“The Death of Virtue—A Telltale Sign of Civilizational Collapse”


“The Death of Virtue—A Telltale Sign of Civilizational Collapse”

The path of the virtuous leads away from evil; whoever follows that path is safe. -Proverbs 16:17, NLT 

“When, therefore, man lives according to man, not according to God, he is like the devil.” -Saint Augustine

We live in an era of unthinkable absurdity.

Up is down. Black is white. Evil is good. Light is dark. Truth is a lie. Right is wrong. Virtue is vice. Gender is fluid. And we have thousands of “friends” (on social media).

In all this, what you think you plainly see is not really what you are seeing—your eyes are deceiving you (so say the masters of gaslighting). What you have been taught and have cherished as sincerely held beliefs are really just hateful, bigoted talking points used to inflict pain, guilt and shame on others. In essence, your core values are nothing more than a harmful fraud.

I saw this “theater of the absurd” surreptitiously develop over the three decades of my teaching career. Little by little I witnessed our students moving away from traditional, American values; values dating to the founding of our country in the early 1600’s; values espoused by an educated, principled populace; and values centered squarely on the truths and tenets of the Bible.

Our founding documents, beginning with the Mayflower Compact in 1620, did not mysteriously emerge from thin air. No, they came from long years of serious study and debate among our colonial leaders. Read a letter written during this era and you’ll immediately notice the superb mastery of the English language, not to mention the eloquence of the syntax and the expert penmanship. 

By comparison, we now have Snapchat, Twitter, and Tik-Tok! Our language has become so debased and vulgar that it has literally dumbed down an entire generation or two so dramatically that reading comprehension levels are at an all-time low. This is no small thing mind you, a low-functioning electorate being pivotal to the machinations of the power-hungry elite (think “cancel culture” among Big Tech). Lenin would surely applaud.

But I digress. Our seminal ideals emanated from a corpus of learned individuals, who collectively would have rivaled, and perhaps surpassed, any such amalgamation of minds from the panoply of human history. The Philadelphia 55 were exceedingly brilliant, forging together, in that sweltering summer of 1787, a document positively unique to world culture—then, and now.

The Constitution they drafted was the shared result of learning and growing from their collective colonial successes and failures (from 1607 forward) and from their forensic studies and analyses of those who had come before—beginning with the Greeks and Romans and extending to the writers and thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

From that storehouse of knowledge, they gave to us the recipe for greatness— “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

God given rights. Not government given rights. God…given…rights. God, the Creator; God the Sovereign. Unalienable rights. Rights that man (government) cannot take away because man did not give them in the first place. So, what then is the government’s role: to institute and protect these God given rights. That’s it. Protect, preserve, and defend that which supersedes the wisdom and whims of man.

Ah, the “wisdom” and whims of man. St. Augustine warned us: “When, therefore, man lives according to man, not according to God, he is like the devil.” Indeed. We may not always be able to name it, but we know when we see it.

Back to my classroom and the declension of values I was witnessing among my students.

I routinely implored my students (eighth graders) to be informed. We discussed current events daily, and I did my best to encourage them to watch, read and learn from the news. Why? My standard line: “If you’re uninformed—if you have no clue what’s going on—you’re likely to vote for people who are uninformed and clueless, and uniformed and clueless leaders will pass uninformed and clueless legislation (e.g., ‘We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it’).”

In actuality, what I said was more blunt than that. Here’s the more direct verbiage (using as a reference Lenin’s “useful idiots” phrase): “If you don’t know what’s going on, you’ll be an idiot, and if you’re an idiot, you’ll vote idiotically and elect idiotic politicians, then those idiots will pass idiotic laws and turn us into a nation of idiots.” 

I was a prophet without claiming or aiming to be one as we have now reached the Age of Idiocy. We are in a downward spiral of unparalleled stupidity, where our leaders say and do the most bizarre, asinine things—things which defy logic, wisdom, common sense, and serious governing—things which only idiots would do. The examples are legion and multiplying by the day.

Recent case in point: the White House’s use of a Tik-Tok “influencer” to explain why gas prices are so high (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Monroe must be spinning wildly in their graves). Can you imagine anything more preposterous than to trot out a know-nothing “influencer” to explain to us why we’re getting poorer by the day? Rather than our leaders working overtime to fix the problem, they insult our intelligence with this lunacy.

This would be laughable, but the “Machiavelli of Moscow” possesses a stockpile of thousands of nuclear weapons, and that’s far from a laughing matter. Perhaps someone in the Biden inner-circle might have the President and his closest advisors revisit photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from early August 1945 in order to jar them into the reality that this is the most existential moment the world has faced since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. 

Those decimated Japanese cities, where multiplied thousands were vaporized in a flash of unprecedented heat and power, were flattened by bombs that, when compared to the current Russian nuclear arsenal, rate as little more than “firecrackers.” This is a time for sober thinking and reasoned decision making—and not a time for silly political stunts involving the most unserious, benighted people in our culture.

What we desperately need are people of unassailable virtue and iron-clad values to step up and lead with great courage and without apology to the uniformed and the ignorant. “The path of the virtuous leads away from evil; whoever follows that path is safe.” If our planet is to be spared the unthinkable, then we must abandon the path of the absurd that we are currently on and choose instead the path of virtue, and we must do so post haste. 

Right must be right. Truth must be truth. Virtue must be virtue. Up must be up. Good must be good, and evil must be named and confronted. There is no other way to salvage this march towards destruction. All that’s necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

At this point, doing nothing is not an option unless we want to imagine the grand, historical cities of London, Paris and Rome all being obliterated in an instant. In a moment of sheer, diabolical insanity—as desperate, killers-of-the-innocent, dictators are wont to have—this could be our catastrophic reality…a world where thousand-year-old cities, along with all their inhabitants, are leveled in literal seconds. 

Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the bomb,” knew this. While gazing across the early morning New Mexico desert at a rapidly rising, mushroom-like, atomic fireball, “brighter than a thousand suns,” Oppenheimer presciently quoted a line from a Hindu poem, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” 

He, being a man of great intellect and seriousness, knew more than anyone that the powerful monster they had unleashed on that warm July morning had the very real potential of being the undoing of humanity. At this very moment that destructive potential is staring us in the face. Let’s hope that Putin doesn’t bring to fruition Oppenheimer’s whispered fear.

So, our prayer is that men and women of real virtue—and not just the cheap virtue signaling types—will step up to do whatever it takes to resolve this crisis. If those kinds of people cannot be found, we are likely witnessing the end of life as we have known it since the surrender of the Germans and the Japanese in 1945. The stakes are really that high.

Useful idiots rife with the absurd? Or courageous men and women filled with wisdom and knowledge? Civilization hangs in the balance. Let’s pray we are not weighed in that balance and found wanting.

May God’s grace see us through.

A fellow beggar along the Way,
greg

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