the lioness replied “but my one is a loin. “
The point is quality and not quality.
[1] The Epoch Times Dec 25-29 2025 page A15