As a child, you lived in an enchanted world. You were sure that superheroes were real. Maybe you waited for your letter from Hogwarts long after it was due. Or you wondered when you might wake up one day where you really belong, in a hobbit hole in the Shire — somewhere that inexplicably felt more real than your world.

Then, gradually, education and ordinary experience weakened our senses of the miraculous, the mysterious, and the enchanted. Mechanism and probability give us a tidier but somehow diminished picture of reality. The world became ordinary, and everything suddenly has a reductive explanation.

C.S. Lewis noticed something about that loss in his work The Discarded Image, his study of the medieval mind. When the modern person looks at the night sky, Lewis observed, he feels he is looking out into a void that has no interest in him.

The medieval person, in contrast, felt he was looking in, toward something ordered and inhabited. The medieval man believed himself inside an ordered cosmos, whereas the modern man sees himself adrift in a random universe.

Max Weber identified this change in 1917, in a lecture that has haunted Western thought since. He called it Entzauberung — disenchantment. He wrote “There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.” He was wrong, but the counter-enchantment would arise from unlikely places…

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What “Enchanted” Actually Meant

Chesterton captured the enchanted worldview better than anyone else in his book Orthodoxy, where he wrote “The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature, are the terms used in the fairy books — ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.”

This sounds like typical whimsical Chesterton — and it is, but behind his wit, Chesterton always had a real metaphysical point. The fact that water runs downhill is not self-explanatory. Yes, we have gravity, but the forces of nature at the formation of the universe may well have made gravity a repulsive instead of attractive force. The fact that the sun rises is not inevitable if Earth were to adopt the rotation and orbit of some other far-off planets we’ve since discovered.

These things happen because the idea of causality first exists at all — the hand of God — keeping them in motion through the continuation of existence itself. The enchanted mind might understand probability, but doesn’t see it as the only ruling decision-maker in the universe. It leaves room for a story, a Creator, or at least an acknowledgement that there is still a great deal of mystery in the world, and these all allow the enchanted mind to maintain a sense of wonder and curiosity. A world experienced as intentional and storied generates the question why in a way a purely mechanical world eventually must ignore. If everything reduces to a blind process, the question “why” never really gets answered.

In the medieval world, belief in an enchanted world manifested in many ways: in a sure understanding of humanity’s place in the universe, in the Church’s teaching on spiritual truths, in fables, legends, and folklore, but also in less edifying forms as in village healers, snake-oil salesmen, and those believed to really be meddling in dark arts. The Church was not the source of all enchantment in medieval life, but it was the institution that discerned between what was holy, what was harmless superstition, and what was genuinely dangerous. But what really begins to poke holes in our modern disenchantment is the idea of miracles.

Discerning Miracles

Despite common accusations, the Church has always been its most rigorous skeptic when it comes to the miraculous.

The medieval Catholic Church built an entire apparatus — canonical investigations, medical examination boards, waiting periods measured in decades or longer — specifically to separate genuine miracles from wishful thinking, psychological episodes, mere coincidence, and fraud. The tradition of discernment of spirits, codified in the Rituale Romanum and refined across centuries of theological debate, was designed to distinguish authentic supernatural events from natural ones and, when necessary, from demonic counterfeits. Sacramentals like holy water, blessed medals, and relics gave ordinary Catholics a regular reminder of the ordinary infused with the extraordinary — that the world is more than mere matter. The proper Catholic sense of enchantment was disciplined, not a free-for-all of overactive imaginations.

The evidence it produced deserves at least a brief look — even for the nonreligious — to appreciate that miracles are not simply believed without evidence. The public miracle at Fátima, Portugal in October 1917 operated on a scale difficult to explain naturally. Three peasant children had predicted, months in advance, that a public miracle would occur on a specific date at a specific location. Approximately 70,000 people gathered in heavy rain — among them Avelino de Almeida, a senior correspondent for Portugal’s largest secular newspaper, who had mocked the predictions in print beforehand. He filed an eyewitness account describing the sun spinning, changing color, and plunging toward the earth. The article ran on the front page. The editorial staff of an actively anti-clerical publication had no interest in confirming a Catholic miracle. They simply reported what their correspondent saw.

There are many more such miraculous cases we could look at — the strange life of Padre Pio, the hundreds of thousands of miraculous healings associated with holy sites and Marian apparitions, or the many Eucharistic miracles like that of Lanciano. The point isn’t an apologetic one, though that’s certainly something to think about. These are things that happened, were reviewed by professionals, and found wanting for ordinary explanations. There still is a sense of an enchanted world in light of these. Maybe you could chalk it up to our still defective understanding of how the universe works — but that will always be the case. We’ll never understand everything.

The world keeps behaving as though it were enchanted, and so maybe there really is still a story to humanity that we shouldn’t have cast aside in the Enlightenment. But how did we go from an entire society believing that enchantment lay behind every corner to a society where that view is mocked and scoffed at?

Breaking Enchantment

Disenchantment didn’t arrive overnight. Our sense of enchantment was deconstructed piece by piece over several centuries.

The Reformation’s iconoclasm was perhaps the most visible starting point for the disenchantment of the West. The revolutionary spirit of the Reformers removed statues, relics, and much of Catholicism’s physical mementos from churches, schools, and common places. This wasn’t just the natural result of any religious revolution, however. The Reformers operated on a theological stance that matter carries no sacredness and that images risk idol worship. Whether you agree or disagree with the Reformation’s intent, the practical effect was to strip the physical world of spiritual weight. It began a process of de-spiritualizing the physical signs of Christianity — and this was the first major step in disenchanting the medieval world.

Once the physical marks were removed of their spiritual significance, the philosophers and scientists entered the picture to further drive a wedge between mechanistic and spiritual views of the world.

Descartes proposed a methodical approach to doubt and knowing, by essentially throwing away sure knowledge of anything that he couldn’t reduce to indisputable fact. This left him with just one thing: Cogito, ergo sum — I think therefore I am. The problem lies in the fact that Descartes assumes the only way to knowledge is by deduction — if it is not grounded logically, it cannot be known. But this entirely casts aside the reality of perception as a way of knowing. While Descartes rightly believed perception can be unreliable, we all know there are some things we know to be true because we perceive them first. Virtually all the forces of nature were understood by perception before we understood them by deducing physical principles. Gravity was felt long before Newton could describe its effects on objects.

The doubt of Descartes about perception threw into question all things related to an enchanted world; if it could not be deduced on logical grounds, we have reason for disbelief in even what we perceive directly. This was a huge blow to the common understanding of life and the world as fundamentally charged with mystery and miracles.

As the Enlightenment unfolded, advances in mathematics and formalized logic furthered the view of a mechanistic world — the planetary motions were accurately predicted by this point, chemistry was slowly emerging out of alchemy, Newton could describe gravity’s mysterious pull, and the mathematics of calculus was transforming our ability to capture nature on paper. All this pointed toward a universe guided by mathematics, leaving little room for explanations that defy descriptions by formula.

Weber watched the process reach its conclusion at the turn of the twentieth century and wasn’t pleased about it. His “iron cage” was indeed a trap — the condition of people who had rationalized every source of meaning out of existence and were left a cold, inert world.

And yet at the point where rationalism’s conclusions had been fully drawn out early in the century — giving voice to Nietzsche and foundation to Communism — the enchanted world mounted a comeback…

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The most popular stories of the last generation were quest narratives for a reason.

The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher — all retell the hero’s journey in their own ways. These fantasy books, movies, and role-playing games follow a hero who receives a call, leaves the familiar, endures trials, is transformed, and returns changed.

As children, we dreamed of living inside these stories, imagining ourselves as the main protagonist. You wanted to be more than a consumer of it, and secretly — maybe even unconsciously — you saw yourself as the hero.

Millennials, Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha are the generations plagued worst by short attention spans and passive scrolling; but they are also the generations engaged in some of the most immersive and participatory quest narratives in history, found in video games. The number of hours logged, the enormity of the worlds explored, and the depth of characters defined speak to two facts: 1) that these generations don’t have real-life “quests”, but 2) they want a mission, badly.

Though media and tech may have accelerated the desire for a real-life quest, this is nothing new. In the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer illustrated the need for a quest in his tale of pilgrimage: knight, miller, prioress and pardoner, (every social rank traveling together) set out from a London inn toward the shrine of Thomas Beckett at Canterbury. They told stories along the way, competed, argued, laughed, and prayed. Pilgrimages like these were the real versions of many quests found in our modern fantasy literature, movies, and games.

These medieval pilgrims understood that humans don’t need unlimited freedom or comfort, but they do need quests. You need a quest, too, because a life without a quest quickly becomes empty and directionless…

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What a Quest Was and Why It Worked

The medieval pilgrimage was a well-defined but unpredictable experience of transformation. The departure required real commitments (much more so than simply a long vacation), often involving months of preparation, the settling of debts, and the writing of a will. The travel itself was of course challenging, as the routes to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela were long, dangerous, and physically demanding. But the journey’s end was acknowledged as much more than simply a visit to a far-off place. It was a personal and spiritual journey that would transform the pilgrim in a radical way.

