Owen, I think I’ve spent the last few years writing adjacent versions of the same essay you keep writing, which is either a sign of intellectual convergence or a very niche form of collective madness.
I share a great deal of your diagnosis. The scapegoating, the hollowing out, the obscene concentration of wealth and power, the way people who have been failed materially are encouraged to direct their anger at migrants, minorities, the poor, anyone except the people and structures actually making the decisions — all of that feels deeply familiar to me.
But strangely, even in the middle of that sadness, I don’t feel entirely hopeless.
Part of the reason is people like you. There are still people in the West who believe that human dignity is not conditional — not on income, nationality, usefulness, respectability, or whether someone happens to be politically convenient. The dignity of working people matters. The dignity of migrants matters. The dignity of marginalized people matters. The dignity of the person everyone has decided to blame this week matters.
And you have defended those people consistently, often when it would have been much easier not to.
I write a lot about decline, and one thing I keep coming back to is how easily we confuse decline with apocalypse. Apocalypse is oddly comforting. It gives us a dramatic ending and, perhaps more importantly, lets us imagine ourselves as the exceptionally cursed generation standing at the end of history. Very flattering, really.
But decline is much more ordinary than that. Empires decline. Political orders exhaust themselves. Institutions decay. New equilibria emerge. History is absolutely littered with civilizations convinced they were uniquely doomed.
The question is not simply whether the West declines. It is what comes out of that decline.
And I still think there is enormous possibility here: new forms of solidarity, new ways of organizing economic life, new institutions, a less imperial relationship with the rest of the world, and perhaps even the radical discovery that a society does not have to humiliate its own working class in order to function.
Where I particularly value your work is that my own instinct is usually to climb to 30,000 feet and start muttering about empire, civilization, technology, dignity and the moral architecture of modernity — which is all very enjoyable until someone reasonably asks, “Yes, but what actually happened?”
That’s where journalists like you matter.
You go back down into the documents, the numbers, the individual cases, the policy decisions, the contradictions. You do the patient work of establishing what is actually true. And that makes the larger argument infinitely stronger.
So I think we are often looking at the same landscape from different altitudes. I’m usually staring at the weather system. You are also checking who left the window open.
I’m very grateful for that.
And for whatever it’s worth, I think there is still light in the middle of all this — not because decline isn’t real, but because human beings are still capable of solidarity, invention, courage, humor and love.
That seems like a reasonably good set of raw materials to begin again with.
I liked the preface very much. And the video was just plain heartbreaking. To allude to a favored quote: 'Remember Owen, hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.' Well done, Owen.
Owen I always appreciated your work but was frustrated by how you couldn’t connect with the anti-imperialism struggle. Then I saw you shift after Corbyn - you even named what your employer the Guardian did and how the establishment worked to stop Corbyn and said sorry for your part in it. Then I saw your journalism during the financial crisis, then the genocide in Palestian and Congo and Sudan. Now you can see the connections - The post WW2 census builds on the previous 500 years of Western colonialism. Euro/US empire is not like previous empires. Its tentacles are so deep, it is destroying all life on Mother Earth.
I too have hope, not that it will all be ok, that we are capable of something else and many will be killed and yet some will survive and thrive. This book is your arrival and looking forward to reading it and hope to be at the launch.
Thank you, Owen, for much hard work on the book and this good introduction to the public. I've long been in empathy with your perspectives and will be getting the book and do my bit in promoting it and your related channels. Best regards from South Africa.
Disaster Capitalism - the rise of the shock doctrine ( Naomi Klein) the destruction is deliberate, the objective is extraction, profit , greed. Today , a QED moment, decline of all moral authority, as ongoing genocidal destruction in Gaza turned into graveyard, shamelessly, offering solution, a 'Riviera' on the Med built by those who destroyed it. Who will ever again accept 'western lectures ' on human rights or the 'rules based order'. Timely must read book.
