It is clear. The West is dead. It is time to stop beating a dead West. It is time to start grooming and riding new horses beyond even postnormality.
As a futurist, I take a long view – of both the past and the futures. Thus, in my understanding, ‘the West’ began around 1500 following the invention of the printing press and the rapid diffusion of old and new ideas facilitated by it, on the one hand, and by the hardware, software, and ‘orgware’ that enabled industrialisation and global colonisation, including the creation of the global nation-state system, by Europeans, on the other.
The zenith of the West was reached by the end of the nineteenth century when physical and social technologies enabled European countries massively to export their surplus populations to the ‘empty lands’ of North and South America and Oceania, while dominating the rest of the world militarily, economically, and culturally via direct and indirect colonial arrangements. As one consequence, the global population of ‘white people’ for the first time in world history approached 50 per cent at the end of the nineteenth century – a percentage that has been steadily declining subsequently as a result of substantially reduced fertility among ‘whites’. Their numbers may be around only 5 per cent by the middle of the twenty-first century. We may soon be organising ‘Walks for Whitey’ and ‘Take a White Person Home for Christmas’ and the like to celebrate their passing.
The West ended just over one hundred years ago on July 1914 with the beginning of WWI, on the one hand, and the rise of electric and then electronic communications systems, and other weapons of mass destruction, on the other. Everything the West has done since the end of WWI has just been spasms of rigor mortis following its death after a brief ‘Golden Era’ when the idea of the West swayed the world, offering some people reason for hope for a permanently better future – in part by destroying that hope for many more.
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