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I think the two world wars together were the end of an epoch. The way the west saw herself before, the way she thought about her artwork, her place in history, her religion, etc. changed pretty radically starting right around the world wars. In the before times, it was just simply taken for granted that the West was the civilized part of the world and that our ideas were simply better. Our religion (which was either Catholic or high Protestant) was true and to be spread, we were going to science the fuck out of pretty much everything and build utopia.
The thing is that following the two world wars, we gradually gave up on all of that. Our ideas like democracy, limited government, western philosophy, and the modern scientific method were all, one by one, discredited. We are quite literally the first culture I’m aware of that worries that our kids are too in love with their own civilization. That worries that our kids are reading too much of our own literature.
Now cards completely on the table, I’m more of a western chauvinist than anything. I look at what the west has achieved in the last 500 or so years, and I think it deserves very high praise. 500 years ago, we would be having this discussion via letters delivered by horse and buggy. And that would have been anywhere on the planet. Our philosophy and science is the bedrock on which all of the technology that allows people to argue on the internet (without being arrested), allows people to live so well that most people expect to live into their eighties and childbirth is generally safe, allows us to visit the moon and build giant space telescopes. To lose this not only means slowing progress, but possibly losing the ability to keep the progress made.
I can see this in the context of western Europe (France and Britain in particular) but I don't think it holds in regards to the US. Victory in World War II isn't the end of an epoch for so as much as it is a culmination. The path we set out upon back in the mid 19th century has been shown to be the correct one.
There can be no doubt. For a glorious moment we were both the city on the hill, and the Lord's terrible swift sword.
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