I have come to see that modernity, which first arose under the conditions of post-Westphalian Western Europe, involved the logic of colonialism from the very beginning. While modernity carried all before it for several hundred years, its crisis at the beginning of the 20th century was caused by the rapid modernisation of formerly archaic societies like Japan, whose defeat in 1946 temporarily resolved that crisis. Colonialism morphed into neocolonialism, which may have appeared more humane, but would have faced the consequences of its accumulating contradictions sooner were it not for the success of Bretton-Woods in suppressing them. The situation now is rather different for many reasons. In particular, China is now no less modern than the west, and may be considerably more so. Europe is facing the mother of all crises, since it certainly cannot hope to compete with China as an equal and lacks coercive power. Neocolonialism has all but disappeared as an effective paradigm for exploiting the labour and natural resources of most non-western countries. Apart from money printing and hypocritical moralisation, what’s left ? Not very much; and at the same time, it’s hard, frankly, to understand what could replace neocolonialism as Europe’s modus operandi.
The damage done - since before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution - the century following, and in the era you describe has been to concentrate wealth in the hands of the least desirable and most unpleasant specimens of H. sapiens, and it is irrevocable.
The planet has been so badly ruined that collapse is inevitable.
What will rise from the ashes remains to be seen but few alive now will see it as so many will die.
From Ralph Robinson’s English translation of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1551 and the introduction of humanist philosophy that gave rise to Enlightenment thinkers, through to the ratiocination of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841, which created the modern genre of criminal detective fiction, individuals have been analysing and unwinding the philosophical moral faults within our imperfect and degenerating Christian culture which still invisibly inform our social and political structures. Like yourself they are all part of a collegiate ancestral search for solutions to the ‘morbid symptoms of an order in decline’.
Hi Owen, I want to purchase this through Libro.fm in Canada but it says that it’s not available here due to publisher restrictions. It’s also difficult to order here aside from Amazon, which I have boycotted. Any chance your publisher can change their restrictions?
I thought the video introduces the themes of Owen’s argument well. Hopefully the book will play its part in challenging the status quo. It does feel like we have reached a critical juncture and that maybe prioritising humanity and our planet can come to the fore. Just hope we’re not too late.
'The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism' - Hannah Arendt
Owen, I think I’ve spent the last few years writing adjacent versions of the same essay you keep writing, which is either a sign of intellectual convergence or a very niche form of collective madness.
I share a great deal of your diagnosis. The scapegoating, the hollowing out, the obscene concentration of wealth and power, the way people who have been failed materially are encouraged to direct their anger at migrants, minorities, the poor, anyone except the people and structures actually making the decisions — all of that feels deeply familiar to me.
But strangely, even in the middle of that sadness, I don’t feel entirely hopeless.
Part of the reason is people like you. There are still people in the West who believe that human dignity is not conditional — not on income, nationality, usefulness, respectability, or whether someone happens to be politically convenient. The dignity of working people matters. The dignity of migrants matters. The dignity of marginalized people matters. The dignity of the person everyone has decided to blame this week matters.
And you have defended those people consistently, often when it would have been much easier not to.
I write a lot about decline, and one thing I keep coming back to is how easily we confuse decline with apocalypse. Apocalypse is oddly comforting. It gives us a dramatic ending and, perhaps more importantly, lets us imagine ourselves as the exceptionally cursed generation standing at the end of history. Very flattering, really.
But decline is much more ordinary than that. Empires decline. Political orders exhaust themselves. Institutions decay. New equilibria emerge. History is absolutely littered with civilizations convinced they were uniquely doomed.
The question is not simply whether the West declines. It is what comes out of that decline.
And I still think there is enormous possibility here: new forms of solidarity, new ways of organizing economic life, new institutions, a less imperial relationship with the rest of the world, and perhaps even the radical discovery that a society does not have to humiliate its own working class in order to function.
Where I particularly value your work is that my own instinct is usually to climb to 30,000 feet and start muttering about empire, civilization, technology, dignity and the moral architecture of modernity — which is all very enjoyable until someone reasonably asks, “Yes, but what actually happened?”
That’s where journalists like you matter.
You go back down into the documents, the numbers, the individual cases, the policy decisions, the contradictions. You do the patient work of establishing what is actually true. And that makes the larger argument infinitely stronger.
So I think we are often looking at the same landscape from different altitudes. I’m usually staring at the weather system. You are also checking who left the window open.
I’m very grateful for that.
