Western Civilization, as many have pointed out, has lost its way. People have lost meaning and purpose, and there are no Great Goals for us to reach for. The result has been a slow-motion civilizational decay and necrosis, the premature death of living tissue. We see this across society, from crashing birth rates to people eagerly sterilizing themselves and their own children.
The most common explanation is that the collapse in civilizational mojo comes as a result of decadence. I think this is part of the answer, but decadence may actually be the symptom and not the underlying disease. Indeed, I think today’s malaise was actually forecast in ancient times! In the Torah, there is a verse commonly translated as:
When I bring them into the land flowing with milk and honey that I promised on oath to their fathers, and they eat their fill and grow fat and turn to other gods and serve them, spurning Me and breaking My covenant,
The funny thing is that the word for “fat” is NOT the word for “fat” anywhere else in the text (the Torah has two words for “fat” or “cream,” but neither is the word in this verse).
Instead, the word translated above as “fat” actually means “ash.” (You can see for yourself via this link.) So the verse really should be translated as:
When I bring them into the land flowing with milk and honey that I promised on oath to their fathers, and they eat their fill and become ash and turn to other gods and serve them, spurning Me and breaking My covenant,
Why ash? Because ashes of the tabernacle are what is left after the fire of a relationship is all gone. Ash in the Torah is nothing more than the ghost of a memory of a spiritual connection. And so a people who are described as “ash” are, for any greater purpose, as good as dead. When a people lose their purpose and ambition, they no longer seek to grow and develop, to change and improve. Such a people have no productive existence any more; they just go through life seeking maximum fun and minimum meaning.
Doesn’t that sound familiar? And doesn’t it echo with today’s society, having turned away from religions that expect growth and a desire for improvement, replacing service to the Creator with worshipping Mother Earth as part of a self-hating (anti-human) pagan death cult?