Editorial: The Twilight of the modern world: Spengler, Unwin, and Burke in an Age of Decline
Spengler’s Cycle — More Relevant Than Ever
When Oswald Spengler wrote The Decline of the West in the aftermath of the First World War, he warned that civilizations follow an organic cycle: birth, flourishing, decay. For him, the West’s Faustian culture had already passed its peak. What remained was a hollow civilization, obsessed with technology and pleasure, but drained of spiritual depth. Today, amid political shortsightedness and cultural exhaustion, Spengler’s analysis reads less like pessimism and more like diagnosis.
Spengler saw the late stage of civilizations marked by bureaucracy, mass democracy sliding into demagoguery, and an obsession with systems — process without purpose, argument without meaning. The so-called modern right speaks of tradition but cannot even reverse collapsing birthrates or restore the family in the very states that vote for it most strongly.
It is an age when individualism subordinates all else, until collapse follows: no more sacrifice for the unborn, no more reverence for the dead — values that Edmund Burke once regarded as the bedrock of continuity. Already in the French Revolution, Burke saw the destructive impulse to sever culture from its roots. Our own era — with its polarized politics, consumerist culture, and geopolitical fragility — bears all the marks of what Spengler described as civilization’s “winter.”
J.D. Unwin: Sexual Freedom and Civilizational Energy
The English anthropologist J.D. Unwin, in his 1934 study Sex and Culture, examined eighty civilizations and found a stark pattern: societies that loosen sexual norms, weaken marriage, and diminish the sanctity of childbearing lose cultural energy within three generations. The vitality that once built cathedrals and empires fades when we no longer live for the next generation. The “expansive energy” ebbs away.
We live now in such a haze. Ours is a culture that lives only for the present — like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, seeking pleasure in the moment rather than glory in eternity or sacrifice for generations to come. When tomorrow disappears from our mental horizon, tomorrow itself collapses. A culture without restraint, without children, and without duty becomes a civilization that has surrendered its will to endure.
Here the parallels with Spengler are striking. The West’s decline in marriage, collapsing birthrates, and erosion of the family correspond exactly to Unwin’s thesis: without disciplined sexuality and the bonds of kinship, a civilization’s organizational power — its ability to sacrifice for the future — dissolves. What replaces it is distraction, hedonism, and ultimately impotence in the face of external threats.
Across Europe, birthrates have fallen below 1.5 children per woman — far beneath the level required for population stability. Individualism has taken hold as the dominant creed, displacing older notions of duty, continuity, and sacrifice. And yet, the loudest political responses to this civilizational crisis often come not in the form of a constructive defense of family life, but from uneducated voices who rail against immigration while offering no vision for the renewal of marriage, childbearing, or the moral culture that once sustained strong households. To scapegoat foreigners while neglecting the deeper collapse of the nuclear family is to confuse symptom for cause, and to mistake a demographic death spiral for a political quarrel.
Even the ancient cultures of the Far East, long thought to embody filial duty and communal solidarity, are now under pressure. South Korea’s fertility rate has plunged below 0.8 — the lowest in the world at this very moment. A society once renowned for its discipline and devotion to posterity is now shrinking at an unprecedented pace. Japan, too, faces an aging population and vanishing youth, while China struggles to recover from decades of policies that hollowed out its demographic foundation. These are not isolated national tragedies; they are signs that the great civilizations of both West and East are faltering at the most basic level of survival: the willingness to bear and raise children.
Burke’s Wisdom on Order and Inheritance
To this we may add Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century statesman who saw in the French Revolution the dangers of uprooting tradition. For Burke, society was not a contract among the living alone, but a partnership with the dead and the unborn. Shatter marriage, faith, and family — the mediating structures of continuity — and liberty itself becomes unsustainable.
As he wrote, “a state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.” But a society that destroys its inherited forms altogether is courting ruin.
The Convergence of Warnings
So here we stand, at the brink of our civilization’s demise. Birthrates are falling across Europe and the Americas, even in traditionally Catholic countries to the south of the United States, where faith once seemed to safeguard family life. The family structure is more or less collapsing: households fragment, single parents carry crushing burdens of debt, and children grow up without the stability and rootedness needed to become the strong pillars of the future.
Spengler points to the cycle of rise and fall; Unwin identifies the intimate link between sexual order and civilizational strength; Burke reminds us that tradition is the foundation of continuity. Taken together, they sketch a sobering portrait of the West: a society aging, childless, spiritually hollow — yet still convinced it can innovate its way out of decline.
None of these thinkers believed decline to be inevitable in a mechanical sense — but all warned that a civilization’s survival depends on discipline, sacrifice, and continuity. The question is not whether Spengler, Unwin, or Burke were “right,” but whether the West can recover the virtues they saw as essential.
For if they were right, then their verdict stands: a society that abandons marriage, neglects its children, and severs itself from tradition cannot endure.
Editor-in-Chief. Henrik Sundin
