Unarguably, human beings (and all the more societies) have the ability to sanction their ideas and straighten out their actions because the “kingdom of Heaven is within us” and the Godly seed is imperishable. Or, to paraphrase the Gospels again, “men are laws into themselves” and there is indeed a self-regulating inclination, like the attraction of a gravity center which tends to reestablish “normality”, at least at a larger human scale. But these affirmations don't take into account that men have also perfect freedom, the “free-will” which is one of the attributes which distinguishes us from the other living creatures who are inexorably bound to follow the natural laws given to them by the Creator. Now, our liberty includes the ability to deny our own divine attributes and produce the most grotesque concepts or commit the most foolish and barbaric acts one could ever imagine. If this ever-growing degeneracy reaches a critical mass, we will predictably fall into our own trap and destroy ourselves one way or the other, not because God wills our demise but because even God cannot save us from ourselves.
Interestingly, such processes already happened in the history: there were societies whose spiritual, intellectual and moral corruption reached a point where downfall and destruction became unavoidable; think only of the Greek or the Roman empire (to say nothing of the “legendary” Sodom and Gomorrah). Religious paganism, a cult of matter, frivolity, a hedonistic or perverse life style eroded those civilizations from within and lead to their destruction by what appeared to be a barbaric, inferior population which paradoxically, was spiritually, intellectually and morally healthier than the “civilized” one that it replaced and dissolved.
But in 500 A.D., most of the world and those “barbarians” in particular were still living under the reign of a relative normalcy, perpetuated through tradition since Creation. Starting from Renaissance however, spiritual disorientation, moral frivolity and the materialization and narrowing of the intellectual horizon took over the mentality of Western man, proliferated to the East, especially since the so called “enlightenment” (thanks to a Peter the Great and other “luminaries”), and today encroached on most of the populated world. This sentence may sound outrageous to the ears of modern man, because it usurps the very foundation of his culture and civilization, but it is true although it cannot be explain or qualified in just in a few words.
What distinguishes our age from all the others is not its moral decadence which is an inescapable manifestation of our fallen nature (its exacerbation being a consequence rather than the cause of our decline), but the extraordinary state of confusion left by the disappearance of the guiding light of tradition. I often encountered in the Western personality a bizarre cohabitation between an encyclopedic accumulation of scientific knowledge and factual information combined with a complete lack of intelligence and common sense. Such a complexion is innocuous and tolerable when complemented by a certain amount of compassion and decency — however, an imagination (and especially collective imagination) rooted in absurdity and irreality and inspired by a mediocre or base moral character could lead to inhumane and appalling monstrosities: “nothing is worse than the mind, cut off from its roots”.
Motto
In our days, when the monstrous state of confusion that has engulfed humankind seems to have thrown individuals and societies in complete disarray, one feels almost embarrassed to bring into discussion lofty spiritual matters which may be regarded as inconsequential and naïvely idealistic compared to the grave human problems that our terrestrial existence raises every day. Two thousand years ago, the Bible foretold these circumstances for which René Guénon provided a more recent account: “... the inferior judges the superior, ignorance sets bounds to wisdom, error prevails over truth, the human is substituted for the divine, Earth has priority over Heaven, the individual sets the measure for all things and claims to dictate to the Universe laws drawn entirely from his relative and fallible reason (from “Individualism”, in “The Crisis of Modern World”).