Islam & The West — Part 3: The Twilight of Faustian Man & Western Civilization
by Ahnaf Ibn Qais
Ahnaf Ibn Qais argues that the Faustian Twilight is happening right now & that the demise of Western Civilization (as many know it) is already here. Demography, Energy, & Technology (in a triadic relation) are interacting to bring about said demise, which is now all but inevitable…
Read Part 1 here, & Part 2 here.
“Demography Is Destiny…” Revisited
The Emptying Cities of Europe, A Dying Ambition: A grand European city, perhaps Paris or Berlin, with its architectural splendor on full display--Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance buildings, and modernist skyscrapers that once symbolized Europe’s ambition and innovation. However, the streets are notably empty, with only a few elderly citizens walking through the grand plazas and empty parks. The scene is bathed in the muted colors of a long twilight, with the sun setting behind the horizon, casting the city in long shadows. The iconic structures remain, but they no longer buzz with life. The image reflects the demographic decline in Europe, symbolizing how the once-vibrant cultural centers are now struggling with aging populations and lower birth rates. The Faustian drive--that eternal quest for progress and dominance--appears to be dimming with the setting sun. In the background, fading posters of past political campaigns promising renewal are barely visible, torn and forgotten, suggesting that the solutions of the past have failed to stem the demographic and cultural tide.
“Of all people, it was historical theorist Oswald Spengler who characterized that dream most precisely, anatomizing the central metaphor of what he called Faustian civilization—yes, that’s us—as an eternal outward surge into an emptiness without limit. That was never a uniquely American vision, of course, though American culture fixated on it in predictable ways; a nation that grew up on the edge of vastness and cherished dreams of heading west and starting life over again was guaranteed to think of space, in the words of the Star Trek cliché, as “the final frontier.” That it did indeed turn out to be our final frontier, the one from which we fell back at last in disarray and frustration, simply adds a mordant note to the tale.”
~ John Michael Greer; excerpted from ‘An Elegy for the Age of Space,’ published on August 24, 2011, in The Archdruid Report (defunct), now hosted at Resilience.org
So far, we have covered ground regarding the Islamic world & its attitude to the ‘West’ of Clown World & its sundry derivative ideologies:
Islam & The West — Part 1: Prefatory Remarks
We then examined the centrality of Masjid Al-Aqsa to the ongoing Clash of Civilizations, in tandem with how the Islamic World, writ large, views the cancerous Zionist tumour & the Western world’s key role in assisting its barbarism:
Islam & The West — Part 2: Masjid Al-Aqsa & Islam’s Red Lines
What we have not done as of yet, however, is examine Europe & the wider West.
It is fashionable for many on the Dissident Right to use the expression ‘Demography is Destiny!’ yet that is not quite *technically* correct for two main reasons:
Firstly, while it is true that demography is vital to understanding how any society, big or small, functions (past, present, & future), that is but part of the story.
Other considerations are also important, such as Energy consumption & production patterns and the overall level of technology accessible to people.
Secondly, demography alone tells you little about society's net trajectory if you remain unaware of cultural mores, ethical norms, & other nuances.
Yes, ethnography, history, & related subjects can help. Studying with keener eyes the nuances of a society’s gender ratios, ethnic makeup, age brackets, & sundry demographic variables can all give one a better picture of ‘where things are going.’
Yet, we need to remember that different societies throughout the ages have grappled with crises in various ways, and what may, for one society, be a catastrophe may end up being, for another, just another warm summer breeze.
Take, for instance, Chinese Civilization & the Sinic world writ large.
Over the past several millennia, they have weathered brutal famines, civil wars, natural disasters & all manner of other catastrophes (manmade & natural). Such ‘Collective Memory’ will serve them well as the Global Situation rapidly deteriorates.
The same is not true for Faustian Man & the Western world. While Europe has seen many catastrophes over the past centuries, few have been existential.
Crises like the Thirty Years’ War, the French Revolutionary & Napoleonic Wars, the Two World Wars, etc., were undoubtedly brutal, horrific, & haunting; however, none of these were Fatal to Western Civilization as such.
The last such crisis (of existential import) would be the Black Death, which decimated some 25 to 50 million of the European population in the mid-14th century, which amounted back then to perhaps over 50% of the overall European population.1
Today, however, the event is (1) Too distant for Western memories & (2) Too abstract to grasp for a people who have had an excellent ~3 centuries or so of Global Dominion.
