In 1925, the great poet T.S. Eliot wrote one of his most famous poems. Filled with dark imagery and somber scenes, The Hollow Men, ended with the lines “This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.” Eliot’s words are an apt description of how a great civilization dies. Often, a slow process of internal decay precedes a final death-blow. The French, for example, lost World War II before it even began. After losing millions of men in the Great War, pacifism had become a dominant force that enervated the minds of the public. In such a state of despair, resistance to the Nazi war machine was impossible. Similarly, when writing of the Roman Empire, the great historian Edward Gibbon claimed that even if hostile barbarian nations had been wiped off the face of the earth, Rome still would have fallen due to its internal corruption. In every age, the task of a statesman is to identify the greatest internal threats to a society, in order to prevent them from destroying a nation’s resolve.
In the wake of the attacks on Israel, many Americans believe that the greatest threats facing our society are the individuals who support violence on college campuses and in cities throughout the country. While people are correct to fear these massive gatherings of malicious individuals, I would argue that this fear is largely unjustified. Unstable people can be whipped into a frenzy for nearly any cause, and while it is true that an increasing number of people in our society lack sanity, there is a much greater lack of conviction. Indeed, our society has always had groups of people that will take to the streets in favor of immoral causes. The real danger occurs when good people stand by and do nothing.
It is an unfortunate fact that America has been succumbing to indifference since at least the middle of the 20th century. The German-Jewish emigre Leo Strauss told an audience in 1953 that although the United States had defeated Germany in World War II, they had succumbed to what he called characterized as the German “historical sense.” He believed that while Americans had once vigorously defended natural rights as embodying eternal truths, many now viewed our nation’s values in purely historical terms. These rights were now seen as historical amalgamations with no permanent value. One can certainly see this phenomenon on full display when politicians and judges claim that the Constitution can change over time and has no fixed meaning.
Coupled with this historical relativism is a widespread pseudo-tolerance that is indistinguishable from indifference. Standards which were once commonplace have been thrown by the wayside in the name of greater autonomy. Strauss foresaw this development as well, writing that many liberals believe that our “inability to acquire any genuine knowledge of what is intrinsically good or right compels us to be tolerant of every opinion about good or right or to recognize all preferences of all ‘civilizations’ as equally respectable.” When we have lost faith in unchanging natural right, we are no longer able to judge the worth of different goals, and must accept all values as equally rational. Hence the prevalence of the phrase “my truth” which is nothing more than an implicit assertion that there is no objective truth. And just as individuals have “their truth” so do different societies. Thus, many people cannot make a rational distinction between the aims of a civilization like Israel and those of a group like Hamas. Without natural right we must bow before the altar of pseudo-tolerance and proclaim that all lifestyles are equal.
Any society that is so indifferent that it cannot distinguish right from wrong is doomed to succumb to cultural insanity and ultimately fail. It is true that America is a relatively tolerant country. But we did not become tolerant because we were indifferent to questions of right and wrong. Rather, our society’s tolerance emerged from a deep-seated conviction that some degree of tolerance is a good thing. Tolerance resulting from indifference and tolerance resulting from conviction should not be confused with one another.
Indifference breeds insanity and moral catastrophe. The Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton once remarked that it is foolish for one philosopher to burn another for his heresy; “but there is one thing that is infinitely more unpractical and absurd than burning another man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter.” Relativism inevitably leads to indifference, which leads to civilizational collapse. In order to perpetuate our society, Americans must reclaim their conviction in the existence of natural right. This starts by refraining from whataboutism and stating a simple fact: “terrorists are evil.”
