https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/are_the_end_times_near_.html
A few years back my wife and I flew to Georgia where she was keynoting a panel discussion on feminism at Kennesaw State University. We were picked up at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta by the conference organizers, who naturally engaged Janice in conversation about the devastation wrought by feminism in the culture at large and academia in particular.
At one point I intervened to suggest that feminism was merely a subsidiary issue, as was the case with every other culture-wrecking movement and socially destabilizing factor confronting the Western world: identity politics, neo-Marxism, political correctness, radical environmentalism, “climate change,” “social justice,” outcome egalitarianism, information censorship, trans-national authoritarianism, abortion on demand, anti-meritocracy, chain immigration, “white supremacy” — the list goes on. Our hosts were initially taken aback, suspecting that I may merely have been playing devil’s advocate, but soon understood the argument I was making. Feminism was no doubt a critical issue, a socially destructive and culturally malignant phenomenon, but only one of many indices of something of far greater import: the approaching disintegration of Western civilization.
Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of The West, published 1918-1922, laid out the trajectory of the enfeeblement and decay that awaited us, developing a theme that went as far back as the Greek historian Polybius, but that, in the wake of a war that wiped out a generation, seemed less a “theme” than an historically imminent reality. The greatest poet of the modern age, William Butler Yeats, felt it in his bones, working out a visionary schematism in his prose volume A Vision and reflecting on the inevitable in his timeless poem “The Second Coming,” written one year after the end of the Great War: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” Robert Bork’s must-read Slouching Towards Gomorrah hammers out Yeats’s vision in lurid contemporary detail, pointing toward a “syndrome” of collectivist attitudes dominating the culture, the debilitation of the family structure, and a “left-liberal moral consensus” diluting the text of the U.S. Constitution.
In his master volume On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy in an Age of Unreason, published in 1995, Irish historian Conor Cruise O’Brien was not sanguine about the prospects for Western civilization in the coming years.
