It has often been said that all political arguments are fundamentally religious in nature. In other words, our political opinions ultimately rely on our belief in an afterlife and our adherence to the rules that guide us there. It’s no coincidence that both politics and religion seek to dictate human behavior; the former via a legal framework, of course, and the latter via a moral one. These frameworks are deeply intertwined, as is evident in the overlap of the Ten Commandments and the Bill of Rights as well as the belief, best espoused in the Declaration of Independence, that our rights come from God rather than government. Until recently this legal and moral double helix served as the backbone of Western Civilization and ushered in the most prosperous era in human history. Yet despite the immense progress made possible by Judeo-Christian morality, historically and philosophically ignorant progressives despise its foundations and will stop at nothing to burn it to the ground, literally.
In their defense, common sense isn’t exactly their bailiwick. They bemoan a supposedly unjust system from $1200 MacBook Airs while drinking $7 free trade espressos, raging against the very machine that has afforded them a higher quality of life than 99 percent of humanity. Unlike their ancestors they seek to destroy rather than to create, a nihilism wholly antithetical to the Western ascendancy of the last few centuries.
Hence why today’s political arguments are little more than dressed up versions of the debate over our spiritual foundations; nearly every issue currently tearing America, and the larger West, apart boils down to faith. Take abortion, where the right is anchored by the eternal truth that all life is God’s creation and therefore sacred, versus the left’s egomaniacal contention that the same humans who treat their faces as pincushions are capable of adjudicating what is best for their bodies. Or the current insanity surrounding sex and gender, in which conservatives’ case rests firmly on the belief that God created man and woman to complement one another and populate the planet, and such authority transcends our own neuroses. Even debates around energy and agriculture are centered on the Biblical principle of man’s dominion over the Earth, a point of contention responsible for our differing philosophies around fossil fuels and the consumption of animal proteins. In short, the right’s belief in the permanence of objective truth is in stark opposition to the left’s more subjective “progress,” prompting their absurd, yet increasingly popular, notion that it’s the West’s Judeo-Christian foundations that are holding society back. Abrahamic religions and other “Stone Age philosophies” are not only cruel, but also prevent us from realizing our full potential. From human rights to scientific advances, traditional faith is a yoke on the neck of humanity, or so we are told. Once free from these moral chains, there’s no limit to what we can achieve. Flying cars, cancer cures, you name it, the progressives’ own, more sophisticated Garden of Eden is just around the corner. But judging from its performance so far, the left’s Godless moral compass is a poor substitute for its Abrahamic predecessors. In fact, it is leading Western society straight off a cliff. We are a mere six decades from the modern left’s ideological genesis, the Sixties, and the bills are piling up faster than TikTok can create new genders. As our focus on faith has declined, so too has our focus on country, community, and family, with obvious and tragic consequences. For starters, the lust for altered states of consciousness borne out of the Summer of Love has had tragic results, as drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death among Americans age 15 to 49.
And though the liberals of yesteryear made massive strides in the arena of racial equality, their ideological progeny have managed to reverse those advances at the speed of light. Sixty-three years after Ruby Bridges became the first African American to attend an all-white public school in the South, students of color are once again being segregated from their white counterparts, only this time by choice. Equality, it seems, is so 1970; superiority is the cause du jour. And the hard-won scientific advances of the last few decades? Fuhgedabouit! Faith in science has plummeted as the most basic biological realities are ignored or considered bigoted by our so-called “experts.” While any Amazon or Sahara bro can tell you exactly what a woman is, the most educated professors in Massachusetts stutter at the question. So much for “progress.” It’s a decline not only manifesting itself culturally, but physically as well, as is evident in the ruination of our urban centers. An unholy trinity of drugs, crime and prosecutorial leniency is morphing our once-great metropolises into Gotham. As anyone who has recently visited San Francisco, New York City, or Seattle knows, these historic engines of enterprise are likely lost beyond repair. Ludicrous left-wing policies, such as defunding the police and the abandonment of cash bail, are stocking these labyrinths of left-wing largesse with violent offenders. East and West Coast urbanites are predictably fleeing for red state relief (one can only hope they leave their politics behind). Europe is faring little better. The world’s most progressive continent is now roiling from violent crime waves after decades of unchecked immigration. And the continent’s reverence for Mother Earth over its Christian heritage is driving the birthplace of the Enlightenment back to primitivity, as the lust for “green energy” has led to a Third World-style crisis. These failed progressive experiments have done little to alter the mission of our secular, and let’s face it, Marxist global institutions. Rather they are emboldened, bringing their latest obsession with Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance, or ESG, to bear on that most hallowed institution of Western wealth, the markets. Judging from the collapses of Sri Lanka, FTX, and Silicon Valley Bank, we are in for a terrible ride. It’s all trickle-down Rousseau, and it’s all terrible.
Human beings, it appears, are incapable of governing themselves absent some higher moral authority.
Today’s most popular atheists, such as Sam Harris, would have us believe otherwise, but they’d be wrong. Man is perfectly capable of being moral on his own, they preach, and without all of those icky, uncomfortable restrictions prescribed by the faiths of old.
It’s such an obviously absurd notion because we all know from our own shortcomings that humans are fallible, and fallible beings are poor guides on the quest to what is good and just. Is there anything more hideous and absurd than the belief that man, with all his selfish motivations and monstrous instincts, is the peak of being? The streets of San Francisco perhaps, but that’s about it.
And we may just be getting started.
The culture wars show no signs of slowing down and progressivism, like technology, appears to be autocatalytic. In other words, the further it progresses, the faster it progresses.
Just look at the lunacy produced by the abortion and trans movements over the last few years, and consider what the next five, ten, and twenty have in store if we continue to treat our current predicament as politics as usual.
The future will be a lot of things, but bright isn’t one of them.
As with most rootless philosophies, when taken to its conclusion modern liberalism is doomed to repeat the afflictions it was supposedly concocted to cure. From segregation to scientific progress to Sun worship, we are moving backwards.
The reason is simple: whereas the traditional religions that form the pillars of Western Civilization teach modesty, temperance, and respect, society’s new godless faith stresses self-fulfillment, debauchery, and chaos, and as such will always lead back to our worst impulses.
And when such obvious regression is considered progress by vast swaths of society, perhaps we are getting exactly what we deserve.