When she was in her teens, one of my daughters was drawn toward drama (the on-stage kind), performing effectively in several high school productions before her interests veered in other directions. My mind keeps returning to one performance that featured an emo Hamlet hugging the walls of a high school mixer, all brooding teenage angst, exhibiting both swiftly descending despair and frustration with the slow tempo of progress toward desired goals. That is one way of visualizing our civilization’s increasingly suicidal course over the past century or so: acting out a death wish like someone who is young and insistent on either getting what they want now or holding their breath until they turn blue. Our many-faceted death urge manifests in orgies of literal death, including abortion, euthanasia, and mass murders; in avoidance of life, such as the retreat from marriage or formation of families; and in escape from reality like transgenderism, social media, pornography, and the seemingly endless prolongation of adolescence. At other times, though—especially when I survey the long span of Western Civilization’s lethal downward spiral—this death wish resembles less the nihilistic impatience of youth than the sclerotic despair of decrepitude. And then there are times when it seems we have managed to combine the two.

Regardless, here we are. And now, roughly half a millennium after Europe embraced the scientific pursuit of human betterment—subduing diseases, reining in plagues, dulling pain with analgesics, ameliorating handicaps with medicine and technology, and most recently cracking open the door to a new era of gene therapy and artificial human enhancement—many of us sense we have profoundly lost our way. All these accomplishments (and they are real accomplishments, many of them magnificent accomplishments, particularly in the medical sphere) that were intended to advance us toward a new and better, humanly derived Eden have clearly failed to do so.

That health is more enjoyable than sickness is beyond doubt. That a full stomach is an improvement on an empty one is also true. But first vaguely and then fretfully and finally despairingly, many of us have begun to realize that relief from pain and hunger and the provision of comfort, entertainment, labor-saving devices, even intoxication in all its forms, are not the same thing as happiness, peace of mind, and sense of purpose. They inhabit separate categories. They are not the same kind of experience. So, for instance, however many five-star meals we enjoy at however many first-class restaurants, those meals will not by themselves fill us with peace or satiate any of our non-gustatory gnawing desires. It is increasingly apparent that all our progress, all our work, all our brain power and pizzazz, will not be enough to make us happy. Nothing—no thing—will be enough.

This uneasy acknowledgment of science’s limits persists even in the face of excited promises of scientific utopias; for example, CRISPR’s doorway to genetic manipulation on a grand scale, offering physically (and intellectually) faultless human beings. Even AI—that sorcerer’s-apprentice-like enhancer of human productivity and efficiency reputedly destined someday to make human participation in the world of work unnecessary—heightens rather than allays unease.

Why are such seemingly “good news” scenarios not the particular kinds of good news we are most seeking, even if what they foretell someday comes to pass? I think it is because such scenarios leave unaddressed the real problem, the real human challenge in this and every age—how to discern our human purpose and attempt to fulfill it. What do we humans mean? Why are we? The info technology utopias inadvertently let out their secret despair by dis-closing the pointlessness of human beings, or at least the great mass of them, if the I.T. dream/nightmare ever becomes reality.

Whether or not we believe him, when we hear a tech billionaire speculate that within a decade or two or three human workforces will be almost wholly obsolete, but that AI will be so productive that everyone can be paid not to work, does this outlandish promise of universal leisure and prosperity strike us as any less depressing than the tech nightmare version where AI ultimately takes over everything and annihilates the human race? Aren’t both versions really nightmares?

The cherry on top would be fulfillment of the belief famously expressed by Ray Kurzweil and shared by others in the tech cohort that humans will someday, not very far in the future, outrun mortality. Forget for a moment whether you consider this likely or even possible and just entertain it as a thought experiment. Would our condition then be better or worse than it is now, let alone than it was 1,000 or 1,500 or 2,000 years ago? There we are, living on and on and on (again, if AI doesn’t do away with us—we are in the supposedly happy AI dream now), our physical necessities and needs for entertainment perfectly fulfilled. If we fill up one planet with ourselves or our junk, we just move on to another, and another. The only catch is that, in John Lennon’s unintentionally dystopian lyrics, we’ll have “nothing to live or die for.” Just yawning oceans of time waiting to be filled with ever-new video games or other essentially pointless activities.

