HESPEROPHOBIA, or hatred/fear of the West

Steve Sailer has posted an article that the National Review has rejected written by John Derbyshire. It is worth the read, employing the word Hesperophobia to describe the intense hatred of European and American values widespread in the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, as the resignation of Harvard President Larry Summers demonstrates, Hesperophobia is also prevalent in the U.S, particularly in the academic community.

The final paragraph of Derbyshire’s pessimistic piece is worth repeating here:

As I said, time is short. The Hun is at the gate. In the case of most European countries, in fact, the Hun, the hesperophobe, is inside the gate. We can dream on for a while, dream that our cultural superiority, our technological superiority, our political superiority, will preserve us against all assaults. Perhaps we should remember that the Huns were cultural illiterates, technological ignoramuses, and political incompetents. It doesn’t take much in the way of culture, technology, or statecraft to deliver a crippling blow to a weary, sybaritic, over-governed civilization that is near the end of its allotted span and has lost all faith in its own founding values. Time is short.

Now this sort of thinking is not new: The Decline of the West or Untergang des Abendlands was written in the early 20th century by Oswald Spengler and posited the supremacy of the West over other cultures by a Faustian strong-minded will to power over Dionysian cultures prone to static economic principles and punctuated by occasional spasms of religious or tribal/ethnic fanaticism. As the title suggests, this supremacy is presumed to be fleeting and bound to diminish.

Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire also stands as an example of the genre.

A good antidote for at least another half-century of relative optimism can be found in a recent piece by Michael Lind in the Financial Times, unfortunately off-line. Lind points out that the U.S. has had a paramount position in the world economy since the early 20th century and is likely to continue its dominant position, for a number of reasons, for the next few decades, despite the alarming trade and financial deficit’s the U.S. is running up on a yearly basis.

Armchair philosophers will differ according to learning and temperament on these issues. Just today, the Financial Times bemoans a trahison des clercs as leading to the resignation of President of Harvard Larry Summers. Maybe the US is going the way of France in this respect.

But "one day at a time" still remains a good way to proceed when faced with daunting historical questions such as Derbyshire proposes.