One hears about the “collective West” all the time. The “collective West” imposed sanctions, the “collective West” declared war, the “collective West” is, the “collective West” is…
Some time (about ten years) ago, the endless talk about the “golden billion”, emanating, as a rule, from our professional Marxists, stuck in the ears in exactly the same way. According to their ideas, the “golden billion”, this accursed descendant of colonial empires, shone in the center of the world with a continent of satiety and overstocking, and around it five billion unfortunate representatives of the third world suffered hopelessly.
Now all these lamentations of the Marxists look extremely absurd. There is no longer any “golden billion” at all. Europe – this blurred almost indistinguishable world, the criteria of specialness and selectivity of which are absolutely not observed – is quietly withering and dying, and the economic center of the world is rapidly moving to the Pacific region, where the growing economies of India, China and other Asian countries are gaining strength. On the other hand, Brazil, Australia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are asserting themselves more and more boldly. Liberals like to joke about Russia as a big gas station. But what, then, is Europe, turning into a chimera before our eyes? Just an orphan cafe, with a price tag that goes up every day, stuck to this gas station. In the next thirty years, not a single European country is in the top ten economies of the world (except, perhaps, England with dominions, but England is not Europe either).
And where are those Marxist wise men today who have eaten our ears with their “golden billion”? They imperturbably continue to sing their eternal song, now about the “collective West”. Fortunately, the memory of today’s layman is so short that on Monday he no longer remembers what Sunday talk shows poured into his ears. New day, new song. However, what happened anyway? Where did the notorious “golden billion” go?
And he didn’t go anywhere. He never existed. It was a simulacrum, the gold dust of which hid three or four hundred really super-rich families who accumulated the lion’s share of world GDP. This is what it really was and is. As for everything else… It turned out that the usual two-legged herd is quite interchangeable. And under the continuous mute about the “golden billion” nimble clerks simply changed the agenda and signs. Getting ready for a new change of scenery. And in the next act of the performance, the European herd was hastily exchanged for an Arab-African one, and the American one for a Latin American one. The operation is still developing successfully and is nearing its end so that in some ten or fifteen years the white population will be in the minority both in America and a little later in Europe. Leaving the “golden billion” only the gold dust that the ideologists of the “collective West” let into our eyes.
Something similar is happening today with the “collective West” itself. On the one hand, we are told about the unprecedented consolidation of the Western world in the face of “Russian aggression” and “Russian danger”. On the other hand… And consolidation, excuse me, who? The nature of what we see has changed very, very much in recent decades. There is no more good old West, no good old Europe. And the consolidation that we are pathetically told about is the consolidation of supranational elites and world media, that is, several thousand top managers serving the same 200-300 super-rich families. But where did the good old Europe go? Good old West?
Let’s figure it out. It all started not yesterday. In order not to operate with too deep perspectives, let’s say this: the West ceased to be what it was and what we used to see it, at the same time that the USSR collapsed as well. The death of the USSR became at the same time the beginning of the end of the Western world, old Europe. That Europe, which, when its rival, the USSR, fell away, no longer needed the masters of the world.
In the old bipolar world, Europe had a role to play. It was to be a counterbalance to the Warsaw Pact bloc. Just as West Berlin was a showcase of the Western world in front of its Eastern neighbor, so the old Europe was that “sideboard with crystal” that a person from the East had to be fascinated to look at. But after the collapse of the socialist world, there was no longer any need for a shop window. The time has come for deconstruction – both the old Europe and its notorious “billion”. Today, deconstruction is coming to an end, and the frightening reality of what is left of the old civilization and old Europe appears before our eyes.
In order to correctly assess the scale of what is happening, let’s digress a little and turn to the very concept of “civilization”. In recent decades, with the light hand of S. Huntington (author of the book “Clash of Civilizations”), we habitually talk about different civilizations that simultaneously exist on earth. These are, according to Huntington himself, Western, Orthodox, Islamic, Hindus, Sin, Japanese, Latin American and African civilizations. We will not go far into Huntington’s constructions, which are largely far-fetched and inconsistent. (Where, for example, did Israel and the Jewish civilizational project go, obviously separate and irreducible to any other?) And can Oriental cultures be called civilizations? Where, for example, did Huntington see African civilization?
Wouldn’t it be better to call what Huntington calls civilizations world cultures? And after that, to recognize as really existing an inexorable criterion that brings them all to the same denominator. That criterion is technology. After all, it is precisely the “sum of technologies” that ultimately presents a fatal, inexorable limit to any great culture. And no matter how great and beautiful the Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Iranian, Russian cultural world is, we all have to live in the same technogenic world, all equally using its trains, planes and smartphones.
Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to recognize the reality of a single civilization that was built by one great culture, forcing the whole world to live according to its laws? Yes, of course, we are talking about the European Christian civilization, which at the turn of the 16th-17th centuries abruptly changed its course, rushed along the path of technical progress, gradually capturing the whole world without exception into its whirlpool.
So, let’s talk about several great cultures that simultaneously exist on Earth, but only about one and only – technogenic – civilization. Civilizations that dominate these great cultures with a real sword of Damocles. So, no matter how they build their own pictures of the future, there is a fate that they cannot avoid. This is the same “sum of technologies”, like a rock, in the colossal shadow of which all these great cultures must inevitably disappear. For here, at the foot of this Tower of Babel, all of them, having their own vector of development, have their own limit.
And today the world that gave birth to it, the great culture and civilization of the West, is the first to disappear in the shadow of this great rock. Yes, today we are witnessing something truly majestic, terrible and yet unprecedented. Something truly creepy and sinister. What is happening literally before our eyes, but as if no one notices. As if the majestic bulks are collapsing in complete ontological silence. That is, there is just too much annoying noise from this civilization. But all of it is like a heavy smoke screen, behind which an existential drama is taking place in complete silence – the real death of the gods, the collapse of a once great culture. Truly the greatest of catastrophes is the destruction of the sacred canon of culture. And behind it – and the most Western world. And now – there is no longer any traditional education, no cultural standards, no longer the oldest European culture. The very concept of “western civilization” did not remain either in university courses, or in school programs, or in the minds of the Western layman. Portraits with the great men of antiquity left the classrooms and university audiences. Plato, Dante, Shakespeare are declared representatives of the chauvinistic patriarchy, unacceptable in the bright realm of total inclusiveness. The very study of which is recognized as offensive to transgender people, blacks and Asians, and therefore should be excluded.
It was not until the end of the 19th century that Nietzsche proclaimed the death of the Western God. But it turned out that the death of religion was immediately followed by the death of culture, and the next generation of carriers of the once great civilization turned into fellah barbarians, wandering senselessly among its ruins, not understanding where and why they ended up, having no more ancestors or memory, no future, no reason for its existence.
So, the old West, the old civilization, which was the central carrier of our technogenic world, no longer exists. The West is disappearing before our eyes as rapidly as the “golden billion” has disappeared. There is no longer an old society built on a common culture, no collective memory. Just a conglomerate of condominiums bound by a regime of totalitarian democracy and liberal dictatorship. Only a conspiracy of global elites – and a tsunami of new barbarism coming at us from the last stars of the West, flooding worlds, cultures and continents along the way. And yes, we need to talk and shout about this. And build barrier dams. And at the same time, think about how to call what is now hanging over us like a crazy clay Golem and what we so clumsily call the “collective West”.
Vladimir Mozhegov, VIEW
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