From the mid-18th century to the early 19th century, the Western world & Faustian Man spearheaded the Industrial Revolution, which enabled the Occident to outproduce, outcompete, & outfight the rest of the world in the coming decades.2
India & China, who had till then been ‘the main protagonists’ of Human History (taking that title away from Egypt & Mesopotamia ~3 millennia prior), were rapidly edged out. The former was outright colonized, while the latter was crippled via Opiates.3
The ‘Scramble for Africa,’ once impractical due to disease, climate & related factors, suddenly became possible with new advances in medicine, logistics, etc., funded by the mass siphoning of resources away from the protagonist-duo mentioned earlier.4
The European powers pursued said project fervently, and the 19th century ended with large parts of the Old World (i.e., Africa, the Indian subcontinent, etc.) either under outright European control or within a European Power’s Sphere of Influence5:
World map of 1910 showing colonial possessions and commercial highways
Map from The Harmsworth atlas and Gazetter showing the worlds population density in 1908
By now, in its death throes as ‘The Sick Man of Europe,’ the Ottoman Empire could do little against these Technological leaps, spearheaded by fundamental shifts in the Energy mix, as Coal & steam mechanisms dominated military & civic life.
As the Empire De-industrialized and faltered, more avenues for European expansion were opened. Before WW I, it had shrunk to a petty rump of its once majestic, sublime self, a hollow shell of its grandeur in the 15th & 16th centuries.6
Overall, the Islamic, Sinic & Indic worlds were retreating worldwide.
The Russian Empire, which had hitched itself to the Occident during this time, chugged along with Faustian Man & the Western world, its identity as a European power already firmly cemented by the Tsar’s ties to European nobility.7
The 19th century ended then with Faustian Man standing tall, having humbled the peoples of all other Civilizations & societies via his mastery of the Material Sciences, his grasp of sundry Technological wonders & his relentless drive to Expand.
Yet amidst said overwhelming triumph… lay a Hubris that would prove fatal.
Faustian Man, longing for eternity on Earth, saw himself as The Conqueror of Nature, the protagonist of a Drama whose comedic ending would involve taming all of Nature’s bounties for his own economic, material, & scientific use, now & forever.8
As John Michael Greer has noted on several occasions, Faustian Man seemed poised to take Man out of the caves and March him into the Stars:
Lamentations for “The Final Frontier”
Demography, therefore, *was not supposed to be* Faustian Man’s Destiny.
Instead, Energy & Technology, in tandem, were supposed to play that role…
…the role of creating a shiny, secular, scientific utopia from which Faustian Man would then venture out into the Starry Sky, forever expanding in every direction.
John Stuart Mill, the English Philosopher & Economist, observed in the mid-19th century (i.e., during the dizzying heights of European prowess in sundry fields):
“What has made the European family of nations an improving, instead of a stationary portion of mankind? Not any superior excellence in them, which, when it exists, exists as the effect, not as the cause; but their remarkable diversity of character and culture. Individuals, classes, nations, have been extremely unlike one another: they have struck out a great variety of paths, each leading to something valuable; and although at every period those who travelled in different paths have been intolerant of one another, and each would have thought it an excellent thing if all the rest could have been compelled to travel his road, their attempts to thwart each other's development have rarely had any permanent success, and each has in time endured to receive the good which the others have offered. Europe is, in my judgment, wholly indebted to this plurality of paths for its progressive and many-sided development.”9
This fundamentally linear view of History is unique to Faustian Man & Western Civilization. The unfolding of space and time is fundamentally comedic, with Man Conquering Nature and subduing her for his ends.
In his heyday, Faustian Man was well served by such instincts, which enabled him to expand, explore & colonize the planet by sheer Will, Readiness, & Ability.
& for a while, such rapid expansion, alongside this Grand vision of Conquering Nature served Faustian Man very well:
At the beginning of the 20th century, this Grand Project was chugging along quite well. Nothing, it seemed, could stop Faustian Man from fulfilling his destiny:
The world's population was ~1.75 billion, with over a quarter living in Europe.
Meanwhile, one-third of all people on the planet were Christians, while Muslims only numbered a bit over 220 million worldwide.10
Little did he know that what was fated for him was not triumph but languished agony.
