The Devil of Progress: When Consumption Replaced Faith

When we think about the secularization of the West, we tend to look for its causes in ideas: the Enlightenment, science, liberalism, social movements, the decline of religious authority. All of these things matter. But there is something even more concrete that we often forget:

the way we live has changed.

For thousands of years, most Europeans lived in predominantly agricultural and pastoral societies. The family was an economic unit as much as an emotional one. Land meant survival. The community was where people were born, lived, worked, married, and died. Religion was not something practiced only on Sundays. It was woven into everyday life: the calendar, festivals, marriages, funerals, births, moments of fear, and moments of hope.

Then, within just a few generations, everything changed.

People left the countryside and moved to cities. Work moved from farms and family workshops into factories, offices, shops, and eventually the service economy. The family gradually lost many of its economic functions. Local communities became less important. Individuals acquired a degree of freedom their ancestors could hardly have imagined.

And along with that freedom came something new:

mass consumption.

This, I believe, is one of the keys to understanding the contemporary West.

The peasant produced. The industrial worker worked. Modern man increasingly consumes.

This is not a condemnation of supermarkets. I go to them too. The question is much deeper: what happens when consumption stops being merely a means of satisfying our needs and becomes one of the main ways in which we define ourselves?

You only have to walk into a modern shopping mall to get a sense of it.

It is curious. The old temples were places where people went to remind themselves that something existed beyond them. Shopping malls are places where people go to discover how many things they can possibly desire.

The comparison is deliberately provocative, but it says something.

Advertising no longer simply tells us, "You need this product." It tells us that the product can make us more attractive, younger, happier, more desirable, more successful, more free.

It doesn't merely sell objects.

It sells possibilities.

And a society built around possibilities inevitably begins to look suspiciously at limits.

This also helps explain the transformation of social values.

In a traditional agricultural society, people were born into a series of identities they had not chosen: a family, a village, a religion, a social class, a trade, a community. That did not necessarily make them happy. But their identity was deeply connected to something that existed before them.

Modernity broke many of those constraints.

And in many respects, that was a good thing.

Women gained rights that had previously been denied to them. Minorities gained the ability to demand dignity and equality. Millions of people acquired freedoms that would have been unimaginable to previous generations.

When we see today's Woke movement challenging patriarchy, we should remember that behind it lie decades—and in some cases centuries—of struggles for women's rights and the rights of minorities.

And when we see a Gay Pride parade, we should not make the mistake of thinking that homosexuality itself was invented by modernity.

It wasn't.

Homosexuality has existed throughout human history.

But the contemporary Gay Pride movement is a product of modernity.

In a traditional agricultural and pastoral society, it would have been essentially inconceivable to see thousands of people marching publicly to assert a sexual identity. Not because homosexual people did not exist, but because the social conditions that make such a phenomenon possible did not exist: large cities, individualism, anonymity, mass communication, modern political organization, individual rights, and a radically different understanding of personal identity.

The world in which we live changed.

And as the world changed, so did the way we understand ourselves.

But there is something else that I find even more interesting.

Capitalism does not necessarily need to destroy a cultural revolution.

It can sell it.

A protest can become an event. An identity can become a market. A political cause can become an advertising campaign. A difference can become a brand.

This does not mean that LGBT rights were created by corporations, any more than feminism was invented by the market.

It means that contemporary capitalism possesses an extraordinary ability:

it can absorb almost anything.

Even things that were originally created in opposition to it.

And this brings us to religion.

Why did the West become secular?

Part of the answer certainly lies in ideas. But another part lies in everyday life.

For centuries, God was present in an enormous number of aspects of human existence. Today, many of the functions once associated with religion have been taken over by other institutions.

Medicine protects us from disease.

The welfare state protects us from poverty.

Schools provide knowledge.

Science explains the physical world.

Technology solves problems.

Entertainment fills our free time.

And the market offers us an astonishing range of things to buy.

And so God can gradually become less necessary.

Not necessarily because someone actively fought against Him.

Simply because He is no longer needed to organize everyday life in the way He once was.

Perhaps this is the deepest form of secularization.

Not the denial of God.

His irrelevance.

This is why I find it difficult to take seriously those theories that explain the religious crisis of the West through black masses, satanic rituals supposedly performed by global elites, Beelzebub, or mysterious Masonic lodges.

We do not need to imagine a global elite gathering in a dark room to understand what happened.

If we want to use the word "devil," I would rather use it as a metaphor.

