Summary: Western civilization is now often criticized from within for its imperialism, decadence, and moral failings. But the tradition of Western self-criticism is not a modern weakness; it is an ancient strength. The Greeks and Romans consistently questioned their own actions, empathized with their enemies, and questioned their societal norms. This deep-rooted capacity for introspection helped build the resilient, self-correcting culture whose contributions to human flourishing have shaped the world of today.

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At a time when Western histories and societies face relentless internal scrutiny—accused of imperialism, cultural arrogance, decadence, and other failings—it is tempting to view this self-criticism as a modern malaise, a sign of weakness. Yet even a cursory look at the literature of ancient Greece and Rome reveals a different story: the West’s tendency to question itself, empathise with its enemies, and confront its own imperfections is not a recent phenomenon. It is age-old and unique. It may even be one of the main sources of Western strength. Far from undermining Western civilisation, this introspective tradition—evident in the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Tacitus, and others—has catalysed its resilience and moral progress. By holding a mirror to their own flaws and extending sympathy to adversaries, the ancients laid the groundwork for a culture built on self-correction and the pursuit of betterment—traits that continue to define the West’s success.

The ancient Greeks, whose city-states birthed and gave name to democracy, logic, ethics, geography, biology, aesthetics, economics, mathematics, astronomy, physics, history, politics, and philosophy, were no strangers to self-examination, even in times of war. Homer’s Iliad—a foundational text of the Western literary canon, composed in the late eighth century BC—is a masterclass in humanising the enemy. While celebrating Greek heroism, Homer does not vilify the Trojans. Instead, he paints Hector, Troy’s greatest but ultimately doomed warrior, as a devoted husband and father whose heartbreaking farewell to his wife, Andromache, moves readers nearly 3,000 years later. Later, Achilles, the Greek champion, shares a moment of profound empathy with Priam, the Trojan king, as they weep together over their respective losses. This is not mere storytelling; it is a moral stance, urging Greeks to see their enemies as mirrors of themselves, subject to the same cruel fate. Such understanding reflects a culture unafraid to question the glorification of conquest and to seek understanding across battle lines.

This introspective spirit shines even brighter in Greek tragedy. Its best-known playwrights—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides—are generally rated, along with Shakespeare, as the greatest tragedians of all time; they used the stage to probe their society’s values. In fifth-century BC Athens, tragedies were performed before a mass audience in an open-air theatre at the annual festival of Dionysus, god of wine and fertility. When people today think of plays, they imagine small theatres with audiences whose average level of education and intelligence is much higher than that of the general population. Given the composition of Greek audiences, therefore, the adversarial nature of Attic tragedies—built around the agōn, a formal clash of characters and ideals that let spectators see moral and political questions tested through direct confrontation—is even more remarkable. Let us look at a few examples.

In 472 BC, just eight years after the Greeks repulsed the Persian invasion at Salamis, Aeschylus, reportedly a veteran of the Battle of Marathon, presided over the performance of his play The Persians. It is an extraordinary example of cultural humility. Rather than gloating over a defeated foe, Aeschylus sets his drama in the Persian court, giving voice to Queen Atossa’s grief and Xerxes’ humiliation. The chorus of Persian elders laments the loss of their youth—a universal cry that would resonate with any Athenian who had lost a son in battle. Aeschylus could have written a jingoistic paean to Greek superiority; instead, he penned a tragedy that invited his audience to mourn with their enemies, acknowledging the hubris that threatens all nations.

Sophocles, too, contributes to this tradition in Antigone (c. 441 BC), where the adolescent heroine’s defiance of King Creon’s edict to leave her brother Polynices unburied pits individual conscience against state authority. Polynices, branded a traitor, is the “enemy,” yet Antigone’s loyalty to him is portrayed as noble, and Creon’s eventual regret reveals the folly of his rigid rule. The play’s sympathy for those who challenge the state reflects a Greek willingness to question authority and empathise with outcasts—a precursor to modern debates about justice and dissent.