The first half of the 20th century was to be the Bane of Faustian Man & the Western world. The second half was the final death blow to his Grand Vision, one from which Europe, the Fountainhead of the Faustian ethos, was never to recover…
Nostalgia, Lost Dreams & Failed Futures
Faded European Monument in a Changing City- A grand, historical monument in the heart of a European city, weathered and faded, standing as a relic of a past that once represented a vision of an ethnically homogenous, white-majority Europe. The statue is surrounded by a modern, multicultural crowd, with people of diverse ethnicities and cultures moving through the bustling city square. Flags from different countries fly alongside the monument, and signs of globalization and diversity dominate the space. The monument, once a proud symbol of national identity, now looks worn, with cracks running along its base and patches of graffiti hinting at shifting societal values. In the background, sleek modern buildings with a cosmopolitan feel tower over the old architecture, symbolizing the passage of time and the transformation of the European identity. The scene evokes a sense of nostalgia and loss for an imagined past, reflecting how old ideals have faded in the face of a rapidly changing reality.
“If ever I to the moment shall say:
Beautiful moment, do not pass away!
Then you may forge your chains to bind me,
Then I will put my life behind me,
Then let them hear my death-knell toll,
Then from your labours you'll be free,
The clock may stop, the clock-hands fall,
And time come to an end for me!”Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; Faust (1808 & 1832), Part I, Scene IV: The Study, Faust to Mephistopheles, lines 1698–1706
Almost Two centuries of European Global Pre-eminence were shattered by the Two World Wars, which saw tens of millions perish in the space of a few decades.
In that short window of under half a century, Europe’s sundry Industrial nations butchered one another with an apocalyptic fervour that left the Peninsula battered, broken & exhausted in mind, body & spirit. Nothing was ever to be the same:
As the Soviet Union & the United States assumed leadership in their respective spheres, unease gripped the sundry circles of leadership and intelligentsia across Europe, with many beginning to see the proverbial ‘writing on the wall.’
Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor of the newly formed West Germany, observed:
“Unless we act, events that we Europeans will be unable to influence will overtake us. I believe we Europeans feel far too safe. Europe’s political and economic leadership in the world, which was still unchallenged at the beginning of the century, has long since ceased to exist. Will the dominant cultural influence of Europe be maintained? I think not, unless we defend it and adjust ourselves to new conditions; history has shown that civilisations are all too perishable.”11
Nearly seven decades later, Chancellor Adenauer’s words still ring true, now more than ever before in many respects… almost to the point of being prophetic:
The cultural dominance of Europe and its nations has been supplanted by Neoliberalism and its sundry fruits, initially spearheaded by the Americans but today increasingly under the auspices of a corrupt, technocratic, & managerial elite:
Clown-World & its Sundry Discontents
Europe today, as the Eminent Dr. Fadi Lama observes, is no longer a Subjectof Geo-economics & Socio-politics, but rather a mereObject,discardable by its American masters at a whim, should the need arise for the Hegemon to do so:
Eurabiamania 52: Why the West Can’t Win
The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk observed in Critique of Cynical Reason (1987) that this malaise of Faustian Man has rendered him incapable of the higher emotions of Mankind, namely awe, ecstasy & love:
“In our thinking there is no longer any spark of the uplifting flight of concepts or of the ecstasies of understanding. We are enlightened, we are apathetic. No one talks anymore of a love of wisdom. There is no longer any knowledge whose friend (philos) one could be. It does not occur to us to love the kind of knowledge we have; rather we ask ourselves how we might contrive to live with it without becoming ossified.”12
Western Civilization & Faustian Man cares not for the *higher, transcendentals* of life, for his core ethos today is that of Cynicism, as Sloterdijk further observes:
“Cynicism is enlightened false consciousness. It is that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned its lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology; its falseness is already reflexively buffered.”13
Cynicism, that Cynical Reason permeating every facet of life, is the Modus Operandi of today’s Faustian Man. He has nothing left, frankly, save for a winnowing Nostalgia that finds increasingly less & less relevance in a world where such things are Moot:
Nostalgia is a sentiment of the Dreamer, divorced from the practical day-to-day realities of life. Dreams of revival & restoration are aplenty, but none of these will bear fruit so long as Mathematical, brute realities are empirically borne out.
Dreaming of Golden Ages from long ago… is cope. & such copium will lead one to retreat. It is no wonder then that today, the loudest voices who call for Brutal Ethnic Cleansing & related fantasies… are men who left their homelands long ago.14
Such men have already ‘voted with their feet’ in more ways than one:
When they left their homelands years prior (some choosing to outright raise their families, old & new, in foreign lands), they demonstrated then & there *by their actions* that they no longer had genuine ‘Skin in the Game’ for their past societies.
