Parallel to the events of the Russian war on Ukraine, critical cultural voices in the West are rethinking the ideological arguments of the past few decades. about the rest of the world.

In his article in the American newspaper "The New York Times", Brooks says that the World Values ​​Survey periodically asks people from all over the world about their moral and cultural beliefs, and some of the survey results are studied and compiled into a map showing how different cultural regions stand in what relate to each other.

In 1996, the Protestant cultural area was incorporated into Europe and the English-speaking region, while Western values ​​were different from, for example, those in Latin America or the Confucian region, but were contiguous.

But the 2020 map looks different;

Protestant Europe and the English-speaking regions have moved away from the rest of the world's cultures, and are now like a strange cultural peninsula.

In summarizing the findings of the surveys and insights, the World Association for the Investigation of Values ​​noted that on issues such as marriage, family, and sexual orientation, “there has been a growing divergence between the values ​​prevailing in low-income and high-income countries,” “we have always been extremists in the West, and now we are far away from The rest of the world is getting wider."

order and chaos

The writer says that people are strongly motivated by the desire for order, nothing worse than chaos.

These cultural changes, and the often simultaneous breakdown of effective governance, can look like social chaos;

Pay people to look for order at any cost.

In contrast, the author says, "We in the world's democracies are fortunate enough to live in societies that have rules-based systems, in which individual rights are protected and in which we choose our leaders. However, in many parts of the world people do not have access to This kind of system."

Just as there are signs that the world is diverging economically and culturally, there are signs that it is politically divergent.

In its Freedom in the World 2022 report, Freedom House notes that the world has experienced 16 consecutive years of democratic decline.

And it reported last year that "the countries that witnessed a deterioration outnumbered the countries that witnessed an improvement by the largest margin recorded since the start of the negative trend in 2006. The long democratic stagnation is deepening."

This was not what was expected to happen in the golden age of globalization, according to the writer.

dysfunction

In that era, democracies seemed stable, and authoritarian regimes seemed to be heading toward the ashes of history.

Today, many democracies appear less stable than they were, and many authoritarian regimes appear more stable;

American democracy, for example, has slipped toward polarization and dysfunction, according to the author.

Meanwhile, China has shown that highly centralized countries can be as technologically advanced as the West.

Modern authoritarian states now possess technologies that allow them to exercise widespread control over their citizens in ways unimaginable decades ago.

Autocratic (authoritarian) regimes have now become a serious economic competition for the West, and account for 60% of patent applications, and authoritarian governments can enjoy surprising popular support, according to the writer, who believes that the West is united on a series of universal values ​​around freedom, democracy and personal dignity, but these Universal values ​​are not universally accepted, and they seem to be becoming less and less accepted.

The height of the walls between the systems of the world

The writer analyzes what he calls "a world in which difference turns into conflict, especially as great powers compete for resources and dominance."

But something greater is happening today that is different from the great power struggles of the past, and that is different from the Cold War.

This is not just a political or economic struggle, it is a struggle over politics, economics, culture, status, psychology, morals and religion all at once.

More specifically, it is a rejection of Western ways of doing things by hundreds of millions of people along a wide range of fronts.

Personal dignity and social cohesion

To define this conflict in greater detail, the writer says that the difference is the West's focus on personal dignity more than the rest of the (non-Western) world's focus on societal cohesion.

But that is not all that is happening. What matters is the way in which these ancient and natural cultural differences are invoked by autocrats who want to expand their power and sow chaos in the democratic world.

Autocratic rulers now routinely weaponize cultural differences, religious tensions, and status resentment to mobilize supporters, attract allies, and expand their power, and it is this cultural difference that status resentment turns into a culture war.

Western duties

The writer says that the criticisms that many people make of the West, and about American culture - for being too individualistic, too materialistic, and too condescending - are not wrong. The next several years, if we are to convince people in all those swing countries across Africa and Latin America and the rest of the world to support democracies and not despots, that our way of life is the best way of life."

But at the present time - as the writer adds - many people feel that the West does not respect them, and therefore they support authoritarian leaders who express their resentment and national pride.

These leaders do not actually recognize them.

For those autocrats - from former US President Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin - their followers are merely tools in their own quest for self-greatness.

What future?

In the end - the writer says - that only democracy and liberalism are based on respect for the dignity of every person.

In the end, it is these systems and our worldviews that provide the highest satisfaction of the impulses and desires that I have attempted to describe here.

"I have lost faith in our ability to predict where history is heading, and in the idea that as countries 'modernize' they evolve along a predictable line, I think it is time to open our minds to the possibility that the future will be very different from anything we anticipated," he says.