أَعُوذُ بِاللّٰهِ مِنَ الشَّيْطَانِ الرَّجِيمِ

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

اللہ کے نام سے شروع جو بڑا مہربان نہایت رحم کرنے والا ہے

In the name of ALLAH, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Revisiting Modern Western Thoughts

Modern Western thought is a tradition of philosophy, science, and culture that started during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It focuses on human reason, individual rights, scientific proof, and personal freedom over old traditions or religious rules. It shapes how modern societies view truth, law, and progress.

Modern civilizational studies often assume early humans were primitive or "ignorant". This view assumes human progress moves in a straight line from simple, ancient survival to complex, modern knowledge. Historians traditionally measure progress by looking at things like science, technology, and written records. Presentism is the habit of judging the past using modern values. This civilization relies on science, and assumes any society without the science was ignorant or unadvanced.

Modern Western thought emerged from the 15th to 18th centuries, evolving as a direct response to the rigid, religion-centered worldview of the Middle Ages. This transition started with the Renaissance and peaked with the Enlightenment, shifting the focus from blind faith to human reason and science. In the 14th to 17th centuries, people rediscovered ancient Greek and Roman art and ideas. Humanism began with the belief that humans matter at their own, not just as a part of a religious plan. Art became realistic, and people started learning about nature and the world for themselves.

John Locke (1632- 1704) was a pioneer thinker of the modern western civilization; this English philosopher and physician is celebrated as the "father of liberalism" and the founder of modern empirical philosophy.His quiet demeanor and medical training allowed him to observe society carefully. This helped him write ideas that changed the world.

Voltaire (real name François-Marie Arouet) (1694-1778) was French writer and philosopher. He was a leading thinker of the Enlightenment—a time when people began to use reason and science to challenge old traditions and strict kings. He fought hard for free speech, religious tolerance, and the separation of church and state

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Swiss-born philosopher. His ideas helped start the French Revolution. He famously believed that humans are naturally good, but are corrupted by society and rules. He thought people should rule themselves instead of having kings.

David Hume (1711–1776) was a Scottish philosopher. He is famous for skepticism (the idea that we cannot know anything for absolute certain, especially things that go beyond our physical senses) and empiricism. He believed all human knowledge comes directly from our experiences.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a Scottish economist and philosopher. He is known as the "Father of Economics." His famous book The Wealth of Nations explains how free markets, driven by self-interest, naturally guide the economy like an "invisible hand.

"Edmund Burke (1729–1797) was an Irish statesman and philosopher. He is known as the "Father of Modern Conservatism." He argued that society should respect tradition, custom, and gradual change. He warned against sudden, violent revolutions.

John Locke’s starting point is simple and revolutionary: every human being arrives in the world with natural rights — to life, liberty, and property — that exist before any government, any king, and any General Will. Government does not grant these rights. It is created specifically to protect them. The moment it fails that function, the contract is broken and the people may dissolve it. This sounds like Rousseau. It is the precise opposite. Rousseau’s revolution tears everything down to rebuild the perfect society from first principles. Locke’s revolution restores what was wrongly taken – it is conservative by nature, backward-looking, anchored in existing rights rather than utopian futures. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was Locke in practice: not the demolition of an order but the correction of a king who exceeded his mandate. The American Revolution of 1776 was Locke in practice again: a list of specific violations, a reluctant separation, and a new government explicitly designed to do less, not more.

The French Revolution had Rousseau. The Anglo-American tradition had Locke. The difference in outcomes was not accidental. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the original Woke. He invented it. Every premise of contemporary progressive ideology traces directly back to one man who had never met a "noble savage", never raised a child, and never lived according to a single principle he preached.

1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because, if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual. Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755.

2. The "Noble Savage" is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it.

3. The "General Will" is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were "properly enlightened". Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself liberation.

4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every "liberation" movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same.

5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair.

6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda (remember the obłuda of communism?). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word.

7. The original Woke was about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire. The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.

1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.

2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.

3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.

4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.

5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.

6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.

7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now.

The basic flawed premise we make about ancient times is assuming they were primitive "starting points". In reality, ancient people viewed themselves as living in the decay of older, greater "golden ages". Furthermore, they had highly advanced urban structures, engineering, and trade networks long before traditional agriculture and writing systems. We often misunderstand the ancient world because of a few core errors in how we think about the past.

Early humans were not primitive or ignorant. Modern humans have had the same brain power for 300,000 years. Our ancestors used high intelligence and deep natural knowledge to survive. They simply did not have the large cities and digital tools we have today. Studies of ancient DNA show early humans had the exact same genetic tools for brainpower that we have today. We did not slowly get smarter over time. Early brains were fully modern.

Early humans mapped the stars, tracked animal habits, and knew which plants could heal. They moved 20-ton stones and built giant structures without modern machines. They carved, made music, and painted complex scenes long before writing was invented. We are building on the ideas of the past. It is because we need the teamwork and tools of millions of people who came before us. Early humans focused on freedom and living in balance with nature. Modern life focuses on making many tools and growing the population.

