On Michel Houellebecq on the fall of France

A good article by the author of Submission at Unherd: The narcissistic fall of France He talks a lot of demographics and notes it is just not the West that is in trouble:

No, we are not really dealing with a “French suicide” — to evoke the title of Eric Zemmour’s book — but a Western suicide or rather a suicide of modernity, since Asian countries are not spared. What is specifically, authentically French is the awareness of this suicide. But if we consent to set aside for a moment the particular case of France (and really it would be wise to do so), the conclusion becomes crystal clear: the inevitable consequence of what we call progress (at all levels, economic, political, scientific, technological) is self-destruction.

I have long thought that the root cause of the West's problems was WW1, I think it was Andrew Roberts who claimed that France's national psyche was shattered by Verdun in particular. After both wars, the intellectuals turned to Marxism for guidance but their disillusionment with it lead to the Post Modernism Nihilism of Foucault and his contemporaries. However, this doesn't explain why the advanced Asian countries are also affected. 

It is well worth reading the whole article.


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