If today can be seen as equivalent to third-century BCE Greece then our society is currently in decline, and I fear that this will happen if we lose our faith. Nevertheless, I have tried in The Great Partnership to find common ground with atheists, serious atheists, with Nietzsche and with others.
There is a passage that seems to me highly relevant to our current situation. Will Durant, an American historian writing between the 1930s and the 1960s, published an 11-volume work entitled The Story of Civilisation. In his younger days Durant wanted to be a priest, but he lost his faith and became instead one of the world's greatest students of the history of civilisation. In Volume V he says something that I believe strikes a chord with where we are today:
A certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilisation; at its height it gives people that unity of morals and belief that seem so favourable to statesmanship and art. Religion ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For as knowledge goes or alters continually, it clashes with mythology and theology which change with geological leisureliness. In other words science moves faster than rabbis and priests do, does that makes sense? They just travel faster so we can't keep up. Priestly control of arts and letters is then felt as a galling shackle or hateful barrier and intellectual history takes on the character of a conflict between science and religion. Institutions that were first in the hands of the clergy, like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce tend to escape from ecclesiastical control and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology, and after some hesitation the moral code allied with it. Literature and philosophy become anti-clerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason, and falls to a paralysing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos. And life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and weary wealth. In the end, a society and its religion tend to fall together like body and soul in a harmonious death.
This was written in the early 1950s, but anyone who has ever studied the history of civilisations, whether it be the 14th-century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun or the 18th-century philosopher Giambattista Vico, or even atheists like John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell, has come to this conclusion: individuals may live good lives without religion — the moral sense is part of what makes us human — but a society never can, and morality is quintessentially a social phenomenon. It is that set of principles, practices and ideals that bind us together in a collective enterprise. The market and the state may be driven by the pursuit of interests but societies are framed by something larger and more expansive, by a shared vision of the common good. Absent this and societies begin to fragment. People start thinking of morality as a matter of personal choice. The sense of being bound together — the root meaning of "religion" — in a larger enterprise starts to atrophy and social cohesion is lost. The West was made by what is nowadays called the Judeo-Christian heritage which gave it its unique configuration of values and virtues. Lose that and we will lose Western civilisation as we have known it for the better part of two millennia.
- The New Intolerance
- Democracy in Danger: The Origins of European Technocracy
- New Poetry
- Spain and the Conquest of China
- New Poetry — Fred Agonistes
- New Poetry
- Second-Family Man
- Five New Poems
- The Mythology of Decline
- An Exchange: Toepfer and the Holocaust
- Manhattan Elegy
- Iliad!
- Old Man Failing
- Dad's Gay
- Benedict XVI and the Future of the West
- New Poems
- The End of the Dance
- History Lesson
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