Here’s the text of my lecture at the 2024 Roman Forum conference at Lake Garda in Italy:

A PAPER TIGER?

Introduction

We have been discussing responses to the inhuman global order now under construction. I will discuss the outlook for that order, and so the environment we will be operating in. I will concentrate on the secular side of the New Order, but as always events in Church and State are closely related. And I will look at the situation mostly from an American point of view, but so far as I can tell things are very similar in Europe.

Current situation

We are currently living in what is called a democratic consumer society, meaning one that emphasizes widespread security and prosperity, and certain kinds of individual choice. That society has mostly been able to deliver those things, but its success now seems precarious.

We seem prosperous, but prices outrun incomes, young people cannot find jobs or establish families, and the American federal deficit last year was 7.5% of national economic output. That cannot go on.

In spite of our general safety, we have constant wars abroad that now threaten to involve serious adversaries. We also have seen a rise in crime at home, with criminals becoming more brazen, and the authorities often refusing, for political and social reasons, to prosecute or to enforce general public order. Major cities are therefore becoming less habitable.

Our slogan is “choice,” but the public has not chosen any of these things, and they are not allowed to speak freely about them,¹ so that and our other slogans ring increasingly hollow.

To make matters worse, we keep hearing about looming global catastrophes—another pandemic, new and bigger wars, economic collapse, environmental degradation, climate change. The latest worry is that AI will take over the world, throw everyone out of work, declare humanity obsolete, and abolish us all.

But the world is big and complicated, and trustworthy analysis is hard to come by, so it is hard to evaluate any of this. Are these dangers real, or are they social media panics, scare stories propagated for political reasons, or illusions induced by unrealistic expectations? And to the extent the problems are real, how good are the proposed solutions, which invariably involve more power for our rulers?

Political and social background

A variety of circumstances exacerbate the feeling of unease.

Techno-utopianism

Nothing works perfectly or forever, and bad times always come eventually. Even so, there is a deeply-rooted technological utopianism today that tells people that politics and technology can do anything, and freedom, equality, safety, and comfort are the default state of human life.

That belief defines their world, but it is obviously false. Something as complex and subtle as social life cannot possibly be managed with any confidence, least of all bureaucratically. For that reason people who accept today’s dominant outlook constantly feel threatened by incomprehensible forces, since nothing works as they expect.

That feeling extends to our rulers as well. They fear on some level that their outlook may not be as well founded as they think, but they can imagine no alternative, so when something they did not expect happens they are shocked and think the world is falling apart. If a flashy real estate billionaire wins an election, or a rich tech entrepreneur buys Twitter, there are a great many intelligent people in responsible positions who quite literally believe the Nazis are about to take over.

Such beliefs of course lead our rulers into actions that ignore reality, and so make bad results more likely.

Lack of social cohesion

The greatest contributor to the general feeling of insecurity though is a loss of social cohesion that deprives people of a settled position in which they feel they can rely on others. One reason for the loss is that electronic connections are replacing the physical presence of other human beings. The Internet was supposed to bring us together, but instead it isolates us by dissolving concrete human relationships. More and more, people are living in virtual worlds made up of transitory images and soundbites that can be assembled to make anything at all seem true. That trend began long ago with the advent of mass communications, but recent developments have radicalized it.

A more specifically institutional reason is that global markets and bureaucracy are taking over more and more social functions. The World Economic Forum is a symbol of that tendency, but there is of course a great deal more to it than that—technical possibility, for example. The automobile, fast and frozen food, and the mechanization of housework have done a great deal to integrate everyday life into global networks.

Whatever the causes, the upshot has been that family, Church, cultural tradition, and other non-market and non-bureaucratic arrangements are less relied on and therefore become less reliable. Current ways of thinking also make them less trusted, because they are not rationally designed. And they are considered oppressive, since they are based neither on arbitrary individual choice like market transactions nor on neutral principles as the liberal state claims to be.

The downgrading of specific human connections means loss of common standards on how to deal with each other. Some people continue to believe human relations should be governed by a natural moral law based on human nature. Others insist that human nature does not exist, morality is simply a human creation, and it is bigoted and tyrannical to say otherwise.

The result is that some people think pornography in children’s libraries, and drag queens and sexual reassignment surgery for young people, are a matter of basic human respect for members of sexual minorities. Other less respectable voices say they are obvious child abuse. What can the two sides say to each other?

Official reactions to parental concerns about schools show the consequences. Parents, who were once accepted as the primary guardians of their children’s welfare, are told it is none of their business what their children are taught. They are told that educational institutions are guided not (as it may appear) by ideological zealots who have acquired institutional power but by trained professionals who follow best practices.

So parents are denied information about what is going on, and many people who have gone to school board meetings to call administrators to account have been arrested² and even treated as potential terrorists.³ There have been dozens of such incidents. From our rulers’ standpoint that treatment makes sense. Why be patient with people who reject expert judgments and so, it is thought, can only be relying on irrational bigotry and the threat of violence?

Mass migration

Loss of social cohesion aligns with our rulers’ preference for an industrial ordering of human life. They want a manageable and administratively transparent system. That means getting rid of human ties and distinctions that are irrelevant to their concerns so the whole population can become an aggregate of graded interchangeable resources. That is the actual meaning of “ensuring full participation of marginalized communities” as a social ideal.

