This website is focused on helping lay foundations for a new civilization, not following the decline and fall of an old civilization. But understanding weaknesses in the old civilization may provide insight into what to avoid. The problem is that most analyses of Western civilization do not go far enough. They either support mild reforms or promote a revolutionary game of musical chairs.
The success of the hard sciences — mostly physics, chemistry, and biochemistry — has propelled science in general to the top rung of authority in Western society. Traditional authority structures of society such as religious institutions, community arrangements, and family relations have declined drastically in importance.
Central governments have supported science and have receive support from science. The spread of government-controlled education to the highest university level has also provided government with reciprocal support. Central governments have played other sources of authority against each other and increasingly taken their place.
The politicization of society has continued until only science has the authority to challenge it — but science is dependent on state support and so does not challenge central government. Science is becoming increasingly politicized as the source for more power grabs by the central government. But the politicization of science is the end of science. So nothing is left to challenge the power of the state and totalitarianism follows.
Meanwhile, science faces a moral crisis with its inability to place limits on research, on applications, or on the scope of science no matter how immoral. By including mankind in its naturalistic methods, science promotes atheism and materialism, much to the delight of a science establishment drunk with arrogance. Deconstructive, skeptical, and ironic methods that have brought down the humanities turn on science to undermine it and bring down the intellectual house of cards.
The mistake is giving too much authority to science in the first place. A modest science can take its place among society’s institutions only as science forsakes its exaggerated claims. The state that grew with science and technology also has too much authority. Which means that others should gain in authority. Who? The traditional authority structures of society such as religious institutions, community arrangements, and family relations.
2009