MAIN IDEA:

At the very beginning of this book, the author makes an important note that the book is about the idea of the decline of Western civilization, not about the decline per se. It describes the cultural tradition of pessimism and how it was expressed in literature and intellectual debates. Here is the author’s description with reference to relevant authors:

“But we will also see that the idea of decline consists of two distinct traditions. For every Western intellectual who dreads the collapse of his own society (like Henry Adams or Arnold Toynbee or Paul Kennedy or Charles Murray), there is another who has looked forward to that event with glee. For the better part of three decades, America’s preeminent thinkers and critics—from Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Thomas Pynchon, Christopher Lasch, Jonathan Kozol, and Garry Wills to Joseph Campbell, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Jonathan Schell, Robert Heilbroner, Richard Sennett, Noam Chomsky, Paul Goodman, Michael Harrington, E.L. Doctorow, and Kirkpatrick Sale, not to mention Cornel West, Albert Gore, and the Unabomber—have advanced a picture of American society far more frightening than anything pessimists like Charles Murray or Kevin Phillips could come up with. As a critique of Western industrial society, it dates back to the nineteenth century. In this point of view, modern society appears as greedily materialistic, spiritually bankrupt, and devoid of humane values. Modern people are always displaced, rootless, psychologically scarred, and isolated from one another. They are, as the Unabomber puts it, “demoralized.” The key question now becomes not if American society or Western civilization can be saved, but whether it deserves to be saved at all.”

At the end, the author concludes:

“… the whole debate over “the decline of the West” presents us with a false set of choices. The alternative to historical pessimism about the future of modern society is not optimistic complacency: they are opposite sides of the same holistic view. The alternative to cultural pessimism is not some sort of megatrend “third wave” or other futurological adventure of authors like Warren Wagar and Alvin Toffler. The classical liberal view originally sprang up precisely because its adherents recognized the dangers of insisting that individuals have significance only if they are part of a larger whole. In earlier times, that holisticorganic model had been “the great chain of being,” in which a person’s status was assigned by God and nature and enforced by political authority. Enlightenment thinkers rebelled against this sort of social determinism; John Locke defined this position of “being under the determination of some other than himself” without that individual’s consent as a form of tyranny. One of the great blessings of the civilizing process, the Enlightenment concluded, is that it raises humans above that servile status by making them aware of their individual rights, interests, and powers as well as free from irrational passions and fears.”

MY TAKE ON IT:

For me, the American pessimism provides a somewhat funny contrast with the Soviet optimism, which surrounded me for the first part of my life. The funny parts come from the completely opposite character of these cultural environments. When one steps out of the milieu of books and debates into reality, the American and Soviet worlds could not be more different. The depressive mood of American pessimism when one reads about rotten capitalism crimes of the past, the misery of the present, and the imminent doom of the future immediately dissipates under the reality of a nice room, a car that could bring you anywhere, conditions of surrounding comfort, availability of any food and goods conceivable and freedom to read, think, and do just anything one desire. In contrast, in Soviet life, the feeling of optimism and excitement from anticipating the wonderful future of communism quickly turns into frustration caused by the need to wait in line for any necessity of life, the impossibility of traveling, the stifling bureaucracy of everything around and, finally, recognition of the reality that wrong thinking or reading something not approved by the party could bring a prison term. 

Lots of people treated the cognitive dissonance of Soviet life by ceasing to believe in anything, which eventually led to the destruction of Soviet society. The question is, would it be possible for cognitive dissonance in American life to end up in the destruction of American society? I think it will not, mainly because the many anti-American, parasitic quasi-intellectuals will fail to generate support from the majority of regular people for such destruction. The massive intellectual pessimism did attract the support of a mass movement of unproductive people leaving on handouts from the administrative welfare state. However, these supporters are too weak to withstand the backlash from the majority that will inevitably demand the return to traditional American values that proved their ability to support the realization of the American dream of freedom and high quality of material life. It will probably not happen easily and smoothly, but it will happen anyway. After that, the American intellectual pessimism will be moved to the dustbin of history, accommodating a cozy place next to communism.