The later idea of vaguely “finding yourself” through free travel and exploration might sound similar, but the two ideas are very different. Both seek change, but the latter is really seeking a new identity to be found somewhere in the world. On the other hand, the pilgrim knows his fundamental identity as a Christian, and to go deeper in that identity is what motivates his quest. There is also a distinction in the fact that the pilgrim or any adventurer with a goal brings his will in the journey. It’s not a passive experience of a place or people, but rather a mission that pushes him or her to act. The aimless wanderer isn’t rooted in any identity at the outset and thus sets off with an equally undefined quest (maybe one without an end) and a certain passivity in attitudes. Who knows what meaning you’ll adopt if you wander, hoping it will find you?

A basic sense of destination must be known for any meaningful quest. Bilbo and the dwarves had a map and a plan. Certainly, there were many unexpected twists and turns from that plan, but these surprises tested their will toward the quest’s end. The aimless wanderer might latch onto these diversions as a new path in their search for meaning. But for the pilgrim, rather than diverting your aims, these trials merely strain your resolve for the goal. This is how the quest works to reveal those great qualities you couldn’t have discovered by staying in your hobbit-hole.

Much like The Hobbit, the itinerarium, a pilgrimage journal, documented the transformation of the pilgrim throughout the quest. Pilgrims recorded distances and landmarks of course, but more importantly their interior movements: moments of doubt, breakthrough, understanding, and spiritual consolation. The journey was written down because spiritual growth was the expected result.

Anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, drawing on the medieval pilgrimage tradition, described this middle state as liminality — a threshold condition in which the traveler is neither who he was nor yet who he will become. He has left his old identity behind and hasn’t yet arrived at the new one. The pilgrim was between worlds — stripped of his social role, his familiar surroundings, and his ordinary comforts precisely so that something new could take shape in him.

The pilgrimage worked because it provided a tangible solution to man’s desire for purpose. Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that every living thing has a telos — a proper end toward which it moves, and in the movement toward which it becomes most fully itself. A human without a telos is a failure of being. St. Augustine identified the same truth but identified the telos of man in knowing God: the heart is inherently restless, oriented naturally toward an ultimate destination, which is God. The pilgrimage externalized and ritualized that interior condition, giving the restless heart a direction to pursue.

Seeking Quests in Careers

For most, the only “quest” of the modern era is the path of earning of living. This, our culture teaches, is the aim of life: to perform a job, make money, and if we’d made enough money in our working lives, to retire.

Aside from the question of meaning, however, this end in itself satisfies nothing of the need of humanity for a true quest. As we become adults, we all recognize that the working world is much duller than life in stories. And even though most of life’s real quests may fall short in our perception of their significance, the typical career falls farther still — particularly the modern career, because it is more open-ended, less foreseeable than ever before.

The medieval world offered a clearer path to most people. Religious life had been shaped and structured for centuries already, offering young men respected paths into priesthood or monastic life. Women too were offered sensible paths in convents for a more structured participation within the Church. But even outside of the dominant institution of the Church, secular career paths were quite clear.

The guild system offered a young man entering a trade a path with clearly defined stages in apprentice, journeyman, and master. You knew where you were in the world, your career, and what was required to advance. At the least, the son typically knew he had a real path in the work of his father. The career outlook was reasonably predictable.

But modern life has replaced structured journeys with open systems, such as education without a career path and a career without clear milestones for advancement. This ambiguity in the working world is the natural result of a freer world (a good in itself), but not without the cost of clarity. Some thrive in this fog of war, but many others struggle with restlessness when presented with endless choice and no direction. They need a defined quest, but there is no quest-giver. In the grand scheme of things, a career is only a side-quest…

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In our modern culture, the word “progress” is viewed as an inherent good. Anything done for the sake of progress is automatically assumed to be beneficial for humanity. It’s often the excuse to plunge head first into untrammeled territory.

Artifiical Intelligence, for example, is a field where we’ve abandoned caution in the anodyne name of progress. Many AI researchers are not guided by a well-developed philosophical or cultural tradition, but rather the vague platitude of “changing the world” — of progress for progress’ sake. For some people, that seems to be a good enough reason as any.

But what if we’re viewing true progress all wrong? What if, in order to advance as a civilization, we need to be looking backwards just as much as we are towards the next best thing?

Throughout history, some societies have actually been revitalized and pushed forward only because they drew inspiration and expertise from tradition. They didn’t outright reject what was old, but built upon previous foundations and used them as the basis for new development — for progress.

From the early medieval period to the founding of America, true Western progress has always been informed by a healthy respect — and even awe — of the past. So I’d like to share three periods of history where we advanced by drawing inspiration from our ancestors — and it’ll help us understand today why we need to be thinking about tradition whenever we try something new.

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Carolingian Renaissance

The first period of history I’d like to discuss is one that is often overlooked, sandwiched between the fall of Rome and the medieval period, but it was a great leap forward in cultural and organizational development for the Western world. In many ways, it was when the West finally gained its identity.

This is the period known as the Carolingian Renaissance — when Charlemagne gave birth to the first post-Roman Empire in the West. To understand how Charlemagne revitalized his empire by looking to the past, we first need to understand the landscape of the empire at the time…

In the late 8th and early 9th century, Charlemagne ruled vast lands from Northern Spain to the North Sea. He was a skilled administrator, but his newfound empire had problems. Though the empire was flourishing economically, the centuries since Rome’s fall took a toll on the cultural development of the West.

In particular, Latin literacy was falling, a blow to the administrative and scholarly classes since Latin was essential for empire-wide communication. Because of this, an uneducated clergy had difficulty interpreting and preaching on the Vulgate Bible, the universal biblical translation of the time.

And on an aesthetic level, there were no cohesive architectural or artistic styles that marked Charlemagne’s lands as a bonafide empire — empires need grand building projects and beautiful art, after all.

In short, the Frankish Kingdom wasn’t the beacon of culture that Charlemagne wanted it to be.

Charlemagne thus devised a plan to create a “cultural rebirth” and he did so by looking to ages past — to the high cultures of Greece and Rome — as models. Specifically, Charlemagne hoped to revive the Western Roman Empire, which he held as the ideal model of a Christian Empire. His coronation as the “Emperor of the Romans” showed his admiration for the ancient culture.

One of the main ways he hoped to return to the golden age of Rome was by promoting latin as the language of the intellectual class. By making latin widely understood again, ancient texts could be revisited and an educational revival would follow. It seems like an inconsequential move, but this shift in language jumpstarted a civilizational rebirth…

As antique manuscripts and religious texts were made more accessible, literature and law flourished, and newly established schools became effective centers of education as new editions of classic works were produced.

One of the ancient manuscripts that emerged was Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture, called The Ten Books on Architecture, which contained information about how the Romans built their massive structures. This provided the Carolingians with a template for lost stone-building techniques, and large stone structures were built in northern Europe for the first time since Rome’s occupation.

Between 768 and 855, an impressive 27 new cathedrals, 417 monastic buildings and 100 royal residences were built. And these Carolingian cathedrals and palaces still stand today as tributes to Vituvius’ influence.

Charlemagne created a bridge to the ancient past — the latin language — resulting in rediscoveries in literature, philosophy, and architecture, shaping Western culture in a new direction. Looking backwards actually progressed the Carolingian Empire.

I often question whether our modern teaching methods are creating similar bridges to the past, or are they actually putting up barriers? What rediscoveries could we make today if we insisted on studying the ancient works and figures with the idea of civilizational rebirth in mind?

Italian Renaissance

Interestingly enough, the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius was also a key figure in another rebirth that came a few centuries later, as artists and engineers looked back to the classical world for inspiration once again. This was the Italian Renaissance.

Artists like Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and da Vinci were all inspired by the classical world, and in particular, the architect Vitruvius.The 16th-century architect Andrea Palladio even considered the ancient roman his “master and guide.”

In 1416 Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture was repopularized by Florentine scholar Poggio Bracciolini after he republished it. The work soon prompted a rebirth of classical architecture, art, science, and engineering.

Brunelleschi, for example, was inspired to invent a new type of hoist to lift large stones for the dome of the cathedral in Florence. Da Vinci, deeply inspired by classical writings on math and science, dedicated one of his most famous works to Vitruvius. His drawing, aptly titled “the Vitruvian Man,” is based on the principles of body proportions developed by Vitruvius.

More consequentially, though, Palladio — whom many would consider the greatest architect of all time — drew inspiration from Vitruvius He was motivated to write his own treatise on the subject, The Four Books of Architecture, which pulled from and built upon Vitruvius’ methods. Palladio’s work is considered a seminal work in architectural history, offering a comprehensive guide to classical design principles, including the five classical orders which were first developed by Vitruvius.

His work is still studied in architectural programs today, a legacy that can be traced back to Vitruvius and the Renaissance’s obsession with the classical world. Thus Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical architectural styles all have roots in Vitruvius’ work.

But most of all, the rediscovery of Vitruvius’ works and the cultural rebirth they helped fuel underscores an important lesson:

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Thomas Carlyle argued that the history of the world is the biography of great men. But his critics replied instead that great men are products of their age — fulfillments of a cultural expectation.

However, the disagreement between them misses the more important point that great men and the movement of history are inextricably tied.

What I will side with Carlyle’s critics on is that the type of hero for each age appears formed by society. No civilization spawns heroes at random. A society’s laws reveal what it wishes were true, and its philosophy reveals what should be true. But the hero archetypes that emerge express what is true of their society. The hero — whether mythological or historical — represents what a civilization actually believes.

