‘The Undoing of Civilisation’: What’s Driving the West’s Decline, British Pundit Discusses

The key problems the West faces today is not military disarmament—the diminishing of a country’s military strength—but moral disarmament, argued a British pundit.

According to Brendan O’Neill, the chief political writer for London-based Spiked magazine, Western societies are going through a process of “decivilisation,” in which people, particularly the younger generations, are “disconnected from the past and live in utter dread of the future.”

“When your military won’t even say words like ‘strength,’ when your museums are hiding away artifacts, when Shakespeare has been added with loads of trigger warnings in case you get upset at his racist ideas, when the universities are overrun by academics who teach kids to hate the history of the West,” he said in Sydney on April 23.

“You can really see that this is … the institutions of the West destroying themselves in order to appease what they view as the original sins of Western civilisation.”

Speaking at the Centre for Independent Studies, a Sydney-based think tank, Mr. O’Neill said modern societies are facing an “incredibly serious threat” of moral disarmament, the process in which people are “stripping away the values and virtues that once defined who we are as a society.”

“I think the key problem we’re facing today is not necessarily military disarmament or physical disarmament, or not having the right equipment to fight back should they come our way, but moral disarmament,” he noted.

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“The pushing aside of the core values and core ideas that [once bring society] together and the embrace of the woke ideology that is incredibly damaging to the confidence of our institutions, the confidence of the people in our society.”

The statues of Captain James Cook—a renowned explorer who charted and claimed the eastern coast of Australia for Britain—have repeatedly become a target of anti-colonial activists.

On the day before Australia Day this year, the British explorer’s statue in St Kilda’s Jaca Boulevard in Melbourne was cut at the ankles and sprayed with the words “the colony will fall” in red paint. On the same day, a statue of Queen Victoria was also been defaced and graffitied with a similar message.

The remnants of a Captain Cook statue in St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia on Jan. 25, 2024. A Captain Cook statue in Melbourne has been hacked off at the ankles the day before Australia Day. (AAP Image/Diego Fedele)

The repeated attacks on the statue have prompted a council officer to suggest its permanent removal due to the serious damage incurred.

Anti-colonial sentiments were also prevalent during the Australian government’s campaign for the Voice proposal, which would establish a permanent Indigenous advisory body to parliament, and amend the constitution to recognise Indigenous people.

Australians emphatically voted against the proposal, with No proponents arguing it would sow further division in the community.

At the same time, governments and corporations have thrown support behind legislations that promote transgender ideology, such as the self-sex ID and conversion ban.

However, under the surface, “something very serious” was happening, he said.

“We’re living through what can only be described as the process of decivilisation. The unraveling of the great gains of our society and the great culture of our society and the problematisation of these things as too male, too white, too old fashioned and not really appropriate or fitting to the modern era,” Mr. O’Neill said.

“It’s a vast project of the undoing of civilisation.”

He described civilisation as “a sense of permanence”—connecting with society’s history, being optimistic about the present, and having aspirations for the future.

However, that has been “completely robbed from the young in particular, who are now living in this permanent limbo of dread for what came before them and dread of what might come later,” Mr. O'Neill added.

Younger generations are feeling extraordinarily alienated from their own history, the result of being taught to “hate your own history, hate the old orders, the old museums, the old judges.”

“They live in a kind of limbo now,” the British author said.

“Everything about your past, you are encouraged and in some cases educated to hate, and at the same time, you fear for the future, you dread what is coming down the road.”

“And that is fundamentally the end of civilisation.”