@Skallagrim your thoughts on the above.
You raise very good points.
Let me begin by saying that you are definitely correct to say -- indeed, only a fool could dispute it -- that there are overlapping and interacting spheres within our
Hochkultur, which we so often (and so inexactly) refer to as "The West". Likewise, that this term has various meanings in various contexts. To some extent, this is true of every High Culture. So we may at last console ourselves by saying that these confusions are not unique to us.
I do
not believe that, in their most "honest" meanings, the terms "Christendom" and "the West" are really different concepts. I do believe that you can assign meanings to them, and that means
have been assigned to them, that
do make them into different concepts.
My own thoughts may be summarised as follows (and note that this is by default a simplification): our High Culture is properly called "Christendom", and this means "the whole of Christian
culture". What is now called "the West" is, most generally, a secularised way of saying the same thing.
Now, I stressed
culture. I did that for a reason. It's not just about the religion. The religion is central to our culture; its formative core, whose light informs all aspects. But the culture is formed
around the religion. It extends beyond it; it includes more than just the religion in its most narrow sense. And those who convert to the religion
without embracing the culture are part of
Christianity, but
not of
Christendom.
This brings us to the notion of "where white people live". That is not entirely true, but there really is a very great correlation. The reason being that white people come from Europe, which is where our culture originated. They carried it with them. Often without really thinking about it. Even if and when they stopped being avidly or even actively religious, the
culture persisted. So, generally speaking, Christendom really is "wherever white people live". But it's not
only where white people live. Wherever someone of another background has truly embraced the Christian (that is: "Western") culture, Christendom exists.
That happens to correspond
precisely to what I believe "The West" to be.
However, "The West" is a very inexact term, which has also been used historically to exclude people who are most assuredly part of Christendom (but who just happened to be under an anti-Christian yoke at the time). For that reason, een though "The West" is useful as short-hand, I usually insist that "Christendom" is by far the more accurate name to define the same idea.
You mention that Christendom arguably doesn't exist, but I must disagree: it exists, but is not presently recognised by many.
In addition, you mention it always having been more of an ideal than anything. With that, I certainly agree. But every culture is, in itself and all its immaterial aspects, purely an idea. The Mandate of Heaven is also "just" an idea. That does not make it unimportant, nor does it make it less than
real. Ideas are very real.
In any event, the above outlines what "Christendom" (and thus, "The West") means to me. It means Europe and the countries inhabited by people of European descent, to the extent that they are inhabited by said people
and by non-European people who have embraced the Christian/Western culture. It does not include those segments of any population, eithin in Europe itself or elsewhere, who
reject that culture.
(We should note, in this context, that a lot of white people who claim to hate "the West" and/or "Christianity" have no idea at all how very Christian and Western they are,
implicitly, without even knowing it.)
This means that our High Culture includes the majority of African-Americans in the USA, for instance, but does not include Haiti or Ethiopia. It includes Russia, but not Turkey. It includes Armenia, but not the bulk of the
banlieues outside Paris. It includes major parts of Latin America, but not all of it. (Particularly, there are regions inhabited by various Native American people, who do not feel themselves to be part of our culture at all -- which means they aren't.) It includes a dwindling part of South Africa, whereas the bulk of that country now identifies with an explicitly African loyalty, which is not part of our culture at all. Japan, South Korea and Israel are not part of our High Culture. They are themselves, and to reduce them to part of us is untenable.
I think that should be an adequate definition of terms.
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The "scarce means" aren't a constant, though. The Industrial Revolution fundamentally altered the nature of scarcity by shifting it to scarcity of labor instead of scarcity of land. The recent push for automation is moving scarcity to be purely about raw materials, which was not historically the case. Modern economies can't do actual conquest. Even early industrialization saw the premise of empires to be disproven with colonies proving virtually impossible to be profitable.
The basic nature of the means has changed. The basic nature of the hierarchies aren't compatible anymore. The Romans had the specific notion of a King as something to avoid, while the modern West has an aversion to all forms of hard government. Even the nonsense Europe is getting into is fundamentally predicated on consent of the governed, and we've seen that it is not a logistical possibility to govern the unwilling anymore.
It takes extremely small portions of a population in active revolt, in modern times, to utterly cripple a state. It's been said repeatedly that a hundred assholes with molitovs and ARs could doom basically any major city, because it takes mere hours to drive them to massive chaos with a power outage. And the bar for having literal millions of discontents is fractional percentages.
You point out why everything is supposedly different and changed... and then provide arguments that point towards the same course of events that I'm pointing towards.
But then, there is also the fact that you're not quite correct in your assertions. Modernity has an obsession with an appeal to the supposed will of the masses. You draw a conclusion from that, which is not ultimately supported. Because it's not new. Rome
also had that obsession, and their street-fights, by this stage, were a lot messier than ours. The fact that there is fragility in the system is countered by the fact that (unlike most people back then) the vast majority people today has quite a bit to lose. The means of individuals to undertake disruptive measures are countered by the similarly expanded means at the state's avail. These things balance out.
Eventually, it
will get really bad. And the whole edifice
will collapse. And you are pointing out reasons why that is so. Alright. We seem to be in agreement on that. So much the better. It's going to be a while, though. Look at every riot, and all the pathetic looting of all the predictable stores. It's little more than some discontent. When they start skinning people alive and crucifying them, things will actually be serious. Until then... early days still.
Oh, and once things really get bad -- then we'll see just how logistically possible it still is to govern the unwilling. Long-term: not possible. Sure. But once the gloves come off, when the people in charge
also have nothing left to lose (except their power)... ha! They'll show us just how hard their government can be.
)