Finally, we come to the truly remarkable case of Euripides. In Hecuba (424 BC), Trojan Women (415 BC), and Andromache (date disputed), the playwright portrays the savage cruelty inflicted by victorious Greeks on the Trojan women they enslaved. In front of a mass audience—a significant share of which consisted of highly patriarchal Greek men—Euripides bemoans the horrific fate of enemy slave women at the hands of Greek men. By giving voice to the defeated, he challenges the moral certainty of conquest, urging his audience to see their enemies as victims of the same forces that could one day destroy Athens. These plays are not just art; they are acts of cultural self-criticism, exposing the flaws of Greek society—xenophobia, misogyny, hubris, cruelty—while affirming the humanity of those it deemed enemies. How modern.

The Romans were great innovators in jurisprudence, administration, engineering, logistics, urban planning, and politics, bequeathing to the world such words as republic, liberty, and legal—concepts they valued highly. Culturally, however, they were greatly beholden to the Greeks. Virgil’s Aeneid (19 BC) is both a national epic and, by consensus, the greatest work of Latin literature. It narrates how, after the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Aeneas led the remnants of his people to Latium, where they intermarried with the native Italians to become the ancestors of the Romans. The epic’s high point is Aeneas’ interaction with Dido, queen of Rome’s archenemy Carthage. They have an affair, he leaves, and she commits suicide. Her curse on the departing Aeneas foreshadows Carthage’s enmity, yet Virgil portrays her as a noble, broken figure—not a villain. In fact, Virgil focused readers’ attention on Dido so completely that she became the heroine of the Aeneid. In the early fifth century AD, Macrobius, a Roman provincial author, observed, “The story of Dido in love … flies through the attention of everyone to such an extent that painters, sculptors, and embroiderers use this subject as if there were no other … that she committed suicide in order not to endure dishonour.” Virgil’s Carthaginian queen remained the heroine of poetry (Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women), tragedy (Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage), and opera (Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas).

Tacitus, the greatest Roman historian, was also a senator, praetor, suffect consul, and proconsular governor of the province of Asia. In other words, he was at the very centre of the imperial establishment. Tacitus wrote Agricola (c. AD 98) to honour his eponymous father-in-law by recounting how the latter solidified Roman control over what is now England and Wales. Nevertheless, Tacitus attributes to Agricola’s enemy, the British chieftain Calgacus, a powerful denunciation of the Roman Empire: “Plunder, slaughter, rapine they call by the false name of empire, and where they make a desert, they call it peace.” With that almost certainly invented statement, Tacitus undermined the proudest Roman boast—that empire brought peace (see Aeneid 6.852–53; the Pax Romana; and the Emperor Augustus’ Altar of Peace). Similarly, in Germania (c. AD 98), Tacitus idealises the Germanic tribes’ simplicity and courage, contrasting them with Rome’s supposed decadence. By praising Rome’s enemies, he holds a mirror to what he sees as his own society’s moral decline.

Finally, Lucan’s Pharsalia (c. AD 61–65), an epic of Rome’s civil war, mourns Pompey Magnus, Caesar’s rival, as a tragic figure fighting for the Republic’s lost ideals. His murder in Egypt, lamented by Lucan, evokes sympathy for a defeated enemy whose loss marks Rome’s slide into autocracy. Writing under Emperor Nero, Lucan uses Pompey’s fate to critique tyranny, showing how sympathy for an enemy can serve as a veiled rebuke of one’s own rulers.

The ancient Greeks and Romans waged wars, built empires, and committed atrocities. Yet their literature reveals a unique capacity to question those actions, to see the humanity in their adversaries, and to strive for moral improvement. This mindset formed a cornerstone of Western resilience—a culture that thrives on self-criticism, not self-congratulation, a culture that is alert to its faults and resolute in correcting them. To quote Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Disuniting of America: “No doubt Europe has done terrible things, not least to itself. But what culture has not? … There remains a crucial difference between the Western tradition and the others. The crimes of the West have produced their own antibodies. They have provoked great movements to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry.”