The devil of the modern world would not need to perform a black mass.

It would only need to convince us that there are no limits to what we should desire.

Its temple would not be a crypt.

It would be a shopping mall.

And its ritual would not be an occult ceremony.

It would be the shopping cart.

We enter. We choose. We desire. We buy.

And tomorrow we desire something else.

It is a religion without God and without transcendence, but it has its own daily rituals: advertising, purchasing, gratification, replacement, desire.

The problem, of course, is not progress itself.

Without progress, we would still be living with diseases we can now treat, widespread illiteracy, high infant mortality, extreme poverty, and countless injustices that humanity has rightly fought to overcome.

The problem begins when progress stops being a tool and becomes a faith.

When we assume that every change is necessarily an improvement.

When we confuse freedom with the absence of all limits.

When consumption becomes the answer to our anxieties.

When family, community, tradition, and even patriotism are perceived merely as outdated obstacles to individual freedom.

And yet, in the end, there is one limit that even the most powerful economic system will never be able to erase.

We can desire everything.

We can buy cars, houses, holidays, clothes, experiences, medicines, technology, comfort. We can build increasingly sophisticated machines and imagine a future in which technology will solve problems that today seem impossible.

But we cannot buy immortality.

And this is precisely where, for those who believe, God might have the last word.

Because we may eventually conquer almost everything that belongs to the material world, but one question remains before which money, markets, and technology all come to a halt:

What happens when our life ends?

Perhaps death is the one limit that the consumer society will never be able to turn into a commodity.

And there is another irony.

In our attempt to consume more and more, we may end up consuming the very world that makes our consumption possible.

Land, water, energy, forests, biodiversity, raw materials: everything has limits. A civilization built on the assumption of virtually unlimited material growth must eventually confront the finite nature of the planet.

We do not know where the breaking point lies, nor whether humanity will actually experience an ecological collapse. But we can imagine the extreme scenario.

A post-apocalyptic society.

Not necessarily a simple return to the Stone Age. It could be something much stranger:

advanced technologies surviving alongside surprisingly archaic forms of social organization.

Intermittent electricity grids, drones, artificial intelligence and computer systems existing alongside self-sufficient local communities. The ruins of great cities standing beside fortified villages. Scientific knowledge preserved by small elites while much of the population returns to agriculture, animal husbandry, local production, and barter.

A new Middle Ages, perhaps.

Not the historical Middle Ages, of course, but a new age in which technology and archaism coexist.

History, after all, is not a staircase on which every generation automatically climbs one step higher than the previous one.

We like to imagine progress as a straight line: every generation richer, better educated, more technologically advanced and more free than the one before it.

But history does not always work that way.

There have been collapses, fractures, political breakdowns, economic crises, epidemics, wars, migrations, and cultural regressions. The fall of the Western Roman Empire is certainly one of the most famous examples, but it is hardly the only moment in history when complex systems entered into crisis and were replaced by very different forms of organization.

Every generation is new compared with the generations that came before it.

And no generation is guaranteed to be better.

Perhaps that is the lesson we have forgotten.

Progress is not a benevolent deity leading humanity inevitably toward an earthly paradise.

It is a tool.

And like every tool, it can be used to build or to destroy.

We have built an extraordinarily powerful civilization. Now we must discover whether we are wise enough not to consume the conditions that make that civilization possible.

Because perhaps the real "Devil of Progress" is not the one that tells us what to do.

It is the one that convinces us that we can have everything.

Everything except immortality.

And perhaps, precisely at that boundary, modern man may discover that God was never dead.

He was simply waiting.

When Christ Returns, Will He Still Find Faith on Earth?

“However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” The question, recorded in Luke’s Gospel, is deeply unsettling. It is not a prediction that Christians will disappear, nor a prophecy about the end of the Church. It is a question about faith itself.

And that may be precisely why, two thousand years later, it can still be read in the light of the cultural crisis facing Christianity in the West.

Christianity has never been static. Throughout its history, it has survived persecution, wars, plagues, schisms, heresies, reforms, revolutions, and profound social transformations. Time and again, it has found within itself the ability to renew and reinvent itself.

In the Middle Ages, during a period of profound social and religious change, Francis of Assisi and Dominic of Guzmán emerged, followed by the great mendicant orders. They were not simply new religious organizations. They represented a response to a spiritual and social crisis, placing poverty, preaching, and communal life back at the heart of Christian experience.

