Commercial mass media has swept away other forms of culture. Credit: Getty
At some point in the past few years, visiting nearly every major city in Europe or the Americas became indistinguishable from visiting every other major city in these regions. You could gawk at a billboard for Kylie Jenner’s makeup line on a roadside in West Hollywood or in Paris. You could dine at the Chinatown in Vegas or the one in Rome. You could book a 7 a.m. padel court in Stockholm or in São Paulo.
Many intellectuals and revolutionaries, Right-wing and Left, find this apparent sameness — omniculture, they’d call it — downright repellent. For conservatives, it signals the erasure of particularity by “globalism.” Leftists, meanwhile, see in the omniculture the triumph of a consumerist economy built on exploitation. What neither camp appreciates is that this sameness is the source of the West’s enduring influence at a time when the United States and its allies are in relative decline thanks mainly to the rise of China.
We should be grateful for omniculture because it appeals to a globalized world more than any of its civilizational rivals do.
Intellectuals and revolutionaries always like to imagine idealized versions of culture. During the Cold War, the best minds looked past the grimness of the “really existing socialism” of Communist states to the idealized socialisms that existed only in the imagination. In the same way, the nostalgic Right today laments the decline of an idealized Greco-Roman-Christian West, and the legacy Left celebrates the defeat of an imperialist, racist West. Neither of these constructs bears any resemblance to the actual culture of the Really Existing West today.
Half a century ago, much of Latin America was ruled by military officers in sunglasses, some of whom looked to Italian fascism or Spanish or Portuguese corporatism for economic models. Meanwhile, the eastern half of Europe was governed by Communist satraps of Moscow. Now democracy, in more and less corrupt versions, has replaced military juntas and rule by politburos. In addition to sharing multiparty democracy, Europe and the Americas increasingly share similar politics — not least the polarization between rural and working-class voters (“the Right”), and urban professionals and ethnic minorities (“the Left”).
The convergence of the nations of the West isn’t limited to political forms and political divisions. Partially, it’s demographic: Western nations are becoming uniformly diverse, in the sense that all are now home to ballooning shares of immigrants from non-Western regions, including Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
In every Western country, fertility rates have collapsed far below the replacement level of 2.1 children per woman. In the United States, the total fertility rate is 1.6; in the European Union, it’s 1.34; and in Latin America, it’s 1.8 and falling. The shortfall is being filled, everywhere, by immigrants and their descendants. The foreign-born share of the United States population is nearly 15%, the highest rate since the late 19th century. Foreign-born residents make up an even larger share of the population in Britain (around 20%) and Canada (more than 20%).
Growing secularization is another characteristic of the omniculture. Protestantism once defined the United States, while Catholicism shaped life across much of Continental Europe and Latin America. But on both sides of the Atlantic, organized religion and church attendance are in rapid, and perhaps irreversible, decline. More than half of Americans never attend religious services at all. Christian self-identification in the United States has declined to around 60%, not owing to the influence of non-Christian religions, which remain small, but because of the rise of “nones”: those who have left the Christian denominations of their ancestors, mostly for “nothing in particular.”
In Europe between 2010 and 2020, the Christian share of the population dropped to about two-thirds, down from about 3 in 4 — a result caused less by Muslim and other non-Christian migration than by the simple extinction of Christian belief without its replacement by another traditional religion. The same process can be observed in Latin America, where Catholicism is in decline and competing with “nones,” who account for more than 20% of the population in South America and 13% in Mexico and Central America.
The Catholic Church is also losing ground to Protestants, chiefly evangelicals and Pentecostalists, whose numbers in Latin America swelled to about a quarter, up from only 4% in 1970. Increasingly, in Latin America, evangelical Protestants make up an important constituency of the political Right, as in the United States.
The decline of organized religion has been accompanied by the liberalization of attitudes toward sex and reproduction throughout the Really Existing West. In Europe, abortion is prohibited outright only in Vatican City, Poland, Monaco, Liechtenstein, and Andorra; elsewhere, it is legal and subject to varying restrictions. In the United States, following the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade, only 13 of 50 states imposed total or near-total bans on abortion.
Homosexuality has been decriminalized in every European country, with most recognizing same-sex marriages or civil unions. In the United States, the Supreme Court has decriminalized homosexuality and legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. Every Latin-American country has decriminalized homosexuality as well.
In the case of the arts, the folk cultures of various peasantries, the elite cultures of royal courts and the haute bourgeoisie, and the official artistic styles of totalitarian regimes have been swept aside everywhere by commercial mass media and social media. Thanks to comic books and superhero movies, today’s Westerners recognize Spider-Man and Darth Vader more easily than they do figures of Greco-Roman mythology like Hercules or biblical heroes like Joshua. Even many Western conservatives, while lamenting the decline of classical literacy, appear to derive much of their worldview from children’s books by two British authors, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
Patriotism exists in the Really Existing West, but it is an unintellectual, sentimental, populist patriotism, based on national sports teams and national music and movies. Contemporary Europeans have long forgotten what they learned in school about the early kings and saints of their countries, but they can tell you the names of their leading national football players and Eurovision contestants. The World Cup plays the role of the original Olympic Games in the era of multiple Greek city-states and kingdoms.
The emerging pan-Western omniculture is deeply pluralistic — but the pluralism is based on functions and sectors, not on races or religions. In premodern multiethnic societies, segregated, parallel communities often existed side by side, as in the millet system of the Ottoman Empire, which allowed minorities a restricted freedom to practice their own religion and establish their own culture and law. In today’s Really Existing West, by contrast, horizontal stratification of different areas of life has replaced vertical communal divisions. There is a pan-Western business and economic culture; a pan-Western academic culture; a pan-Western avant-garde artistic culture; and various pan-Western musical styles with fans everywhere (rock, pop, rap). The same individual can participate in all of these subcultures at different times, with no sense of contradiction.
