Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralised society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic.
George Orwell wrote those words nearly 80 years ago.
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An insightful, if pithy, tweet surfaced recently on my feed. It nicely summarized what happened to neutralize an awakening electorate in America over the past decade:
“They got you fighting a culture war to stop you from fighting a class war. It was designed that way in 2012 when the woke left & right were created. Occupy Wall Street/The Tea Party were making inroads uniting the political spectrum & the people against Wall Street following the 2008 crash. ‘We’ll get them to argue about women & their cocks instead'”
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We’ve all heard the rhetorical attacks on Western Civilization—often centered on Christianity, capitalism, or colonialism, and often on all three. Among radical leftists, the consensus is that these elements are evil, but given that each is currently or historically integral to civilization as we know it, it’s worth examining the data to determine whether they deserve to be so despised.
First, Christianity. A 2018 study found that religion was “the decisive background factor” determining how much human rights were respected in any given country. And not all religions had the same impact. The percentage of Christians in the population was closely associated with a nation upholding human rights, whereas the percentage of Muslims was the opposite—that is, Muslim countries were less likely to uphold such rights. Another study reached similar conclusions about the effects of Christianity vis-à-vis Islam on nations’ ranking in the Good Country Index. (The index measures countries’ “contributions to global prosperity in domains such as peace, climate and health.”)
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I have written about the death and rebirth of socialism periodically over the years. But as André Gide said in another context, “Toutes choses sont dites déjà, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer”: everything has already been said, but since no one was listening, it is necessary to say it again.
Really, the socialist impulse is a hardy perennial. How could something so frequently and thoroughly discredited persist in the hearts of men? Some think it has something to do with the gullibility of the human animal, some (but I repeat myself) with the persistence of the utopian dream. I suspect there are many explanations, of which the raw desire for power plays an unedifying but also underrated role. I also favor the explanatory power of original sin, which has profound psychological as well as theological application to many of the more farcical aspects of human experience and what is more farcical than socialism?
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Christians around the world will commemorate the most important event in our faith’s history this Sunday, but the Resurrection of Jesus isn’t just important to those who believe a Nazarene who walked the earth 2,000 years ago is the Son of God. The secular world’s history also turns on this pivotal event, which inspired so much progress that we take for granted today.
Christianity turned the values of the Pagan Roman world upside-down. The Romans considered the early Christians subversives—many called them “atheists” because they didn’t worship any pagan gods—and put them to death for refusing to worship the emperor. After some emperors adopted the faith, Emperor Julian attempted to revive paganism, but lamented that the Christian ethic had transformed the empire.
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