Top Highlights

• I would point out that while intellectuals have been predicting the imminent collapse of Western civilization for more than one hundred and fifty years, its influence has grown faster during that period than at any time in history.
• We live in an era in which pessimism has become the norm, rather than the exception.
• Two decades ago John Kenneth Galbraith remarked that every publisher wants his author’s book to be entitled “The Crisis of American Democracy”—because he knows that that title will sell.
• Pessimism and optimism are attitudes the scholar brings to his analysis of events, not conclusions that arise from that analysis.
• In this point of view, modern society appears as greedily materialistic, spiritually bankrupt, and devoid of humane values. Modern people are always displaced, rootless, psychologically scarred, and isolated from one another. They are, as the Unabomber puts it, “demoralized.” The key question now becomes not if American society or Western civilizat...