Poetically translated: The Going Under of the Land of the Evening. Literally: The Decline of the West.<\/span><\/p>\n Victor Davis Hanson, Western Cultural Suicide<\/a>. The philosopher in me likes it that Hanson begins with a distinction and ends with a paradox. (Philosophers hate a contradiction but love a paradox. And of course they are masters of distinction. Distinguo ergo sum<\/em>, saith the philosopher.) The distinction, and an important one it is, is between multiculturalism and a multiracial society united by a single culture. A distinction being elided as the melting pot melts and we drift down the path to Balkanization too weak and self-doubting to defend our values.<\/span><\/p>\n The paradox:<\/span><\/p>\n Is not that the ultimate paradox: The solution to the sort of violence we saw in Britain and Sweden the past week, or to the endless acrimony over \u201ccomprehensive immigration reform,\u201d is that the Western hosts will so accede to multiculturalism that the West will be no longer unique \u2014 and therefore no longer a uniquely desirable refuge for its present legions of schizophrenic admiring critics. If the immigrant from Oaxaca can recreate Oaxaca in Tulare, or the Pakistani second-generation British subject can carve out Sharia in the London boroughs, or a suburb of Stockholm is to be like in one in Damascus, then would there be any reason to flee to Tulare, London, or Stockholm?<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Leon Wieseltier, Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture: A Defense of the Humanities<\/a>. With scientism in the ascendancy, the humanities are dying. I would also point to the ideologizing of philosophy via scientism and leftism. <\/span><\/p>\n See also: The Owl of Minerva Spreads its Wings at Dusk<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n