When such men yell loudly about ‘sending the savages back where they came from!’ the emotion one should feel toward such outbursts is neither anger nor fear but rather pity, & it ought to be a pity of the heartfelt, genuine sort:
For these poor men have lost everything & are utterly lost themselves. Meaning, Significance & Purpose are alien to them, for their Cynicism makes such matters equal parts frivolous & ‘childish relics from the past.’
Francis Fukuyama, in his now infamous work, The End of History & The Last Man (1992), loudly proclaimed:
“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such … That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”15
Furthermore, he also observed that Faustian Man would not simply sit idly by:
“Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”16
Fukuyama, of course, was wrong. History had *not* ended; it had only just begun:
The End of History & What Happened After…
Yet, he was certainly on point when he observed that men would continue to struggle.
Perhaps it was his mentor, Samuel Huntington’s influence, or maybe it was just good common sense… regardless, even Fukuyama, a true believer in Liberalism & the ‘Rules Based International World Order,’ had to recognize the ebbs & flows of Human Nature.17
All his Moronic predictions aside, Fukuyama’s proclamation that Liberal Democracy is man’s ‘endpoint in ideological evolution’ is essentially Faustian man uttering ‘Let this Beautiful Moment Stay!’… fatal words for he who signed a pact with Mephistopheles…
For as stipulated long ago, this was but the signal for the Devil to begin dragging Faustian man into the underbelly & bowels of Hell.
The Allegory is perhaps lost to some, but sometimes showing is better than telling18:
Civilizational Exhaustion is hard to pin down & define in just a few words, but perhaps it was the German Polymath Oswald Spengler, who said it best:
“And then, when being is sufficiently uprooted and waking-being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama—the sterility of civilized man. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood as an essentially metaphysicalturn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer wants to live—he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.”19
Europe, then, is no longer a Continent.
It is a Peninsula that is increasingly finding itself importing the rest of the world to make up for (1) Sub-replacement Fertility Rates, (2) An Aging Population & (3) Stagnant Labour Productivity. Yet, it is much worse than just this:
Europe today utterly depends on Cheap Russian & Middle Eastern Energy, Cheap Chinese consumables, & Cheap Labour… the sort it regularly imports annually.
Without this triad (i.e., Energy, Consumables, & Labour), the standard of living & overall lifestyle that Modern Europeans partake in… falls apart rapidly. Already, the Peninsula finds itself isolated from two out of three of these critical components:
Middle Eastern Oil & gas will soon be a thing of the past (ditto for Russian gas) when the current ‘Israel’ vs Resistance Axis & Russo-Ukrainian wars, respectively, conclude.20
Chinese consumables will likewise not make it to market as the Global economy bifurcates more & more, with World War III about to become fully Kinetic.
Energy poverty in the wider West, & Europe in particular, is thus here to stay.
The trendlines for per capita consumption for Primary Energy (i.e. barrels of oil, bricks of coal, etc. *before* they are transformed in any manner) stagnated & plateaued ages ago, with declines & falls expected into the near future21:
Energy Access, the True Marker of Wealth in Industrial society, has been Moribund for several decades. Contrary to some peoples’ naive, optimistic Techno-Utopian fantasies therefore… the ‘Robots will not be saving the day’ anytime soon:
In an environment where the average person has access to far less energy per annum than his parents & grandparents did several decades ago, any automation that does take place, will occur in select industries, in the context of trade-offs.
Robots & Automation are not exogenous, ‘Deus Ex Machina’ elements not subject to basic Economic forces (i.e. pricing, scarcity, etc).22
Given increased Energy Poverty, this means Labour, Human Muscle & Long Hours of Toil (not silicon chips & computing power) are the future…
& so long as that future involves an Obsession with ‘GDP Line Go UP!,’ Infinite Growth, Conspicuous Consumption & other silliness…. The Migrant waves will continue, given Demographic, Economic & Technological realities.
The DOOM Cometh…!
Concluding Remarks
In this essay, we analyzed how Faustian Man & the Western world, writ large, are animated by Nostalgia, Cynicism & other Moribund follies.
We touched on the Civilizational Exhaustion of Faustian Man & his various creative endeavours, to the point where the same old dreams are repeatedly being dreamt, with repetitive nostalgia for Past Futures infecting Western minds.
