It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the more misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age ... and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. ... What they set themselves to achieve - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. ... This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another - and doubtless very different - St. Benedict.
-Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
The sad thing is the age of barbarism and darkness was that of Pagan Rome, while Christian Romania (aka "Byzantium") and Francia (aka Gothic/Frankish/Saxon Western Europe) were truly an era of light in Christ, where such concepts of civilization as the sanctity of human life, the dignity of women, chivalry, courtship, custom, political freedom from monarchic opression, Christian education, protection of the weak from the strong and opressive, and the like were finally fleshed out and put into practice.
The Teuton conquerors had a far higher morality than the rulers of classical Rome, as witnesses Tacitus and many others.
The distorting lense of the Renaissance and Classicism makes us miss the actual vision of Christendom triumphant, which lived and breathed so long as the Classic Pagan world and world view was vanquished into the "darkness" of "dark ages" by the lumen Christi.
As long as we are looking for salvation in the wrong place, things will continue to get worse for the west, as they have since 1453.
We can't continue to fear the triumphant Christendom and its civilization of the era AD 380 to AD 1453.