When a civilization loses its connection to a core mission, then it becomes unmoored. Distractions from that mission degrades execution and competence at all levels: Corporations (who are told profits are evil) get distracted by DEI – and their competence falls. The military is told it must lead social change, and it embraces DEI – only to be humiliated when it is asked to fight a war. On a personal and familial level, when people forget (or never learned) that the greater purpose of a single person is to build deep and meaningful familial and community relationships, they instead get bogged down in their own narcissism.
When that happens, lacking any big motivational or societal goals, people stop taking marriage seriously, stop having children, and search for new neuroses to haunt our dreams and provide the corrosive fears (e.g. Climate Change, Covid, etc.) that are the dime-store substitutes for shared investment in a constructive communal project. Without a mission, society folds.
This is not new. Every time a primitive society was “rescued” when the West brought food, it collapsed. if your entire culture is built around surviving at the edge of extinction from starvation and disease, then nothing makes any sense once that central challenge has been taken off the table. Primitive societies have no higher ideals: their people are too hungry to concern themselves with abstract problems.
Today’s richer societies are now deeply mired in the same problem, writ large. None of the wealthy nations in the world have so far solved the problem of how to motivate a population who no longer fear starvation.
(The only rich nation that today has substantially higher than replacement levels of children is Israel – and the most plausible explanation is not solely the religious angle. It is instead that Israel is still motivated by the oldest ambition of mankind, the ambition shared with all primitive cultures in human history: mere survival.)
This is not because there are no worthy higher causes. There most certainly are!
Religions, at least Islam and Christianity and Judaism, offer competing (though not-always-compatible) visions and missions that can motivate people to see that there are more important things than their deep-down gender preferences.
Nationalism provides a higher cause as well. Europe conquered the world at least in part because there was so much competition, driven in part by nationalism and religious sectarianism. (Arguably the EU, by seeking to end nationalism in Europe, has sapped Europe’s vitality.)
More recently, Communism vs Democracy provided a grander mission that people could believe in, on one side or the other. And war is a sensational motivator, even if conducted through proxies like the Space Race. At least in time of war, passions are inflamed. And people procreate – see the Baby Boom.
But now the missions have decayed and rotted away. People are no longer believing deeply in them: the “isms” like Communism and Socialism and even Zionism aged out after 70 years. Europe’s competing countries have become the oatmeal mush of the EU, so birth rates are plummeting. Christianity is nicer than ever before – and the result is stagnation. The list goes on and on. Few Americans can even articulate what the mission of America is, and as a result, much of what passes for a national mission is little more than xenophobia.
Vivek writes consistently about trying to restore a higher purpose to America. As a Catholic-educated Hindu, he grasps the paradox of a mission being critical to societal success even if you don’t think the mission is ultimately “true.” Jordan Peterson and Mark Steyn and even Richard Dawkins have all said very similar things: they are not sure if they believe, but they certainly want everyone else to believe!
Because having a mission matters. But not all missions are equal. Global Warming Apocalypters don’t get us anywhere, and they, along with their co-religionist Wokers, are not having children anyway. They are modern-day Shakers, unable to reproduce, and so ultimately are merely dead ends in human history. And their evangelism promotes the overall woke mind-virus.
Communism and DEI and Racial purity are similarly not missions that any free person should welcome and accept, because they don’t lead to the improvement of humanity on this earth. Islam certainly gets people fired up, and sometimes even blown up. It does not offer a winning mission statement if we believe in a future that is better than the present.
The paradox is that, consciously or not, powerful people and governments the world over are not even acting in their own long-term best interests. Instead of helping to find productive causes that can motivate their people, they are suppressing the free speech of all who believe in traditional values. Instead, they promote pablum that enhances their short-term power, but at the cost of long term decline and the death of civilization as we know it.
Traditionally, unfree societies suppressed free speech because they had a mission, and would not countenance any competing ideas. No citizen of the Soviet Union or Red China or Nazi Germany could repeatedly question Stalin or Mao or Hitler. Those societies had a vision, and they promoted it ruthlessly, to the exclusion of all else. Even Ancient Egypt blocked external ideas, and they did so for thousands of years – when Pharoah invited the Hebrews to move in, he specifically told them to leave all their things behind: Egypt wanted to limit the intrusion of everything foreign as much as it could (the migrants were even settled remotely from the natives). Of all of these named totalitarian societies, the Egyptians were the most successful at isolating themselves. But of course the Egyptians did not have the internet, or even the printing press, to contend with.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, has a mission: he wants to get to Mars. That is an echo of the 1960s Space Race, and worked well enough with that generation. Musk also understands that mankind needs to reproduce. Musk is doing his part when it comes to reproduction, having fathered at least 12 children.
For me, all the “good” missions have to be rooted in the text of the Torah – those principles are summarized here. The Torah is all about creating and building and investing in meaningful relationships with each other and with G-d. Of course, this is may be too abstract for most people – which is why the Torah is partially really only for Jews (and its message has not been resoundingly successful even among my own co-religionists).
But whatever we do, we need to get to it quickly. In order to be saved, the West needs to figure this out, and soon. Steyn correctly identifies that demography is destiny, so unless and until people start believing in something more than themselves before we are biologically incapable of kick-starting the birth-curve, then civilization’s death spiral will end in a smoking crater.
P.S. (One might even argue that Javier Milei’s economic goals are religious in origin, even though Argentina is not a wealthy nation and can be motivated primarily by the desire for economic survival.)