Let’s look at that belief across the centuries, specifically how the idea of the hero changed throughout Greek, barbarian, and Roman cultures, but dramatically shifted with the rise of Christianity, where the ideals of the hero reached their zenith. But as modern culture began a turn away from Christianity with the onset of the Enlightenment, we’ll also see how the heights of our modern hero archetypes have fallen with it…

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The Ancient World

Homer gave the Greeks their first and most enduring heroic template in Achilles — the prevailing warrior in the Trojan War against Hector. The Iliad is an extended meditation on what the early Greek imagination considered the highest human type: the man of excellence — of arete — in skill, physicality, courage, and loyalty.

But by the classical period, Athens had produced a different (but real) hero in Socrates. Plato’s works Apology, Crito, and Phaedo describe to us a man who dies for the sake of his philosophy. Socrates remains both loyal to his values and the law in his refusal to escape from prison and willingly accepts death with a composure that shamed his weeping friends. The heroic ideal had migrated from the body to the soul. Socrates and his student Plato launched the brightest era of Greek philosophy, as schools were begun and followed by droves of young, curious Greek minds. The culture was fading in its worship of the de facto Greek pantheon, and a groundswell of philosophic spirit was taking hold of wider Greece.

Rome’s ideal was in many ways itself, or rather specifically that of civic virtue. Plutarch’s Lives — the most influential collection of heroic biography in Western history — held up figures like Cincinnatus, who left his farm to save Rome and returned to it immediately after, as the Roman summit. Virgil’s Aeneas was defined by pietas: dutiful devotion to gods, family, and city. The Roman hero was the man who subordinates himself entirely to the purposes of the empire, much like John F. Kennedy’s proposal to Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

The Medieval World

In the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the influences of barbarian warrior culture, Roman civic duty, and Christianity merged to create one the of most impactful heroic archetypes in world imagination — the knight, along with his chivalric ideal. In the knight, the warrior’s strength was directed by Christian virtue and placed in service of the local lords. The Song of Roland gives us one of its earliest expressions still extend today, with Roland dying at Roncevaux not merely as a brave soldier but as a Christian warrior. The Arthurian cycle refined the ideal further in the adventures of Lancelot, Gawain, and Galahad.

What the chivalric tradition understood was that the knight’s dignity depended not only his will and strength, but more acutely on his faith and moral uprightness. A knight who fought for glory alone was simply Achilles with a cross on his shield. The chivalric ideal demanded more in the adoption of a monastic-like attitude to martial excellence: placing it in service of the weak, the common good, and the Church.

By the late medieval period the knight had become a figure of self-serving vanity, confirmed by the misadventures of Don Quixote. Knighthood, though a lasting heroic ideal even through today, still lacked something in the highest hero archetype ever achieved.

The Modern Turn

The early American republic produced heroes in the mold of Plutarch’s Romans. Washington was like a Cincinnatus — the idealized farmer-soldier who saved the republic yet desired a return to his farm. Parson Weems’s hagiographic Life of Washington is essentially a secular saint’s life written in the Plutarchan mode. The heroic template was still recognizably classical, self-sacrificing statesmen, still oriented toward something beyond the self: the republic, the common good, the unprecedented experiment in self-governance. The Founding Fathers were flawed men, as all men are, but the heroic tradition they inhabited pointed toward an idea of ordered liberty that transcended any individual.

The 19th and 20th centuries gradually displaced the civic hero with the ideological one. The hero became the figure who advanced a cause — liberation, equality, justice, solidarity. These are genuine goods, and many of the figures elevated in their name were genuinely self-sacrificial, genuinely courageous, genuinely admirable. Martin Luther King Jr. is the most instructive modern example: a man of real moral seriousness and evident personal courage, elevated to a status of near-inviolable veneration in American culture. He is effectively a secular saint — a figure whose image confers moral authority and whose criticism is treated as a kind of sacrilege.

The theological difficulty lies in the structure of the veneration, and what that structure reveals about the culture doing the venerating. Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris — rightly ordered love — holds that goods must be loved in proportion to their proximity to God, the highest good. Racial equality is a genuine good, rooted in the conviction that every human person bears the image of God. But when racial equality becomes the ultimate good — the summit of the moral hierarchy, the standard against which all other values are measured — it’s been elevated beyond its proper place. The religious impulse doesn’t disappear when God recedes, but instead resettles on whatever is next in line.

When it comes to heroes, the main result of this shifting of values is that our heroes narrow in their virtues. We make heroes out of individuals for smaller and smaller reasons. For example, the American Founding Fathers became heroes to us (on the tail of the Enlightenment) not because they were deemed heroic in a broad sense, but specifically in terms of a bravery and self-sacrifice that won political freedom for early America.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the hero archetype shrink further to one of political action — those actors who won us racial equality, or victory over the U.S.S.R, or some other specific political accomplishment rose to become the newest generation of secular saints. They are not saints in the personal sense in terms of exemplifying moral virtue; they’re secular saints for what they enacted, repealed, signed into law, marched in protest for, etc. While many of these ends may have been good, the idea of “hero” in the modern sense shrunk significantly to mean those who led this or that political action.

This is the modern heroic predicament: that our heroes continue to shrink in moral stature. The causes they serve may be real and important, but the grandness of the hero has been diminished, because the ruler by which we measure them has shrunk. They are not bigger in the minds of us today because they aimed at bigger things, but because we expect so much less.

Our culture’s heroic imagination has descended to merely global maxima — the best among what we can see simply with our own eyes. But there was a time when heroes really were measured by the highest things — and those heroes have been with us the entire time…

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We don’t talk about death in a meaningful way anymore — and this is historically strange.

For most of Western Civilization, death was out in the open, visible to peasant, prince, and child alike. It was deliberately exposed to society as a means of teaching and wisdom. The skull on the philosopher’s desk, the hourglass on the painter’s table, and the ashes pressed into the forehead on Ash Wednesday were not expressions of a culture simply obsessed with the macabre. Instead, they were reminders of our limitations, our natural mortality.

The tradition that produced them was convinced that a life lived in awareness of its own ending was a better life than one lived in denial of it. Memento mori — remember your death — was actually an invitation to live with clarity and purpose…

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The Stoics

The phrase itself is Latin, and its origins are curiously institutional rather than philosophical. In accounts of the Roman triumph (a military victory parade), a slave would stand behind the successful general during the procession and remind him, from time to time, of his own mortality. At the height of his glory, surrounded by cheering crowds and the spectacle of conquest, the most powerful man in Rome was made to hear the words: remember, you will die. The reminder was built into the ceremony itself, because the Romans understood that a man is most tempted to forget his limits when on the heels of a great victory.

The Stoic philosophers habitualized what the Roman army acted out post-victory. Seneca, writing to his friend Lucilius, urged:

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day.”

Similarly, Marcus Aurelius, running an empire from a military camp on the Danube, wrote to himself in private:

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

For Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the daily contemplation of death wasn’t pessimism. Regular contemplation of mortality was an antidote to procrastination and a motivation to action. If you believe death may fall upon you in the night, you would be wise not to waste the afternoon. You’ll also find yourself concerned with meaningful action, careful speech, and guarded thoughts.

Because the mind naturally drifts away from uncomfortable truths toward distraction, the Stoics viewed the contemplation of death as an act of the will, a discipline requiring daily effort. The memento mori corrects the passive slide into vices, especially sloth and pride. It compelled the Stoics to consider each day as potentially their last, giving them an urgency to live virtuously.

Memento Mori in Art

It should come with little surprise that when Renaissance artists looked back to the Romans, they picked up on the theme of the memento mori. The Renaissance welcomed death as a visual contemplation on our mortality for nearly three centuries.

But the memento mori first made its way into Medieval art through the Danse Macabre where Death appeared as a skeleton and danced with popes, emperors, merchants, peasants — even children. The imagery appeared on church walls across Europe, largely spurred by the grim events of the Black Death. The Grim Reaper, the hooded scythe-wielding figure of Death in, developed out of a darker 19th century take on Danse Macabre art.

The memento mori gained great popularity with the Renaissance artists, who, with centuries of Medieval backdrop to draw from, settled the skull naturally into scenes of learning and sanctity. The skull wasn’t used as a symbol for horror and fear as it is today, but rather as the philosopher’s or the saint’s companion, as the more piercing symbol of life’s finiteness than the benign hourglass.

St. Jerome, the great scholar of the early Church who translated the Bible into Latin, was among the most painted saints of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and he often appeared with a skull nearby. Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing places the skull directly on the saint’s desk, its profile deliberately counterbalancing Jerome’s own aged head. Beyond it reflecting merely the holy disposition of St. Jerome, however, it also reminds us of the gravity and longevity of his work — translation of the Latin Vulgate — that would long outlast himself.

In 1521, Dürer painted St. Jerome in his study surrounded by objects symbolizing transience — the skull, a snuffed-out candle, and a piece of paper tacked to the wall reading Respice Finem: consider the end. The painting was a sensation, and the type became a specialty of local workshops, spawning dozens of versions across Northern Europe.

St. Francis of Assisi was treated similarly across generations of painters, from Zurbarán to Guido Reni. The skull in Franciscan iconography carried specific theological weight because Francis himself called death his “sister,” and Franciscan sources consistently described death as the doorway to life. The skull on his desk reflected the Christian belief that death was not an end but rather a passage.

With the Enlightenment’s detraction from Christianity, Dutch painters of the seventeenth century took this further by removing the saints and letting the objects speak for themselves. A sputtering candle, half-eaten food, an hourglass — all gentle reminders of finitude. But somewhere among these objects would still rest the skull. Often these still paintings contrasted the beauty of fine tables and trinkets against the naked skull, emphasizing the futility of worldly possessions.