Centuries later, confronted by the Protestant Reformation and the fragmentation of religious unity in Europe, the Catholic Church responded with the Council of Trent and an extraordinary period of renewal. New orders and congregations emerged and flourished, from the Jesuits and Capuchins to the Theatines and Oratorians. Once again, the Church demonstrated a remarkable capacity for adaptation.

History seemed to follow a recurring pattern:

crisis, new charisma, renewal, expansion, institutionalization, and renewed crisis.

But something has changed.

The Crisis That Does Not Destroy Religion — But Makes It Unnecessary

Christianity learned to survive in societies marked by poverty, violence, and insecurity. It offered meaning to suffering, illness, death, hunger, and uncertainty.

Modern Western society, however, has produced something fundamentally different: mass prosperity.

Not for everyone, of course. Poverty still exists, even in the wealthiest societies. Yet millions of people now live under material conditions that would have seemed extraordinary for most of human history.

And this may be one of the deepest challenges Christianity has ever faced.

Someone living in poverty and insecurity may naturally turn to religion for answers to suffering and death. Someone living in a society capable of providing security, healthcare, entertainment, consumption, mobility, pleasure, and countless opportunities for self-realization may gradually come to see religion not as a necessity, but as a choice.

The problem is not necessarily atheism.

It may be something more subtle:

indifference.

A society does not necessarily have to reject God. It can simply stop considering God a central question.

From Christianity to the Consumer Society

Contemporary society has also created a new form of anthropology.

For centuries, Christianity taught people to desire something beyond this life: salvation, heaven, resurrection.

The consumer society offers a different promise:

happiness here and now.

There is no longer necessarily a need to wait for paradise when it is possible to construct small earthly paradises through consumption, travel, entertainment, technology, the pursuit of beauty, experiences, and the endless search for well-being.

Consumerism is not a religion in the traditional sense. Yet it can perform some functions once largely associated with religion: it creates desires, rituals, identities, symbols, forms of belonging, and promises of personal transformation.

Paradise has gradually been moved from the afterlife into this life.

And perhaps that is one of the hardest challenges for a religion built around the promise of another world.

A Church That Still Produces New Charisms

And yet Christianity is far from dead.

New movements, communities, spiritual charisms, vocations, mystical experiences, and forms of devotion continue to emerge. The Church continues to produce saints, visionaries, charismatic figures, and new religious movements.

But there is a provocative question to ask:

Are these new charisms still transforming civilization, or are they increasingly trying to prevent an already transformed civilization from abandoning Christianity altogether?

The distinction is enormous.

In the past, a new religious movement could help shape an entirely new cultural order. Today, it may find itself facing a society that no longer needs to be Christianized.

This also offers one possible way of interpreting the persistence of Marian apparitions and apocalyptic messages. When a religious culture progressively loses its central position, the language of punishment, catastrophe, conversion, and the end of the world can become particularly powerful.

This does not mean that every apparition is deliberately manufactured by the Church, nor that all believers share an apocalyptic worldview.

It means that apocalyptic language becomes especially powerful in times of cultural crisis.

When a religious tradition can no longer persuade the surrounding culture through cultural authority, it may increasingly proclaim that history itself will eventually prove it right.

The consumer society will collapse.

Great disasters will come.

Humanity will be punished.

The world will have to convert.

Such themes can be found throughout contemporary religious culture.

The West Secularizes, Africa Grows

There is another extraordinary paradox.

While Christianity has lost much of its cultural centrality across large parts of Europe, sub-Saharan Africa has become one of the major demographic centers of contemporary Christianity.

There, Christianity also encounters Islam as a major religious and cultural competitor, within societies very different from those of Europe.

The historical result could be enormous.

The Christianity of the future may become increasingly less European.

The faith that once traveled from Europe to evangelize other continents may increasingly depend on the religious vitality of African, Asian, and Latin American populations.

That would not necessarily mean the end of Christianity.

It could mean the end of Christianity as a predominantly European cultural religion.

The Christian Egregore

One could even use the esoteric concept of an egregore as a metaphor.

Not as a scientific or metaphysical claim, but as an image of the enormous symbolic structure accumulated over almost two thousand years: the blood of martyrs, the sacrifices of saints, prayers, relics, liturgies, pilgrimages, miracles, apparitions, conversions, cathedrals, sacred images, stories of persecution, and promises of salvation.

An immense collective memory.

That structure does not simply disappear because Europeans attend church less frequently.

It continues to live in art, culture, memory, language, and the Western imagination.

