Karl Popper gave a lecture under this title, in Zurich, in 1958. He began by saying that, when he thinks about the history of the expression Occident, he wonders if he should not avoid it, since it became current usage following Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, an author whom Popper considers the false prophet of a non-existent decline, as well as proof that what his false prophecy really shows is the intellectual decline of many Western thinkers, who hide their lack of intellectual modesty with high-sounding words.
Having said that, he asks: what do we Westerners currently believe in?, what does the West believe in? "If we were to approach this question seriously - he answers - most of us would confess that we don't know very well what we believe in", and adds: "We should be proud that we don't have one idea, but many ideas, good and bad; and not having a single belief, nor a single religion, but many beliefs and religions: some good and some bad. That the West can afford this plurality is proof of its supreme strength. The agreement of the West in a single idea and in a single belief would be the end of the West, our capitulation, our unconditional surrender to totalitarianism”.
In the West there have always been and there are now many false prophets and many false gods: there are people who believe in power and subjugation of others. There are others who believe in an inexorable law of history that allows us to predict the future with certainty. There are enthusiastic prophets of progress and complaining prophets of reaction. There are also those who only believe in success and efficiency, in economic growth at any cost and in the power of man over nature.
And finally, there are those who have the most influence among us today: the prophets of pessimism, who agree that we live in a miserable, positively criminal age, the worst of ages. Which provokes a double response from Popper: 1) He says that “the well-meaning enthusiasts who wish and feel the need to unify the West under the direction of an inspiring idea do not know what they are doing. They are not aware that they are playing with fire, that what attracts them is the totalitarian idea”. 2) He considers the pessimistic conception of our time wrong, based on the conviction that, "in the West, almost all of us would be willing to make any sacrifice to ensure peace on Earth, if only we could see the usefulness of the sacrifice for this end".
At this point, Popper asks again: what does the West believe in? His answer is descriptive: Westerners hate despotism, repression and force; we are against war and against any form of blackmail and, especially, against blackmail by the threat of war. We believe in freedom and that only freedom makes life worthy. And, although we sometimes doubt whether or not it is right to buy peace at the price of freedom, we know that it was never possible to defend freedom without taking risks.
In short, the West believes in personal freedom to think and to self-regulate one's own life and interests, and recognizes each person as a unique and unrepeatable subject of their own history, which begins and ends with them. Western culture is, therefore, an anthropocentric culture which, according to Paul Valéry, is based on Greek philosophy, Roman law and Christian theology, and, according to Xavier Zubiri, on Greek metaphysics, Roman law and the religion of 'Israel.
The end result was good. Popper affirms that, "despite everything, our age is the best of which we have historical knowledge, and that the type of society we live in in the West is, despite its shortcomings, the best that has existed so far". For this reason, and looking at the monument to the Unknown Soldier as a symbol of Western beliefs, Popper also sees it as a symbol of "our faith in the unknown common man".