Holbein made a similar argument with particular brilliance in The Ambassadors, where a distorted skull stretches across the bottom of the canvas, visible only when viewed from an oblique angle. Death was in plain sight, but only comprehensible from the right angle, or in my own interpretation, the right theology.

The Church’s Reminder

No institution in Western history has done more to keep death visible than the Catholic Church. And it did so for theology rather than morbidity, because a faith hinging on death and resurrection can’t hide death away.

Christianity’s early history was naturally close to death. Aside from the obvious death and resurrection of Jesus, the early Christians were persecuted and killed for their Christian faith at certain junctures in their first four centuries. Often, to skirt death above, Christians worshiped among the dead below — in the catacombs surrounded by images of resurrection — fish, bread, the raising of Lazarus.

To many outsiders, the Christians likely appeared obsessed with death in a strange way. They eventually took up a method of Roman execution — the cross — as the central symbol of their faith, while their liturgies were full of the language of sacrifice. Christianity thus bears a duality of attitudes: a solemn knowledge of death but joyous hope in resurrection.

The liturgical calendar encoded this conviction into the rhythms of ordinary life. Once a year, on a Wednesday at the start of Lent, Christians come forward to receive ashes on the forehead and hear the words drawn from Genesis: “Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” All receive the same public mark, as far back as the 13th century. The Bishop of Rome — the most powerful figure in Western Christendom — bowed his head to receive the same ashes and hear the same words as every peasant in every parish. It became a tradition for the popes to receive ashes at the Basilica of Santa Sabina on Aventine Hill. The Ash Wednesday form of memento mori flattened Church hierarchy for a moment, reminding all that death and judgement were impartial.

The Church’s treatment of death runs still deeper in its liturgical imagination: whenever it celebrates a saint’s feast day, it celebrates the dies natalis — the day of their birth into heaven, which is to say, the day they died. In this inversion lies a fundamental Christian theology: death is not the end of the story but its decisive turning point, the threshold of Heaven.

Among written works, the Ars Moriendi — the art of dying well — was among the most widely circulated texts of the medieval period. It was a practical guide to preparing for death that was read by ordinary Christians who understood that dying well required preparation and practice. St. Alphonsus Liguori extended this tradition into the 18th century with his Preparation for Death, a sustained meditation on mortality as a spiritual discipline.

The overarching premise of these saints, liturgies, and practices was that the person who has thought seriously about death is more capable of living well than the person who has not. Ecclesiastes recognized long ago the urgency that death forces upon life:

“Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, . . . before the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (Eccl. 12:1-7)

But much of what we used to know, we have since forgotten, especially on subject of death…

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It’s popular now to say that the West is in decline — and it’s certainly something I’ve written about many times. The signs are all too apparent: a crushing cost of living, plummeting birthrates, and increasing political instability.

But most people make a huge mistake when they think about decline. They imagine it and feel a sense of impending doom. They think it means the end of their personal story.

History shows us a paradox, though. When Rome crumbled, there were certain groups of people who didn’t merely survive — they actually ascended. While the world spiraled into chaos, these groups built foundations that lasted for centuries, seemingly immune from the decline around them.

How did they do it? And what can we learn from them?

By examining history’s most chaotic periods, I’ve uncovered three principles that make an individual — and their lineage — truly resilient. These are the pillars that allowed the survivors of history’s dying empires to weather the storm and plant the seeds of new civilizations.

If you master these three things, you’ll be following in the footsteps of history’s greatest overcomers — those who didn’t let their environment slow them down. Like them, you also can ascend amidst the decline around you.

Faith First

The first pillar that allows individuals to transcend the chaos is an unflinching religious faith. At first this might sound like a cliché, but from a historical perspective, faith is the bedrock of every great civilization. There is no such thing as a great culture that is not, at its core, a religious culture.

Historian Will Durant claimed a culture’s success was intrinsically tied to its religiosity. Strong nations were born out of faithful people, but when religion dwindled, things started to fall apart. Durant, who had studied dozens of civilizations and wrote the classic work The Story of Civilization, claimed that cultures always begin with religious fervor which gives a nation strength to overcome great difficulty.

It’s their faith in a higher power that allows them to bear the initial “growth pains” that precede prosperity. In Greece and Rome, for example, mythologies told of heroes who battled overwhelming adversity to accomplish their goals. These myths inspired their peoples to overcome struggles while offering an ideal to strive for.

It’s also of note that a people’s religion is actually strengthened by hardship. Durant writes that “...a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it.” Durant believed tough times were actually essential to building the character and faith of a nation.

And the reverse means the downfall of a civilization and its religion: once success and abundance are eventually attained, the seeds of a culture’s downfall has already been planted. Durant writes:

“If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows… toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude…”

When there are no great struggles left, people tend to lose their religiosity, and an analytical yet nihilistic ethos dominates the culture. Sound familiar? This certainly sounds like where we are today.

Durant was far from the only thinker to link a culture’s religiosity with its success. English historian Arnold Toynbee pointed toward religious faith as a key way for people to transcend decline. He used the early Christian saints and martyrs as examples of this overcoming. Though they faced hardship and persecution, their suffering was actually instrumental in reinforcing their faith and helping to spread Christianity. This religious foundation eventually forged Western civilization. Instead of hardship being an obstacle, it was directed in a new, creative way. Toynbee writes:

“It is not, then, by seeking to escape suffering, but by embracing and responding to it, that the soul born into a disintegrating society can win release and regain…the path of growth from which his society has strayed…”

So if religion is what allows cultures to overcome suffering and hardship, it follows that faith must be embraced by those who wish to flourish during the decline of a dying civilization. Only through true belief can one find the strength to carry on during hard times and help right the course of a wandering ship.

Think Like a Dynasty

The second pillar necessary to transcend the decay of modern culture is what I call a dynastic mindset. To ensure your efforts actually outlast the current instability, you need to start thinking generationally.

All of the great civilizations throughout history were built on the idea of family and dynasty — why build anything at all if it will simply disappear after you’re gone? Longevity requires thinking beyond mere lifespans and embracing a generational approach.

For example, there were families in ancient Rome who lasted throughout all of its political turmoil, wars of succession, and changes in government — dynasties that lasted centuries. They proved that family was more powerful than institutions.

You may have heard of the Julii clan who gave us Julius Caesar. This clan was one of the original patrician families that were present when Rome was still a kingdom. Some legends even connect them to the time of Rome’s founder Romulus. Despite their legendary origins, they sunk into relative obscurity for a century and a half. For a time, they didn’t have any notable members even though they were still an elite family who held considerable political power.

But this shows us how resilient generational thinking is. They reemerged in full force in the late republic, and once Julius Caesar burst on the scene, they became part of the Julio-Claudian dynasty which gave us Rome’s first imperial dynasty.

Families outlive institutions and governments when approached with a generational and deliberate mindset. Decades or even centuries of unassuming groundwork can shape entire societies. And some families can even outlive empires…

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What are you doing with your mind? Ancient thinkers have been concerned with that question long before the advent of mindless scrolling on social media.

For most of Western history, how the mind was being used was central to the philosophy on living a good life. The quality of your attention was not incidental to who you were, but rather a reflection of your discipline and character.

Past thinkers recognized a duty to exercise your mind, seeing the sin of Sloth as applying equally to the mind and the body. The ancient world built entire disciplines around this conviction. We have built an entire economy — the attention economy — around destroying it.

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Wisdom of the Philosophers

Plato recognized the impact of what we think about and how it affects our soul in Book VI of The Republic:

“The soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about.”

Typical of Plato, this is a metaphysical claim — that the inner life is not a fixed thing but a dynamic one, continuously shaped by whatever it is allowed to dwell upon. The soul, for Plato and for virtually all subsequent Western ideas, was something being formed, moment by moment, by the direction of its own gaze.

This wasn’t simply an abstract conviction confined to the circles of the philosophers, either. Instead, it shaped how the Greeks organized education. The paideia, the classical formation of the young, was built on the premise that what a child was exposed to, what stories he heard, what music he absorbed, what images surrounded him, would form him at a deeper level than instruction. Plato famously wanted certain poets (not all of them) censored from his ideal city because he thought Homer’s gods, quarrelsome and petty, were shaping the souls of Athenian boys in the wrong direction. Even the enemies of Socrates argued for his condemnation on allegations of poisoning the minds of the youth with his ideas. The Greeks were particularly sensitive to the intellectual influences on their youth, because they recognized their power in shaping whole generations.

Marcus Aurelius returned to the same conviction in the Meditations, a private journal never intended for publication, written while campaigning on the Danube frontier:

“Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts; for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”

Marcus was reminding himself, in the midst of war and administration, that the interior life required its own discipline.

Aristotle went further, arguing in the Nicomachean Ethics that contemplation was not merely a useful habit but the highest activity available to a human being, the one most fully expressing what we are. To be chronically distracted, in this framework, was not merely to be inefficient in the modern sense that everyone believes they have ADHD. It was to fail at being human in the most fundamental sense — a failure to truly live.

Engineered Attention

Against this classical backdrop, we question (to Aristotle’s point) whether modern man is really living at all. Our attention today is ruled by screens, apps, and social media feeds. The last is a comical term, as we’re clearly being fed content, like hogs to grain.

