Why have there been no great men since 1950?

Great Britain has been going through a new dark age since 1950 in the arts, ideas and writing. A fall-off much more striking than the simultaneous diminution in our political power. I recently reread this wonderful article by Andrew Thornton-Norris on this subject which I highly recommend.

I think the same is true of Western Europe (and Eastern Europe too under Communism and then the post-Communist explosion of a kind of capitalism). And in all the rich countries,  and in the world in general the story sounds pretty similar.  

Please correct me if I am wrong. 

What is also interesting is that I have never seen this phenomenon remarked on except in this article.

And what are the reasons for this sudden steep decline?

In the West, we seem no longer to do great men. And please do not mention Mrs Thatcher, Martin Luther King or Ronald Reagan. Who after 1950 compares with Keynes, Jung, Joyce, Laurence, Churchill, Evelyn Waugh, Proust? Or the painters like Picasso, Matisse, etc, etc?

Add to that loss of religious faith and loss of faith in Western civilisation as superior to other civilisations and you have have decadence, yet we had technological innovation and the amazing post-war economic miracle.  For everyone, rich and poor, life in Western Europe was better than it had ever been. The Communist Eric Hobsbawm referred to the period 1950-1973 as Western Europe's Golden Age, but things continued to improve since. Even in Communist Eastern Europe between the death of Stalin and 1989, living standards rose slowly and war was avoided.

They were the best of times, they were the worst of times.

From the article I linked to, I particularly liked and completely agree with this aphorism of Maurice Cowling's,

...secularisation so far from involving liberation from religion, has involved merely liberation from Christianity and the establishment in its place of a modern religion whose advocates so much assume its truth that they do not understand that it is a religion to which they are committed.

One of my greatest regrets is that university I did not get to know and sit at the feet of Maurice Cowling (and Edward Norman and the Peterhouse people). Their kind of conservatism appealed to me, even though I did not like their Thatcherite conclusions they drew from it. I found Margaret Thatcher's ideas repugnant and simply completely  uninteresting. I was a romantic. She has been proven right about a lot of things but she was, at best, to quote Sellars & Yeatman's description of the Roundheads, Right but Repulsive.