The Decline of the West
he said, “Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence, by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?” Daniel 4:30 NIV
I have built – Nebuchadnezzar lacked the humility of recognizing that God is the true builder—and destroyer. Thinking that he was the author and finisher of his own fate, his pride sent him into the fields as an animal. You would think that we would have learned a few things from this megalomaniac, but no, we have plenty of examples of Nebuchadnezzar’s pride today. Without any recognition of the biblical precedent, we march down the same path, a path resulting from our own rejection of God’s purposes. America is in serious decline, along with Europe and the West. There are many self-inflicted factors contributing to this collapse. Here are a few:
- For several generations, corporations have deliberately fragmented extended family connections in order to make work more important than family. Forced moves, carrot-and-stick promotions, and financial incentives caused extended family proximity to collapse. This caused a shift in personal values so that work (i.e., money and status) became life’s primary goal. An example is our tendency on meeting someone for the first time to ask what they do, not who they are.
- The economic system of America only recognizes wealth and power as virtues, promoting those who reached the top as role models for everyone else (a logical impossibility) and denigrating those who refuse to climb the corporate ladder. Celebrity status has become the most important qualification of human achievement.
- Climate change radicals have convinced young people that the human world will end in 10 years. This results in little motivation to change or improve personal or communal life. According to this political agenda, nothing can stop the degradation of the planet and along with it the extinction of human life. This produces an attitude of “just take what you can now” since there is no hope of a vibrant future. The ethical result is a complete fixation on myself.
- The Church has been rendered irrelevant and antiquated, and with it the God of the Bible. Since the Plague, the Church has been less and less important in society. Those functions once the domain of the Church have been taken over by the State which now requires total subservience. Since the “higher criticism” of the 1900’s, the primary position of the Bible as a cultural ethical authority has been radically undermined to the point where general society doesn’t know, or care to know, what the Bible teaches.
- The basic categories of personal identity have been successfully undermined (gender, ethnicity, culture). Basic physical, emotional, and psychological identification has been replaced (deliberately) by “socio-political” terms that no longer bear any resemblance to actual human reality. This allows politics to define whatever fits its agenda, keeping everyone in a state of constant fear and confusion. For the individual, personal choice becomes the touchstone of reality.
- The American business model, built on the industrial revolution where human beings are replaceable cogs in the economic engine, has reached its zenith with the replacement of humans with machines. The greatest threat to self-fulfillment is artificial intelligence for which there are presently no boundary conditions.
- The corporation and the state have replaced values previously based on divine revelation – worth, equality, truth, right and wrong, charity, forgiveness, and the promise of a better life. God has been exiled from humanity and along with His exile, all sense of greater purpose, community, and interdependence. We have graduated from “Man is the measure of all things” to “I am the only one who really counts.”
But it has all happened before—at the end of an empire—the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Persians, etc. Once the tipping point passed, no civilization ever recovered. Nebuchadnezzar ate grass. We’ll eat ashes.
Topical Index: pride, civilization, Nebuchadnezzar, exile, Daniel 4:30
