Will Western civilization survive?

Those who seek the future in crystal balls must get used to crushed glass. Prophets and prognosticators, in other words, are frequently wrong. The future surprises us, which should not altogether surprise us since we believe in a God of surprises, whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts not our thoughts.

A discussion group to which I belong recently tackled the question: "Can Western Civilization Be Saved?" Rather to my surprise, all present concluded the answer was "No," albeit for different, sometimes conflicting, reasons. These are the main reasons that I am doubtful that Western civilization can be saved.

First, what remains of Western civilization seems too demoralized, enfeebled, and desiccated to resist the challenges of a resurgent, not to say insurgent and militant, Islam. When the President of Iran can publicly deny the Holocaust, and call for Israel to be "wiped off the map," and do so with impunity, you know that the West no longer has the resolve, perhaps not even the resources, to stand up to tyrants.

But it is not just events in the Middle East that induce pessimism; consider Western Europe. The European Union deliberately excised all references to God and its Christian history from its Constitution. In France, political correctness prevents police and civil authorities even from naming, let alone confronting, the fundamental cause of the riots and widespread destruction of private property; namely, the Islamization of formerly Christian Europe.

The European media adopt the euphemism "young unemployed" instead of the reality "young Islamic males." Even in North America we see signs of a refusal to make critical distinctions; thus George W. Bush, a President I support, reportedly said recently that America owed as much to Islam as to Christianity. This remark typifies what Dr. Johnson called "nonsense on stilts".

Likewise, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice declared Ramadan to be a State Departmental holiday. Unless and until the West, and its leaders, are prepared to honestly confront the aggressive, dominating, no,--subjugating is more accurate--nature of Islam, as long as we persist in proclaiming the fiction that all religions are non-violent and peace-loving, then the West is bound to lose in what Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington aptly called "the clash of civilizations".

Second, the Western way of life, centred as it is on the automobile, is dependent on fossil fuel which is fast running out. John Kunstler's recent book The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age (Grove/Atlantic, 2005) demonstrates, at least to my satisfaction, that the world has already passed what geologists call "Hubbert's Peak"--that is, the point at which it takes more than the energy equivalent of a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil. Since everything, including agricultural production, is dependent on cheap oil, Kunstler foresees a future return to agricultural primitivism. Kunstler also explains why the great god "technology" is not about to bail us out this time, and why the much ballyhooed alternatives--solar, wind, or hydrogen power--are not realistic alternatives but pipedreams.

Third, our world-wide abuse of the environment is rendering the world increasingly uninhabitable. Whether we will melt because of "global warming", or freeze through nuclear winter; whether the polar ice cap will melt and drown us, or atmospheric particulates block out the sun's rays and freeze us, I do not know. One thing I do know: those blowhards who recently assembled at public expense in Montreal to listen to Paul Martin and Pierre Pettigrew "review progress" under the ludicrous Kyoto Protocol, assuredly do not know either.

But that we have abused the earth's resources is unquestionably true; Kunstler points out, for example, that it took sixty-five million years to generate the fossil fuels that we have depleted since 1900. Project forward and it is unsustainable.

Western civilization cannot withstand any one of these three challenges; taken together, Western civilization is doomed unless God, in His infinite mercy, has other plans.

Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus from the Faculty of Law at Western University in London, Ontario.