Secular Discontents

Extract

The West is today what it has been for a number of decades, the center and source of powerful ideas incarnated in institutions and practices from whose effects no corner of the globe is wholly immune. It is the great disturber of other cultures. Thus, mutatis mutandis, the West takes its place with the ancient Orient, with classical Greece, with Islam, with the great civilizations that extended and imposed themselves through differing proportions of military power, commerce, and high cultural confidence.

In its development the West has been informed by the profound contributions of the Greco-Roman and JudeoChristian traditions, and it cannot be understood without reference to them. But the factors that allowed the West first to become a great economic force and second to extend that force into the ecumene have their immediate causes in the eighteenth century. This period in Europe, variously termed the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason, elevated to prominence and gave particular meaning to such abstract social concepts as “liberty,” “equality,” “rights,” and “authority.”