Demography, Energy & Technology Stagnation, Plateaus, Declines, & Falls… will mar the Occident for the rest of this century, creating vacuums of power & influence for those of other Civilizations willing, ready & able to step in & fill up said voids.
Novel ways of looking at the world need to be synthesized, & with said new methods, Harmony with the wisdom traditions of the Ancients must also be found.
Islām, heir to the Magian world, & builder of Eurabia, is poised to play a pivotal role in this New World & New Order. Thus, the Faustian West & the Magian East may soon synthesize to form the Mizaanian Soul, which we will analyze in later essays.
Next Time, we will analyze how Eurabia & Mizaanian Man is already starting to form.
~ Ahnaf Ibn Qais; writes The Fall of The West & The Annals of America
Once Again, Many Thanks to the lovely editorial Team at Arktos Journal, & to the excellent Sir Constantin von Hoffmeister for picking up my essay series! 😉
A Warm Welcome to all the New frenz from Arktos Journal who wish to inspect my humble DOOM-wares! 😉Subscribe for more such DOOM, gloom & despair! 😊
Footnotes:
Epidemiology of the Black Death and Successive Waves of Plague, SAMUEL K COHN JR:
The Industrial Revolution: Past and Future By Robert E. Lucas, Jr.*:
https://aier.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/EEB-8.04-IndustRev.pdf
Contours of The World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History; By Angus Maddison:
What Caused the "Scramble for Africa"? By Alistair Boddy-Evans:
http://newsela-media.s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs/lib-scramble-for-africa-35853-article_and_quiz.pdf
Both Maps are available in the Public Domain.
First Map Original: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/12/World_1910.jpg
Second Map Original: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/The_Harmsworth_atlas_and_Gazetter_1908_Population_density_map.jpg
Ottoman de-industrialization, 1800–1913: assessing the magnitude, impact, and response
By S ̧ EVKET PAMUK and JEFFREY G. WILLIAMSON:
Slavophilism and Westernism in 19th Century Russia, Sasha Westgate:
http://personal.kent.edu/~swestga1/SlavophilismWesternism19century.pdf
The dilemma of modern man and nature: an exploration of the Faustian imperative; Hans-Christian Einswanger, Malte Faber and Reiner Manstetten:
John Stuart Mill; On Liberty (1859) Chapter III. Of individuality, as one of the elements of well-Being p.136
Chapter 1; Global Religious Populations, 1910–2010, TM Johnson, BJ Grim, GA Bellofatto:
https://v17.ery.cc/https/media.johnwiley.com.au/product_data/excerpt/47/04706745/0470674547-196.pdf
Konrad Adenauer, Address on continuing European integration at the Grandes Conférences Catholiques (25 September 1956)
Critique Of Cynical Reason, Peter Sloterdijk
https://archive.org/details/critique-cynical-reason/page/n3/mode/2up
Ibid, pp. 5-6
Tommy Robinson & other such personalities come to mind here. In the case of Robinson, he has not lived in the United Kingdom for a long time, yet chooses to nevertheless stir trouble back home by instigating racial, ethnic, religious & other tensions regularly.
Excerpts taken from The End of History & The Last Man (1992), By Francis Fukuyama.
Ibid, p. 330.
My own pet theory, Dear Listeners & Readers, is that he wanted to have something to blame when the ‘End of History’ itself Ended… and what better scapegoat to turn to than the Nature of Man himself? 😉
Oswald Spengler; The Decline of the West, Vol. II, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, pp. 103–04
Yours Truly has written many an Analysis on The Fall of The West to speak about these Geopolitical & Socioeconomic shifts, whereby power & influence are moving from West to East rapidly due to a combination of warfare, diplomacy, etc.
Emphasis: Technology, Automation, Robots, etc., are casually bound to Demography & Energy. Declines in both (qualitative & quantitative) mean likewise a corresponding effect on Technology. This is why (for instance) a society like Germany where the labour productivity has been stagnant for years, the population is rapidly aging (due to below replacement fertility) and there is now widespread Energy Poverty… will not be miraculously churning out millions of Robots to ‘do the jobs the Migrants currently do.’ More likely scenario: More Migration to dilute the labour pool & other related shenanigans to continue juicing up the Fake GDP numbers & whatnot.
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Once Again, Many Thanks to the Lovely Sir Constantin, & the fantastic Team at Arktos for hosting my essay! 😉 Honoured to have been able to showcase my DOOM-wares for all your reading displeasures, Dear Readers & Listeners! 😉
Fascinating and accurate essay!