The aim of bourgeois ethics, to eliminate all forms of death and impose the value of life, without qualification, could only take root where biological death was actually seen as undesirable. Of course, traditional societies attach strong meaning to death, poverty or sickness; but the exalting of biological life as the supreme value is inhuman and, by its qualitative density, destroys the very meaning of existence. The West, by disenchanting the world, has made life on this earth into the value par excellence. When you no longer have eternity before you, life becomes an anxious struggle against time. Earthly time may become infinite, but this infiniteness only gives unlimited scope to the anxiety of modern man. The infinite accumulation of works is a phantasmagorical substitute for immortality. This obsessive fight against time, disregarding the enjoyment of the present moment, is characteristic of Western man.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) pp. 55-56