Western self-criticism, then, is not new. What is new is the apparent imbalance between recognising Western shortcomings on the one hand and appreciating the West’s magnificent bequests to humanity on the other. That should not be surprising, given that the commanding heights of Western culture—universities, museums, galleries, and theatres—have become dominated by a motley crew of Marxists, Frankfurt-schoolers, post-structuralists, deconstructionists, postcolonialists, de-colonialists and critical race theorists. Despondency over the future of the West, however, would be an over-reaction.

In 184 BC, amidst worry about Rome’s decline, Cato the Elder won the election as Censor on a platform of a “great purification,” in which he aimed to “cut and sear … the hydra-like luxury and effeminacy of the time.” At that point, Rome controlled Italy, Corsica, southern Spain, and small parts of the Dalmatian Coast. Yet, Rome proceeded to grow and would not reach its maximum territorial extent as well as the period of its greatest prosperity and tranquility until three centuries later, under the Nerva-Antonine Dynasty. It would take another three and a half centuries before the Western Empire disintegrated in AD 476.

Its eastern half survived under the leadership of rulers whose title was “Basileus ton Romaion” (King of the Romans) until the fall of Constantinople in 1453—some 1,600 years after Cato expressed his concern over Rome’s future. Paying homage to the Byzantine custom, Sultan Mehmed II declared himself “Kayser-i Rum” (Caesar of the Romans). By that time, Western Europe was on the mend. The Renaissance was in full swing, and in 1492, Columbus sailed for the New World. The stage was set for the Scientific Revolution, followed by the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and a half-millennium-long Western preeminence that transformed the globe—largely for the better. The revolutions that originated in Europe brought to all the peoples of the world greater knowledge, prosperity, and control over nature than anyone could previously have imagined possible. Let us, by all means, continue the tradition of self-doubt and self-criticism that have characterised Western civilisation from its beginning. However, now that the West has come under sustained and vitriolic attack from without and within, perhaps we should balance that self-criticism with recognition of Western civilisation’s unmatched contributions to human wellbeing and progress. 

This article was published by Quillette on 7/4/2025.

Summary: For decades, experts assumed that rising prosperity inevitably led to falling birth rates, fueling concerns about population collapse in wealthy societies. But new data show that this link is weakening or even reversing, with many high-income countries now seeing higher fertility than some middle-income nations. As research reveals that wealth and fertility can rise together, policymakers have an opportunity to rethink outdated assumptions about tradeoffs between prosperity and demographic decline.

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For years, it was treated as a demographic law: as countries grow wealthier, they have fewer children. Prosperity, it was believed, inevitably drove birth rates down. This assumption shaped countless forecasts about the future of the global population.

And in many wealthy countries, such as South Korea and Italy, very low fertility rates persist. But a growing body of research is challenging the idea that rising prosperity always suppresses fertility.

University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde recently observed that middle-income countries are now experiencing lower total fertility rates than many advanced economies ever have. His latest work shows that Thailand and Colombia each have fertility rates around 1.0 births per woman, which is even lower than rates in well-known low-fertility advanced economies such as Japan, Spain and Italy.

“My conjecture is that by 2060 or so, we might see rich economies as a group with higher [total fertility rates] than emerging economies,” Fernández-Villaverde predicts.

This changing relationship between prosperity and fertility is already apparent in Europe. For many years, wealthier European countries tended to have lower birth rates than poorer ones. That pattern weakened around 2017, and by 2021 it had flipped.

This change fits a broader historical pattern. Before the Industrial Revolution, wealthier families generally had more children. The idea that prosperity leads to smaller families is a modern development. Now, in many advanced economies, that trend is weakening or reversing. The way that prosperity influences fertility is changing yet again. Wealth and family size are no longer pulling in opposite directions.

This shift also calls into question long-standing assumptions about women’s income and fertility. For years, many economists thought that higher salaries discouraged women from having children by raising the opportunity cost of taking time off work. That no longer seems to hold in many countries.

