Podcast Of My Talk On Civilisation Under Siege

When even conservatives can’t articulate what’s worth defending, Islamism becomes an alibi for civilisational self-hatred.

It often seems that Western civilisation is subject to a double threat. Internally, Western academics and activists insist on the ‘interrogation’ of Western history under the guise of decolonial activism and the recasting of civilisation as a series of crimes. Externally, a rising, increasingly anti-Western Islamism is on show, and not just in Yemen or Gaza. But such a division is perhaps too neat: the Islamism of Hamas finds supporters among the academic set in Western capitals, and foreign competitors like Russia or China are only too eager to repeat tropes about the West’s colonial history.

This lecture will examine what we mean by talk of Western civilisation, and where the real threats to it come from. Is this a question of a hostile, external threat, or is the issue much closer to home? When even supposed Western conservatives struggle to articulate the value of their civilisation, is the discovery of a new, foreign adversary an all-too-convenient alibi for a crisis of meaning in the heart of the West?