This functional pluralism is difficult for many intellectuals and activists on both Right and Left to understand. Catholics and Calvinists and Marxists and democrats and romantic nationalists alike have dreamed of aligning every aspect of society — from politics and values to art and architecture and literature — with a single overarching doctrine. Democracies must have “democratic” architecture, socialist regimes must have “socialist” art and literature, and so on. The functional pluralism of the new omniculture seems like incoherence to these would-be social engineers.
But such diversity would have been familiar to ancient Greeks and Romans and premodern East Asians. In the Hellenistic era and the Roman period that followed, formerly segregated and separate cultures of the Mediterranean disintegrated and became parts of a kaleidoscopic whole in which at least some individuals could pick and choose among fragments of different traditions. People could take part in imperial or civic rites, worship their ancestors and household spirits, practice Stoicism or Epicureanism, and belong to this or that mystery cult at the same time. Similarly, in premodern China and Japan, you could be a Confucian in public life, a Taoist in private life, and perhaps a Buddhist on some occasions for particular purposes. This kind of cafeteria approach to culture — with no comprehensive dogma governing every aspect of life, and with some transnational subcultures appropriate for some functions but not others, is the emerging norm — in the Really Existing West.
Subcultural pluralism, however, is not liberal individualism. The local geographic community has given way to multiple transnational communities for many people, but these decentralized communities can be just as conformist and intolerant. Marshall McLuhan believed that modern communications technology would create a “global village.” Yet global villages — plural — would be more accurate. The same neoliberal economic orthodoxy is taught in business schools in the United States, France, and Brazil, while the same intolerant woke identity politics structures the arts and humanities on both sides of the Atlantic. You can choose to enjoy country music or rap, but each has its zealously guarded standards of authentic tradition.
Post-liberal critics of the modern West get this wrong. Tradition and community have not been replaced by radical individualism and anomie. Rather, complex plural communitarianism has replaced homogeneous tribal and village communitarianism.
The dominant attitude toward sex in this emerging Western omniculture is not one of celebration of alternative lifestyles, but of lack of concern about what other people do in their bedrooms. If this is liberal, it is the liberalism of indifference. Transgenderism is a bridge too far, because it requires everyone to actively acknowledge minority sexual identities — and radical claims about mind-body dualism — instead of just ignoring them.
Thinkers on both the Right and the Left persist in trying to explain these cultural developments as derivations of this or that overarching ideology. Cultural Marxism! Gnosticism! False consciousness spread by the capitalist media! But there is no common worldview, any more than there was in the Hellenistic era, when you could worship Athena and Serapis at the same time. The intolerant monotheisms that tried to impose uniform belief on societies by state coercion, and the intolerant secular religion of Marxism-Leninism, were historical aberrations. In the absence of government-imposed orthodoxies, large-scale societies will be heterodox by default. Led by the Really Existing West, global civilization is returning to its natural incoherent condition.
Attempts by Western conservatives to revive older versions of the West — whether of 1950 or 1350 — are doomed. The West of widespread Christian orthodoxy and overwhelming white majorities and sexual conservatism is gone, never to return. One by one, the countries that the Right sees as refuges from the omniculture of the Really Existing West have succumbed and have been absorbed by the omniculture. Catholic Ireland liberalized abortion law. Anti-gay Hungary jettisoned Orbán and Orbánism. Radical Salafists who want to restore the medieval Caliphate, trad Caths who want to restore medieval Christendom, slavophile Eurasianists who want to de-Westernize Russia — all are fated to fail.
Equally doomed is the progressive Left’s vision of a post-national world society in which every race and gender is represented in every social realm in proportion to its numbers in society as a whole. A shared civilization doesn’t mean a lack of national rivalries and wars. And the incoherent, segmented, functional pluralism of the omniculture, with different subcultures for different private and public purposes, is incompatible with absolute cultural egalitarianism.
The models for the nostalgic Right are all in the past and the utopias of the progressive Left are in a borderless future that will never come about. Among contemporary societies, there are no alternatives to the new pan-Western omniculture that don’t have to be propped up by autocracy, given their lack of appeal even within their own borders. Communism, at least, once won enthusiastic converts around the world, but radical Islamism appeals to few other than a minority of ethnic Muslims. And the relaxation of religious coercion in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan would almost certainly lead to the assimilation of those societies in short order into the emerging omniculture.
People in other countries look to China for models of industrial policy and state capitalism, not for neo-Confucian philosophy or authoritarianism. Xi Jinping’s daughter attended Harvard, and China’s Communist princelings have traded Mao suits for Western businesswear and Western fashions.
Jeremiads about Western decline, then, are doubly wrong. While the United States and Europe have allowed too much manufacturing to be lost, the main reason for their declining shares of global GDP and potential military power is external — the industrialization of China, India, and other countries — not internal mismanagement or moral decadence that can be reversed by wise leadership or a revival of correct values.
Paradoxically, the relative decline of the West’s share of global economic and military power is accompanied by the spread of Western values — the values, that is, of today’s new, religiously indifferentist, multiracial Really Existing West. If you don’t like the omniculture of the Really Existing West, you can move to Communist North Korea or anti-gay Uganda or the Taliban’s Islamist Afghanistan — for as long as they hold out against the tide.