Perhaps the biggest problem for young people today is deciding what to believe and therefore not knowing how to live. My heart aches for them, including some of my grandchildren. By the same token I am deeply moved to see those who have the wisdom to see the truth through the mists of deceit which envelop our culture. In my life it was so much easier. There was no distracting television, only the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) “wireless,” which included intellectual feasts like C.S. Lewis giving talks that were later adapted into Mere Christianity (sadly we missed those, but real high-quality material like that we did often hear). Some evensong was played and appreciated in some factories! School was blessed by examples of genuine learning, set in a framework of unchallenged Judeo-Christian morality.

The fact my family was poor never occurred to me. Running to Daltons to get three thin (very thin) slices of ham to garnish home grown potatoes was just part of life. I had modelled for me lives lived without complaint. My dad never took us into debt; home was managed on $20 a week, plus my mother’s sewing money. (She made almost every form of clothing that could be sewn or knitted.) Above all, families were strong, and we did not appreciate it but merely unselfconsciously expected it. It was simply how things were. None of my school friends ever experienced divorce. How does one compute the value of that way of life? The black scholar, Tom Sowell, notes that even under slavery most black children grew up in two-parent families. As recently as 1960 two-thirds of black children grew up in two-parent families. The figures for whites were the same. A century ago, slightly more blacks were employed than whites. Such societal norms were good for children, and the absence of minimum wage laws meant that children could earn money for their own projects. As God through Moses had promised the children of Israel, if you keep these laws, it will go well with you forever. And when societies don’t?

Now we watch university students supporting Hamas, dismissing any counter evidence because they have accepted the world must be seen as a battle between oppressed and oppressors and truth is only personal. They know no history, no great literature more than a few years old. It is years since I last met a student who has read Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, written as a first-person singular account of living under a regime produced by applied Marxism and ultimately dying for what the protagonist knows to be a lie. Truly, ideas do have consequences. The reductive form of knowledge which rules the minds of most of our elected leaders explains their incredibly simplistic policies. Climate change is what climate has always done—look at geological history. Look at the data for temperature and the temperature goes up before the CO2. The Little Ice Age (early 17th to early 19th centuries), when the river Thames froze to the point of allowing a winter fair on the frozen river just as the coal-powered industrial revolution was ramping up, would force them to understand that what politicians do is not driven by hard analysis but by what they feel will win the next election. The story of slavery is another example taught as though only white people enslaved black people. Most students are utterly unaware that slavery has been “normal” in all major empires in history and that the Ottomans were amongst the most brutal. The very word slave is derived from Slav. In the Mediterranean Basin, slaves were white for centuries. Thomas Sowell and other black intellectuals are trying hard to correct these distortions, but the real moral to draw is that modern students are not widely educated. Instead, they are introduced to a narrative from which they are not allowed to depart. Wisdom is a word that is noticeable by its absence in the modern multiversity. Everything is deductively produced from a false premise, that humans do not know the truth because it does not exist (ironically, they believe that statement to be true!) Everything is about having the power to express your own feelings and if you are from an oppressed group to force the oppressors to bend the knee. Thus, the laughable inability of academics to define a woman and the current crisis of Black street gangs must be due to slavery because it fits the academic narrative that is to be believed and is unassailable. Facts are dismissed by rhetoric, not argument. Similarly, the struggles in Gaza must be fitted into an oppressed and oppressor narrative, and critical comments about Islam are Islamophobic, despite the “brotherhood” of Islam with its control of immense oil wealth and displaying zero willingness to take in displaced Palestinians. The oppressor/oppressed distinction is itself overruled by the needs of the powerful. The leaders of Hamas and Iran have no guilt about sacrificing their own people to their obsession with destroying the Jews. It is not about race; it is all about culture. If we do not assert the truth that cultures are different, we will lose everything, not least the practice of healthcare as we knew it.

The practice of medicine flourished for centuries before it had anything that looked vaguely like modern effectiveness. Not until the 1860s did it make practical sense in terms of life expectancy to go to the doctor. Medicine is not a product of enlightenment. A strong case can be made it was Christians who took the old narrative, derived from the Jewish and Greek cultures and refined by the Hippocratic physicians, and added the compassion that Jesus had taught us. Christians cared for the abandoned, poor and sick in a way no other culture had done. Monasteries became the institutional means that led to hospitals and so much that is good about our culture. Even the most virulent critics of the West want to come to the West when their culture falls apart!

The doctor, before modern medicine emerged, could only accompany the patient to the gates of death and tell the patient their time had come. Nevertheless, he was respected for how he did his job, because he respected and used the traditions of his culture. In my lifetime, medical technical prowess has gone through the roof and respect for the profession through the floor. Why?

Cultural decay has fascinated numerous academics. No overarching consensus developed, but plenty of evidence shows that loss of moral consensus is fundamental to decay. A friend reminded me of the work of JD Unwin, which I had come across years ago when I did not appreciate it as I do now. He was an Oxford anthropologist/sociologist who studied more than 80 distinct cultures and societies and was particularly interested in the correlation between sexual behavior and cultural flourishing or decay. His book on sex and culture was published 90 years ago and is beautifully introduced by Kirk Durston on his website. He defined flourishing in terms of architecture, art, engineering, literature, agriculture, and he wondered whether societal constraints on immediate sexual fulfilment might lead to societal success in terms of stability, inventiveness and development.

His work indicated that sexual restraint was the single most important factor positively correlated with cultural flourishing. The best form was being chaste before marriage, and then being monogamous in marriage. When this pattern is established for three generations dramatic development occurs, and when societal rejection occurs it takes three generations to lead to collapse. In the Western world, this rejection began in the 1960s. Need I say more?