In five or so remarkable years at the end of the 1960s the Modern Era’s balloon popped. Nineteen sixty-eight’s global revolutionary year sparked the chaotic beginning. Five years later, 1973’s Arab-dominated OPEC’s fist-pumping oil embargo announced the first clear sign that the West’s imperial run was over. Postmodernity, born in the period’s global turmoil.  

In between about 1968 and 1973 or so, the West wobbled toward breakdown. Its confidence deflated by one embarrassment, by one unresolved crisis after the next. Social revolution roiled democracies at home; assassinations, riots, bombings; US defeat in Vietnam; breakdown of the international currency mechanism, dollar devaluation, recession, failing industries, “stagflation”; Watergate . . . and on, setting off a decade of economic weakness and political malaise. Many among the “Rest” (the non-West) watched the muddle, made a reasonable assessment of it, and lost confidence in the West’s leadership and in its modern project as a model for development.

Long wearied by the West’s globe-straddling imperial power (at the onset of World War II, more than 80 percent of the Rest was directly colonized or controlled by Western powers), and now newly freed from colonial occupation, the Rest spoke up with stronger voice and vigor to criticize the West’s universalist modernizing project. They saw through the modern project’s narrative façade—the story that for centuries had bulldozed the world’s cultures flat—and pronounced it, as Jean-Francois Lyotard duly noted, dubious (see Essay 3). The West lost its triumphant swagger; its dominating cultural authority collapsed.[1]

Western modernity, its individualism, dualism, universalism, foundationalism, and faith in progress, fell under radical scrutiny. Its institutional keystones—the modern liberal states that commanded the power centers organizing Western life, not to mention much of the world—lost the public’s confidence. Governance slid into a half-century (and continuing) legitimacy crisis. What else can we call the January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol but an exclamation point on a slow-rolling fifty-year Age of Fracture?

What changed all of a sudden at the 1960s’ end? Loss of faith in Western virtue.