Our official social morality is thus an ideology in the Marxist sense. By weakening traditional distinctions and connections, and so making bureaucracy and global markets the only serious principles of social order, it puts all power in the hands of bureaucrats and billionaires.

That effort is furthered by mass immigration from everywhere. Borders are flooded by migrants who are dispersed throughout the country for permanent settlement. That would disrupt any society, but the problems are blamed on racism and xenophobia: the existing population is excluding the newcomers and making it impossible for them to live peacefully and productively.

So the official answer is to get rid of exclusion, which includes every advantage local people have over people just arrived from the other side of the world. That means further destruction of community and cultural standards and the networks of relationships that carry them. If family, religion, and community networks matter there will be important social relationships that exclude some people, especially new arrivals. According to our official morality, that is the worst thing imaginable.

The result is that you cannot say “Merry Christmas” or fly the national flag, because it will make some people feel left out. The very idea of a particular national or local culture thus becomes racist. As Emmanuel Macron put it, “There is no French culture. There is culture in France. It is diverse.”⁴

That result extends to other particular connections, for example family life or religion. These vary by people’s background, and do not include everyone equally, so allowing them weight in any setting can also be seen as racist or at least exclusionary.

The effect of these trends is to make us lost in the world, because there is no place in it that we belong. We cannot act effectively, because we are not connected to other people in a way that makes trust and common effort possible. Hence, among other things, careerism, ideological conformism, and obsession with money and pop culture. These are the ways people are still allowed to connect to the world.

Solutions that make things worse

From the standpoint of our rulers that is not all bad. A weakly connected people is easy to manage. Even so, people want government to make them feel the world is safe. In a world of global uncertainty, individual isolation, and religious indifference what else is there to look to?

So bureaucratic experts will fix everything. Socialism is evidently making a comeback, at least in the sense of a demand for the state to manage the whole of social life. But can the state deliver? There is the basic problem that technological utopianism does not work. In addition, though, looser social ties mean that institutions are becoming less effective, less trusted, and more corrupt. Growing nihilism and social division make the common good ever harder to define. In its absence social peace is maintained through propaganda, censorship, and a system of payoffs idealized as “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

All in all, then, the government fights exclusion by destroying the traditional relationships that connect people, and tries to make them feel secure through the technocratic approach to social life that is responsible for much of the insecurity. The result is to accelerate the tendency toward weak families, few children, mutual distrust and resentment, no hope for the future, and general social dissolution. Further results include addiction and, especially among socially sensitive but often weakly connected people like young unmarried women, depression and other psychological problems.⁵

Messianic politics

The belief that salvation is from the state nonetheless remains unshakable. If concrete experience, cultural tradition, and stable traditional relationships give way to bureaucracy, global markets, and electronic imagery, people come to believe that nothing is fixed, everything is a social construction, and propaganda and marketing backed by political power can do anything.

That view is enormously destructive. It tells our rulers that their power constructs social reality. But that means they have unlimited responsibility for social conditions. So if they want to do what is right, it seems they should refuse to tolerate social evils and continually remake all social reality to get rid of them.

In the absence of any substantive common good the vision guiding that effort can only be based on abstract criteria like equality, efficiency, security, and choice. These criteria are applied at the individual rather than community level. The result is that communities become non-functional, because function requires differentiation of position and authority—that is, hierarchy—which can be oppressive. What is called democracy thus turns into comprehensive rule by technocratic elites.

Attempts to “dismantle systemic racism,” which means eliminating all differences in condition between ethnic groups by whatever means seem necessary, provide an example. These efforts require the state to deprive traditional connections, individual efforts, and voluntary cooperation of all effect, because otherwise people and groups will differ in relative success. The whole of social reality must therefore be determined from above.

So even assuming their good faith, our rulers’ outlook leads them to aim at absolute power guided by a reckless ideology. They also have less disinterested motives, of course, and those also lead to horrible results, but they truly believe it is best for everyone if they run everything. The greater their public spirit the more dangerous that impulse becomes and the easier it is for ordinary well-intentioned people, who are educated in the same understandings, to be persuaded to support it.

To make matters worse, many people in the Church, even at the highest levels, have accepted these ideas. To align with them is to align with power while demonstrating a commitment to what are considered the highest moral ideals. It is also to dispense with the need for thought or personal risk-taking. For an ambitious and prudent careerist, what is not to like?

Illiberal liberalism

I should say something about the political outlook governing these efforts.

That outlook, which in America we call liberalism, attempts to make freedom, choice, and efficiency the basic purposes of public order. That means rejecting any concept of the common good based on human nature in favor of a conception of human rights based on arbitrary will, and applying that conception ever more broadly and minutely to social life. The demand for equal freedom thus ends in a comprehensive system of control designed to promote the equal sovereignty of every will, and thus the independence of every individual from every other and the irrelevance to social life of every particular conception of higher goods.

The result is that goods like religion, along with family and community, get suppressed as inconsistent with the sovereignty of individual choice. Christian or natural law support for a principle now counts against its legitimacy. It makes it part of a system—traditional morality—that is considered oppressive because it limits choice based on a particular conception of what is good. Even verbal support for such a system is considered an attack on the rights of others, because it helps construct the social environment in which they live.