But it may have reached a stage in which its symbolic power no longer corresponds to the cultural power of the society that created it.

The structure remains.

The culture changes.

And Then Christ's Question Returns

This is where the words of Luke's Gospel acquire an almost overwhelming significance:

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

If Christ really returned, would he still find a Christian civilization?

Perhaps not.

He might find churches, basilicas, priests, bishops, monasteries, pilgrimages, apparitions, religious movements, and millions of people who call themselves Christians.

But would he still find faith?

That is a different question.

A religion can survive demographically while dying culturally. It can preserve its institutions while losing its ability to shape people's desires, values, and choices.

It can survive as an identity while weakening as a worldview.

And perhaps this is the greatest paradox of contemporary Christianity.

Christianity may not be approaching extinction.

It may instead be approaching the end of the cultural world that once made Christianity indispensable.

Christ May Return to a World That No Longer Expects Him

For almost two thousand years, the West built much of its history around the Christian expectation of the Second Coming.

But what if Christ returned to a world in which most people were no longer waiting for him?

That would be a radical rupture.

He would not necessarily find an atheistic or openly hostile world.

He might find something far more difficult:

an indifferent world.

A world in which humanity has not necessarily denied God, but has learned to live as though God were unnecessary.

And perhaps that is the most unsettling meaning of the Gospel question.

Christ does not ask:

“Will I still find churches?”

He does not ask:

“Will I still find priests?”

Nor does he ask:

“Will I still find people who call themselves Christians?”

The question is about faith.

And so, if Christianity really is entering the final stage of its great Western cultural cycle, the decisive question is not when it will end.

It is what will remain once the historical conditions that made Christianity the center of Western civilization have disappeared.

Perhaps what remains will be a smaller but more authentic Christianity.

Perhaps a new Christianity will emerge, shaped above all by other continents.

Perhaps faith will experience another great renewal, as it did with Francis, Dominic, or the religious orders of the Counter-Reformation.

Or perhaps the long cycle that began two thousand years ago will simply continue to fade.

We cannot know.

But we can leave open the question that may contain everything:

When Christ returns — if he really does return — will he still find faith on Earth?

Perhaps, in the end, this is not a question about the future.

It is a question about the present.

And above all, it is a question addressed to us.

The Decline of Europe and the Crisis of the West: From the Struggle for Hegemony to the Destiny of Civilizations

Europe, the Center of the World, and the Logic of the Balance of Power

To understand the crisis of the contemporary West, we must begin with European history, because the twentieth century represents the decisive moment when a continent that had dominated the world for centuries gradually lost its central position.

Since the modern era, European politics has been shaped by a fundamental principle: preventing a single power from imposing its supremacy over the entire continent. The balance of power became the mechanism through which European states attempted to contain the rise of potential rivals.

The Habsburg Empire, the France of Louis XIV, Napoleonic France, and finally unified Germany represented, at different historical moments, possible challenges to the continental order.

Britain, progressively transforming itself into the world's leading maritime and commercial power, adopted the principle that no continental power should be allowed to dominate Europe. Its foreign policy was therefore often based on creating alliances against whichever state appeared capable of altering the existing balance.

Germany and the European Tragedy of the Twentieth Century

At the end of the nineteenth century, Germany became the greatest challenge to the European order. After unification in 1871, the new German state developed an extraordinary industrial, scientific, and military capacity, rapidly becoming a power capable of competing with Britain.

The First World War was not the result of a single cause, but rather the explosion of accumulated tensions: nationalism, imperial rivalries, alliance systems, and political miscalculations.

The result, however, was an unprecedented European tragedy. The conflict destroyed four great empires and profoundly weakened the continent.

The Second World War completed this process. After 1945, Europe was no longer the center of the world, but a territory divided between two new superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union.

The New Administrator of the European "Condominium"

The metaphor of a condominium helps to symbolically understand what happened. Europe, after decades of internal conflict, had exhausted its own strength. Like a condominium unable to resolve disputes among its residents, it found itself forced to rely on an external administrator.

That administrator became, on one side, the United States, and on the other, the Soviet Union.

The Iron Curtain became the concrete symbol of the end of European autonomy. The continent that had dominated the world for centuries had become the arena of confrontation between external powers.

The twentieth century was therefore the century in which global leadership shifted from Europe to the United States.

America and the Construction of a New Universal Model

The United States did not exercise its influence only through economic and military power. Its social and cultural model gradually became global.

The spread of American capitalism, consumer society, and a new conception of the individual profoundly transformed the world.

