How the West Was Lost
Coping With Life in a Strange, New Civilization
by
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Why do we produce so many abused and neglected children? Why do we find it perfectly routine to learn that barely teen-aged girls are giving birth to babies, and raising them without a man in the house? Why are our prisons filling up with young men faster than we can build them? How do you stop such behavior? What government agency can prevent these things? If the people are mired in pathology, all government can do is damage control. Why do Christians find divorce so easy to resort to? Perfectly fine women find themselves simply unable to endure what every generation of their ancestors would find perfectly natural to endure. They hate it that they have no other choice, but they could not survive otherwise. They are simply driven out of their marriages. Why do our kids, even Christian kids, find sexual behavior to be unavoidable? On the seventh of January, 2005, the following headline appeared in the local section of my morning newspaper: “1st-graders Suspended in Sex Case.” The article was subtitled: “Boy and girl caught with some clothes off under stairwell at an Eastside IPS school.” I’m sure the school’s principal speaks for most of us when he tells the reporter, “I have never in my life experienced anything like this,” although in our heart of hearts we know that the quote is a couple decades late to really be shocking. We’re not really surprised, because we’ve become accustomed to watching the bar steadily lowered, as the moral baseline plummets. Soon, nothing will be left undone, much less unthinkable. Why do Christians find abortion to be an option, even if horrendously shameful? Christians abort their children. Why? Because the air we breathe does not come out of the West any more. The West built minds that were horrified by such a thought; Western Civilization had at its center a fundamental respect, an awe, a fear of God. Human life, the highest point of Creation, was instinctively defended. I am obviously not claiming that murder, infanticide, euthanasia and abortion never happened in the West. Of course they did, but they were universally regarded as moral crimes, behaviors that caused you to forfeit your own life. The death penalty came naturally to Western Civilization
because life was so highly esteemed; anything less undervalued the
innocent life the guilty party took away. In the New Civ, we’ve gotten hopelessly confused on this point. We can’t distinguish between guilt and innocence. We somehow regard the defense of guilty life as equal to the life of the innocent he victimized, i.e. it must be protected. But at the same time, abortion is now a “human right” that must be protected at all cost, and euthanasia, the “merciful” execution of inconvenient people who are already born, is increasingly easily justified
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About the Book
His premise is that civilizations have “life spans,” and the Western civilization that produced
And the more time that passes, the more “normal” the New Civ gets to feel.
We sometimes have to “pinch” ourselves to remember that society once had roots in a universe that knew something of moral absolutes, where the horrible behaviors we now read about in every morning newspaper were so rare that one such event in a year would have felt like the world is just about to end. But these things are what passes for “normalcy” today. We are still able to be reminded of what we know in our bones, although it gets harder all the time: something has gone terribly wrong.
That’s what this book is about.
About the Author
Patrick Murphy is a business man and a writer whose interest in Christianity, political philosophy and history led him to ask the question: why does the world feel so different now? Why do the social pathologies that have overtaken modern society feel so normal ? His conclusion is that a fundamental change has occurred in our world in our time. We have experienced a transition from one civilization to a completely different one, and did not notice.