In much of the West it can therefore be illegal to present a natural law view of sexual matters. The public presence of such views is thought to continue the oppression of people who have traditionally been marginalized. Western governments, as they pursue their proclaimed goals of freedom and equality, thus become ever more intolerant and tyrannical in their efforts to eliminate oppression and inequality from all social relations.

The problem of tyranny is obfuscated by the self-presentation of liberal governments as open and democratic. Dissidents, it is said, can raise their concerns, and if they think the people have chosen badly they can try to persuade them better.

But the democratic aspects of the current regime are of course exaggerated. A diverse technological society of millions of people that is increasingly integrated into a global political and economic order is not going to be run democratically. It is going to be run by networks of professionals acting on behalf of the centers of power that employ them. These people inevitably become conscious of their common interests and act together to promote perspectives and policies that advance them and defuse or fend off conflicting popular concerns.

A major part of that effort, of course, is channeling discussion and defining its limits in such a way that a system formally based on popular rule will not allow the people to make the wrong decisions. The Internet was expected to open up public discussion and popular participation. To some extent it has, but it has also multiplied opportunities of control. If you control social media and Google search results you control the world. Hence the calls for ever more vigorous efforts to suppress “disinformation,” “hate speech,” and so on. Freedom and democracy, it is said, requires a safe, inclusive, and correctly informed environment, because otherwise some voices will be shut out. But such an environment can only be realized through total social control by experts.

How far will it all go?

So that is a brief sketch of our current situation. It is obviously unfavorable to Catholicism and human well-being generally. But there are contradictions within it, like the destruction of the human connections that make a society a society and the conflict between aspirations and ultimate consequences, that make it unstable. The world around us can look like the consolidation of an inhuman world empire. It can also look like cranks acting out their fantasies. Which is it? Is it a paper tiger or is it not?

False comforts

It can be hard to tell. In the long run the regime will certainly destroy itself. But we need to avoid false comforts, in particular the idea that the problems cannot possibly be real. Sane people find it hard to believe people who look normal are in fact crazy. Beyond that, Americans have generally believed in America. In a comfortable, historically successful, and until recently thoroughly middle-class society like ours there is a tendency to assume that whatever respectable people and institutions do must somehow be fundamentally right and normal.

That attitude is not as common as it was, but it still has some effect on our side of the Atlantic. My impression is that in Europe there is less faith in country, but more readiness, especially in the Northern countries, to trust experts and public administrators. If they say something is so it must be accepted. The effect is likely similar.

As a result of this general attitude of social trust, ordinary and especially older people have often been unwilling or unable to take in the reality of what is happening. That response is behind the success of a great many progressive talking points. We should trust the professionals, have faith in journalism, the public schools, and other democratic institutions, and ignore people who talk about things that sound crazy. If what they say sounds crazy they must be crazy. So we are told.

Or if bizarre things do happen and we can’t deny them we shouldn’t worry too much because they must be anomalies that people will not stand for much longer. And if common sense doesn’t prevail right away we still shouldn’t worry because the pendulum will inevitably swing back.

But it never seems to work that way. Our whole system of education and public life is designed to root out “prejudice” and “deeply rooted stereotypes.” How is that different from rooting out common sense? And in a technological, media-drenched, famously diverse, and thoroughly manipulated society, where is the point of sane cultural balance for a pendulum to swing toward? In fact, what the public finds shocking today becomes tolerable tomorrow and unquestionable the day after.

What is basic to all these false comforts is the idea that globalism and cultural radicalism will not work so they will go away on their own. That is true in the long run, as we shall see, but today’s society is rich and well-organized enough to prop up a great deal of insanity for a long time. In addition, it is not clear to most people what alternative there is. That means a lot of destruction, and we need to take that quite seriously.

Current tendencies have been going on a long time, have gone very far, and their supporters intend to take them much farther. Periods of retrenchment sometimes follow radical episodes and lead to claims that the tide has finally turned. Events have repeatedly proven the contrary. When the first wave of political correctness hit in the 90s it seemed stupid and people were soon saying it was over. Later, of course, it came back worse than ever.

The same seems likely to happen with the current reaction against the extreme cultural radicalism of the last ten years or so. Unless something changes in our fundamental ways of thought and social organization we can expect radicalism to return. It is supported by all public principle and opposed at present only by common sense, which has a hard time holding its own in a media-soaked technological society managed by irresponsible administrators.

Durability of empires

So more inquiry is needed to decide how durable current tendencies are likely to be. Since we are dealing with a would-be world order—that is, an empire—that means looking at the durability of empires. How long will the political structures last that hold this whole enterprise together?

There have been a great many empires, each with its own history and features. Whatever their differences, one thing they have in common is their need for a specific basis of unity. They cannot rely on inherited social and political habits or local ethnic, cultural, or religious solidarities to keep them together. They need something definite beyond that.

That basis of unity must have both practical and ideal components, both people through which it exists and functions, and an explanation why those people and the institutions they run should rule.

The ideal basis may be abstract like “justice and order” or concrete like Hellenism or Romanitas. It may also, like Christianity and Islam, combine universality with concreteness. It can be as minimal as the Mongol theory that their victories meant God must approve of what they were doing and want them to rule. But it must be something.

