PRINCIPAL
3 John Carroll ( 1993 ). Humanism : The Wreck of Western Culture . Harper Collins : London ( p . 1 ). 4 Konstantin Kisin ( 2022 ). An immigrant ’ s love letter to the West . Little Brown Book Group , London ( p . 28 ). 5 ibid , ( p . 28 ). 6 Rabbi Jonathan Sacks ( 2020 ) ‘ Morality : Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times ’. Hodder & Stoughton Ltd : London ( p . 20 ). 7 Jean-Claude Michea ( 2009 ) ‘ The Realm of Lesser Evil ’. Polity Press : Cambridge , ( p . 17 ). 8 Patrick Deneen , Why Liberalism Failed . Yale University Press : New Haven , ( p . 5 ). 9 Jean-Claude Michea , ( 2009 ). The Realm of Lesser Evil . Polity Press : Cambridge , ( p . 89 ). 10 ibid , ( p . 91 ). 11 George Orwell , The Collected Essays , Journalism and Letters , Vol . 1 : An Age Like This , 1920-1940 ( Harmondsworth : Penguin , 1970 ), p . 583 . 12 Kesebir , P ., & Kesebir , S . ( 2012 ). The cultural salience of moral character and virtue declined in twentieth century America . The Journal of Positive Psychology , 7 ( 6 ), 471 – 480 . https :// doi . or g / 10.1080 / 17439760.20 12.715182 13 James Arthur ( 2024 ). Philosophies of Catholic Education : Linking Neo- Scholastic Legacies and Contemporary Concerns , Routledge : Oxfordshire ( p . 73 ). effectively the guinea pigs of this experiment .
Over recent years there has been a growing number of scholars lamenting the decline of western civilisation . John Carroll 3 , in claiming that humanism should be judged to be guilty of wrecking western culture , opens his book with this rather dire statement :
We live amidst the ruins of the great , five-hundredyear epoch of Humanism . Around us is that ‘ colossal wreck ’. Our culture is a flat expanse of rubble . It hardly offers shelter from a mild cosmic breeze … We are desperate , yet we don ’ t care much any more . We are timid , yet we cannot be shocked . We are inert underneath our busyness . We are destitute in our plenty . We are homeless in our own homes … ( our culture ) is wrecked . It is dead .
Not a positive portrayal of our progress . Konstantin Kisin 4 , a Russian born citizen of the United Kingdom , similarly notes :
I believe that here in the West we … have forgotten that the prosperity , safety , life expectancy , stability and freedoms we enjoy did not just fall out of the sky . They were built , over centuries , on philosophical and moral foundations that have withstood the test of time . They were defended over and over again by our ancestors who bled to defend them . They were refined in the crucible of fierce political and ideological debates .
Kisin goes further to list the many benefits enjoyed by the West simply not present in Russia , his country of birth , and concludes by pleading to the reader that ‘ it is only by grasping this fully that the West will endure – and too many people here are unwilling or unable to do so ’ 5 .
The great Jewish scholar , Rabbi Jonathan Sacks , noted that ‘ if we care for the future of democracy , we must recover that sense of shared morality that binds us to one another ’ 6 . In expressing the Bible ’ s viewpoint on a flourishing community , Rabbi Sacks states unequivocably that it is morality that dictates the success of any society .
As noted above , Carroll ’ s claim of a ‘ colossal wreck ’ has not just happened . As a society we have made very intentional and at times , completely unintentional decisions in the name of progress . Underlying these decisions has been the subtle and now essentially failed ideology of Liberalism .
Whilst it is beyond the scope of this article to fully cover this surreptitious ideology , Liberalism has played a key part in weakening the concept of morality within western societies . Jean-Claude Michea 7 in describing liberalism notes that the :
basic axiom of political liberalism is sufficiently well known . If the claim of certain individuals ( or associations of individuals , such as the Church ) to have the true definition of Good is the fundamental cause that leads people into violent confrontation , then the members of a society will only be able to live in peace with one another if the Power charged with organising their coexistence is philosophically neutral ; in other words , if it abstains from imposing on individuals any particular conception of the good life . In a liberal society , everyone is thus free to adopt the style of life that they deem most appropriate to their conception of duty or happiness : on the sole and unique reservation , of course , that their choices are compatible with the corresponding freedom of others .
In this way , Liberalism claims the high , ‘ morally neutral ’ ground and says that it has no intention of ‘ shaping the souls under its rule ’ 8 . We know that central to the liberal doctrine is the removal of anything that sought to inform or shape moral behaviour , and that such practice was considered as limiting of individual liberty .
In fact , Liberalism ’ s initial concern was effectively to ‘ banish from political life , above all , any reference to a common conception of morality and the good life ’ 9 . According to liberalists , ‘ the balancing mechanisms of Market and modern Law are sufficient in themselves to generate all cultural dispositions that are indispensable to the integration of individuals into the community ’ 10 . Yet based on our current predicament and what we witness nightly on our news channels , we know this is simply not the case . Indeed , history and the study of human beings suggest we do not do that well without the presence of shared moral and cultural values .
George Orwell 11 , writing in 1940 , noted that the :
English intelligentsia have come infected with the inherently mechanistic Marxist notion that if you make the necessary technical advance the moral advance will follow of itself . I have never accepted this . A year ago , I was in the Atlas mountains , and looking at the Berber villagers there , it struck me that we were , perhaps , 1000 years ahead of these people , but no better than they , perhaps on balance rather worse . We are physically inferior to them , for instance , and manifestly less happy . All we have done is advance to a point at which we could make real improvement in human life , but we shan ’ t do it without the recognition that common decency is necessary . My chief hope for the future is that the common people have never parted company with their moral code .
I wonder what Orwell would be thinking if he were with us today . We know that our children are growing up in a very different society to previous
6 Great Scot Issue 172 – Edition 2 2024