In several high-income nations, rising female earnings are now associated with higher fertility. Studies in Italy and the Netherlands show that couples where both partners earn well are more likely to have children, while low-income couples are the least likely to do so. Similar findings have emerged from Sweden as well. In Norway, too, higher-earning women now tend to have more babies.

This trend is not limited to Europe. In the United States, richer families are also beginning to have more babies than poorer ones, reversing patterns observed in previous decades. A study of seven countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia — found that in every case, higher incomes for both men and women increased the chances of having a child.

This growing body of evidence challenges the assumption that prosperity causes people to have fewer children. 

Still, birth rates are falling across much of the world, with many countries now below replacement level. While this trend raises serious concerns, such as the risk of an aging and less innovative population and widening gaps in public pension solvency, it is heartening that it is not driven by prosperity itself. Wealth does not automatically lead to fewer children, and theories blaming consumerism or rising living standards no longer hold up.

Although the recent shift in the relationship between prosperity and fertility is welcome, it is not yet enough to raise fertility to the replacement rate of around 2.1 children per woman — a challenging threshold to reach.

But the growing number of policymakers around the world concerned about falling fertility can consider many simple, freedom-enhancing reforms that lower barriers to raising a family, including reforms to education, housing and childcare. Still, it’s important to challenge the common assumption that prosperity inevitably leads to lower birth rates: Wealth does not always mean fewer children.

This article was published at The Hill on 6/16/2025.

Listen to the podcast or read the full transcript here.

Joining me today is Maarten Boudry, a philosopher and author with eclectic interests, including progress, cultural evolution, conspiracy theories, and more. You should check out his Substack. He joins the podcast today to discuss a fascinating essay titled “The Enlightenment’s Gravediggers.”

You start with a very powerful and illustrative story about Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Rousseau was one of the first philosophers of the Romantic movement, which was a big part of the counter-Enlightenment. At this point in history, modernity hadn’t yet delivered anything tangible for the common people, but there was a relative measure of intellectual freedom, so, in that sense, we were already in the early stages of modernity.

Rousseau, before he was an established philosopher, was leafing through a magazine and came across an announcement for a prize by the Académie de Dijon. I don’t have the prize question with me here, but it was something to the effect of, “Have the improvements of the sciences also led to a betterment of morality in our society?” Rousseau describes that the moment he read that sentence, in a flash of insight, he saw the innocence of humanity in its original state and the depravity and decadence of civilization. And so he wrote his essay, a sweeping indictment of the whole of so-called civilization. It says that wherever the sciences are blossoming, wherever knowledge is improving, virtue is declining, and every supposedly great civilization eventually collapses under the weight of its own useless knowledge. By the way, he won the first prize—this is relevant for what comes next.

What I find fascinating is that Rousseau was a very cultured and educated man, but he condemned the whole idea of being refined and learned and cultured. In effect, he was biting the hand that feeds him. The Enlightenment philosophers had created this little island of intellectual freedom, which was the hand that was feeding him by giving him the freedom to study and exchange ideas. And he knew that hand would never punch him in the face. In fact, his friend Diderot encouraged him, even though he totally disagreed, because he relished the provocation of an Enlightenment philosopher tearing down the whole project of the Enlightenment.

That is one of the most fascinating and unique aspects of modernity. We do not just tolerate this sort of behavior; we encourage it. If you understand what is behind that story, it provides a lot of insight into what comes next in the 20th and 21st centuries: this very modern phenomenon of anti-modernity, the capitalist phenomenon of anti-capitalism, and the Western hatred of Western civilization.

Tell me more about the cultural trend of disdain toward Western civilization and capitalism.

There are a couple of different intellectual tributaries to this grand river of anti-modernity. There’s postmodernism, with the idea that we should undermine truth and reason, the foundations of modernity. There’s the victim versus oppressor narrative, sometimes called post-colonialism, which is the idea that you can neatly divide the world into oppressors and victims, which also leads to an indictment of Western civilization. And there’s environmentalism, which rejects the fruits of modernity. In the book, I ask the question, why do these different ideologies exist at all? Is there something about modernity that sows the seed of its own destruction?