It is helpful if it is at least basically acceptable to the people of the empire. Otherwise the empire will be fragile. The Mongol Empire, along with the European empires after the rise of nationalism in Africa and Asia, provide examples. So do the Third Reich and the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe.

The ruling class also needs cohesion, and it needs to be intelligent and competent enough to understand its situation and respond appropriately. The empires of Alexander and Charlemagne are examples of the need for a cohesive ruling class. They stood for prestigious ruling principles—Hellenism, Christianity, the heritage of Rome—but they centered on one man rather than a class of men. As a result they fell apart when personal unity was lost—in Alexander’s case very shortly after his death, in Charlemagne’s as soon as there was more than one heir to his dominions.

Similarly, the Mongol empire broke up a few decades after the death of Genghis Khan, with the part that included China turning into a Chinese dynasty, and the more Western parts turning into Muslim military empires, but dominated by Mongol rather than Arab or Turkish soldiers.

An effective and cohesive ruling class normally depends on ties like education, culture, ethnicity, religion, and class background. The British Empire had all these for the most part. The Roman Empire tended to de-emphasize ethnicity and the Chinese Empire favored education over class and religion, although Confucianism made cultural tradition a sort of religion.

Islamic empires usually relied heavily on religion and the military, with other factors being weaker. A local or regional military leader would try to induce the Caliph in Baghdad to confirm his position as sultan. Sometimes stability was promoted by relying on soldiers of a particular ethnic background—Arabs initially, Turks during some later periods. But sometimes it was achieved in a more artificial way, through an intense system of education that turned foreign slaves into a military elite. Since that elite owed everything to the state they could have the cohesion and loyalty—and of course the education—required for an effective ruling class.

The Egyptian Mamluks and Ottoman janissaries are examples. The government selected talented boys from the Balkans or Caucasus, separated them from their local and family connections, forced them to convert to Islam, imposed a strict system of education and training, and turned them into elite soldiers. Since Muslim governments were usually at bottom military dictatorships, that made them part and sometimes the dominant part of the ruling class. In Mamluk Egypt the sultan himself was a slave soldier. The system was very effective as long as it maintained its original principles and did not allow, for example, membership in the elite to be inherited.

Finally, empires fall through failure by ruling elites to understand their situation correctly and act accordingly. That often takes the form of trying to do too much too fast. Power goes to their head, and the empire destroys itself through overreach.

An example would be the Qin dynasty that unified China in 221 B.C., but lasted only fifteen years because of the violence of its methods. The Han dynasty, which succeeded it, ran the structure the Qin had created in a much more moderate way and lasted more than 400 years. They promoted Confucianism, for example, instead of following the reported Qin practices of burying Confucian scholars alive and burning their books.

In contrast, the ruling elites of more successful and enduring empires, like Persia and Rome, concentrated on essentials. That meant limiting their ambitions, for example by working with local rulers and leaving conquered people to their own laws and customs. And Rome, like the British Empire, mostly grew slowly as occasion prompted rather than attempting to multiply conquests.

The thing that seems most important though is for the ruling class to believe in their mission. They may be cynical, corrupt, and hypocritical to a degree, but they must believe that their rule is justified. The Soviet empire provides an example. An apparently strong empire fell apart when those who ran it stopped believing in it. The European and European colonial empires provide another example. They fell apart when their ruling classes like everyone else stopped believing in them. In contrast, an otherwise weak empire can last in some form as long as it stands for a principle that is widely and deeply accepted. The Abbasid Caliphate and Holy Roman Empire are examples.

Our current imperial order

With these considerations in mind, what is the outlook for globalism? In spite of its success and power it has basic internal flaws that seem likely to bring the overall project to an end fairly soon although aspects of it like cultural policy in the West are likely to take longer to die.

Its ruling class

At bottom we are now ruled by billionaires and bureaucrats. The latter include not only government, corporate, and NGO officials but academics and journalists, whose employers have become more and more closely tied to government and large corporations.

That class has been growing in unity and power for decades, to the point that a Marxist description of the state as a committee for managing its common affairs would be largely correct. That is the source of the complaints about the “deep state,” “permanent government,” “DC swamp,” and so on.

These people are united by common interests, similar education, increasing separation from the population at large, and a common social vision that identifies social progress with suppression of traditional distinctions and connections. Their unity of interest and outlook is demonstrated by their remarkable ability to coordinate efforts without formal central control, as well as by the so-called “revolving door” through which high officials cycle among posts in government, industry, non-profits, academia, and journalism.

All significant public figures and social authorities, from religious leaders to pop stars, support them. They are also supported by American economic power, notably the position of the U.S. dollar in international trade, and by American military power. The latter may not be used intelligently, but its frequent exercise has at least kept it in practice and reminded people that it exists and must be taken seriously.

Its ideology

As noted, an empire needs something definite to hold it together. Since life is easier when the social and political order lines up with what is considered the moral and spiritual order, the unifying principle is normally a religious conception or something that functions as such. The Chinese had the Mandate of Heaven, the Romans the favor of the gods and majesty of deified Rome, the Ottomans the Caliphate and thus the leadership of the Muslim community, and so on.

