The Auto-Genocide of the West

Last week, I came across a timely quote from Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the most lucid and prophetic cultural commentators of the Twentieth Century:

…[I]t has become abundantly clear in the second half of the twentieth century that Western Man has decided to abolish himself. Having wearied of the struggle to be himself, he has created
his own boredom out of his own affluence,

his own impotence out of his own erotomania,

his own vulnerability out of his own strength;

himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down, and, in a process of auto-genocide, convincing himself that he is too numerous, and labouring accordingly with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer in order to be an easier prey for his enemies; until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keels over a weary, battered old brontosaurus and becomes extinct.
Malcolm Muggeridge, from his essay “Jesus: The Man Who Lives,” in Seeing Through the Eye: Malcolm Muggeridge on Faith, ed. Cecil Kuhne (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 16.

Given the loss of respect for life (Western Man says: "we're not sure when life begins for a human being, but instead of defaulting towards protecting life, let's kill and call it choice"), morality (Western Man says: "although my rights may come from God, who cares what He has to say about how I ought to live them out"), and the truth (Western Man says:"the only absolute truth is that there is no absolute truth"), it is worth pondering how much longer we can continue down this path.

ht