The attention economy is not a neutral development or an inevitable consequence of technological progress. It is an engineered system, built around human attention as a finite resource, and whoever captures it can monetize it. Every feed, notification, and algorithmically-optimized scroll is the product of huge investments and some of the sharpest technical minds of a generation, all directed toward one end: to keep you from leaving.

The mechanisms are now well documented. Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s founding presidents, admitted in 2017 that the platform was deliberately designed to consume as much of users’ time and attention as possible — exploiting the dopamine hit that comes with someone liking or commenting on their post. Intermittent variable rewards like these (the same structure that makes slot machines effective) keep our fingers scrolling instead of powering off our phones. Further, content engineered for outrage and anxiety are privileged in our feeds because these topics hold attention longer than uplifting content. The infinite scroll was designed without a stopping point because stopping points allow people to leave.

While these highly addictive apps have earned plenty of criticism over the years, the bigger questions are typically never asked. The wasting of hours a day in a virtual town center is one thing. But a larger concern of mine is how the constant consumption of short, viral media degrades the capacity for the kind of attention that the ancient world considered essential to a fully human life. Sustained focus, the ability to stay with a difficult text, a long argument, a moment of silence: these skills all atrophy without practice. Older generations raised without these addictive technologies but getting sucked into them later is one thing — they may become rusty on such skill they had in their youth. But what happens when generations are now raised that never attained these skills in the first place? All the later generations will know is an 8 second attention span. A mind trained from childhood to expect constant stimulation might not simply be delayed in the skills of contemplation: I fear they may lose the capability of deep thought altogether.

A New Era of Soft Minds

The losses are harder to see because they are interior.

Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, produced across decades of sustained intellectual labor, was a teaching document. It assumed students who could hold an intricate argument in mind across sessions, return to it, dispute it, and be changed by it. The letters of Erasmus, Thomas More, of later figures like Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke often contained careful arguments, sometimes running to thousands of words. That organization of the mind has not disappeared because people devolved naturally. It has been dismantled by an environment that rewards speed and punishes depth.

John Cassian, writing in the fifth century, described the wandering of the mind during prayer (what he called logismoi) as the central spiritual struggle of the interior life and prescribed specific disciplines for it. The Desert Fathers, the Benedictine lectio divina, the hesychast tradition of the Eastern Church all built their practice around the same premise that inner quiet was not a natural state but a victory for the contemplative, prayerful soul. The modern person has not escaped that struggle. We have simply lost the disciplines and multiplied the distractions.

Two decades of the attention economy softened the mind’s tolerance for difficulty itself. The capacity to sit with a hard question, to read against resistance, to follow a long argument without relief, quietly eroded through the accumulated habit of always reaching for the easier thing. By the time AI arrived, the ground had already been long prepared by smart phones, social media, and video games.

While AI didn’t cause the crisis of attention, it arrived at precisely the moment when the mind, already softened, was most vulnerable to the offer it presents: hand over the hard work of thinking. The friction that once forced the mind to slow down and actually engage with difficulty has been engineered away. The temptation is no longer merely distraction, but rather complete abdication from challenging thought.

Aristotle’s claim was not that contemplation produces good results, or (by extension) that it will ever outperform AI in terms of efficiency, speed, and completeness. He posed instead that contemplation is a fundamentally human activity. A person who permanently outsources that activity then becomes in many ways less human and more vegetative.

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There is something in the Western soul that can’t sit still. Other civilizations built empires, yes — but they built them to stabilize rather than to expand. The West built empires and then kept going. It crossed oceans not merely to trade but to discover. It mapped the stars not merely to navigate but to understand. The West asked not just “how do we survive?” but “what lies beyond that horizon?”.

But this Western ethos is not simply ambition. It is something praiseworthy in moral judgement until it gets polluted into ambition — that is a central danger the West is wrestling with which we will return to.

Christopher Dawson, the great Catholic historian of culture, identified what he called the “missionary character” of Western civilization: a compulsion to transform the world. The West, uniquely among civilizations, has always exported itself. Its ideas, faith, institutions, and art were not made for itself, but for the whole world. There was always another people to convert, another land to civilize, another problem to solve, another frontier to push.

Similarly, Oswald Spengler, writing from a more aloof vantage point, said much the same thing. The defining symbol of Western culture, he argued, was not the Greek temple or any other tangible figure but the infinite plane. The West, in his mind, is Faustian: always reaching, always expanding, oriented not toward harmony or stillness like in the East but toward the unlimited. Its mathematics invented calculus — the mathematics of infinitesimal change and limits to infinity. Its architecture built cathedrals that pointed to heaven. Its music reached for ever greater grandeur.

Both men were describing the same energy. The question neither fully answered was: what happens to that energy when it has nowhere transcendent to go?

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When the Hunger Turns Inward

The frontier, in every meaningful sense, has closed. The age of earthly discovery is over. The entire world is not only just mapped, but constantly photographed by satellites orbiting above and displayed to anyone via Google. But more importantly, the inner frontier that once gave Western expansion its moral weight has also receded. The idea that the West carried something worth giving — a faith, a civilization, a vision of human dignity — has been largely abandoned by the West itself, hollowed out by self-doubt and historical guilt.

What remains is the West’s quest for the infinite, with nothing big enough left to accommodate it. Stripped of its orientation toward something beyond itself, the old Faustian drive simply turned inward, resulting in a practice of extraction rather than transformation.

Look at where the bulk of our best Western minds now direct their energy. They don’t seek to build institutions that outlast them, nor complete the kinds of civilizational projects that once consumed the best of a generation. Instead, an enormous portion of Western intellectual horsepower is devoted to a single obsessive question: how do I make money without making anything? The ideal is no longer the explorer or the builder or even the industrialist. The idea for many early 20-30 year olds is the man who has found the algorithm, the loophole, or the pattern in the market that will make him rich beyond imagination. Entire subcultures are organized around decoding the stock market not as a mechanism for allocating capital toward productive ends, but as a puzzle to be solved before the next man beats can. The vocabulary is telling, too: plays, positions, edges. That is a language of strategy without purpose.

This is not an attack on capitalism. Capitalism, at its best, was itself a Faustian enterprise — building, risking, creating. What we are describing is something more parasitic: the Faustian drive fully unmoored, seeking infinite return for minimal creation. It searches for expansion without exploration and gain without effort.

The Destroyer of Just Society

The ancient Greeks had identified this pathology long before it became civilizational.

They called it pleonexia, the desire to have more than one’s share. Aristotle placed it at the center of his political philosophy as the great destroyer of just communities. It was not merely greed in the vulgar sense; it was the disposition of the soul that could never be satisfied, that measured its own worth entirely in terms of accumulation relative to others. The pleonektes (the one afflicted with this desire) was not simply rich, but actually incapable of the kind of self-control that makes friendship, justice, and genuine community possible.

What Aristotle understood, and what we have largely forgotten, is that unchecked desire is both a personal failing and a political one. A civilization biased toward pleonexia does not merely produce unhappy individuals; it produces institutions, cultures, and incentive structures that systematically reward the wrong things and punish the right ones. It elevates the schemer above the builder, the extractor above the creator, the man who found the shortcut above the man who did the work.

The West’s aimless hunger also mirrors how personal self-focus relates to depression. As the renowned psychologist Jordan Peterson has said, “There’s a direct relationship between how much you’re thinking about yourself and how miserable you are.” Likewise, when a civilization with an inherently outward-facing character turns its focus to its interior, it loses the vitality that made it great in the first place.

The Greeks did not think this was inevitable. They thought it was a choice made collectively, over time, through cultural habits and the virtues a people chooses to honor. If enough people choose to put their energy into building, exploring, and creating a healthy culture, they become the proof of a civilization once again looking outward rather than inward.

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We live in an age of pure convenience — an age where human effort has, in some sense, been conquered. But what feels effortless to us as end consumers belies an extraordinarily complex underbelly. Every one of our comforts rests on immense networks of human beings: systems built, maintained, and advanced by millions of minds working in coordination.

This complexity has a cost, too. As civilizations grow, they do not simply become more advanced; they also become more dependent. More people build more infrastructure. More infrastructure enables more comfort and interdependence. That interdependence allows for further specialization, and specialization produces still greater complexity.

But there is a second half to this equation.

As civilizations become more complex, they require more people to sustain them. A small society can remain simple, but a large one can’t. Modern life is not something a small group could recreate or even maintain. Then, every leap in technology requires a critical population to achieve it. For example, the modern semiconductor fab could never be built by a thousand-person village. Ninety percent or more of that village would be farmers or hunters simply to survive. Only sufficient scale can advance civilization.

And that raises a question we have only recently begun to recognize: what happens when the number of people begins to fall?

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The Scaling of Civilization

The smaller the society, the more self-sufficient it tends to be. The earliest human groups — small, nomadic bands — lived close to the edge of survival. Most members contributed directly to food, water, shelter, and defense. There was little room for specialization because survival demanded nearly everyone’s full attention.

These societies were resilient in the sense that they were insular. Their smallness allowed them to move and adapt to local crises, but it also limited their ability to develop complex systems. There were no spare hands to build them. Even today, the pattern holds: the more isolated a family becomes, the more its time must be devoted to survival.

As populations grew into the thousands, agriculture emerged (or perhaps more accurately, enabled that growth). This was not merely a dietary change, but a civilizational one. Farming required permanence, and permanence demanded coordination. In the Nile River Valley, irrigation cycles required shared labor and timing; in Mesopotamia, early cities like Ur depended on grain storage and redistribution to function.

