The Patriot Post® · A Civilization Losing Its Moral Compass

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about why we are where we are.

Well, that’s not completely true — I have been thinking about it for a very long time. It is just that when you reach a certain age and begin to consider there are more years behind you than ahead, quiet thinking becomes less of a hobby and more of an obsession.

Long-time readers will remember I have written how convinced I am that supernatural forces are at play, that the aura surrounding our conflicts indicates we are witnessing a faceoff between good (God) and evil (Satan). I’m a believer, so my mind being locked in on that wouldn’t be a real surprise.

But I am aware that I look at philosophy through a Christian lens, so I do pray for wisdom to see beyond my biases and blinders — and it seems that God does grant it, albeit in flashes of insight rather than doing what I ask and just handing me the whole book.

I’ve read Friedrich Nietzsche and discovered the Scottish American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (MacIntyre passed away in May of last year) when we were living in Scotland, where I read his 2007 update of his 1981 book, After Virtue.

People tend to misunderstand Nietzsche’s “God is dead” comment by taking it at face value, but his warning was a bit more pointed — famously warning that once Christianity lost cultural authority, Europe would become irrational and inhumane — it would become morally unmoored. Without transcendent standards, moral language survives but becomes raw power dressed up as compassion. He predicted the rise of what he called slave morality: resentment reframed as justice.

MacIntyre argued that while modern societies still use moral vocabulary (“rights,” “justice,” “fairness”), they have lost any shared understanding of what those words mean. What’s left is emotivism: moral claims become expressions of preference backed by social pressure.

I’ve also written about Immanuel Kant’s idea that, for the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God’s presence empirically. When you strip philosophy down to its essentials, it’s really about three things: whether God exists, whether we have souls, and whether we are truly free. Together, they answer the question of how we should live. If we are free, if God exists, and if there is something beyond this life, then our choices carry real weight. Human reason seems built for this purpose — not just to understand the world, but to guide our moral behavior.

I have also been tinkering with Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics — that the behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies — and how it explains what we are seeing in the EU and UK: the weird dichotomy of secularization of old, white Europe and the UK coupled with the importation of new, brown Third World Islamization, the latter not really being a big fan of Western civilization.

Now take all four of those ideas and put them into the context that I have been struggling with for about a decade — the idea that what we are living through is a complete shift in moral context and the tried-and-true moral basis of Western civilization’s success is being replaced with … well, something else. Right now, it just seems more anti-Western than anything I recognize as civilization.

Historically, Western civilization — rooted in Christianity layered atop Greco-Roman thought — held that moral truth is objective, individuals are responsible for cultivating virtue, and justice flows from doing what is right rather than merely equalizing outcomes: first define the good, then pursue justice. Over the last century, that order has steadily reversed. Today, many institutions operate on the assumption that whatever feels equitable or balances group outcomes is therefore moral, even when achieving that “fairness” requires deception, coercion, collective punishment, or the abandonment of long-standing norms.

Trying to frame it a little tighter, the best I can do is to say I believe Western civilization is quietly moving from a moral system grounded in virtue and objective good to one grounded in outcomes and perceived fairness. When fairness is severed from moral truth, it becomes a tool of power rather than justice.

And that, I think, is the heart of it. We are not merely arguing policy or politics — we are watching a civilization decide whether it still believes in moral truth at all. A culture that abandons virtue for outcomes, truth for narrative, and conscience for consensus does not drift gently into decline; it slides into something colder and harder, where power masquerades as compassion and coercion is baptized as care.

Once “fairness” replaces goodness, literally anything becomes permissible in its name. I think about the rise of collectivism in the West and how Friedrich Hayek noted that collectivism is the death of truth, and how the committed collectivist must be willing to do anything, even things that shock the conscience.

To me, it seems the question before us is not whether this experiment will fail — it already has and is — but whether enough people still remember what good actually means to resist the change. History proves that civilizations don’t die from external enemies first. They die when they forget why they were worth defending in the first place.