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The West has lost its virtue We have abandoned the taboos that held us together

Desperate Afghans cling to a US military plane leaving Kabul

Desperate Afghans cling to a US military plane leaving Kabul


December 29, 2021   7 mins

A century ago, as the Great War raged, Oswald Spengler wrote that “Western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion.” The Decline of the West, Spengler’s grand, ambitious, poetic theory of Western downfall — well underway, in his telling, by the time he began writing — has had its followers, detractors and imitators ever since. It has also, in recent years, had something of a renaissance.

Decline is in the air, mingling with the smoke of burning forests in Greece and the shocking footage coming out of Afghanistan. Much of what Spengler wrote about the West’s dissolution — which he predicted would make itself fully known in the 21st century — has proven prescient, and he hadn’t even heard of climate change or the Taliban. You would have to have a strong will — the kind which old Oswald admired — to deny, as nations angrily fragment, the gulf stream stutters, the supply chains choke up, that he might have been onto something.

But what is “the West”? It depends which tribe you ask. For a liberal, the West is the “Enlightenment” and everything that followed — democracy, human rights, individualism, and that dynamic duo, “science and reason”. For a conservative, it might signal a set of cultural values: traditional attitudes to family life and national identity, and probably broad support for free-market capitalism. And for the kind of post-modern leftist who currently dominates the culture, the West — assuming they concede it even exists — is largely a front for colonialism, empire, racism and all the other horrors we hear about daily through the official channels.

All of these things could be true at the same time, but each is also a fairly recent development. The West is a lot older than liberalism, leftism, conservatism or empire. It is at the same time a simpler, more ancient and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a particular religious story.

“There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church,” explained the medieval historian Christopher Dawson in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War Two. “Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.”

“The West”, in other words, was born from the telling of one sacred story — a garden, an apple, a fall, a redemption — which shaped every aspect of life: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe — its structure and meaning, and our place within it.

The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless. And when an old culture built around a sacred order dies, there will be lasting upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics to the level of the soul. The shape of everything — family, work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to the body to kin to duty — all of it will be up for grabs. Welcome to 2021.

Forty years ago this year, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued in his classic work After Virtue that the notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what “virtue” means, or why it should mean anything.

Macintyre’s favoured teacher at the time was Aristotle, not Jesus, but his critique of the Enlightenment and prediction of its ultimate failure was based on a clearsighted understanding of the mythic vision of medieval Christendom — and of the partial, empty and over-rational humanism with which Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace it. Macintyre believed that this failure was already clearly evident, but that society did not see it, because the monuments to the old sacred order were still standing, like Roman statues after the legions had departed.

To illustrate his thesis, Macintyre used the example of the taboo. This word was first recorded by Europeans in the journals of Captain Cook, in which he recorded his visits to Polynesia. Macintyre explains:

“The English seamen had been astonished at what they took to be the lax sexual habits of the Polynesians and were even more astonished to discover the sharp contrast with the rigorous prohibition placed on such conduct as men and women eating together. When they enquired why men and women were prohibited from eating together, they were told that the practice was taboo. But when they enquired further what taboo meant, they could get little further information.”

Further research suggested that the Polynesian islanders themselves were not really sure why these prohibitions existed either; indeed, when taboos were abolished entirely in parts of Polynesia a few decades later, there were few immediately obvious consequences. So, were such prohibitions meaningless all along?

Not quite. Macintyre reminds us that, at first, taboos “are embedded in a context which confers intelligibility upon them”. But if they are deprived of that context, “they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions,” especially “when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten”. Once a society reaches the stage where the reason for its taboos has been forgotten, one shove is all it takes to start a domino effect that will knock them all down. Macintyre believed that this stage had already been reached in the West.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? When the taboos were abolished in Polynesia, reported Macintyre, an unexpected “moral vacuum” was created, which came to be filled by “the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries”. In this case, a certain colour of Christianity had stepped into the breach created by the death of a previously sacred story. The end of the taboos had not brought about some abstract “freedom”; rather, it had stripped the culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but now that the formal architecture was gone too, there was an empty space waiting to be filled — and nature abhors a vacuum.

