Rise and Fall

What can we do to stop the fall?

There certainly seems to be justification for the view that Western civilization, and particularly our American version of it, has had a good run but is slowly (and sometimes in rapid spurts), is coming apart.

To understand the “coming apart” part, it would seem that understanding why there was ever a “together” part is important.

It is certainly not the first time such a thing was considered.

In the mid-twentieth century, British historian Arnold Toynbee, writing in his 12 volume “Study of History”, cataloged twenty-two civilizations that grew out of societies that had arisen and evolved over the past sixty centuries toward dominance of their own “known worlds,” or stalled in isolation and fell into obscurity. The interesting commonality is that each saw its foundation in a religious or cosmological outlook that shaped its internal cohesion through the form of the life of a society, its style of life, moral taste, form of government and spirit of laws.

The cosmology, the bringing together of the natural sciences in an effort to understand the physical universe as a unified whole, of Western civilization was arguably in the form of religion. The art, literature, culture, and enduring ideas that emerged from the eastern Mediterranean basin in the centuries before the birth of Christ, through the Middle Ages, and that ultimately took modern shape after the Renaissance, all had a common belief system anchoring them. The ancient Greeks and classical Romans had pagan gods, many of whom were virtually identical under different names, and Christianity was the first great monotheistic religion – but all were fundamental in the way humankind understood and explained the natural (and supernatural) world around them.

Many of these civilizations, in the throes of their decline, began to curse their gods for the misfortune that had befallen them - and in that abandonment, erased one, if not the, most important bond that held them together. Some were overcome by the religion of a conquering civilization, some just grew tired of the demands made upon them by their gods, and failing to reap the benefits of the gods protection of prosperity simply gave up.

It seems interesting that while America isn’t faced with some overwhelming conquering force that worships some foreign god (we are not under direct attack by any Islamic country), we seem to be giving up our cosmology to the absence of any god, or perhaps more accurately, anointing ourselves as gods. Some will argue that “science”, of the kind of St. Anthony of Fauci, or government, ala every progressive in Congress, are vying for the job as top banana, but in the end, both of those are simply representations and extensions of man.

Several years ago, Pew Research Center did a global survey of religiosity, and it probably comes as no surprise that in that survey, Muslim countries were the most religious and the old European countries were the least. There was also a correlation to the wealth of those countries, the richer the countries were, the less religious they are – with America representing the greatest exception. America was slightly less religious than Lebanon or Turkey.

It seems clear that if the premise that jettisoning the common cosmology is the death knell of Western civilization, America is the only force holding it together.

On October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan delivered his famous “A Time for Choosing” speech in which he said:

“You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

It should not be lost that Reagan was referencing the Soviet threat and the spectre of godless communism the USSR represented. Today, we face another of those godless challenges in the form of China (a country that finished dead last on the scale of religiosity with a score of 97% no religious belief).

Will America fall and take Western civilization down with it?

I can’t say. The Magic 8-Ball says, “Outlook Not So Good.”

Toynbee’s analysis of 6,000 years of human civilization seems to argue against us reversing course.

It is hard to understate the horrors that await if we don’t. France underwent the Reign of Terror as their churches and cathedrals were stripped of God and repurposed as “temples of knowledge”.

But there is always the chance we might make it – America plays its best game when it is the underdog.

People always ask me what we can do.

The best answer I can give is in Reagans voice – we must do all that can be done.