Basic features.

The nineteenth century colonial empires relied instead on an ideal of progress, enlightenment, and Christian civilization. The last part of that ideal proved vulnerable. The first two parts were so abstract and open-ended that they were eventually thought to point away from the third as overly concrete. So our current empire, which maintains the dominance of the West, continues to appeal to progress and enlightenment but not to Christian civilization. Instead, it gives progress and enlightenment a technocratic interpretation that has to do with efficiency, equality, and the satisfaction of individual desire, all achieved through the application of science to all aspects of life.

Present success.

So our current state ideology abolishes religion in the sense of a relation to higher powers but nonetheless claims similar authority in the name of scientific expertise and abstract neutral principles. That is a paradoxical situation that seems unstable.

Even so, what are called “Western values” now have popular and elite appeal. People want to live in Western societies, because they are prosperous and in many ways allow them to live as they want. They are also better governed on the whole, reflecting a generally higher degree of order, competence, and public spirit inherited from the Western past.

Beyond that, people have largely come to accept Western values as correct. “Freedom” and “democracy” are good words that mean everybody gets what he wants. And racism, sexism, discrimination, and the like are quite generally considered ultimate evils. In spite of some grumbling and foot-dragging there has not been much resistance to their expansion to include any attachment to historical community or traditional family relationships. People may hate the consequences, but they cannot find words to object to the theory.

Supports.

To some extent the lack of resistance reflects the declining role of traditional connections like family and particular community in social life. If someone lives in a big city without close relatives nearby, works for an insurance company, sends any children he has to daycare and schools that emphasize diversity and inclusion, and relies on social programs rather than family, friends, and community networks to deal with practical difficulties, he is likely to take traditional connections less seriously.

It also reflects the deep roots of Western ideology in modern thought generally, for example the reduction of goods to preferences and rationality to technology. Those tendencies lead most educated people today to view objections to the dominant ideology as simply irrational. If you say goods are objective, for example, they cannot imagine what that might mean. It sounds to them as if you were just saying that your preferences are better than other people’s because you are better than other people.

Even so, much of the success of what are called Western values is due to propaganda. It is important to understand its extent and uniformity. Our rulers dominate public discussion. Education, institutional expertise, and journalism are organized bureaucratically and dependent on support from government and major corporations. Pop culture is commercial and corporate as well.

As a result, it is difficult to find a stable setting in which views at odds with the outlook of billionaires and bureaucrats can be discussed, developed, and propagated. Opposition consists mostly of muttered complaints, dissident religious movements, occasional populist outbursts, like Brexit and the Trump movement, that cannot achieve anything coherent because they lack stable elites, and a variety of figures, mostly on the Internet, who have wildly divergent views and very little institutional backing.

Attitudes toward the family confirm that analysis. According to a recent Pew survey, 71% of American adults say career—that is, relation to money and bureaucracy—is extremely or very important for a fulfilling life while only 4% say it is not too or not at all important. The corresponding figures for marriage are 23% who say it is important and 44% who say it is not important. For the importance of children the figures are 26% and 42% respectively.

These results are very much at odds with surveys of actual life satisfaction,⁶ so they evidently reflect people’s acceptance of what they are told rather than life experience. The figures for women confirm that. In the Pew survey they placed more emphasis on career than men (74% vs. 69% saying it is extremely or very important) and less on marriage (18% vs. 28%) and children (22% vs. 29% saying they are important).⁷

The usual observation is that women tend to be highly concerned with family ties but also responsive to social expectations. So I cannot help but believe that these results are the reverse of what they would be if people were left more to their own perceptions. The extraordinary violence of many responses to Harrison Butker’s unsurprising comments on the relative importance of marriage, family, and career⁸ show that many people who accept the official line are deeply conflicted about it. Has someone who has given priority to money and bureaucracy over family and children really made the right choice? That is a touchy question for many people.

The views of Trump supporters, who are said to be “low information” voters because they do not pay much attention to respectable sources of information, offer further confirmation. Fifty-nine percent of them say society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority. Only 19% of Biden voters, who are “better informed” and thus more propagandized, share that view.⁹]

Fundamental weaknesses.

In spite of its practical success and widespread popular support, this Western ideology has fundamental problems. It leaves out too much of reality to deal with fundamental issues. In particular, it has no place for God or for substantive common goods, relying instead on an ideal of maximum equal freedom interpreted in an ever more abstract and open-ended way that is unable to provide answers people can live by.

As we saw in our discussion of liberalism, these features lead to suppression of normal human ties and the beliefs and distinctions that sustain them without providing a replacement. The result is an increasingly divided, corrupt, ignorant, and willful ruling class that is ever more at odds with the people it rules, whom it views as bigoted and in need of re-education and even replacement—and who in fact are becoming ever more dissolute and distracted.

In the face of these tendencies the Western heritage of comparatively good government is not likely to last. We see that in the abandonment of non-partisanship by once-trusted institutions like science, scholarship, the judiciary, and law enforcement. We also see it in the financial corruption of the Biden regime, the incompetence of many of its officials, and their openly expressed hatred and contempt for large sections of the American public.

Inclusiveness.

Developments related to diversity and inclusiveness bring out many of the problems.