It seems to me that we are now at this point in much of the West. Since at least the 1960s, our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years many of the remaining monuments have been — often literally — torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.

In After Virtue, Macintyre explains what happened next. The Enlightenment project of the 18th century was an attempt to build a “morality” (a word that had not existed in this sense before that time) loosed from theology. It was the project of constructing a wholly new human being After God, in which a new, personal moral sense — no longer eternal in nature, or accountable to any higher force — would form the basis of the culture and the individual.

Did it work? In a word: no. Post-Enlightenment “morality”, said Macintyre, was no substitute for a higher purpose or meta-human sense of meaning. If the correct path for society or the individual was based on nothing more than an individual’s personal judgement, then who or what was to be the final arbiter?

Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it, society would fall — as it has — into “emotivism”, relativism and ultimately disintegration. If every culture is cored around a sacred order — whether Christian, Islamic or Hindu, the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin — then the collapse of that order will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture it supported. There is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force we take our instruction from. The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — “the people” or “liberty” or “democracy” or “progress.”

I’m all for democracy (the real thing, please, not the corporate simulacra that currently squats in its place), but the dethroning of the sovereign — Christ — who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order did not lead to universal equality and justice. It led — via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler — to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything — from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present — with no centre, no truth and no direction — we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the self and to the power of money; broken worshippers before the monstrous idol of Progress. “In the ethics of the West,” wrote Spengler, “everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant.”

After Virtue ends with its author declaring that the task we face today is similar to that set for those living through the collapse of Rome: not to “shore up the imperium” but to start building anew. Macintyre famously concluded that the West was waiting for “a new — and doubtless very different — St Benedict.” That was forty years ago, and we are still waiting, but it’s not a bad way to see the challenge we face. Despite the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, the post-Christian West is not at all short on ideas, arguments, insults, ideologies, stratagems, conflicts or world-saving machines. But it is very short on saints; and how we need their love, wisdom, discipline and stillness amidst the chaos of the times. Maybe we had better start looking at how to embody a little of these qualities ourselves.

This piece was originally published in August.


Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist and essayist. His latest novel Alexandria is published by Faber. He also has a Substack: The Abbey of Misrule.


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Martin Bollis
Martin Bollis
2 years ago

Because it’s so apposite to this piece, I’ll repost a quote I put in yesterday’s thread about smoking.

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”
G.K. Chesterton

Whether you’re reserving the right to tell others not to smoke, or inject a vaccine, or wear a mask, or apologise for the sins of your fathers, or share toilets with people of the opposite sex, “consideration for others” will be the virtue wielded.

The hierarchy of which “others” are the most worthy, is what we in the West will fight each other about in this century; until we’ve weakened ourselves enough for somebody to put an end to our squabbling.

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
2 years ago
Reply to  Martin Bollis

I wasn’t aware of this quote by Chesterton, but it’s a good one. ‘Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless’ – that is me to a tee.

Richard Ross
Richard Ross
2 years ago
Reply to  Prashant Kotak

Assuming there isn’t a facetious undertone to your comment, your thoughts shine, for me at least, like a diamond here. The whole point of good writing (thanks, UnHerd) and our thinking about it should be to eventually come to: “that’s me, to a tee”. And then to grow.

Jeff Butcher
Jeff Butcher
2 years ago

The rot set in at the Reformation with its emphasis on the individual. However this was only because the Catholic Church had become so thoroughly corrupt. If there is continued uncontrolled inward migration to Europe the continent will eventually become an Islamic rather than Christian one and Paul’s question will be answered by Mohammed rather than Jesus.

Bob Taylor
Bob Taylor
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

I’m so sick of the Catholic libel that the rot began with the Reformation because of its “emphasis on the individual.” The Reformation’s emphasis was the Bible as sole authority for faith and practice, not “the individual.”

