For some time now Western intellectuals have been analyzing the crisis of Western society from two major perspectives: as a movement of progress punctuated by the difficult passage of modernity and as a process of decline where significant areas of life lose their unity and creativity. Both analyses point to the roles of secularization, technology, capitalism, state socialism, and militarism as agents and consequences of this crisis. Depending on one's intellectual perspective, solutions vary from the restoration of a conservative order to revolutionary change, and policymakers dealing with the immediate and the concrete have little time to think of the crisis or possible solutions, at least on the broader scale. However, whether seen through the lens of interrupted progress or significant decline, whether neoconservative or revolutionary in one's social change methodology, the central facts of our century remain what Hannah Arendt and Richard Rubenstein proclaimed them to be in 1951 and 1975: triage and holocaust.
For Arendt and Rubenstein the crisis of the West has come to a point of culmination in the twentieth century. This prompted Arendt to announce the decline of Western civilization:
The tragedy of our time has been that only the emergence of crimes unknown in quality and proportion and not foreseen by the Ten Commandments made us realize what the mob had known since the beginning of the century: that not only this or that form of government has become antiquated or that certain values and traditions need to be reconsidered, but that the whole of nearly three thousand years of Western civilization, as we have known it in a comparatively uninterrupted stream of tradition, has broken down; the whole structure of Western culture with all its implied beliefs, traditions, standards of judgments, has come toppling down over our heads.
Rubenstein imagines the horrible possibilities within that decline:
There is always the danger that Metropolis will become Necropolis. The city is by nature antinature, antiphysis, and, hence, antilife. The world of the city, our world, is the world of human invention and power; it is also the world of artifice, dreams, charades, and the paper promises we call money. But even the richest and most powerful city can only survive as long as the umbilical cord to the countryside is not cut. Whenever men build cities, they take the chance that their nurturing lifeline to the countryside may someday be severed, as indeed it was in wartime Poland. One of the most frightful images of the death of civilization envisages a time when the city, deprived of the countryside's surplus food and bloated by the countryside's surplus people, feeds upon its own ever-diminishing self and finally collapses. The starving inmates of Auschwitz, consuming their own substance until they wasted away into nothingness, may offer a prophetic image of urban civilization at the end of its journey from the countryside to Necropolis. Could it be that as the Jews were among the countryside's first exiles and among the pioneer inhabitants of Metropolis, so too they were among the first citizens of Necropolis, but that, unless current economic, social, and demographic trends are somehow reversed, there will be other citizens of the city of the dead, many others?
Though Arendt and Rubenstein analyzed our century within the context of Western society and mainly through the Jewish experience in Europe as paradigmatic
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