Distinctions of sex and cultural community have been basic to all societies. They have to do with fundamental connections—the family and the community into which people are born—on which they have always relied to carry on their lives. But the liberal vision turns equality, choice, economic goods, and the mutual independence of individuals into supreme standards. For that reason it opposes family and other particular religious and cultural connections as legitimate principles of social order.

Indeed, it requires their effective suppression. It is now considered racist, sexist, fascist, Christian nationalist, and so on to want particular community or family as traditionally conceived to play a serious role in social life. Even the basic universal distinction between the sexes is considered oppressive.

So our rulers want to transform human life in a way that is at odds with human nature, which in any case they deny. The obvious precedents for such an effort are religious cults that have attempted to abolish unruly human impulses like the sexual and acquisitive instincts, and communist regimes during their most radical phases. “Wokeness,” with its cancellations, mass public denunciations, hatred of inherited culture, and general mindlessness, is reminiscent of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China.

All such efforts have ended in failure and, when backed by state power, in suffering and social degradation. Current efforts can also be expected to fail, and to isolate people from each other further and make them less functional individually and collectively.

Effect on the ruling class.

These tendencies cause increasingly serious problems for the ruling class itself.

Unlike other imperial ruling classes ours insists, for the sake of its own legitimacy, on internal racial and sexual diversity. They expect—to the extent they think in such terms—that education, institutional and career interests, and an ideology that has the force of religion will be enough to maintain cohesion, common purpose, and a reasonable degree of competence.

That makes them somewhat reminiscent of the Mamluks and Janissaries, who also rejected inherited ties and relied on an education and career path that separated them from their communities of origin, developed their professional competence, indoctrinated them with the official outlook, and secured their loyalty through privileges.

But our ruling class has basic weaknesses compared with these earlier groups. It is not a military class, and it includes both men and women. That makes it less able to maintain discipline and cohesion. And most importantly, it promotes racial, ethnic, and sexual distinctions in a way that makes them principles of division rather than unity within the ruling class itself.

Here the problem is that the promise of equality is taken literally, categorically, and imperatively. It is a sort of metaphysical absolute that cannot be limited in any way. So any disparity in treatment or result among demographic groups is treated as an imposed disadvantage that must be eradicated. That is what “wokeness” is all about.

The biggest single problem is the treatment of statistical disparities as proof of oppression. These are often extreme. For example, Jews are only 0.2% of the world’s population but they have received 22% of all Nobel Prizes.¹⁰ In contrast, only five women have won the Nobel Prize in Physics out of 224 awarded.¹¹ The number of women winning prizes has increased somewhat in recent years but so has the number of Jews, so in spite of growing concern about equality the awards are not becoming more equal.

The recent “racial reckoning” in America suggests that racial disparities are the touchiest issue of all. But these are also extreme and durable. No black person has ever won a Nobel Prize in the natural sciences. And the homicide rate among black people in America is more than seven times as high as among whites.¹² A similar disparity existed in America 70 years ago¹³ and exists today in London.¹⁴

How do you deal with such disproportionate results, which people find painful to the point that it seems indecent to mention them? In a world that demands sensitivity on such issues, they cannot be accepted. Even so, they resist remedy. The result is that conflicts only multiply, demands for ever stronger action grow without limit, and no resolution or compromise seems possible. Changing that situation would require, among other things, eliminating the demand for “equity,” which is now defined as equal outcomes. But in a godless, rancorous, and culturally empty world, what standard of desert other than equality is possible?

One result of this situation is progressive degradation of organizational effectiveness. This takes somewhat different form in different organizations. If you do an Internet search on terms like “nonprofit” and “toxic workplace” you will find any number of stories about NGOs blowing themselves up over these issues.

Usually the consequences are not so extreme, but people in most large organizations have noticed problems relating to diversity that cannot be discussed openly and seem only to get worse. The military is considered particularly effective in dealing with such issues but there are complaints about reduced standards, along with problems like reduced readiness and even serious mishaps like ship collisions.¹⁵ There have also been severe shortfalls in recruitment. It turns out that young men interested in the military have very little interest in celebrating sexual and cultural diversity.

The overall response to such problems has been to ignore or deny reality. The solution for the problems of diversity is always to perfect it with more diversity. To maintain appearances in a media-drenched age strict controls on discussion are imposed that apparently have led our rulers to believe their own propaganda, and insist on acting on it regardless of results.

As a result, we are facing an encroaching crisis of competence. A complex technological society needs a great many skilled people working together to keep it running. Such people are no longer reliably trained and hired.¹⁶ Recent examples in the news, which have attracted attention because of their immediate connection to public safety, include air travel¹⁷¹⁸ and medicine.¹⁹²⁰ In these as other fields of activity—including, as we saw very recently, staffing the United States Secret Service—the demands of diversity are thought to outweigh other considerations that seem far more urgent.

That leaves our rulers one final response that is not crudely repressive, and attracts them for personal reasons: payoffs. If someone has a complaint give him a subsidy or highly paid job. University programs relating to race and “gender” are one example. Proposals regarding reparations for past injustices are another. But that resource eventually runs out because demands escalate and money gets used up. What then?

Will its faith endure?