Kevin Casey
Kevin Casey
2 years ago
Reply to  Bob Taylor

Not quite correct. The reformation did indeed make the individual more preeminent when they rejected the Catholic Church as the sole arbiter of biblical interpretation and instead replaced it with the individual as his own personal “pope”.

Bob Taylor
Bob Taylor
2 years ago
Reply to  Kevin Casey

Please cite sources for this. I’m referring to historic figures of the Reformation. I’m unaware that any of them said anything remotely like that.

Some of the neo – Pentecostals in the 20th century may have said something akin to that, the “I have a word from the Lord” **** which did have its vogue in the last forty years of the 20th century, but I’d be shocked to learn that any of the Reformers said/wrote it.

Kevin Casey
Kevin Casey
2 years ago
Reply to  Bob Taylor

Also “a history of Christianity” Diarmaid Macculloch

Kevin Casey
Kevin Casey
2 years ago
Reply to  Kevin Casey

It’s basic history of the reformation. Google Martin Luther and sola scriptura and for more
https://raymundtamayo.com/protestantism-and-currents/did-martin-luther-believe-in-sola-scriptura.html

Colin Elliott
Colin Elliott
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

The Reformation was a righteous reaction against the worldliness of the established church. OK, worldliness soon reappeared, triggering yet more dissent, but I hardly think that it was a watershed between ‘unrotten’ and rot.

Charles Hedges
Charles Hedges
2 years ago
Reply to  Jeff Butcher

In Britain , the Black Death of 1347-49 and the Peasants Revolt of 1381 where many serfs worked the land of the monastic order prepared the ground for support of the Reformation. The Dissolution of the Monasteries was supported by those who suffered under mean monastic orders. The burning by Mary of 287 Protestants in 11 years, more than the rest of Europe and the fear of the Inquisition carried by The Armada of 1588 alienated support for Rome. Guido Fawkes attempting to blow up Parliament in 1605 cemented anti Catholic opinion.
The centralising of powers under Louis XIV and the conversion of James II to Rome created a reaction  institutionalised anti Roman catholic attitudes in Britain. The problem is that The Divine Right of Kings supported by the Papacy is alien to the Anglo Saxon concept of consultation and consent as practised by the kings. Barnes Wallis said the English genius for invention was due to our individuality which has to be prevented where the monarch rules by the Divine Right of Kings because they can never be wrong. Papal infallibility is the same as communist apparatchik saying the party never makes mistakes and these actions inhibit innovation.
The Industrial Revolution was largely a product of well educated craftsmen from Dissenting backgrounds who were free; they were not inhibited from innovation and profiting from it. Innovation will be slowed down if not prevented if permission is needed from bureaucrats employed by a monarch who rules because of the Divine Right of Kings. Bureaucrats may have personal reasons for not allowing innovation.
In Britain an act or decision is often the result of many years or even centuries, it is Evolution applied to the body politic. Britain became a powerful nation  because it was a is a nation of free born individuals who profited from innovation and where power rested on a navy not an army. The Royal Navy was much cheaper than an army so taxes were lower and there was no armed force by which the King or Parliament could impose it’s will on the people. Parliament and the monarch had to rule via consultation and consent

AC Harper
AC Harper
2 years ago

‘Decline is in the air’.
No. Times are far from the worst they have ever been. I’d argue that the first blow starting ‘The Death of God’ (see Wikipedia) predates the Enlightenment, or the Reformation but instead stems from the ineffectiveness of The Church in dealing with the Great Pestilence (aka The Black Death).
The Great Pestilence shattered the social order in Christendom in slow motion, to receive further blows from the Reformation and later Enlightenment. A decline that has been rolling out over seven hundred years.
To bang on about current events is short sighted and concentrates on a tree, not the wood.

beancounting42
beancounting42
2 years ago

Very good piece and a wake up call. The West is sleepwalking through its decline and fall, our consciences rarely troubled by the huge vacuum that is created in when it believes it need not acknowledge its Creator.