The foundational premise that Western thought began uniquely with the "Greek Miracle" is increasingly viewed as an artificial myth. This assumption has left cracks in modern philosophy, history, and sociology, forcing thinkers to rethink how knowledge and civilization actually developed. Historically, Western thought taught that Greek thinkers invented rational thought out of thin air. This premise ignores that early Greek philosophers lived in Ionia (modern-day Turkey) and borrowed heavily from older Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian cultures. This historical reality destroys the idea that "Western intellect" was born independently and is somehow naturally superior to other traditions.

Thinkers used the ancient timeline to define the "West" as a white, European, and Christian club. During the Enlightenment, European scholars selectively chosen which parts of ancient history they liked to justify things like colonialism. Recognizing this bias leaves modern educators trying to rebuild a more honest, inclusive history of how civilizations share ideas. Modern thinkers and scientists increasingly realize this rigid thinking is flawed. Today, fields like quantum mechanics show us that reality is complex, forcing Western thought to look more toward Eastern traditions that embrace paradoxes.

Naturally, when a civilization is founded on a philosophy with flawed basic premise, then, it is bound to fracture along the cracks invisible in the beginning. A civilization built on a flawed core idea will never rise forever and break apart later. Small cracks may remain hidden in the beginning but eventually grow big over time. The hidden faults in the first rules finally show up. The society splits when it can no longer bend for many obvious reasons. The truth of the matter is that no society and civilization may ignore or exploit human needs or natural limits for long. People can be blinded by the available resources and benefits but abundance has a limit, so people eventually lose trust in the very foundation of the provision over a period of time. The dissatisfaction spreads wide and whole structure falls apart into smaller pieces.

The western civilization, raised on western thoughts as shown above, probably has reached its breaking point as scholars from the west are growingly reflecting in this direction. Guillaume Faye (1949–2019) was a French political theorist and a key figure in the "French New Right" (Nouvelle Droite). He is best known for creating "archeofuturism," a theory that blends traditional ethnic identity with high-tech futurism. He said that "It is the White peoples themselves who are responsible for their decline, by refusing to reproduce, by organizing on their own land the massive arrival of foreigners, paralyzed not by a superior physical force but by ideologies."

Alexander Dugin is a Russian political philosopher and ultra-nationalist. Media often call him "Putin's brain". He pushes for a massive, Russian-led Eurasian empire. Dugin wants to replace Western liberal ideas with traditional Russian values. He said on X.com @AGDugin “The Tradition is the East. Eastern Christianity is tradition. Western Christianity is modernised. The far West Christianity (Protestantism) is more modern than simply Western Christianity (Catholicism). The West is the thrash of history, the black hole in the bottom of reality.” He continues to say “The personal freedom is a pure lie. There is only one real free moment in life: when human being chooses to whom he / she is going to serve - to God or to devil. All the rest is just consequence of such decision. To serve nobody except yourself means you have chosen a devil.”

The Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin has clearly identified the basic flaw in the western thoughts that were built through the “Renaissance” period from the “Dark Ages”. The west left out “God-the Creator and Sustainer” of the world and humanity; therefore, it was bound to end up with “Devil”.

The “Western Thoughts” may be liberal, secular, enlightened and progressive but was “Godless” and therefore reached its natural limits of achievements and “enjoyment”. One is conscious of many voices which will say that western thought is not uniformly "godless," though it includes strong secular and atheist traditions. While the Enlightenment and liberalism promoted the separation of church and state, many foundational Western philosophers, scientists, and political thinkers were deeply religious and argued that their ideas came directly from Christian theology. Interestingly, European movements developed ethics and human rights based on human reason rather than divine command.

Philosophers like John Locke, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton wrote extensively about God and viewed science and faith as partners. Thinkers like Voltaire were critical of church power and dogmatic religion, but most were Deists who believed in a creator God rather than atheists. Today, Western societies welcome many different faiths alongside non-believers, making space for multiple worldviews instead of just one state religion.

Western thought is seemingly and necessarily confused now, and it is currently experiencing a profound identity crisis and intense internal polarization. Critics argue that the West has lost its core unifying narrative, while defenders view this chaotic friction as a natural, healthy sign of a pluralistic society continuously self-correcting. The Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin suggests individualism and atomizing universalism—the belief that the isolated individual is the core subject of society.

He suggests rejecting modern liberalism and globalism to build a Fourth Political Theory rooted in collective identity, traditional values, and a multipolar world order and embrace pre-modern values, religious orientation, and spiritual hierarchy over modern progress. He recommends making the community or the civilization (ethnos) the central focus of human existence instead of the individual; and dismantle power-led global hegemony and replace it with a system of distinct, independent civilizational poles.

NOTE: This write up has been arranged with the help of material available freely on web net.