Melanie Phillips: The West's Auto-Immune Disease

Melanie Phillips:

What I've been describing in terms of what Western culture has been doing to itself is Western culture turning on itself, undermining its own core values and replacing them by values previously thought to be transgressive or destructive: replacing truth with ideology, replacing the idea of a nation state by rival groups jostling for power, replacing morality by amorality and I would suggest nihilism, expressed in various ways. Behind all of that is the Western nation based on the share culture of tradition, law, history, language, religion, is somehow illegitimate and need to be remade altogether. This is very pronounced in Europe. In Britain there is historical guilt of empire, in mainland continental Europe you have the guilt of the Holocaust, you have a collective guilt undermining not just the nation, but the very idea of Western progress. The Holocaust had the terrible effect on Europe, from the cradle of civilisation of Goethe and Mozart and this has demoralised the West and not properly understood and this has fragmented Europe.

European and Western civilisation has had this tremendous crisis of confidence, in itself, in the nation and in the project of modernity itself. So that's why I call it an auto-immune disease. An auto-immune disease in medical terms is caused, as I understand it, by a failure of the central nervous system, and this political auto-immune disease of the West, I would suggest, is caused by, not by the failure of the central nervous system, but by a failure of nerve - cultural nerve. It is an astonishing situation and almost unbelievable, but we have to believe it. It is a situation brought about by cultural exhaustion, guilt, moral exhaustion.

The real threat is not to Israel, but to America, to the United Kingdom and to Europe. The West's enemies understand this very well. They understand the West's weakness. They understand that the West no longer has a sense of purpose because it has lost its belief in what it is, but they have a sense of purpose. They have a sense of purpose infused by religious belief. They are doing God's work, but this is the paradox: this Islamic world that is infused by this sense of purpose, this jihadi fanaticism, this Islamic world is extreme because it feels itself under threat from modernity. The essence of its extremism is that it understands modernity is coming at it through the internet, through social media, through the globalisation movement. Its women are at risk of believing they have a future of freedom, they understand that that is something they have to stop, and that is what they are trying to do: they are trying to stop modernity. It is essentially a defensive movement because they understand at some level that their culture is dying, and it is true, it is dying. However, the paradox is that it's a dying dragon: as its tail thrashes in its death throes, it can kill us, unless we actually understand what it is and fight it,  and we can only fight it by rediscovering our own core values. So this is the terrible paradox and problem that we face in the West, but my final concluding thought is this: you have two civilisations as it were, in a terrible spiral of decline and in their death throes, fighting each other.