The following is a discussion about why America is in decline. It examines the philosophical underpinnings behind the breakdown of American society. Its explanation lies in our philosophical assumptions. I take the opposite view of modernity and assume that we can understand the world and accurately describe reality. Further, mankind is free. What we are experiencing is not the result of determinism, biological or social. It is not the result of so called systems of oppression or patriarchy. There is an oppressive system in the world today, but it is not the one so often talked about by the people who prattle on about race, class and gender. Oddly enough the people who talk constantly about the problems of white male heteronormative patriarchy got all of their talking points from two dead white heterosexual males, Marx and Freud. But this is very much getting ahead of ourselves. And the blaming of our problems on Marx and Freud alone does not really pinpoint the root of our bad philosophical assumptions. We will get to how they came from the root in good time. But, all of our problems flow logically from a freely chosen intellectual mistake that runs deeper than the manifestations of Marx and Freud.
It is hard to even have these conversations because of our tendency to believe that we represent the most advanced time in human history. The way in which many in the modern world wish to pour scorn on all of those that came before us, while remaining blind to our own moral failings, is perhaps one of our most incredible character flaws. One recent political commentator said it well when he stated that “the only good people that have ever lived are living right now”. His biting comment highlights the result of a culture that rejects the concept of sin and excuses itself from any guilt. It is easy to see why “no regrets” is so common, very few people are ready to examine their lives or to accept judgment of any kind. In doing this, we deny that we have ever made mistakes without having to seriously consider whether the things we have done are good or bad.
For the last 400 years every man has been his own judge and jury, a law unto himself. The outcome has been moral and social anarchy that threatens to tear us apart. Today we see cities on fire, relationships frayed, and an experiment in government “by the people, for the people” teetering. But none of this should be surprising. For many years we have been living in the brash confidence that we can be independent and that old traditions can be cast aside. Ancient wisdom was merely a shackle upon our lives. We, of course, are better off without any of that. Yet now at the height of living amongst the only good people in all of human history we find violence and hatred well beyond what one would expect from angels such as ourselves. What we're seeing are the symptoms of madness on a large scale. The reason for the madness is a growing inability to fully engaged with the realities of life by a certain portion of the population. And the ideas behind this view of the universe are spreading. It is their philosophy that, in cutting itself off from the mundane in life, seizes upon many noble ideas but ultimately perverts the good and seeks to dominate all who stand in the way. Their heaven on earth destruction cannot be stopped because they have ceased to engage with the feedback reality gives them. I do not wish to blame just one portion of the population, for to some degree all of us have imbibed this thinking, but some have gone much further than others, rejecting the traditions that at least held this philosophy from its fully destructive flowering.
We made an evil decision 400 years ago, with all subsequent carnage fueled by that master error. Our ancestors rejected the existence of absolute truth and universal morality, but this massive shift was accepted through an innocent sounding idea, “words have no meaning apart from what humans decide”. Since that fateful error, every generation has had a larger and larger number carried off by the belief that man could realize himself more fully if he just gave up on a belief in absolute truth. Man made truly free, had to be unshackled from the order that God created. And language had been the way in which humanity had been most enslaved. It started when God spoke Creation into existence and ordered it by the Word. In time the Word of God would be made flesh and manifest itself in Christ. And so, modern liberation from God came in the innocent sounding idea that words have no meaning.
This master error had predictable effects as its impact on language and logic seeped deeper into the minds of those who wanted to have nothing limit their pleasures. This occurred first in those who were wealthy and then it slowly filtered down into all of society as the Industrial Revolution brought prosperity to more and more people. Such a corrosive philosophy first works on one’s beliefs about reality, human nature and morality before it starts to boil over into personal behavior and then finally political beliefs. Politics is only a late manifestation of this more profound change, for it is altered only when the previous philosophical foundations have been fully eroded. Yet, contrary to modern marxists and deterministic scientists, the policies that we bring about through government are not solely the product of forces that are determined by society or environment. What is enacted in politics comes from the ideas that men hold. Our assumptions about the world and the kind of world we wish to see play the definitive role in shaping how our lives and our government are arranged. This is not to say that ideas are not obstructed by reality in any way, but that ideas set us on our course. A restoration of our culture depends on grappling with the master error that we have all accepted to some degree. We will need to reorient our thinking. As G.K. Chesterton said, “our main conclusion is that it is a fundamental point of view, a philosophy or religion which is needed, and not any change in habit or social routine. The things we need most for immediate practical purposes are all abstractions. We need a right view of the human lot, a right view of the human society; and if we were living eagerly and angrily in the enthusiasm of those things, we should, ipso facto, be living simply in the genuine and spiritual sense[1].”
[1] Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith). Heretics (p. 58). Kindle Edition.
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