The decline of the West began not only with the rise and elaboration of Eliot’s bleak, “Unreal” cities, delinked from the soil and beset by crowd frenzy, but with the birth of modernism itself, both of which are themes in The Waste Land.[56] Modernism signaled indifference to (and independence from) the past, leading toward what the Marxists called “progress” and away from sacred traditions with their self-imposed limits, a process which encouraged disintegration and extremism.