We have seen that our rulers’ ideology disrupts their unity, reduces their competence, and makes them prone to overreach. These things destroy empires.

But an empire can survive a great deal as long as people continue to believe in it. Stalinist Russia survived purges, famines, and general bungling but ultimately conquered half of Europe because even the persecuted continued to believe. Their keepers found they could reliably get political prisoners in the GULAG to cooperate by asking them whether they were still “Soviet persons.” An extreme case was Konstantin Rokossovsky, who was arrested and suffered broken ribs and fingers and even lost his fingernails under interrogation. After he was released he became the second most prominent Soviet commander of the Second World War.

So acceptance of the Western ideology is the most important point. Will that continue?

So far it has been backed by control of discussion, its deep roots in modern ways of thought and methods of social organization, and its general ability to deliver on its promises. At an ideal level these promises have included equal freedom, mostly meaning a relaxation of traditional disciplines. At a more practical level they have primarily been comfort and security.

As discussed, our rulers find it increasingly difficult to deliver. The deep unpopularity of current trends also undermine claims of democratic legitimacy, which are impossible for an empire to sustain in any event.

So will the current political orthodoxy last under such circumstances? Our rulers seem likely to stick with it, if only because they have found it so useful and it is not clear what they could find to replace it. The rank and file seem likely to weaken in their attachment, but they too are likely to have difficulty finding a coherent replacement. Established orthodoxy is too firmly established in current ways of life and thought, and the people are too fragmented and distracted to develop alternatives.

Even so, panicked claims about the rising threat of fascism and the like indicate that our rulers know on some level that popular allegiance cannot be counted on. And at some point the pressure of events will force changes in outlook.

What comes afterward?

So where is all this going?

Are analogies relevant?

Some would argue that too much has changed for historical analogies to be persuasive. For example, the world is now connected by fast and cheap transportation, instant broadband communications, and ever more advanced systems of supervision and control. That makes it effectively much smaller.

In a real sense, it is already one world. McDonalds hamburgers, Taylor Swift concerts, and steel and plate glass buildings are everywhere. There are YouTube videos of Russian recruits marching to a cadence of “Spongebob Squarepants.” People today get their ideals of life from pop culture, and that has become universal.

At a more concretely practical level, economic life is ever more international. Call centers in India provide services to American consumers. A manufacturing plant in Brazil relies on parts from Asia and sends its products to Canada and the United States. Unification of productive processes and distribution networks demands interchangeability, which in turn means unification of professional standards, training methods, and organizational techniques. How can an effectively globalized world ever be disentangled? And how can it operate efficiently without globalized governance?

These changes increase the benefits and reduce the difficulty of governing large territories and populations. But the problems we have discussed do not depend on size. They depend on inadequacies and conflicts inherent in the system itself, notably with regard to the ruling class and its ideology, which seem unable to foster mutual loyalty, public spirit, and a usable conception of the common good. The biggest reason the global extent of the empire matters is that there does not seem to be a globally-usable replacement if the ruling ideology is abandoned. The Chinese can adopt Han nationalism. What can the WEF adopt?

By itself that would just suggest that the globalist order will continue under its current ideology until it becomes entirely nonfunctional. But it seems doubtful that it will hold together at least geographically, because it is doubtful that people and societies will become indistinguishable. Some will find themselves at odds with the rest, and decide it is in their interest to drop out. That of course is already happening, with the struggle between Russia, China, and the Western countries, but the latter have not yet recognized how fundamental the problem is.

There is a “gender-equality paradox” in the social sciences that tells us that the more gender-equal a society is the more the sexes differ in personality and occupational choice.²¹ It turns out that “free to be you and me” does not make boys and girls the same. And societies in the New World and in South Asia have been multiracial for centuries but there are still profound differences within them. After a thousand years the Parsees in India are still very different from the scheduled castes living nearby. Why expect something different globally?

So it seems unlikely that the social and economic condition of East Asia, Western Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa will converge any time soon. But if they do not, why expect a world order based on global political and economic integration and an assumption of universal sameness to keep the allegiance of national ruling elites? We no longer live in the politically, economically, and militarily unipolar world that enabled our current regime to radicalize its demands after 1990. It seems evident that and other developments will put the globalist project under severe stress.

After the fall

The timing is unknowable, but at some point internal contradictions and external opposition will force regime change. The changes are likely to affect the global order first but also eventually the internal order of Western societies, which after all base their legitimacy on universalist claims. In addition to the loss of confidence resulting from loss of near-universal ideological domination, the West will face increasing dysfunction and popular disaffection for reasons already discussed.

But what happens then? The fall of the Soviet Union provides a point of comparison. The demands of our current governing ideology are deeper and more comprehensive than Soviet communism, but its methods are much gentler. That may mean it will do less damage and fall apart sooner because it lacks the brutal determination the Soviets had.

So it is possible that the weakness, incompetence, and disunity of our rulers, the insanity of their ideology, and residual traditions of free discussion, civic responsibility, and government by consent will combine to allow a change for the better through fairly normal political means.

On the other hand, the Soviets had an alternative they could choose if they abandoned their ideology. Our ruling class does not. And our regime seems a more organic outcome of long-term tendencies in the societies in which it originated. That is why it has generally been able to dispense internally with extreme violence. So it may have more staying power, at least in the West, and that may enable it to do more damage. Time will tell.

