What is the primary cause of the decline of Western civilisation?

Somebody who read my previous post here asked this question.  

In that post I said that the main cause was loss of faith in God and denial of transcendent reality, but there are other factors ranging from the hedonism and greed of the materially comfortable, to probable degeneration of human stock resulting from the preservation of those who in previous times would have been weeded out by natural selection (this is a simple fact, like it or not), to demonic interference and corruption which we are too feeble to perceive or resist, and so on. Many of these are connected. However, I see a principal, not primary but secondary, cause as something which is regarded as a great virtue (which is precisely the problem), and that is compassion. Or rather, it is fake compassion, the appearance of compassion, for this is certainly not the real thing as understood spiritually since real compassion is allied to wisdom and love of God. And this version has neither of those as it is not truly and intelligently felt but thoughtlessly sentimentalised.  

Our fake compassion is extended to everything equally regardless of what it is. In fact, its perverse nature means it is increasingly extended to the less worthy rather than the more so since, paradoxically as it may appear, but is not when you understand what is behind it, its real motive is destruction of the good. This may not be a conscious motive of those who respond to it but certainly is of those who are using and exploiting it

What are the criteria for judging what is more or less worthy? To understand that you have to see reality as spiritual which, of course, it is. Then you will see there is a hierarchy of truth, goodness and beauty. What corresponds to these in their higher aspects has greater merit than what corresponds to them on a lower level. This does not mean that the lower is less deserving in its own way but it has to be seen as lower or else it will obscure and even destroy, in this world, not really, of course, the higher.

This is what our fake compassion is doing. It is destroying truth, goodness and beauty. It is being used to level down and reduce the higher to the lower in the name of unity. A culture arises because it seeks to manifest the higher. It sinks when it refuses to distinguish between the higher and the lower or acknowledge that there is any such distinction. It can be a delicate balancing act to be able to perceive the higher but not use that to override the validity of the lower, and the fact that in the past we have sometimes failed in that is being exploited in order to eradicate the higher altogether. But real compassion allied to wisdom would be able to do this without any difficulty.

When you no longer have the idea of God as the centrally organising fact of existence you have to replace it with something else. Today that something else is the abstract notion of humanity, and humanity, abstractly considered, is regarded as just one thing with no distinctions within it allowed. It is seen in purely material terms and so everything is equal. There is no better or worse except insofar as better corresponds to this idea and worse is what goes against it. Compassion is defined as treating all humans and their cultural achievements in the same way, and anything that resists this tyranny (which is what it is) becomes branded as hateful.

It is easy to look at past generations and say they lacked compassion because often they did in the way we understand it today. But in our zeal for imagined progress we have forgotten the actual purpose of life in this world which does not exist of and for itself but as the means to know life more fully in a higher dimension of being. Any supposed compassion which ignores this is a false compassion which will cause more harm than good. And that means, more often than not, it is just an excuse to feel good about oneself. The greatest teacher and exemplar of love there has ever been, the one from whom we actually get our idea of compassion in the West, said that his kingdom was not of this world. We should not forget this and the implications of it.