Most importantly, agriculture introduced surplus, and surplus introduced specialization. Not everyone needed to farm anymore. A portion of the population could instead craft tools, organize governance, conduct trade, or shape religious life. For the first time, societies could sustain roles dedicated to advancement over mere survival. Complex civilizations required numbers.

Classical Civilizations

This trend toward increasing non-survival labor reached new heights in the classical world.

The early Greek city-states (not forgetting the Mycenaeans as a critical precedent), some numbering in the hundreds of thousands, developed systems of governance, philosophy, and military organization that still shape the world today. Their scale allowed for many thinkers, soldiers, artisans, and administrators, each of these categories with their own slew of subcategories. They reached a societal complexity that no single individual could fully comprehend in all its moving parts.

Rome only brought that complexity to new heights, to awe the world not only in its complexity but most acutely in applying that complexity across such a vast territory: a true pan-continental empire.

At its height, Rome governed tens of millions. Its roads stretched over 250,000 miles. Its aqueducts delivered running water into cities like Rome itself, which likely exceeded one million inhabitants. Grain shipments from Egypt fed the capital, while legions secured borders from Britain to the Near East.

None of this was accidental, nor natural, because the building and shaping of our environment in ways never before seen is a hallmark of humanity. Humans question, imagine, and create — not merely repeat patterns as other creatures do.

Back to Rome, it took generations of engineers, laborers, soldiers, and administrators all operating within a system so vast that its stability depended on constant maintenance. Food could not stop being produced while aqueducts were being built. The soldiers could not stop defending the Roman borders while the Colosseum was constructed.

All parts of the society were intertwined, and if just one thread were pulled loose, even a civilization as mighty as Rome could — and did — collapse. The belief that Rome was invincible was no different than the claim that the Titanic was unsinkable: there is no true law of “too big to fail.”

In its later days, populations declined, trade networks fractured, and infrastructure deteriorated. Without the maintainers of a complex society, a civilization reverses into simpler modes of existence. The “dark ages” were not primarily the result of religious backwardness, but of fragmentation: political, cultural, and demographic. As unity dissolved, so too did the ability to sustain large-scale systems.

Complexity is contingent; it exists only so long as there are enough unified people to sustain it…

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We often assume our world of technology and relative peace is the default state of human affairs — but it isn’t.

For most of history, life was brutal and short. Civilization is not a guarantee. As Kenneth Clark lamented in his acclaimed 1969 television series Civilisation, “however complex and solid it seems, [civilization] is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed.”

Civilization, then, is a delicate achievement that requires constant maintenance. When that maintenance fails — as it did during the fall of Rome or the Bronze Age collapse — the darkness of illiteracy and violence becomes the historical norm once again.

So that means that in order to maintain a civilization, each generation must do its part. Fathers and mothers must pass on accumulated wisdom to their children, and when those children grow up, they must do the same in turn. Now today, Gen Z is the next generation to take the mantle. If you’re in this group, you’re beginning to have an impact on society at large. This is a great responsibility, and also a great challenge because our civilization is seemingly in such a fragile state.

With this in mind, I want to show you why, even as a seemingly advanced society, collapse is never far off. And it is only by understanding history that we can predict our future and arm ourselves with the tools to become great men and women of consequence who will stave off civilizational decline and build a better future.

So here are 3 ways that understanding history will change the way you see the world — and hopefully help you play a part in solving the challenges we face today.

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A Warning System For Decline

We can only understand the state of our current civilization in light of the cycles of history. To the casual observer, we are wealthy, well-fed, and entertained. Life is good right?

But to the historical mind, cracks are everywhere. One only needs to read a classic like Edwards Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to see them.

Gibbon basically performed a “civilizational autopsy.” He posited that Rome didn’t necessarily suffer a sudden death from a single powerful blow. Rather, it eroded over centuries. The warning signs — currency debasement, reliance on mercenaries, political instability, a widening gap between rich and poor, and plummeting birth rates— were all present long before Rome officially collapsed. Yet, most Romans failed to notice as they continued their daily lives nearly uninterrupted.

Gibbon called this the “natural effect of immoderate greatness.” Success bred a complacency that made self-correction impossible. Why sacrifice for the common good when prosperity feels guaranteed? This is precisely how decline arrives unannounced through the path of least resistance.

This pattern is not unique to antiquity, of course, and the symptoms Gibbon identified probably ring a bell to you. Other cultures have undergone the same cycle, and the signs are present in our own civilization. Rampant inflation, a faltering middle class, and plummeting birth rates are all too common news items in the West today.

Historical literacy serves as an early-warning system for these symptoms, though.

The person who has studied Gibbon or the collapse of the Weimar Republic possesses a pattern recognition that others lack. They realize that we are not fundamentally different from the Romans. They, too, assumed that because their world had always endured, it always would.

They were wrong.

A Blueprint For Survival

Ok, so history provides a detection system for failure, but it also offers a blueprint for survival, which is the second reason you need to understand history

History shows us how civilizations endure. Only when they treat their survival as a serious problem to be solved each and every day do societies make it through the many “great filters” that stand in their way.

One example is the long-lasting Byzantine Empire. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the East thrived for another thousand years. The Byzantines survived because they understood that civilization requires active maintenance…

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The Church may be in crisis. Without diving into all the political forces at play, Christianity has undoubtedly experienced a sharp decline in participation over the last 60 years — but maybe this challenging era of Christianity at hand is part of something bigger. Just as there are political and social cycles of highs and lows, so too are there rhythms in the life of Christianity.

The Greeks, like Polybius and Plato, recognized patterns of evolution between the many forms of government in what they called the kyklos. Later thinkers would apply the same concepts of a “cycle” to other aspects of historical development, too. Sir John Glubb believes empires to exhibit a six-stage lifecycle lasting approximately 250 years. Authors Howe and Strauss applied this cyclical thinking to social history, noting the rise and inevitable crisis experienced by American society every 85 years in four stages: a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling, and a Crisis.

In a similar vein of thought, we can think of the life of the Church as a progression of highs and lows across its history. The Church has, as perhaps all complex institutions have, a lifecycle, too. Historian Christopher Dawson proposed six ages in the life of the Catholic Church, each lasting between 250 and 500 years long and marked by a period of ascendancy and ending with a major crisis.

Dawson’s ages of the Church are a break with typical historical organization of Church history into ancient, medieval, and modern eras, and he explains why thinking of Church history in these six stages is more useful:

“One of the main reasons why I dissent from the current threefold division or periodization of Church history as ancient, medieval, and modern is that it is apt to make us lose sight of the multiplicity and variety of the life of the Church, and of the inexhaustible fecundity with which God continually calls new peoples into the divine society.”

Dawson doesn’t just divide Church history merely into periods of its organizational, philosophical, or relational aspects. Rather, Dawson views Church history by its periods of ascent or decline — when was the Church growing in power, prestige, spirituality, and philosophy?

Each age has its period of waxing ascendancy, peak in the vibrancy or prestige of the Church, and finally a waning due to internal spiritual decline or external crisis. Just as Christ died and rose again, many believe this dying and rising is a sequence the Church itself must experience. Let’s look at Dawson’s six ages and where our current age might be heading…

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First Age: Early Church

30 - 300 AD: The First Age of the Church begins with Christ and the arrival of the Holy Spirit upon the early church at Pentecost. It’s from this point onward that the Church began its first wave of ascendancy, converting Romans, Jews, and other Gentiles across the Mediterranean. While it would be difficult to name a “high point” of the Church between its beginning and endpoint, the First Age, according to Dawson, ends in crisis with the heavy persecutions of the third and fourth centuries, particularly the persecution of Diocletian.

Second Age: A Christian Empire

300 - 650 AD: The next age of the Church kicks off with the victory of Constantine at Milvian Bridge. The Roman Emperor then granted religious freedom to the growing number of Christianity via the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, leading to an acceleration of conversions throughout the empire. Further this age reaches new heights through the many spiritual and theological writings of many Church Fathers, such as St. Augustine. This age declines with the political decline of the Western Roman Empire by the many invasions of barbarian tribes and culminates in the conquest of Jerusalem in 643 AD.

Third Age: Carolingian Era

650 - 1000 AD: The Third Age of the Church began with the conversion of formerly pagan tribes of central and western Europe, most notably the Franks. Clovis I became a greater defender of Catholicism and aided its spread in the region, as did his descendants in the Merovingian dynasty. The age climaxed with the rise of Charlemagne in central Europe, who oversaw the Carolingian Renaissance and formed the basis of the Holy Roman Empire. Church and State ruled together in this age. After his death, the age entered a period of decline due to external threats (e.g. the Magyars to the East, Vikings to the North), and the empire for a time appeared finished.

Fourth Age: Medieval Reign

1000-1500 AD: The next age began with the humble monasteries, particularly the renewal of monasticism forged at Cluny in 910. Reforms swept through the Church under the papacy of Gregory VII in 1073. Then, the 1200s saw the pinnacle of Medieval spirituality, thought, and culture with the rise of Scholasticism, the synthesis of Christian and Aristotelian thought. Further, the well-known mendicant orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans were birthed, and many of the great Catholic universities emerged. Unfortunately, the greatness of the age stagnated in the face of increasingly difficult political realities, the Black Death, and finally the winds of change in the Protestant Reformation.