For some critics, this expansion represented the emergence of a standardized global culture, symbolically described as the "hamburger civilization": a model based on the market, consumption, and the increasing individualization of human existence.

The issue is not merely economic. It concerns the way a civilization defines itself and transmits its values.

The Clash of Civilizations and the Question of Identity

Political scientist Samuel Huntington argued that the world would not become completely uniform because civilizations preserve profound differences connected to history, religion, and their understanding of human nature.

Globalization has therefore produced a paradox: while it tends to unify markets and lifestyles, it also generates reactions defending cultural identities.

The fundamental question becomes: can a civilization spread its values without transforming its own worldview into a universal model imposed upon others?

Western Freedom: The Strength and the Vulnerability of Our Civilization

One of the foundations of the West is the concept of individual freedom.

Its roots can be traced back to ancient Greece, where a revolutionary idea emerged: human beings are not merely subjects under authority, but citizens capable of participating in public life and contributing to the creation of laws.

Western freedom has produced extraordinary political, scientific, and cultural achievements. Yet it carries within itself an eternal question: how can individual freedom be reconciled with the survival of the community?

Plato had already reflected on the danger of freedom without balance. Alexis de Tocqueville, while defending democracy, also warned that societies can weaken when individuals become exclusively focused on private interests and lose their sense of civic responsibility.

Individual and Community: The Fragile Balance of Civilization

No society can survive solely through isolated individuals. Human beings are social creatures who require institutions, traditions, and shared values.

At the same time, a community without freedom risks becoming oppressive.

The challenge of modern societies is therefore to find a balance between two fundamental needs: protecting individual autonomy while preserving the cultural and social fabric that makes freedom itself possible.

Every cultural transformation raises a fundamental question: does it represent the natural evolution of society, or does it risk breaking the historical continuity of a civilization?

The New Global Challenge: The United States, China, and the Future of World Order

If the twentieth century was the century of Europe's decline as the center of global power, the twenty-first century may become the century of competition between the United States and China.

China represents today an economic, technological, and geopolitical power capable of challenging the international order created after the Second World War.

This competition is not only about resources and markets. It also concerns different visions of society and different understandings of the relationship between the individual, the state, and the community.

The Destiny of Civilizations: Decline or Transformation?

History teaches us that civilizations rarely disappear only because of external enemies. They often enter periods of crisis when they lose the ability to define themselves.

Oswald Spengler described the decline of civilizations as a natural historical process, while Arnold Toynbee emphasized the capacity to respond creatively to challenges as the true measure of a civilization's survival.

The question facing the contemporary West is therefore this:

Can a civilization founded on freedom, critical reason, and constant transformation renew itself while preserving its own identity?

Because the true challenge of every great civilization is not only what it manages to conquer, but what it chooses to preserve.

History does not belong only to those who dominate the present, but to those who are capable of giving meaning to the future.

America’s Two Souls and Europe at the Periphery of the West

The United States of America has always appeared to me as a two-headed nation, built upon the permanent tension between two founding souls that have never ceased to confront each other.

On one side stands the legacy of the Founding Fathers, shaped by Enlightenment culture and, in many cases, by the influence of Masonic thought. This is the America of the Second Industrial Revolution, of Wall Street finance, of great universities, multinational corporations, technological innovation, and the political vision that today is generally described as “liberal.” It is also the America of power projection: Washington, through the White House and Congress, often perceives itself as the centre of international decision-making, a kind of new Rome entrusted with the mission of preserving stability, security, and global leadership.

On the other side survives a very different America: the America of the Pilgrim Fathers, rural communities, evangelical churches, Mormons, small towns crossed by endless highways, and motels where a Bible can still be found on the bedside table. It is a deeply religious and conservative America, attached to family values, individual autonomy, and a certain distrust of a federal power perceived as too intrusive.

These two Americas are not separate worlds, but the two halves of the same brain. Like the right and left hemispheres, they cooperate and clash continuously, creating a dialectic that runs through the entire history of the United States. Presidential elections simply make this permanent tension more visible.

I observe all of this from the perspective of old Italy, a country that was once the heart of the Roman Empire and that today occupies a far more peripheral position in the balance of global power. Europe as a whole increasingly appears as a strategic periphery of a Western world whose main centre of decision-making now lies across the Atlantic. This is not a moral judgment, but a geopolitical observation: the United States remains the principal economic, military, and technological power within the Western alliance.