That is the dead end to which our efforts in the last 500 years or so to master the mysteries of both nature at large and human nature, seeking thereby to eliminate pain and want and disease and maximize ease and pleasure and prosperity, have brought us. We have achieved much—Francis Bacon him-self would likely be astonished at the success of his project to pursue mas-tery over our physical world. But we have not achieved happiness. In fact, arguably we have seen the relative stock of human happiness decreasing rather than increasing, as evidenced by rising tides of suicide, depression, and anxiety, and by the failure of growing subsets of the last few generations to launch successfully into adulthood.

Perhaps we can visualize the post-Renaissance happiness project, particularly as it has gathered steam exponentially in the last century, as the effort to fill to the brim a watertight human progress compartment that at the be-ginning of the Baconian project was perhaps a quarter full. Centuries later it is now perhaps three quarters full, and the heady projections of some in the medical and technological worlds suggest it will fill up completely within another generation. But side by side with the great strides made in this di-rection is the realization that little has changed with the level of the human happiness container.

Or maybe we should say that the human perfectionism project has in fact affected human happiness, only not in a good way. This might not be a direct or necessary effect: Life-changing alterations—like mechanizing the process of spinning and weaving cloth, thereby precipitating the Industrial Revolution; or taming and employing electricity to power engines, light night-time cities, transfer sound and sight through telephones, phonographs, radio, tele-vision, and movies, and on and on to our present-day laptops, cellphones, smart appliances, GPS, and AI—might not be directly opposed to happiness. There may be ways of pursuing the one that do not also deplete the other. Ma-chines do not actually run on or consume happiness, peace of mind, or sense of purpose. But the nature-dominating, power-seeking, wealth-amassing, reductionist and materialist-focusing mindset that has grown and strengthened with centuries of successes and whose less life-enhancing implications have become more apparent has somehow been draining the well-spring of human happiness, such as it is and can be in a fallen universe, at ever greater rates. Let’s look at that mindset, then, and consider what within it leaches peace of mind and heart while it mows down disease, the need for physical exertion, and the limitations of time and space.

To begin with, the scientific revolution conceived by Bacon and his con-temporaries and carried on by their immediate inheritors, though focused on earthly progress and ambitious to gain greater control over nature, was not then an explicit rebellion against God and moral law either in origin or intention. Regardless, the focus was on achieving greater power; the emphasis was on mankind’s dominion over the earth, with Genesis 1:28-29 as the permission slip (“‘. . . fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves upon the earth’”). Setting out on this project to establish and ex-tend our dominion more systematically and scientifically than had ever been done propelled humanity further away from the natural world. We needed, after all, to view it as an object to be acted upon and both extracted from and transformed in order to make progress in mastering it. But nothing done to nature does not also have ripple effects upon us.

For we not only inhabit nature, as we might inhabit a house, but we draw sustenance from it as we once did from our mother within the womb. The very term Mother Nature shows how ancient and natural that comparison is. Nevertheless, this impulse to extract ourselves from what we study has hampered our ability to understand our own limits, to distinguish between good and bad desires or the good and bad ways of achieving them, and to trace the sources of that happiness we are seeking, which 18th-century Americans identified in the Declaration of Independence as our natural right to pursue.

A natural right. In that same 18th century, French philosopher and social critic Jean-Jacques Rousseau was developing his own ideas on nature and human beings and education and rights—ideas that both reacted against and were influenced by Enlightenment rationalism. To begin with, he had reject-ed the idea of original sin, which left him free to believe in human perfect-ibility, if one were only properly taught. Rousseau’s repudiation of original sin made possible an excessively rosy view not only of human prospects, but of nature’s, contradicting the traditional Christian belief that the natural world had also mysteriously experienced the effects of our fall from grace through the sin of Adam. See St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, for example: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom 8:19-21).

This belief in a fallen nature is still largely discounted today. And given a purely materialistic understanding of the universe, why not? What would it mean for an atom, or anything composed of atoms, to “fall”?

This brings us back to the emo-Hamlet rebellious side of our civilization’s death wish, with its refusal to accept the civilizational inheritance bequeathed to us. Such a refusal inevitably also entails rejecting responsibility for passing on our civilizational inheritance to those who come after us. This rejected inheritance could consist solely of the specific flowering of Western civilization in the arts, philosophy, religion, and morality—a drastic enough disavowal of our ancestors. However, in our case we see even more fundamental upheaval, including the desire to turn our backs on the most basic and essential roles that any society in history has deemed necessary to pre-serve its existence and even flourish, including marrying, having children, and rearing those children (to the best of our ability) in conditions of relative security, stability, and love.