Fifth Age: Reformation & Rationalism

1500 - 1750 AD: Out of the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, a great renewal of the Church began to take shape. The Catholic Reformation addressed many of the grievances that spurred the Protestant Reformation and brought many back to the fold. Additionally, orders like the Jesuits were founded to help in the efforts of re-conversion. However, the heights of this era were never near those of the previous age. The effects of rationalism and the Enlightenment spelled dark times for the Church (and all Christianity) ahead. Philosophically, politically, spiritually, the Church entered a new low point in the latter 18th century.

Now, we turn to our age, the sixth age of the Church, where modernity is reconciled or conquered with Christianity…

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C.S. Lewis believed that the modern world’s obsession with equality went too far; that it would eventually destroy ambition — and even the concept of greatness itself.

He envisioned a future world where the abilities of great boys and girls are crushed by administrators afraid to hurt the feelings of lesser pupils; where taste for classical music and great literature are suppressed in an effort to fit in; where future scientists, physicians, and philosophers are considered “stalks that [need] their tops knocked off.”

Disturbingly, it’s a world we’re not too far from now, but how did Lewis know way back in the 1940’s?

Lewis observed in his own time that education could make or break society. If left in the wrong hands — namely the state — the dystopia he imagined would become a reality. Public education would level everybody to a state of mediocrity. But he also hinted at how education could be saved…

Here’s what Lewis predicted, and what we can do about it.

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The Siren Song of Perfect Equality

In Lewis’ 1942 work, The Screwtape Letters, a demon named Screwtape plots against humanity. He schemes to pull unsuspecting men and women away from God, and in the process destroy society.

One of Screwtape’s main tactics is using social trends — the spirit of the times — to accomplish his goals. In the final chapter, for example, the demon describes to his fellow fiends how the modern trend of democratic government and the desire for universal equality can actually be used against mankind…

The idolization of perfect equality can be used to prevent the best and brightest from rising to the top, reducing all into a condition of ignorance. How so? Through the social pressure of conformity. Since people naturally desire to fit in, and the dominant social trend centers around democracy and universal equality, exceptional individuals can be coerced into forsaking the very things that would foster greatness for the sake of conformity:

“….those who come, or could come, nearer to a full humanity, actually draw back from fear of being undemocratic….that people who would really wish to be — and are offered the Grace which would enable them to be — honest, chaste, or temperate refuse it. To accept might make them Different, might offend against the Way of Life, take them out of Togetherness, impair their Integration with the Group. They might (horror of horrors!) become individuals.”

The Coddling of the Mind

It’s precisely this coercive social influence that is most destructive when made a core part of the educational system. The idea that anyone could be smarter — or conversely, less intelligent — than others is the ultimate sin against the doctrine of equality. Thus an educational system designed around equality will coddle low performers and even purposefully conceal the differences that naturally arise between students:

“…dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised.”

How this all plays out reads eerily similar to modern education. Lewis says that university exams will be made so easy that nearly all students will get good grades. Consequently, the quality of universities will be so diminished that nearly every citizen can go to them whether they care about education or not.

Primary schools will become more akin to nurseries, where the “teachers” are far too busy dealing with troublesome students to waste any time on real teaching. Students who are too dull or lazy to learn languages, mathematics, or science, can be set to doing things that children used to do for fun — “Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling.”

All the while the low performers will be kept blissfully unaware that they are inferior because revealing so would cause, as Lewis says, “trauma.” Yes, Lewis directly uses that word “trauma” that has become so ubiquitous in the modern lexicon. “Avoiding trauma” has now become a catch-all term to avoid ever pushing students to their full capabilities or punishing students who are disruptive.

Lewis says the fear of hurting an inferior child’s feelings results in him/her being pushed through school, which only results in a declining education for everybody. He writes:

“The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.”

This all leaves an intriguing question: how does the decline in education actually happen?

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Everything society thinks is brand new is actually old. The book of Ecclesiastes famously states: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Philosophies are no exception. How often have you thought you had a novel idea, only to be humbled by a centuries-old thinker? If you’re anything like m…

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Miraculous births, archetypal heroes, and dying-and-rising gods — are they evidence of a mythologized Christianity or of the Christ-sized hole in pre-Christian thought?

For many atheists, the young C.S. Lewis included, the resemblance of Christian elements to pagan mythologies was a roadblock to serious consideration of Jesus. Some took it so far as to claim Jesus was entirely myth. More credible critics recognized a historical Jesus but clung to the idea of mythic elements informing the more supernatural aspects of the gospels.

C.S. Lewis referred to these mythic dying-and-rising gods as corn kings (from James George Frazer) for their resemblance to the “death” and “rebirth” in the cycle of harvesting and planting of corn. To Lewis, Jesus was just another corn king.

On a stroll around Magdalen College, Oxford with his friend, J.R.R. Tolkien, the issue of corn kings arose:

“What if, Tolkien suggested, the reason Christ sounded so much like the Corn King myth was that Christ was the myth that became fact? To put it another way, perhaps the reason that every ancient culture yearned for a god to come to earth, to die, and to rise again was because the Creator who made all the nations placed in every person a desire for that very thing.” — The Myth Made Fact, Louis Markos

Tolkien’s suggestion transformed Lewis’ understanding of the relationship between myth and the Christian gospels, eventually leading him to formal conversion years later. But who were these dying-and-rising gods that Lewis was so hung up on? What were the myths that became fact?

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The Mythic Christs

The corn kings Lewis was preoccupied with span diverse cultures in the pre-Christian centuries. This ubiquity was fuel for atheists to extrapolate Jesus as a Christian corn king myth, but as will become quite apparent, these corn kings lack — in one way or another — the fullness of the gospel Jesus.

The Greek Adonis (or Bacchus) was a mortal and epitome of male beauty, who upon being killed by a wild boar, came to life again in the form of an anemone flower when his blood mixed with the tears of Aphrodite. Another telling of Adonis’ story instead has him rising again in bodily form after Aphrodite begs his return from Zeus.

Another common corn king is that of the Egyptian god Osiris, associated with cultivation and fertility. The mythology describes his murder by his brother Set, who scattered his pieces across the land. Osiris’ wife Isis then collects his limbs and reassembles him to be revived in the Duat — the Egyptian afterlife — where he ruled the dead.

A third possible corn king was that of Tammuz in Mesopotamian lore. Though a definitive narrative is elusive, some belief Tammuz’ death is followed by a rescue from the underworld.

Baldr, son of Odin in Norse mythology, also shows some reference to a dying god that will one day return. The Scandinavia work Völuspá writes of “Baldr, the bleeding god” and goes on to predict a future return of Baldr which will bring peace. The Prose Edda further describes Baldr in similar language to how a Christian might speak of Jesus Christ:

“The second son of Odin is Baldr, and good things are to be said of him. He is best, and all praise him; he is so fair of feature, and so bright, that light shines from him…He dwells in the place called Breidablik, which is in heaven; in that place may nothing unclean be”

Beyond these corn kings proper (being rising-and-dying figures), pagan mythologies describe other aspects that we may see as similarly identifiable in Christ. There are healing myths, such as those performed by the Greek Asclepius; wine-centric miracles and symbols (recalling the miracle at the wedding of Cana) ascribed to the Greek Dionysus; and general parallels drawn between the gospels and Homer’s Odyssey, with some claiming the historical Jesus is merely donned in myth to make him an improved version of Odysseus.

Mithraism also greatly confused the distinctions between Christ and myth in the early centuries after Christ, too. In Babylonia and Persia, Mithra was seen as a divine savior born from rock; his cult used water as a symbol for his saving power, much like how Jesus was referred to as the “water of life”. Mithraism also used a ritual meal very close in resemblance to the celebration of the Eucharist, as described by Justyn Martyr in his First Apology:

“...the wicked devils have imitated [this] in the mysteries of Mithras, commanding the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated, you either know or can learn.”

Tertullian likewise wrote of the devilish similarities, which he believed to be copied from Christianity. Whether Mithraic rituals were actually so similar to Christian rituals is debated; nonetheless, the concurrent religion of Mithraism only confused the issue further in that Mithra bore many marks of Christ, but was wholly mythological, permitting skeptics to see Mithra and Jesus as similar mythologies in ideas, places, and times.

The idea of tying Jesus to mythology was made ever easier when early Christian’s adopted or unwittingly mimicked mythological art for their own iconography. Jesus’ iconography is thought to bear similarities to Mediterranean deities such as Hermes, Asclepius, Serapis, and Zeus. For example, Hermes was often depicted as a shepherd with a young ram over his shoulders, much like Christ was called the “Good Shepherd” and depicted carrying a lamb. Other examples of potential borrowing from pagan art were the use of halos, which were also used for the sun god Sol Invictus.

But how is Christianity reconciled with these pagan myths?

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In 1972 off the coast of the small southern Italian town of Riace, a snorkeler chanced upon a shocking discovery. At a depth of about 7 meters, Stefano Mariottini, a chemist on vacation from his native Rome, glimpsed an arm poking up from the sand on the sea floor.

At first he thought it was a dead human body. Fearing the worst, he approached the object …

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What happens when society becomes too comfortable, too secure — when we don’t need to rely on each other anymore? What if things are so materially good that we view other people as more of a nuisance than a help?