And for whatever it’s worth, I think there is still light in the middle of all this — not because decline isn’t real, but because human beings are still capable of solidarity, invention, courage, humor and love.
That seems like a reasonably good set of raw materials to begin again with.
I liked the preface very much. And the video was just plain heartbreaking. To allude to a favored quote: 'Remember Owen, hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.' Well done, Owen.
Stop talking stoopid
Really looking forward to this book and can’t wait to get stuck in. Thank you, Owen for helping to keep me sane in a world gone mad.
Owen I always appreciated your work but was frustrated by how you couldn’t connect with the anti-imperialism struggle. Then I saw you shift after Corbyn - you even named what your employer the Guardian did and how the establishment worked to stop Corbyn and said sorry for your part in it. Then I saw your journalism during the financial crisis, then the genocide in Palestian and Congo and Sudan. Now you can see the connections - The post WW2 census builds on the previous 500 years of Western colonialism. Euro/US empire is not like previous empires. Its tentacles are so deep, it is destroying all life on Mother Earth.
I too have hope, not that it will all be ok, that we are capable of something else and many will be killed and yet some will survive and thrive. This book is your arrival and looking forward to reading it and hope to be at the launch.
Thank you, Owen, for much hard work on the book and this good introduction to the public. I've long been in empathy with your perspectives and will be getting the book and do my bit in promoting it and your related channels. Best regards from South Africa.
Disaster Capitalism - the rise of the shock doctrine ( Naomi Klein) the destruction is deliberate, the objective is extraction, profit , greed. Today , a QED moment, decline of all moral authority, as ongoing genocidal destruction in Gaza turned into graveyard, shamelessly, offering solution, a 'Riviera' on the Med built by those who destroyed it. Who will ever again accept 'western lectures ' on human rights or the 'rules based order'. Timely must read book.
I have come to see that modernity, which first arose under the conditions of post-Westphalian Western Europe, involved the logic of colonialism from the very beginning. While modernity carried all before it for several hundred years, its crisis at the beginning of the 20th century was caused by the rapid modernisation of formerly archaic societies like Japan, whose defeat in 1946 temporarily resolved that crisis. Colonialism morphed into neocolonialism, which may have appeared more humane, but would have faced the consequences of its accumulating contradictions sooner were it not for the success of Bretton-Woods in suppressing them. The situation now is rather different for many reasons. In particular, China is now no less modern than the west, and may be considerably more so. Europe is facing the mother of all crises, since it certainly cannot hope to compete with China as an equal and lacks coercive power. Neocolonialism has all but disappeared as an effective paradigm for exploiting the labour and natural resources of most non-western countries. Apart from money printing and hypocritical moralisation, what’s left ? Not very much; and at the same time, it’s hard, frankly, to understand what could replace neocolonialism as Europe’s modus operandi.
Really potent stuff ..I want the whole world to join you with me
Your optimism is misplaced.
The damage done - since before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution - the century following, and in the era you describe has been to concentrate wealth in the hands of the least desirable and most unpleasant specimens of H. sapiens, and it is irrevocable.
The planet has been so badly ruined that collapse is inevitable.
What will rise from the ashes remains to be seen but few alive now will see it as so many will die.
Hope now is only for dreamers.
From Ralph Robinson’s English translation of Thomas More’s Utopia in 1551 and the introduction of humanist philosophy that gave rise to Enlightenment thinkers, through to the ratiocination of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841, which created the modern genre of criminal detective fiction, individuals have been analysing and unwinding the philosophical moral faults within our imperfect and degenerating Christian culture which still invisibly inform our social and political structures. Like yourself they are all part of a collegiate ancestral search for solutions to the ‘morbid symptoms of an order in decline’.
Thank you.
That looks interesting.
Can someone tell Penguin their mobile website can’t cope
Hi Owen, I want to purchase this through Libro.fm in Canada but it says that it’s not available here due to publisher restrictions. It’s also difficult to order here aside from Amazon, which I have boycotted. Any chance your publisher can change their restrictions?
I thought the video introduces the themes of Owen’s argument well. Hopefully the book will play its part in challenging the status quo. It does feel like we have reached a critical juncture and that maybe prioritising humanity and our planet can come to the fore. Just hope we’re not too late.