If a large cohort of any generation—and especially of successive generations—fails to value and assume these roles, then a crucial continuity is bro-ken. For those of us who inherited something we would still call Western Civilization, this continuity includes passing on to our children our “family” history, even in partial or fragmentary form. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” as 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot put it near the end of his groundbreaking poem “The Waste Land,” a 1922 presentation of the fragmenting West after World War I.

Eliot’s poem is evidence that breaking with the past is hardly a late-20th century idea. But the rest of that century should already have thoroughly convinced us of that. And in partial or temporary ways such ruptures have been happening for centuries—consider the French Revolution, which was so anti-traditional that it introduced a 10-day week. The Industrial Revolu-tion also exerted a subversive influence on society’s conception of the prima-cy of family and other complex social ties, as well as providing the machine model of comprehending the functioning of both human beings and society. And then there is Marxism, which in its elevation of the collective and its insistence on evaluating human beings through the limiting lens of class, rejected not only religion but almost all of the West’s hard-earned wisdom about the value of the human person, as well as our understanding of human motivation and destiny.

But there have also been all kinds of fringe movements, esoteric religions or -isms, and small-scale utopian experiments infecting subsectors of West-ern societies throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. And even in the mid-1950s (often regarded by those who came after as a hyper-traditional period), rebellion against transmitting Western culture was becoming evi-dent, particularly in certain sectors. Randall Jarrell’s satiric novel Pictures from an Institution, for instance, took aim at the role post-World War II America’s progressive institutions of higher learning were playing in rejecting the West’s intellectual tradition:

Miss Batterson retorted to a colleague’s objection that all Benton students read that in high school: “There is no book that all my students have read.” Dr. Rosenbaum knew that it is in sentences like this, and not in the pages of Spengler, that one has brought home to one the twilight of the West. He gave a brotherly laugh and agreed: “Ja, dey haf de sense dey vere born vidt.”

Of course, even when civilizations are in their prime, not everything need be or will be handed down, since each generation necessarily culls what it deems ephemeral or outgrown to make space for new wisdom or artistic advances. So each era’s new intellectual or cultural treasure is not just an isolated artistic achievement but an augmented way of seeing. In healthy civilizations, new or better ways of doing something will be incorporated by one generation and then, over time, either retained or discarded as their persistent usefulness or unusefulness becomes clearer. But the wholesale dump-ing of a cultural inheritance does not occur without causing great violence to the society formed by that culture.

And the dumping of much more fundamental handings-on—the sort of institutions and arrangements that have been foundational for all societies we know of, such as marriage or the benefits to individuals and societies of having and raising children—will hollow out such societies’ will to live. Such wholesale repudiation marks the abandonment of belief in the goodness of that society or that civilization.

We are bound to grapple with many aspects of our cultural inheritance, ranging from objectionable habits of mind or moral blind spots to our idiosyncratic lapses of sympathy with aspects of our national life. But if we believe in a society’s basic goodness and soundness or believe in a foundational goodness we can work to repair, then we will be drawn to act in ways that build up this society so that we can hand it on as a continuing project to those coming after us. Otherwise, if we withdraw from the generational relay in which this precious cultural handoff takes place, our descendants will lack what they need to run their own lap of the race.

Recently, I’ve been reading the Book of Sirach, one of the Wisdom books of the Bible similar in style to the Book of Proverbs. The prologue explains how the grandson of the author translated the original from Hebrew into Greek for the benefit of “those living abroad who wished to gain learning, being prepared in character to live according to the law.” Like the Book of Proverbs, it is crammed with adages and advice on almost every topic, from dinner etiquette to desirable qualities to seek in a wife to truth-telling and avoidance of gossip.

