The Daily Telegraph, 16 December, Robert Tombs
The Victorian historian J.A. Froude recalled a time when “the lights were all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by but the stars”. He meant the weakening of religious faith, but we too feel the foundations of our moral and physical confidence crumbling. Since at least the 18th century, we have supposed that, however haltingly, the world was moving intellectually and morally in our direction, because the West had discovered or invented ‘universal values’. In the long run, this may still prove to be true; but in the long run, as Keynes remarked, we are all dead.
In the short run, we are faced with a new axis linking what Lenin called “great Russian chauvinism” with the religious millenarianism of Iran and its proxies, and the rapacious state capitalism combined with traditional cultural aloofness practised by China. Unaligned countries, and even long-time allies, are adapting to new centres of power. Within Anglophone democracies, cultural institutions are busily sowing dissension and demoralisation in a modish espousal of ‘decolonization’, which is a disavowal of Western culture and history. Much of our disarray is self-inflicted: a moral as much as a material failing.
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