AMERICAN CONSERVATISM (=European Liberalism)

The sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, who has spent much of his distinguished career explaining how different the United States is from other developed democracies, is fond of observing that American conservatism is no less exceptional than other American institutions and values.

Fukuyama, eh? Ghost of Hegel and Nietzsche . . .

The names change, but either way, we've already been told up and down by both left and right that the West is in crisis.

The crisis was diagnosed at the time of World War I by Spengler as the going down (or decline) of the West. Spengler understood by the West one culture among a small number of high cultures. But the West was for him more than one high culture among a number of them. It was for him the comprehensive culture. It is the only culture which has conquered earth. Above all, it is the only culture which is open to all cultures and which does not reject the other cultures as forms of barbarism or which tolerates them condescendingly as "underdeveloped"; it is the only culture which has acquired full consciousness of culture as such. Whereas "culture" originally and naively meant the culture of the mind, the derivative and reflective notion of "culture" necessarily implies that there is a variety of equally high cultures. But precisely since the West is the culture in which culture reaches full self-consciousness, it is the final culture: the owl of Minerva begins its flight inthe dusk; the decline of the West is identical with the exhaustion of the very possibility of high culture; the highest possibilities of man are exhausted. But man's highest possibilities cannot be exhausted as long as there are still high human tasks--as long as the fundamental riddles which confront man, have not been solved to the extent to which they can be solved. We may therefore say that Spengler's analysis and prediction is wrong; our highest authority, natural science, considers itself susceptible of infinite progress, there cannot be a meaningful end or completion of history; there can only be brutal stopping of man's onward march through natural forces acting themselves or directed by human brains and hands. . .
However much the power of the West may have declined, however great the dangers to the West may be, that decline, that danger, nay, the defeat, even the destruction of the West could go down in honor, certain of its purpose. The crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose. The West was once certain of its purpose--of a purpose in which all men could be united, and hence it had a clear vision of its future as the future of mankind. We do no longer havethat certainty and that clarity. Some among us even despair of the future, and this despair explains many forms of contemporary Western degradation. The foregoing statements are not meant to imply that no society can be healthy unless it is dedicated to a universal prupose, to a purpose in which all men can be united: a society can be tribal and yet healthy. But a society which was acustomed to understand itself in terms of a universal purpose, cannot lose faith in that purpose without becoming completely bewildered. We find such a universal purpose expressly stated in our immediate past, for instance in famous official declarations made during the two World Wars . .
Philosophy or science should make possible progress toward ever greater prosperity; it thus should enable everyone to share in all the advantages of society or life and therewith give full effect to everyone's natural right to comfrotable self-preservation and all that that right entails or to everyone's natural right to develop all his faculties fully in concert with eveyrone else's doing the same. The progress toward ever greater prosperity would thus become, or render possible, the prgress toward ever greater freedom and justice. This progress would necessarily be the progress toward a society embracing equally all human beings: a universal league of free and equal nations, each nation consisting of free and equal men and women. For it had come to be believed that the prosperous, free, and just society in a single country or in only a few countries is not possible in the long run: to make the world safe for the Western democracies, one must make the whole globe democratic, each country in itself as well as the society of nations. Good order in one country presupposes good order in all countries among countries.
[After the lesson of communism] . . . The situation resembles the one which existed during the centuries in which Christianity and Islam each raised its universal claim but had to be satisfied with uneasily coexisting with its antagonist. All this amounts to saying that for the foreseeable future, political society remains what it always has been: a partial or particular society whose most urgent and primary task is its self-preservation and whose highest task is its self-improvement. As for the meaning of self-improvement, we may observe that the same experience which has made the West doubtful of the viability of a world-society has made it doubtful of the belief that affluence is the sufficient and even necessary condition of happiness and justice: affluene does not cure the deepest evils.
--Leo Straus in The City and Man

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