The West's Bad Habit of Strawmanning the Best Things

Much of the West has a strange relationship with virtue. It dissects it, repackages it, mocks it, and finally, sells you a plastic replica as a revolution. Marriage? Too oppressive. Family? Too suffocating. Culture? Too regressive. Womanhood? Too inconvenient. It is almost as if the West cannot look at anything sacred without wanting to first desecrate it, rename it, then claim to have invented a better version. This bad habit, or this civilizational tic as I choose to call it, has not only eroded its own foundations but is increasingly being exported to cultures that should’ve known better.

One must tread carefully here. There is a temptation, particularly among those disenchanted with modernity (a group to which I might be accused of belonging), to romanticize tradition, as if all that preceded our current malaise was inherently noble, coherent, or functional. This is no more accurate than its opposite. But if the past was no Eden, it is equally true that much of what we dismiss today had, at the very least, the dignity of intention, whereas our replacements often have only the appeal of convenience.

Nowhere is this phenomenon more evident than in the case of marriage, an institution once understood, however imperfectly practised, as a moral commitment between individuals embedded within a larger social and intergenerational framework. It is not that people no longer marry, but rather that they are increasingly expected to justify their desire to do so, as though fidelity, permanence, and shared life are suspect unless proven otherwise. It has now been reduced to an optional legal contract, or worse, a sentimental exercise in self-expression with no presumption of permanence. Meanwhile, its cultural substitutes—fleeting liaisons, commodified intimacy, polyamorous arrangements masquerading as progressive—are celebrated as signs of enlightened tolerance. And when such arrangements collapse under the weight of competing appetites, the West wonders why the edifice of the family has collapsed. 

In the realm of food, we observe a striking parallel: once a deeply embedded aspect of familial and cultural life, food has been subjected to industrial abstraction. That which nourished both body and spirit is now designed primarily to endure supply chains, maximize profit margins, and minimize inconvenience. The culinary traditions that once expressed regional memory and communal identity have been replaced by processed uniformity—bland, pre-packaged, and synthetic, like so much else in Western cultural life. And when the human body responds with the ailments of artificial life, we turn to yet another industry—health and wellness—to repair what industrial eating has broken. 

It is tempting to blame the economic structures that incentivize such superficiality, but the malaise runs deeper. It is civilizational. Family, too, has been reconfigured to suit the individual rather than the child, the adult's freedom rather than the old burdens of kinship. Elders are rarely revered, children rarely disciplined, and the old duties of care are replaced by services. In this, one detects not merely the decline of an institution but of the very idea that some aspects of life should be accepted as duties rather than negotiated as contracts. The family is dismissed as a hotbed of trauma and dysfunction. So, what does the West give you instead? Therapy bills, social media influencers with attachment issues, and the vague comfort of brunch with “your girlies”. 

Perhaps most striking is the fate of womanhood. In liberating women from unrealistic, context-absent traditional roles, a necessary and overdue process in some respects, modern societies have sometimes stumbled into a curious kind of erasure. To be a woman is now to be self-defining, which often means to be indistinguishable from a man, except in those qualities that are most commercially exploitable. The result is not so much freedom as confusion: a femininity stripped of its particular dignity, expected to imitate masculine ambitions and yet retain feminine charm—two incompatible expectations that serve neither the soul nor the self of the woman in question. The insistence on radical fluidity—the dogma that nothing must be defined lest someone feel excluded—has rendered the category of woman so elastic that it collapses altogether. In this, the West has not merely betrayed women; it has rendered them linguistically and legally invisible.

Motherhood, at one point seen as one of the more noble, if demanding, vocations available to human beings, is now seen in certain circles as a sort of ideological capitulation. To suggest that women might find profound meaning in child-rearing is to invite accusations of regression. Instead, they are encouraged to pursue autonomy at all costs—autonomy that, more often than not, involves the mindnumbing banality of the corporate world, or the expressive void of online validation. That this form of “freedom” frequently results in exhaustion and disorientation is rarely discussed in polite society. 

And so it is with culture, which no longer refers to the gradual accretion of moral habits and aesthetic refinements, but to the performative assertion of grievance or novelty. High culture is regarded as elitist, folk culture as regressive, and the only acceptable culture is that which critiques culture itself. So they mock the sari, the scripture, the havan, and the guru, and offer in return a charade of mindfulness, goat yoga, and turmeric lattes. One is reminded of the woman in the song buying a stairway to heaven—only now, she does so through manifestation apps, guided meditations, vision boards and an ever-growing stack of self-help books. The irony, of course, is that this posture results not in cultural evolution, but in cultural entropy. A people without reverence is a people without memory, and without memory, one lives only in the flickering present, at the mercy of marketing.

What we are witnessing is not simply decadence, but disintegration: the inability to distinguish between the imitation and the original, between parody and principle. The West has strawmanned its most enduring institutions and offered in their place pale imitations—hookups for marriage, pornography for intimacy, takeout for nourishment, therapy for family, and social media for community. And then it has expressed bewilderment at its own rising alienation, as if civilization were stitched by sentiment alone rather than discipline and inheritance.

The American experiment now resembles a cautionary tale. In its desperate pursuit to be good—as defined by ever-shifting, emotivist standards—it has become a civilization incapable of sustaining the very structures that made goodness intelligible. It discarded the idea of sin but retained the impulse to shame; it abandoned religion but kept the fervour; it undermined tradition but expected stability. It wanted moral seriousness without metaphysical depth, freedom without responsibility, and salvation without sacrifice.

Such contradictions, of course, cannot endure indefinitely.

It is not, I think, that the humans of this century are more wicked than those who came before us. Cruelty, vanity, and folly are permanent fixtures of the human condition. But what distinguishes our moment is the ridiculous sincerity with which we dismantle our own inheritance—not out of vice, but out of a misplaced desire to be fair, to be kind, to liberate. One might say, with only slight exaggeration, that the West has committed civilizational suicide for moral reasons.

Now, India—and much of what used to be called the non-West—finds itself on a precipice. The question it must answer is not whether it can modernize, for that much is inevitable, but whether it can do so without succumbing to the self-loathing that so often passes for enlightenment. Do we take the knockoffs—easier, sexier, hollow? Or do we return, not regress, to the wisdom that built civilizations?

As for the West, what will rise in the wake of these ruins remains uncertain. But if history teaches anything, it is that civilization abhors a vacuum. If we will not inhabit our own traditions, something else surely will.

“God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,--who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise?”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science.

Image source: The Death of Socrates by Jacques-Louis David.