Kenneth Minogue's 2001 essay "How Civilizations Fall" opens with the classic image drawn from the fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun. A cultivated urban civilisation softens under luxury. Its people lose the sharpness that built the walls and the libraries. Then a tribe of hardier outsiders, Bedouin, in the Islamic case, rides in from the desert, stabling horses in the libraries and treating sculpture as target practice. Over time the conquerors absorb the culture they have taken, until they too soften and fall to the next wave.
Minogue's claim is that the contemporary West is living a version of the same cycle, but the invaders are not outside the walls. They are organised inside them. The decisive new tribe, in his account, is radical feminism as it crystallised around Betty Friedan in the 1960s. Technology and contraception had already eased the heavier burdens of domestic life for middle-class women with degrees. What remained, Minogue suggests (drawing on Diana Schaub), was boredom. The solution offered was not a deeper engagement with leisure or culture, but entry into the wage-labour system on equal terms with men. The movement's tactical innovation was to suppress almost entirely any talk of power and to frame every demand as pure justice.
The first practical step was the manufacture of shared consciousness. "Consciousness-raising" sessions turned private dissatisfaction into collective indignation. Women were cast as prisoners of a patriarchal system that had "confined" them to the home; the only escape was the labour market. Complementarity between the sexes was denied. Men and women were declared to be identical teams playing the same game under rules stacked against one side. Any woman who failed to accept the analysis was diagnosed as suffering from false consciousness. The basic appeal, Minogue notes, was flattery: women were a marvellously talented group who had been iniquitously suppressed.
This produced identity politics of a new kind. Every judgement was to begin from an essential self-identity as female. The older Western practice, European civilisation responding to achievement wherever it appeared, was replaced by quota entitlements. Achievement by quota, Minogue argues, destroys one civilisation from within and installs another. The history of Western high culture, from Thales and Euclid to Einstein, is overwhelmingly the work of men. To say so after the revolution is treated as an affront. The alternative offered is an androgynous world in which men and women become virtually interchangeable, and the distinctive feminine contribution to the texture of life is erased.
Minogue is clear that this is not merely a change in manners or employment statistics. It is an attempt to conquer the West from within by exploiting features of its own culture, its moral universalism, its openness to new claims of justice, its reluctance to assert superiority. Direct assault was unnecessary; the moral rhetoric was enough. Political correctness functions, in his later phrasing, as a truce between the invaders and the civilisation they have entered. The result, he concludes, is that "we are no longer what we were." The radical feminist revolution is "nothing less than a destruction of our civilisation."
The essay does not claim that every gain in women's formal rights or labour-force participation is destructive. It isolates a specific ideological project: the denial of sexual complementarity, the conversion of justice claims into tribal consciousness, and the substitution of group entitlements for individual achievement. In Ibn Khaldun's terms, the libraries are not being burned by horsemen from the desert; they are being reorganised by a new internal tribe that has already captured the language of legitimacy. That, for Minogue, is one recognisable mechanism by which a civilisation falls.
https://newcriterion.com/article/how-civilizations-fall/