The explanation that I eventually came up with is very simple: modern Western civilization is the only hand that allows itself to be bitten. If you were living under Stalin, you could never dream about criticizing the political ideology or economic system; dissent was just not tolerated. The same applies to China and to a lot of other unfree countries. And that leads to a sort of paradox, which I think was first described by an American politician called Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which is basically that there’s an inverse correlation between the number of complaints about human rights violations and the amount of actual human rights violations. If you ever find yourself in a society where nobody is complaining, and everyone agrees that the future will be glorious and the political system is great, you really have to get out of there as quickly as possible because that’s a completely totalitarian society.

You also talk about an alternative explanation: that this self-flagellation is some sort of mutation of Christianity.

As Nietzsche pointed out, a lot of the morality in Christian teachings is a kind of inversion, where the weaker and more vulnerable you are, the more virtuous you are. And there’s also the notion of original sin, that all of us are born tainted by evil. You can find these white guilt rituals on YouTube, where white people prostrate themselves in front of the people that their ancestors oppressed and ask for forgiveness. It’s very similar to the idea of original sin because, of course, they themselves didn’t own any slaves; it’s their whiteness itself, their identity, that they feel they have to apologize for.

However, many of these same people are also explicitly anti-Christian. They have completely secular upbringings and are rejecting Western civilization, which Christianity is part of. So, even though it’s possible that they’re unconsciously influenced by these Christian ways of thinking, it’s hard to prove. It also doesn’t work for all of the cases. It especially doesn’t work for the rightist forms of anti-modernity, which are muscular and aggressive and seem to be based more on pride than guilt.

My simpler explanation is that both on the left and the right, there are simply more opportunities to bite the hand that feeds you. I call this the supply-side explanation. I think the demand for complaining about the current state of affairs has always been there. People like to gripe about everything. I actually came up with something I call the Law of Conservation of Outrage in an earlier piece, which posits that, no matter how much progress society makes, the amount of complaining will always stay the same.

You say in the essay that anti-Western critics often like to pretend that their bravery will be met with universal outcry against them. But with a few exceptions, you note that these crusaders are not only given free reign but are also often handsomely rewarded.

Yeah, they are rewarded in specific contexts. So, in an academic environment, for example, you are rewarded for finding ever more novel ways to condemn Western civilization, and many of these anti-Western and anti-capitalist academics hold university positions that are paid for with tax money, which is basically the surplus production of the capitalist system that they criticize.

Can you talk about some examples of people who criticized their own societies, such as Edward Said and Michel Foucault?

Foucault is an interesting example. Early on, he was a member of the Communist Party, but he very quickly broke with communism. He was a postmodernist, so he didn’t believe in ideology or grand narratives. But he was biting the hand that feeds him in the sense that he was trying to demonize many of the institutions of modernity that we take as exemplars of moral progress.

I’m cutting some corners here, but Foucault’s argument always amounted to, “oh, so you think that we are so much better than we were in the Middle Ages?” In the Middle Ages, they were torturing criminals, but his argument was always that the modern way of treating prisoners or the mentally insane was actually even worse because although it presented itself as morally enlightened, it was really just a sinister bourgeois exercise of power to dominate the weak and vulnerable.

Foucault, of course, had unrestrained freedom to express his hatred of modernity, and he was rewarded by a lot of acolytes and followers who thought he was very brave to question the narrative of moral progress. Ironically, towards the end of his life, he contracted HIV and was treated in the Salpêtrière, which is a hospital in France that played a central role in Madness and Civilization,one of his major works. He bit the hand that feeds him, and the hand nurtured and comforted him until the end of his life.

Edward Said was one of the founders of post-colonialism, of this idea first expressed in his seminal work, Orientalism, that Western civilization, through the centuries, has always harbored a desire to oppress and invade the Orient. The intellectual groundwork for this conquest was laid by fiction and poetry, which, according to Said, presented the Orient as exotic, irrational, and sensual, in contrast with the rational, dominant, and masculine self-image of the West.

