The Collapse of the New Moral Order

Beginning in the early 20th century and gaining momentum after WWII the advance of secularization posed a serious challenge to the Judeo-Christian value system that had prevailed in this country throughout most of its history. The moral duties that constrained our proclivity toward selfishness, violence, dishonesty, infidelity and general unwholesomeness were grounded in Biblical injunctions to refrain from these behaviors and those injunctions were ultimately grounded in the will of God.

As our nation grew more secular, however, Biblical morality and the will of God lost purchase with a growing faction of our population. In their place our cultural elites foisted upon us a new moral order rooted in three secular values, but with no objective basis in a transcendent moral authority that can, and will, hold us accountable those secular values were like moral sand castles at the edge of the incoming tide, and like sand castles it was just a matter of time before they began to wash away.

Gerard Baker has an illuminating column on this in the Wall Street Journal (subscription) in which he discusses the three primary values in the secular moral order and explains why they're beginning to collapse. Here are his first few paragraphs:

The new moral order our secularist elites have been busy constructing since the end of the Cold War is collapsing around them.

Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, and its failure to supply the needs of the people is discrediting it in the popular mind.

This new edifice has been built around three principal pillars: First, the ethical primacy of global obligation over national self-interest, in economic and geopolitical terms, but most directly and consequentially in a rejection of the morality of national borders and an embrace of something like open-door immigration.

Second, a quasi-biblical belief in climate catastrophism, in which man’s essential energy-consuming sinfulness can be expiated only by massive sacrifice of economic progress.

Third, a wholesale cultural self-cancellation in which the virtues, values and historic achievements of traditional civilization are rejected and replaced by a cultural hierarchy that inverts old prejudices and obliges the class of white, male heterosexuals to acknowledge their history of exploitation and submit to comprehensive social and economic reparation.

This fall, throughout the West, on three continents, each of these three pillars is crumbling.

The collapse of the first pillar is seen most vividly in the non-policy of the Biden administration toward illegal immigration and the consequent tsunami of illegal aliens flooding into communities all across the country. This tide of immigrants is putting enormous pressure on resources everywhere and threatens in some places like New York City to produce fiscal collapse. Perhaps, some opine, that's the goal.

Baker points toward Great Britain for evidence of the incipient collapse of the second pillar due to the high economic burden of doing away with gasoline powered vehicles, but he could've aimed closer to home where infatuation with the green agenda has led to the erection of vast wind farms on both land and sea. These wind farms are an aesthetic scourge, but much worse, they're disasters for birds, bats and maybe whales.

On land, wind turbines kill a minimum of a million birds each year just in the U.S. Ocean turbines presumably kill even more and, although the progressive media and politicians scoff at it, there's growing evidence that these turbines are also killing whales as this interview with Michael Shellenberger reveals:

Baker also looks abroad for evidence that the third pillar, cultural self-annihilation, is wobbling, but right here in America we're beginning to see signs of pushback against some of its more unsavory manifestations - e.g. the sexualization of our children, the teaching of critical race theory in our schools and the denigration of America and its history.

Whether that pushback will amount to a counter-revolution or come to nought can't be foreseen, but it is remarkable that Donald Trump, who rightly or wrongly is seen as the champion of those who are fed up with our cultural decline, is tied with or leading Joe Biden in the polls for the 2024 election. This, despite being faced with four indictments and a host of other political and personal liabilities. Where would he be in the polls if he wasn't carrying all that baggage?

Baker concludes that many in the West have simply had enough of our leaders’ insistence on dividing us by race and other attributes rather than uniting us around our common national identity and adds that,

The pillars are crumbling. The fight will go on. We don’t know what will replace this new moral order. But we can at least hope for a restoration of the traditional values that, ironically, through economic and cultural enrichment and political and civil liberation, permitted the West to indulge in this orgy of self-immolation in the first place.