If it does continue until brute practical problems like incompetence, corruption, popular disaffection, ruling class disarray, the accumulation of debt, and competition from societies that have rejected the project make continuation simply impossible, the likely result would be the sort of thing we see in much of the Third World: extreme weakness of civic institutions resulting in rule by weak military regimes supported by force, corruption, and makeshift ideologies.

Under such circumstances the everyday practical workings of society would no doubt be based largely on fundamental connections that re-establish themselves when others fail, like kinship, religion, ethnic ties, and other mostly inherited loyalties. Criminal mafias and perhaps foreign intervention would likely also play a role, as in post-communist societies.

What to do?

That outcome might offer certain advantages for Catholic life compared with current tendencies, but would be mostly unpleasant. Among other things it would likely lead, as in post-Soviet Russia, to lawlessness, brutal conflict, and a radical decline in living conditions. But what should we do to prevent as much destruction as possible and to soften the landing and point to something better when our current governing ideology and its institutions lose all credit or become unworkable?

Other more knowledgeable speakers have told us what they are doing, so I will only make a few very general comments.

Political and social action

We should certainly do what we can to change the direction of politics. But political systems defend themselves. Proposals to restrict “disinformation” and “hate speech,” along with growing misuse of the legal system against dissidents, suggest that our freedom to work for political and social goals is likely to become more restricted. And in any event the prospects for a regime that accepts—for example—the authority of natural law seem remote. Such governments depend on widespread acceptance of their basic principles, and the social and cultural basis for even understanding those principles is now generally lacking. So the road to reform seems very difficult.

Extreme heroism

An opposing possibility would be Romano Guardini’s proposal in The End of the Modern World.²² That was to accept that present tendencies offer no support at all for the Faith, and to deal with the situation through some combination of sanctity, doctrinal purity, warrior spirit, and stoicism.

People capable of that have yet to appear. We seem to be going in the opposite direction. But the future is unpredictable, and necessity sometimes calls forth saints and heroes. We shall see.

Options for survival

Saints and heroes, if and when they arrive, will make their own way and show the rest of us what to do. In the meantime it seems that Catholics need to draw together and cultivate greater self-sufficiency so we can maintain a fairly Catholic way of life in the midst of the current madness.

Many people have pointed that out. Others have pointed out that the project will be very difficult if the current order maintains its vigor. What happens to moral independence when the right of family self-government is denied²³ and “child abuse” is defined to include failure to support transgenderism? Such things have been seriously proposed and in some cases are actually being enforced.²⁴²⁵

On the other hand, our rulers dislike unpleasantness, and their energy, competence, and mutual loyalty are likely to keep declining. Also, a social order is never truly monolithic, and we should be able to get some support for various forms of resistance from people who do not go along with all the insanity. So defensive political and legal action may offer some hope.

Intelligence and unity will be important to such efforts, so if Church leadership does not improve the problems may become very serious indeed. So a great deal depends on whether—for example—the papacy turns around.

Developing alternatives

We have seen that a crucial support for ruling class ideology is the absence of developed alternatives. Surveys show that ordinary people know something is wrong,²⁶ but they cannot articulate what it is or what to do about it. Changing that is an enormously important task.

While the Internet has greatly increased the number of people who understand that something has gone basically astray, it has also multiplied confusion. There are a great many quirky homemade theories floating around with no anchor in a continuing broadbased tradition of discussion.

Recently traditional Catholicism has been gathering force as an opposing movement with a definite tradition that enables it to maintain coherence and continuity, and enough intelligent and educated people involved to produce high-quality discussion. It also has certain advantages with regard to truth, and enough depth to deal with the need for a change in the general direction of Western thought before our political and moral thought can change fundamentally.

So it is evident that initiatives like these conferences and the efforts our European participants have told us about can make a real contribution to the outlook for a better world. We need to stick with them and do everything we can to build on them. That may be the most important thing we can do that directly relates to politics.

One aspect of that is developing Catholic thinking on society and the state and how it should be applied today. That has already begun, and provoked a renewed interest in integralism. Another is building connections with friendly forces and a broader public. The popularity of online Catholic personalities with traditional leanings as well as non-Catholics who are deeply dissatisfied with the direction of events show an interest in answers that are better than the ones generally on offer. If we have something to offer we ought somehow to be able to communicate it. How to do that in our media-drenched, endlessly distracted, thoroughly propagandized, and deeply unserious world, under conditions of life that make human connections ever more fragile, is of course a problem, but what else are we here for?

Conclusion

Above all, though, we need to ask for God’s help. The best arguments and presentation will not improve things fundamentally unless the West’s spiritual direction changes, and that will not happen without God’s assistance. In a discussion of deliverance from tyranny, Saint Thomas said that “to deserve to secure this benefit from God, the people must desist from sin, for it is by divine permission that wicked men receive power to rule as a punishment for sin.”²⁷ So among other things each of us needs to take seriously the need for prayer and repentance.²⁸ If the Catholic view of things is true, and we want to be allowed to treat it as true and help others recognize it as such, we have to act like we truly hold it. And that may be the most important thing of all for us to bear in mind.

Footnotes

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