How to Destroy a Civilisation

Saving the West : How to Destroy a Civilisation

Civilisations rise and fall, that is just history, but poignantly illustrated in Shelly's poem “Ozymandias”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

How or why particular historic civilisations fell I do not know, but I believe I do know one thing which can prove fatal. Something which is a clear and present danger for Western civilisations as we know them.

To start at the beginning consider morals.

How do we get them? Naturally as a Christian I will want to introduce the notion at some point that God is not only the best source of moral understanding, not even just the living example of them but also in his (OK English pronouns fail to do justice to a Triune, supra-gender Divine Being!) own moral character the one immutable standard of morals. But hold that thought for a moment. Moral virtues are common to pretty much all humans.

Not convinced? OK Abram and Sarai: Abram thinks when he goes into ancient Egypt that they will kill him to take his beautiful wife so he passes her off as his sister. At the end of the story Pharaoh lambastes Abram for this because, as he complains, it might have led him to commit the sin of adultery with Sarai. So there were definitely some strong moral ideals alive there!

So again I ask: How do humans get moral values?

Genetics? Possible, though I will argue against it. Spiritual afterglow of being created in the image of God ? – OK I like this one but let's leave it to one side for the moment. As part of our training from infancy? … Yes third time lucky! (see my post: Manners & Morals Pt. 1  )

In that post one of the things I say is that our frontal lobes are so well developed at learning even the most complex social skills that our responses become so quick and “effortless” that they seem instinctive. So we might be tempted to think morals are instinctive – or genetically inherited. But by comparison with the similar brain function required for social etiquette – which differs widely both over the planet and through history – which also seems instinctive – we can say that morals, even though much more comparable over human existence are learned.

I don't want to labour the point but any one who has raised children should remember how by nature babies are totally self-centred. Consideration for others has to be taught!

Here I want to introduce Friedrich Hayek again. This time from his last book “the Fatal Conceit”. In the opening section he talks about the origin of morals. You may be pleased to hear that he agrees with me that it is learnt not genetic, although he tries to do so without referring to God )

If I can boil down what Hayek says without losing too much it is this:

1. Humans are social beings: Philosophers like Locke and Hobbes went back to some imagined “solitary” primitive state. Hayek says, “Rubbish – a solitary human was soon a dead human! We depended on groups.

2. Group survival necessitated rules of behaviour for its members. If you like the idea of moral rules evolving then groups with rules that worked prospered: groups with rules that didn't work vanished. So rules that were effective in promoting group survival survived. Additionally individuals were taught to obey rules which possibly ran against their personal enjoyment or even survival because they could have neither of these without the group surviving!

3. Growth from tribes to extended civilisation brought refinements. The life of a large civilisation needed more refined moral rules. Again Hayek says that by a sort of “survival of the fittest” traditional moral rules became well fitted to maintaining such a civilisation.

4. This evolutionary quality to morals is important in another way: they are bigger than human “reason”. Any person or group who imagine that they can sit down and think up a new better set are seriously deluded.

4. One of the standard initial phases of socialism is to destroy the traditional morals. Yes they intend to replace these rules with others (which they have thought up) – but the consequence is that society will be harmed. In the case of modern Western societies the moral rules which have “evolved” over the millennia have been strongly influenced by Christian ideals and are not just essential to our societies functioning as they do, but are also “good” morals.

Personally I want to bring in the added complexity to the picture of the benign influence God exerts where humans respond to him aiding the evolution of “good” moral rules on one hand but also our “sinful” human nature that is constantly at work corrupting things and leading to worse moral rules emerging.

So what do we observe looking at our own countries?

More next week.