Last edited 2 years ago by beancounting42
Hosias Kermode
Hosias Kermode
2 years ago

All may not be lost. The writer of this article is a recent convert to an Orthodox version of Christianity. During this pandemic, I have met many others on the same journey, feeling the tug of this great religion, often after decades away. People realise they need more. Our own lives have revealed that a morality based on personal rights is bankrupt at best and capable of downright evil at worst. As for “science”, it surely can only take us so far, given the limits of the human brain and the extraordinary complexity of even the smallest systems in our universe. Which isn’t to belittle honestly conducted scientific endeavour at all. Where would we be without it? But religion and science are not mutually exclusive. One encompasses the other. Perhaps our mistake been to assume that those great stories and spiritual texts were meant to be taken literally. The world wasn’t created in six days or Eve formed from Adam’s rib. But as Jordan Peterson among others has argued, these are ways of exploring some of the essentials of human existence through story. His Biblical series consists of difficult lectures, some two hours long. It has generated tens of millions of views worldwide. Why would this be, unless we had some kind of need for or at least fascination with the message being presented? Another mistake has been to assume – Dawkins style – that if the Christian story is not literally true, then the only alternative is the darkness of nothing at all. We cannot know what more there is. Surrounded on all sides by mystery, the right response is surely awe. No one has yet come up with a better, more powerful inspiration for how to act, how to face the world and make any kind of sense of it, than the love and sacrifice that are the essence of the Christian story. Yes many terrible things have been done in the name of Christ. As they have always been done by human beings in the name of their gods. The essence of Christianity remains untainted by them. You can mock me. Or you may go read Matthew 6:25 onward for starters. King James version is the best if you care about the beauty of the language.

LCarey Rowland
LCarey Rowland
2 years ago

About two and a half millennia ago, the prophet Daniel outlined what would later become the pattern for modern worship of leaders instead worship of God.
From Daniel, chapter 11:

“Those who have insight among the people will give understanding to the many, yet they will fall by sword and by flame, by captivity and by plunder for many days.

“Now when they fall they will be granted a little help, and many will join with them in hypocrisy. Some of those have insight will fall, in order to refine, purge and make them pure until the end time; because it is still to come at the appointed time.

“When the king will do as he pleases, and he will exalt and magnify himself above every god and will speak monstrous things against the God of gods; and he will prosper until the indignation is finished, for that which is decreed will be done.

“He will show no regard for the gods of his fathers or for the desire of women (no respect for what women want), nor will he show regard for any other god; for he will magnify himself above them all.”But instead, he will honor a god of fortresses, a god whom his fathers did not know.”

In the course of history, adolf hitler became the embodiment of that beastly leader described above.
Although the Allied armies disposed of the reprobate feuhrer, his example will become the model for future leaders who covet their own power above all others, as they will go to any length–honoring the god of fortresses/forces– to extinguish all that is decent and humane in our decaying civilization for the sake of glorifying themselves.
The alternative, for each person who is willing to reject their invitation to join into this world’s greatest experiment in depravity . . . . the alternative is to turn to the God of Compassion, mercy and justice, Jesus Christ.
This Jesus is the man who walked among us two millennia ago, who showed us the way of truth, mercy and compassion–the way that places us beyond the spiritual reach of those who will dedicate themselves to the fulfillment of depravations of the god of forces.

Philip Stott
Philip Stott
2 years ago

This has been the most interesting article I have read this year. I thank you

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
2 years ago

“The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos”

yawn….

If this essay is, “Best of 2021Our favourite pieces from the last year of UnHerd”

then please print “Worst of 2021, Our poorest pieces from the last year of Unherd” and maybe there will be one I think good.

Samuel Ross
Samuel Ross
2 years ago
Reply to  Galeti Tavas

This article was written masterfully. If you do not or can not see this, it is you who lack mastery in English and logical thought, my friend.