The collapse of
the West is accelerating. The secular, leftist, multiculturalist elites have subverted
Europe so successfully that the clash of civilizations is ending not with a
bang, but with a whimper. The continent’s leaders have imported a violent, virulently
anti-Western horde in the form of mass male Muslim migration; a rape culture
and terrorist mayhem are becoming the new normal; and the best self-defense the
Europeans can muster is ragtag bands of vigilantes. Here in America the
cultural decay is less dramatic but gathering momentum as the radical left’s
half-century war on American exceptionalism takes its toll.
As the West commits
slow-motion suicide, and fundamentalist Islam advances, the questions arise:
what can we do to recover our cultural self-confidence? How can we restore the
vigor and greatness of Western civilization? How do we revive the unique values
of our culture and push back against the barbarians at (and within) the gate?
A new book from Canadian
publisher Mantua Books addresses these urgent concerns: Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values, by Diane Weber
Bederman. Bederman is a multi-faith endorsed, hospital-trained chaplain who
contributes regularly to CanadaFreePress and the Times of Israel, as
well as maintaining her own blog.
Back to the Ethic is both a
personal memoir and a broader cultural prescription. From the author’s own
death-defying struggle with illness and depression to her meditations on a
secularized culture that itself is mortally ill, the book stresses our need to
return to the Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism that is at the root of Western
civilization’s success.
Bederman begins by
simply stating what I noted at the outset of this review – that “our belief
systems are under attack.” Those belief systems, she writes, derive from our
“foundational story,” the Bible. “The Hebrew Bible, filled with these
teachings, the Gospels, and the New Testament make up the backbone of the
Judeo-Christian ethic as practiced today in the Western world.”
Ethical
monotheism, the 3500-year-old value system that began with Moses and the
Israelites wandering in the desert, spread outward from that humble beginning
to transform the earth. “And the world’s greatest transformation,” claims
Bederman, “has been the knowledge that we humans are individually accountable
for our actions.” It taught us that “we each have intrinsic value – we matter
because we exist.”
That belief in the
ethical God of the Christians and Jews “counterbalances egoism and the
idolization of another human being.” Its
emphasis on individualism has “freed us from the belief that we had no control
over our destiny, that we were mere pieces in the games of capricious gods.”
And yet, because it also teaches that we are also our brother’s keeper, the
Bible has paradoxically led to a compassionate culture that rose above the
narrow tribal loyalties of the past.
Ethical
monotheism, set on a Biblical foundation of justice, “colors every aspect of
Western culture, including the basic principles of our social, political, and
judicial systems.” It is based on the recognition “that we are imperfect
creatures, and it provides the path to forgiveness, redemption, and
hopefulness, through ritual, symbol, tradition, and prayer.” The belief in a
single god is a rejection of moral and cultural relativism. “Moral relativism
lacks the universal principles and absolutes that are needed to guide one’s
behavior.”
Winston Churchill
once wrote that the Bible has given us a “system of ethics which, even if it
were entirely separated from the supernatural, would be incomparably the most
precious possession of mankind, worth in fact the fruits of all other wisdom
and learning put together.” But we are losing our connection to those ethical
rules, and unfortunately, Bederman says, now “the ideologies of secularism,
agnosticism, atheism, and political correctness have been elevated to the
status of Champions of Objective Truth that will somehow protect us from
intolerance, war, and all the other human evils that these interest groups
wrongly blame on every religion.”
Those ideologies
do not, for Bederman, offer a cogent intellectual or moral alternative to the
Bible stories that for thousands of years were part of our collective
consciousness in the West. We once read them “for the values considered vital
to all citizens of all races, colors, creeds, and religions living in this
Western culture.” Those stories, however, are no longer shared. Students today
are as tragically unfamiliar with them as they are the classics of the Western
canon. The stories in the Bible “teach us the prerequisites for the
establishment of democracy” and “how to become moral and ethical human beings,”
Bederman writes. They “provide the path to personal liberation and a nourished
soul as well as the infrastructure upon which to build an ethical,
compassionate, free, and hopeful society.”
In addition to
losing our connection to the Biblical roots of our ethics, we are “losing our
sense of the sacred” as well, “the sacredness of family, friends, and
community.” As with regaining our moral footing, restoring that sense of the
sacred lies in reconnecting intellectually and spiritually with the Bible.
Bederman writes:
Maintaining Western culture requires that we
continue to teach the ethics and values of the Bible. We must teach this ethic
as a firewall, a bulwark against cultures and religions that are stuck in the
past, that fear change and free will, or that promote extreme submission.
In Back to the
Ethic, Diane Weber Bederman has written a deeply thoughtful, deeply
personal, and deeply spiritual work which urges us to understand that the
future of Western civilization lies in its monotheistic origins, and that we
can flourish again both personally and culturally by recommitting to the wisdom
and values of the Bible. “[W]e need a shared morality that protects and
promotes freedom, free will, individuality, and care for the community,” she
asserts. “If not the ethics and values of the God of the Bible, what shared
morality will it be?”
From FrontPage Mag, 4/24/16
