Western civilization has a major problem: Every societal ill that had been taken off the table by generations of received wisdom has now come back and come roaring back to life stronger than ever.
The latest example of this is exemplified in a piece by Rupa Subramanya in Bari Weiss’ Free Press that speaks of the spates of suicide and euthanasia growing in the West.
The piece speaks of Zoraya ter Beek, 28, who expects to be euthanized in early May and plans to be cremated:
She said she was hobbled by her depression and autism and borderline personality disorder. Now she was tired of living—despite, she said, being in love with her boyfriend, a 40-year-old IT programmer, and living in a nice house with their two cats.
She recalled her psychiatrist telling her that they had tried everything, that “there’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.” At that point, she said, she decided to die. “I was always very clear that if it doesn’t get better, I can’t do this anymore.”
She is not the only one, unfortunately. Euthanasia is becoming incredibly common across the West.
In the United States, euthanasia has jumped from 2018 to 2021 by 53% and in Canada by 125%.
Increasingly, the West is legalizing euthanasia for people who are clearly not terminal. For example, Lauren Hoeve. As the piece explains:
On November 30, 2022, Hoeve, a Dutch YouTube creator who was then 27, took to her newly created blog, Brain Fog, to announce that she wanted to die. She explained that she had autism, ADHD, ARFID (a.k.a. avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder), depression, anxiety, a “history of complex trauma,” and, since 2019, myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome. She added that she had registered with the Euthanasia Expertise Center, in The Hague, to get the ball rolling.
She then committed suicide. She was 28.
This sort of stuff is becoming more and more common.
And it’s not just this social malady that is plaguing the West. Drug abuse is plaguing the West. 128 million Americans report having used marijuana at some point in their lifetime. It’s worth noting that marijuana today is significantly more addictive and more dangerous than marijuana when you were a kid.
Pornography is not only widespread in its availability, but also in its use and its addiction. The latest stats show that about 70% of American men view pornography. 24% of American women say they view pornography as well. The number of people who admit to being addicted is actually quite high. The impacts of pornography on the human brain are very much like drug addiction. There’s a dopamine release, it wears off, and then people want more of the dopamine. And so they go back to the pornography.
This empties out relations. It destroys the relationship between men and women. Men begin to see women as sexual objects in a way different than would normally be the case. It disconnects them from other human beings.
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We see this with regard to major societal issues like family formation and childbearing. 31% of women aged 30 to 34 in the United States are childless now, which is much higher than ever in the United States. When it comes to LGBTQ+- identity, fully 22.3% of Gen Z say they are LGBTQ+- .
That has tremendous societal impact. It turns out that when one-fifth of your population suggests that they are no longer going to engage in monogamous heterosexual relationships with the goal of family formation, it has a major impact on your civilization.
So what exactly is going on? Why are all of these social maladies suddenly cropping up? Social epidemics are spreading through the population like wildfire. But in order for that epidemic to actually take hand, the systemic immunity of a society has to be compromised.
What was the immunity to all of these sorts of bad ideas? The answer for literally hundreds of years was religion. Not just because people believed in God, but because there are two particular facts about religion that are deeply necessary to understand the beneficial and salutary effects of religion on a society.
One: Religion takes certain moral matters off the table. It says, “God says X, therefore don’t do X.” Why is that important? It’s important because when you’re talking about time-tested wisdom, one reason why any society might say something like, “God says ‘thou shalt not murder’” is because it takes the subject off the table for debate. Once God says it, you don’t need to come up with an independent rationale as to why it’s not okay to murder.
The reality is that when it comes to the vast majority of rules we abide by in society, those are rules not because somebody sat somewhere in a cave and came up with a rationale for the rule, but because over trial and error, over evolutionary long periods of time, those are rules that have been found to be effective.
You don’t have to explain why it works. You just have to know that it does work.
One of the great lies that the Enlightenment told us is that every single thing that was good required a rationale.
That’s not even the same way that science typically works. People tend to think that science works by having a theoretician in the lab who comes up with a theory and then the theory has practical ramifications.
Very often it’s the reverse. Very often the inventions that we use come from someone tinkering in their garage and doing trial and error until something worked. They may not even know why it worked. They just know that it did.
That’s the first thing religion does.
The second thing it does is to create the social fabric necessary to enforce those rules without a top-down state. It creates the intermediate institutions of society that act as an enforcement mechanism.
If you violate the rule of society, for example, that says that you should get married and have kids and live within the boundaries of the church, the rest of the members of the church might not want you at the church. You’re not going to be part of that particular social fabric.
That is necessary. Any society has to have rules that are enforced by social censure.
But both of the things religion provided have been dissolved. We have become the “touch the stove” civilization.
When you teach your very young kids to avoid touching the stove you don’t explain, “Certain objects are hot. When you touch a hot object, you get burned.” You say, “Don’t touch the stove. And if you touch the stove, there will be a consequence.”
We as a society have decided that anything we can’t explain requires us to touch the stove. So we’re going to touch the stove on everything.
So things that we’re just common-sense propositions — such as “It is good that you get married and have children” — we as a society decided to ask, “Why not alternatives? What’s wrong with alternatives? Why can’t all alternatives be treated as perfectly equivalent?”
The answer to that is that it fails. Society fails when you don’t have man, woman, child. End of story. Societies that don’t focus on man, woman, child fall apart because that is the basis of every functional civilization. But we decided because we couldn’t come up with a rationale, why we shouldn’t we have man, man, no child, or woman, woman, no child?
We touched the stove. The result is widespread childlessness; breakdown in family formation, destruction of existing families, children born into families where they’re not really families, just a mom and a kid, because dad is nowhere to be seen.
That has resulted in many more social maladies. We had to touch the stove when it came to drug use. We as a society had decided that it would be bad if huge swaths of the population ingested hallucinogenic drugs.
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And then we decided, well, what if we tried it? What if we touch the stove? Maybe it’ll be fine. How do we know?
And so the time-tested wisdom that favored sobriety was thrown out the window in favor of something different. Has it been salutary in its effect on young Americans? I would suggest the answer is no.
We used to say that engaging in pornography ought to be illicit, that it is bad that when you view pornography, it does something to your brain that is not good, it perverts your view of the opposite sex, of sex itself and of relationships. And then we decided, “Oh, but really, is it going to be that bad? What, are you just a prude, man? Can you find a rationale for your prudishness?”
The response used to be, “I don’t have to find a rationale. It’s gross and bad and you shouldn’t do it. It’s bad for your soul, and it’s bad for you.”
And that was accepted wisdom for literally hundreds of years.
And then we decided to touch the stove and find out what happens.
This has had incredibly negative effects on our civilization.