I find useful points made by, amongst others, Jan Zielonka, Anthony Barnett, and Michael Sandel on openDemocracy regarding the crisis in the values which have defined the West for decades. And yet I believe that we are still missing a theory of what is happening and ideas which are relevant enough to the problems to be solved. For that I would suggest that we need to reconsider this entire question of the “fate of the West” within a wider frame, and I propose four elements to redefine the name of the game that we have been observing with not very high hopes for far too long.
First, as Zielonka suggests, we cannot explain what has gone wrong as if it is the unfortunate sum of a number of mistakes. It is not plausible that the “crisis” is just the product of wrong decisions made by a number of weak leaders that western countries happened to have at the same time. Likewise I would argue that it is not useful to continue to observe the many different crises of a model in isolation as if they were not separate manifestations of the same problem.
We have good reason to make sense of what confronts us as one of those historical processes that Francois Braudel would have described as being of longue durèe. My thesis is that our starting point needs to be the on-going industrial revolution which is producing a mutation of the environment we live in. This revolution is as great, if not greater, than the industrial revolutions of the past. It is a transformation that not only gives us new possibilities, but changes the entire relationship between labour and production, democracy and growth, individual freedoms and communities. Technologies should, then, go back to the place they used to occupy when Karl Marx or Adam Smith developed their understanding of the impact that machines of a different nature were having on societies two centuries ago.