This central role may become even stronger with the expansion of artificial intelligence. AI systems require enormous digital infrastructures and ever-growing amounts of energy. The fundamental question of the twenty-first century may therefore not simply be which technology to develop, but how to produce increasing quantities of electricity at sustainable costs. Solar energy, geothermal power, next-generation nuclear technology, fusion, or other solutions still under development: the real challenge will be to guarantee abundant, stable, and competitive energy. Artificial intelligence will not be limited only by computing power, but also by access to energy.

I do not intend these reflections as a defence of the Italian government or of the current Prime Minister. Domestic politics follows different dynamics, and every political leader must be judged by their decisions and results. However, I observe with some concern the tendency, widespread in European debate, to measure the value of our choices almost exclusively through the perspective of other centres of power.

Forms of cultural and strategic dependence ultimately harm those who accept them first. Remembering that European civilisation, and Italian civilisation in particular, contributed decisively to the creation of ideas such as empire, law, politics, and institutions does not mean living in nostalgia. It means recovering awareness of one’s historical heritage.

No nation can live only on its past; yet without the memory of its own contribution to history, it becomes difficult to imagine an autonomous role in the future.

LGBTQ+ Rights, Civilizations, and a Multipolar World

I have devoted only limited attention on my blog to the subject of LGBTQ+ rights. This is neither an oversight nor an attempt to distance myself from the respect owed to every human being. It is a deliberate methodological choice. The articles addressing this topic are not among the 333 essays that will remain permanently available because I consider the issue to be closely linked to the historical evolution of a particular civilization and, above all, to the geopolitical transformations of the twenty-first century.

Contemporary debate often presents civil rights as the natural destination of history. Yet history teaches us that no political idea emerges in a vacuum. Every right, every institution, and every concept of freedom develops within a specific cultural, religious, and philosophical context.

The contemporary understanding of LGBTQ+ rights has largely developed within the Western world as part of a broader historical process that gradually placed the individual at the center of the legal and political order. Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christianity, Humanism, the Enlightenment, and modern constitutionalism all contributed—each in its own way—to the formation of a culture in which the individual came to be regarded as the holder of rights capable of limiting the power of the state.

Within this historical framework came the decriminalization of homosexuality, its removal from psychiatric classifications, and, more recently, the recognition of civil unions and, in several countries, same-sex marriage.

This does not mean, however, that the same historical development is interpreted in the same way by every civilization.

In many societies, the relationship between the individual and the community follows different principles. Family, religion, tradition, authority, or social cohesion may be regarded as values that take precedence over individual autonomy. This is not necessarily a question of being more or less advanced. Rather, it reflects different conceptions of the human person and of the individual's place within society.

For this reason, I believe the most important question is not whether LGBTQ+ rights are right or wrong. Such a question inevitably leads to ideological confrontation. A more meaningful question is whether these rights should be regarded as universal principles or whether they represent one possible expression of Western modernity.

This question becomes even more relevant in an era marked by the gradual redistribution of global power. For several centuries, the West exercised sufficient political, economic, and cultural influence to spread not only its technologies and institutions but also its understanding of liberty and individual rights.

Today, that predominance appears far less certain. The rise of new economic and political powers, the emergence of a more multipolar international system, and the growing autonomy of many regions suggest that the twenty-first century may be characterized by the coexistence of different cultural models, none of which is likely to establish unquestioned global dominance.

It is precisely in this context that the most significant question arises.

What would happen if the West were no longer the dominant civilization? What if its cultural narrative became merely one among many—or even a subordinate one within the international order? Would the civil rights developed throughout Western history continue to be regarded as universal, or would they gradually be reinterpreted through different conceptions of society?

This question also concerns the future of Western democracies themselves. Rights do not exist independently of history. They depend on institutions, public consensus, and political and cultural balances. If these balances change profoundly, it is reasonable to ask whether the hierarchy of values may also evolve.

This is neither a prediction nor a wish. It is simply a historical question. No civilization has remained dominant forever. No international order has proved permanent. Every major shift in the balance of power has also transformed the language of rights, freedoms, duties, and political legitimacy.

Perhaps the defining question of the twenty-first century will not be which values should prevail, but whether humanity will succeed in establishing a minimal set of shared principles or whether the future will be shaped by the coexistence of different civilizations, each preserving its own understanding of freedom, dignity, community, and justice.

Rather than offering definitive answers, this reflection invites us to acknowledge the complexity of the age in which we live. And complexity, more than certainty, is the proper starting point for any serious historical and philosophical inquiry.