The Deterioration of the Moral Heritage of the West

6 December 2025  Isaiah 30:19-21, 23-26

The First Saturday in Advent

“He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry.” Isaiah 30:19

The shock of a shocking situation is not finding out that it is inconsistent with who you are, but that it is totally consistent. It is who you are.

In 1961 philosopher Hannah Arendt covered  the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the logistical manager of the Holocaust. Prior to the trial Eichmann was examined by a team of physicians and psychiatrists to assess his mental health, and to the astonishment of many it was found that he was perfectly sane. It was the same result as at the Nuremberg Trials fifteen years earlier. The perpetrators of the Holocaust, arguably the most monstrous evil of the 20th century, had not departed from the moral heritage of the west. The shock of the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials was finding out that these men had acted in a way totally consistent with the moral trajectory of the west.

In the 14th century, William of Ockham proposed that there are no such things as “universals” – they don’t exist in reality, but only in the mind. That meant that there was no such thing as “human nature.” Human nature is just a name we give to our experience of certain common features of human beings, but the only thing that really exists is people and their various differences. That being the case, there can be no universal moral principles that can be read off human nature; there are only people, each trying to impose his/her will on other people. In the end, morality doesn’t really exist at all, but only will – who has power and is willing to use it. That became, by the 19th century, the gospel according to Friedrich Nietzsche, and its holy writ was Mein Kampf.

How’d we get the Holocaust? Ask William of Ockham. It started in the 14th century. This moral decay has been around for a really long time. Ideas have consequences.

How’d we get “drag queen story hour,” or boys in girls’ bathrooms, or nearly a million abortions a year, or the trafficking and abuse of children, or the reckless damage to our water, soil, and air? Same.

The shock of a shocking situation is not finding out that it is inconsistent with who you are, but that it is totally consistent. It is who you are.

Ideas have consequences.

If you’re shocked, however, that can only mean that you are at least trying to be something else, that you are no longer at peace with who you are. You may even have cried out, like the apostle, “Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:24). This is one of the oldest features of Israel’s prayers, the intuition that God is the decisive answerer of prayers, and listens to our cries. Another ancient feature of Israel’s prayers is that when we cry out, God will provide a Teacher (cf. Isaiah 30:20), and a community who have listened to that Teacher, and are ready to help you: “Your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, ‘This is the way, walk in it’” (30:21). It is because people cried out, and listened to the Teacher, and became part of the Teacher’s people that we got things like human rights, civil rights, hospitals, medicine, schools, an end to slavery.

Ideas have consequences.

The Teacher’s people exist for only one purpose, viz., “to declare the will of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (I Peter 2:9). There are people who are shocked, and no longer comfortable with who they are. They are crying. They need the ideas we have because they want other consequences. God has already sent the Teacher, now He is sending us. This is the way, walk in it.