To be completely fair, there is some truth to what he wrote. It’s obviously true, especially if you go back centuries, that Western civilization had a very distorted view of other civilizations—just like every other culture in all of history. But Said was not interested in an even-handed or symmetric treatment of Western civilization; he was mostly interested in trashing the West.

The irony in Said’s case is that he studied in Princeton. He had guest professorships and distinguished chairs, and he got lots of awards for condemning Western civilization. Even in Israel, which he, in his later works, condemned as an oppressive, apartheid regime, he was welcomed. His books were published in Hebrew and put on university curricula.

Even more ironically, the opposite was true in the Palestinian-controlled territories. For a long time Said and Yasser Arafat had a friendship, but at some point, Arafat got fed up with Said and banned his books in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which were under Palestinian control. I think there’s no better example of the difference between a hand that punches back and the one that allows itself to be bitten.

Up until now, we’ve been talking about how critics of modernity often receive prestige and accolades. That’s a metaphorical “feeding,” but you also talk about literal feeding. Tell me about that.

In Rousseau’s time, the feeding was purely metaphorical. He lived before the Industrial Revolution, and people were still as poor as they had ever been. The literal feeding only began in the 19th century, and what you see is that the more people enjoy the fruits of a capitalist society, the more opportunities they have to engage in criticism. So, capitalism and industrial modernity become a victim of their own success because they breed this class of people who have their material needs met and can spend their lives biting the hand that feeds them. Karl Marx is a great example. He was living off of the handouts that he received from Friedrich Engels which were made possible by Engels’ father’s cotton factory. Capitalism was affording him the freedom and the material prosperity to write screeds against capitalism.

There was a recent study about how the hotspots of degrowth—the philosophy that calls for an end to economic growth and a controlled shrinking of material production—are all in wealthy countries. You don’t hear a lot of degrowth-ism from people in developing countries because they have a more immediate understanding of the benefits of capitalism and industry. But if you’ve been prosperous and well-fed and affluent for a long time, you tend to take those things for granted. If you read the degrowth literature, they seem to have no clue at all about what it means to farm, for example, and be self-sufficient. They romanticize it, and they can afford to romanticize it because nobody is there to tell them what it was like. Even their grandparents never experienced it.

You end the essay on the nuanced point that, in some way, we should be happy that there are so many critics of our civilization because it is a sign that freedom is still protected.

Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps because I’m an inveterate optimist, I try to put a positive spin on this kind of ungrateful, spoiled behavior. But it is a serious argument; I wouldn’t want to live in a society where people are afraid to speak up. However, I also believe that a society that engages in too much self-abasement and self-flagellation loses confidence in itself, and I worry about what that portends for the future. There are signs, especially in Europe, of technological and economic stagnation. And if you look back to earlier modern eras, there was a lot more confidence and optimism and a stronger belief in progress. I do think something has changed, and we no longer seem to believe in ourselves.

I can give you one example where I think this kind of wholesale rejection of industrial modernity is very harmful. Think about the way that people talk about fossil fuels in Western countries, how they’re destroying the planet, and we have to ween ourselves off as quickly as possible. It’s one thing for a Western activist who is surrounded by fossil fuel products to indulge in these fantasies, but Western environmentalists are also telling poor countries, “Oh, you shouldn’t repeat our mistakes,” meaning you shouldn’t burn all these fossil fuels and engaging in self-abasement, “we are so guilty because we have been doing that for two centuries.” That self-abasement leads them to actively sabotage fossil fuel development in poor countries. The IMF, the World Bank, and a lot of investment banks have openly promised not to fund fossil fuel investments in poor and developing countries. Not at home, mind you: they’re still building coal plants in Germany and gas plants in Norway. This virtue signaling mostly comes at the expense of poor and developing countries.

So, illusions have consequences. Perhaps not yet here because we’re surrounded by so much material affluence, but there are already downstream consequences on the other side of the globe.

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