Near the conclusion, the author introduces a series of chapters with the words, “Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers in their generations” (Sir 44: 1). (If that sounds familiar, it is because the opening words were used as a book title by James Agee and a musical composition by Ralph Vaughn Williams.) Beginning with Enoch, who “pleased the Lord, and was taken up; he was an example of repentance to all generations” (Sir 44:16), Sirach celebrates the signal virtues and accomplishments of Noah, Abraham, and so on, up to those of his near-contemporaries who were martyred for their Jewish faith during the Hellenistic persecutions of the Seleucid kings. Sirach is a classic example of someone working to pass on a heritage from one generation to the next. You can hear the voice of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof singing “Tradition!” as you read.

But again, this process of transmission succeeds only if the chain does not break. Both the givers and the receivers have to believe there is something worth handing on and something worth receiving. And that means that the inheritance must be something real rather than imaginary, something good rather than bad, and something capable of being emulated. Utopian projects cannot be handed on in this sense because they are by definition unreal (after all, the word Utopia, coined by St. Thomas More to describe his imaginary society in the book of the same name, comes from the Greek for “No place” or, more colloquially, “Nowhere”).

Our fears, though certainly real in the sense of being truly felt, are also un-real as reliable prognosticators. They are projections of possible future states rather than realities we have known or inhabit now. Nevertheless, the dark futures they present can appear to be so inevitable that some end up seeking death as an escape from what looks like certain defeat. But reality is not so easily gotten rid of. Unreal fears provide unreal release.

Substack writer Bethel McGrew recounts an event in the life of English theater critic Kenneth Tynan when he was a student at Oxford. C.S. Lewis was his tutor there, and one day a desperately unhappy Tynan came to him “to ask whether his final exams could be postponed, but truthfully, at the moment he didn’t see much point in living at all.” In reply, Lewis:

. . . reminded the young man of a memory [Tynan had] shared from his boyhood during the Blitz: A plane hovering near the Tynan family house dropped a land mine by parachute, which blew up mere inches away. “Now,” Tynan loosely remembers Lewis continuing, “if the wind had blown that bomb a few inches nearer your house, you would be dead. So ever since then—and that was seven years ago—all the time you have lived has been a bonus. It is a gift.”

. . . . All in a moment Tynan felt his bubble pop in the best sense. All his problems suddenly appeared in perspective—the perspective of this great good gift he had been given called Life. This thought so impressed the young man that he walked out of Lewis’s office “exhilarated and uplifted.”

If it is true—objectively true, as a sharp-edged piece of reality is when you bump against it—that life is a gift, then to act on a desire to die is to fall in with a lie, leaving you floating along in unreality, because suicide denies the real, incarnate, objective good of the gift. The gift remains real, right now, even if evils such as poverty, sickness, or loneliness are also present companions. Our fearful and fatalistic projections onto the future, on the other hand, however rational they may appear to our pessimistic mind, are no more real than our daydreams of winning the lottery. It is much easier to laugh at ourselves for indulging in the daydreams, because their greater unlikelihood is so apparent. But lots of unlikely things, bad and good, end up happening in life—outcomes that once seemed against all odds. For, as J.R.R. Tolkien displayed in his fiction and explained in his essay On Fairy Stories, eucata-strophes—unlooked for, unexpected happy endings—occur in life and art as well as catastrophes. “Call no man happy until he is dead,” the ancients counseled. But on that basis we also should not call any man unhappy until he is dead. Reversals come in all shapes and sizes.

Perhaps, then, we should not call even a seemingly decadent and doddering civilization like our own dead until it reaches its last gasp. Instead, perhaps we should busy ourselves with observing and encouraging the vital signs, fanning into flames each ember, and attending most especially to the health of heart and mind. Whether the West ultimately survives or perishes, those would be useful actions to help ourselves, those around us, and even those after us.

A living Western civilization requires a culture of life. It requires respect for human beings, not overlooking the unborn, the young, those burdened with handicaps or health conditions or psychiatric problems, and those whose advanced age or adverse circumstances or depressed spirits or bad breaks or terminal illness tempt them to, like the spirits entering Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon all hope.” Only a culture that values life—that is grateful for life in its particulars, its individuality, its full moons and fall leaves and soft snowfalls, its small children making chalk pictures on the sidewalk, its bikes and skateboards, skinned knees and broken hearts—can keep itself from desiring death.

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Original Bio:

Ellen Wilson Fielding, a longtime senior editor of the Human Life Review, is the author of An Even Dozen (Human Life Press). The mother of four children, she lives in Maryland.