Giambattista Vico wrestled with these questions 300 years ago. He believed that extreme decadence and atomization lead to a new form of barbarism — one where men act “like wild beasts” and self-interest reigns.

Sound familiar?

The modern parallels are striking, but Vico believed there was a way out. He claimed there were 3 “remedies” for societies that had reached this state. Let’s explore what Vico was talking about, why it fits our modern world, and — importantly — which path our civilization might take.

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A Forgotten Prophet

Giambattista Vico was a 17th century philosopher and historian who lived during the Italian Enlightenment. He taught rhetoric at the University of Naples, and though in 1734 was appointed court historiographer by the King of Naples, he never attained the academic accolades that he sought.

In 1725 he wrote his magnum opus, The New Science, which aimed to organize the humanities into a single science that would explain how societies rise and fall. Despite his ambitious work, Vico remained obscure, and he considered himself a failure as his book received a deathly silent reception. It’s said that, while walking the streets of Naples, he hid his face when he ran across colleagues who had ignored his manuscripts.

Though Vico’s desire for fame went unfulfilled during his life, the centuries since have been kinder to his legacy. Many have since revisited his work, gleaning long-lost wisdom on the eternal cycle of cultures.

So what made people reconsider Vico centuries later?

Well, it has to do with Vico’s belief that in democratic societies, the obsession with “perfect liberty” wreaks havoc on the community, and ultimately leads to the “worst of all tyrannies.” As Western society has become more democratic and libertine since Vico’s time, people have noticed alarming similarities between his descriptions and the modern world.

But to understand what Vico was talking about, we first need to understand his conception of historical cycles — the patterns that all societies go through…

The Three Ages of Civilization

In The New Science, Vico proposes that societies follow three distinct ages: the Age of the Gods; the Age of Heroes; and the Age of Men.

The Age of the Gods is characterized by profound piety. A fear of God (or the gods) pervades society and the culture is ruled by theocracy — in order to act, one must first divine God’s will. Humans in this age are barbarous, and rely on powerful deities to form their understanding of the world.

Next is the Age of Heroes. This is the aristocratic period of a culture, ruled by strong leaders and inspired by poetic imagination and epic tales. It is an honor culture where courage is valued and violence dominates. The world of Homer’s Iliad is a perfect example.

Last comes the Age of Men. This is the age of rationality and individual rights. Republicanism and democracy emerge, and philosophy becomes highly regarded — often over military prowess. Reason trumps force. The time of Socrates and Plato in ancient Greek culture or the eras of the Enlightenment and modernity embody this age in the West.

The Age of Men is the height of human society in a material sense, but Vico posits that certain things are lost during this age that are essential to maintaining a healthy culture. Imagination, hierarchy, and shared myth are vital to civilization, but the emphasis on equality and reason erode these values.

Rationalism and the Death of Myth

Interestingly, Vico claims the birth of a rational mindset during the Age of Men and the emergence of anarchy are intertwined. The intellectualism of the Age of Men causes people to question everything, and they erode the vital institutions that created the culture in the first place by dispelling its myths and values.

The debates and discourse which originally birthed prosperity become merely tools of deconstruction, and an individualism of the most extreme kind results. When all shared values are eroded, community disappears. And political turmoil quickly follows. Vico writes:

“But as the popular states became corrupt, so also did the philosophies. They descended to skepticism…they caused the commonwealths to fall from a perfect liberty into the perfect tyranny of anarchy or the unchecked liberty of the free peoples, which is the worst of all tyrannies.”

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With the immense popularity of audiobooks, digital E-readers like Kindle, and free online PDF’s, more people than ever have accessibility to the Great Books — and this is undoubtedly a positive development.

However, there are some unfortunate drawbacks to using digital books over good old-fashioned physical books. So here are 4 reasons why you should own…

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Any true coffee aficionado knows that quality doesn’t come in bulk plastic containers at run-of-the-mill grocery stores. The knowledgeable coffee drinker will speak of a particular blend’s aroma, body, acidity, and any complex undertones in its flavor. But I can’t speak to any of those things in a coffee — I am contentedly ignorant of the ordinariness o…

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Every civilization eventually dies — it’s inevitable.

This might sound harsh, but given the long march of time, it’s an unfortunate reality that every great civilization must wrestle with. And for the citizens who must endure that collapse, it’s not a question of if or even when, but rather: what can be done about it?

What’s the gameplan when there’s no turning things back around?

Well according to the 20th-century British historian Arnold Toynbee, there are precisely 3 options — and only one of them leads to survival…

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Filling the Void of What Was Lost

Toynbee was an English historian who published the 12 volume work A Study of History, which traced the life cycle of about two dozen world civilizations. Importantly, he attributed the growth and flourishing of civilizations to the creative energies of their leaders. When leaders of a culture are practical, innovative, and adaptable, they can easily solve the challenges that confront the culture.

But over time, leadership decays, and becomes what Toynbee calls the “dominant minority” — a leadership class that occupies positions of power yet is wholly inadequate to solve the problems society faces. They lose their creativity amidst their decadence. And once this creative energy is lost, disintegration and schism follow. A civilization then frantically looks for new ways to recover its lost spark.

Toynbee posited that during this phase citizens adopt new mentalities unlike the one that helped the civilization flourish in the first place. He writes:

“Individual souls which have lost the opportunity…for initiating the creative actions by which the growth of a society is sustained are apt to take refuge in a series of alternative reactions to the pressures of disintegration…”

So what are these “alternative reactions” to societal decay? There are broadly 3 sentiments which are adopted by the proletariat in declining civilizations:

1. Detachment

2. Utopianism

3. Transcendence

Let’s explore each — and discover how to save civilization in the process…

Detaching From Reality

The first reaction is detachment, or abandonment, where an individual dissociates from the difficult reality of the situation, and adopts either 1) ascetic self-discipline or 2) a hedonistic abandoning of morality.

A classic example of these contrasting mindsets can be found in Hellenic Greece, where the popularity of Stoicism and Epicureanism increased while Greek civilization declined. Stoics adopted a life of self denial, believing a firm internal disposition could help them weather the storms of life. Meanwhile the Epicureans embraced hedonism where the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain was prioritized.

Though seemingly opposite mindsets, Stoicism and Epicureanism both involve a detachment from the realities of the disintegrating civilization. They are two sides of the same coin which focuses on internal states of being while allowing fate to run its course in the world.

Utopian Dreams

The next reaction that individuals have amidst a declining civilization is utopianism: the embrace of an idealistic vision that ignores the difficulties of their situation. Like detachment, this reaction comes in two contrasting forms:

1. Archaism - idealization of the past

2. Futurism - idealization of the future

Archaism

Toynbee describes archaism as a mimesis (imitation) of past ancestors and ways of life:

“The cult of the past — archaism — offers escape from a deadly present to the myth-memory of an idealized past.”

Think the Romantics of the late 1800’s — they idealized the Middle Ages rather than tackling the pressing cultural issues of their day. The fears of industrialization drove many to seek solace in the daydreams of an imagined golden age.

Though it’s healthy to celebrate a culture’s past, the danger of archaism is that it can stall a society’s growth. Toynbee warns that archaism actually mirrors the mindset of pre-civilizational cultures, leading to stagnation:

“[Archaism] comes near to being a lapse from the dynamic movement of civilization to the virtually static situation of a pre-civilizational Mankind. Alternatively, it may…arrest a society at a given stage, or forestall a threatening change, by immobilizing the dynamic factors of social growth…”

Toynbee pointed to extreme nationalism as a sign of archaism in the 20th century. He claimed that during imperial Germany, an attempt was made to link political movements with Germany’s medieval heritage. Kaiser Wilhelm I, for example, was often depicted as a Teutonic knight in propaganda pieces.

Futurism

The flip side of archaism is futurism, a utopian vision that heralds a coming political or social revolution that will solve all of a society’s ills. Instead of looking backward to a past golden age, futurists imagine that progress for progress’ sake is the highest societal aim.

The problem with futurism, according to Toynbee, is that it tries to “leap-frog” the struggles of society by a single massive stride.Instead of growing organically, building upon wisdom obtained via hardship, futurism provides the myth that utopia can be achieved immediately.

And because of this, futurists’ solutions are often shallow and fleeting. Toynbee writes that futurism is ultimately a palliative solution that fails to solve any real problems:

“The revolutionary cry for immediate release from oppression becomes a meaningless slogan: a cathartic outburst is no substitute for hard-won wisdom.”

Worse, futurism often leads to tyrannical regimes — promises of a perfect society lure the masses into supporting despotic leaders. The 20th century was fraught with ideologies that promised utopianism but only delivered misery — communism and fascism chief among them. Society, then, ends up looking very different from the utopia the people were sold.

Toynbee writes that the two sides of utopianism, archaism and futurism, are ultimately attempts to distract oneself from the harsh realities of decline:

“…the modes of life which we have called ‘archaism’ and ‘futurism’ are both attempts to escape from a crushing present, which has become manifestly unserviceable as a medium for growth, by pointing to an alternative goal.”

Since detachment and utopianism both fail, what options are left for an individual caught up in a crumbling society? Toynbee points to a third option that allows one to rise above the darkness of the present moment…

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Westerners are terrible at playing the long game. Perhaps an unfortunate byproduct of our modern democratic republics, the West at large can’t see past the next election, the next decade. The farthest most can see is the morbidity of the grave — if my world ends there, so it must for everyone. If the West is to be saved, our minds must be stretched to s…

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