Living In Cities

It is many years now since I first heard the name of Oswald Spengler and his book, 'The Decline of the West'. It is a big book, so I have put off reading it till now.
It was written a hundred years ago, so if the West was in decline then, goodness knows what Herr Spengler would make of our decadent times. Could he have imagined that 2+2=5, that the whole concept of womanhood is questioned, that women's wash rooms and women's sport may soon be abolished, that homosexuality is no longer a lifestyle choice, but biologically determined, that our gender is not biologically determined, and that a man is now quite possibly a woman, deep, very deep, inside, that the rich are good and left wing, that the poor are bad and right wing, that hyper capitalism is socialism, and, and............all in the name of Equality?
I suppose nothing like this has ever been seen before.
Except it probably has.
For Spengler, living in cities was a sure sign of the decay of a civilization. The melting pot of city life destroyed the values and the vision of a people.
Strangely, the urbanization of the Industrial Revolution did not lead to a total collapse of English Civilization. A young adult in 1950 could still relate to the England of Wesley and Wilkes and back to Good Queen Bess. To some extent Ulster Protestants still maintain the memory of their culture. But a young adult in England, in 2017 has no memory, no connection with England's past. They do not know what it means to live in a free country, based on Christian concepts of love and freedom, with mutual aid and respect underpinning a largely peaceful society at ease with itself.
City life, with its anonymity and its egotism, is finally killing off a thousand years of common values.