There is a continuing debate back and forth across the Atlantic over whether the United States or Europe is wealthier. It is odd to watch, not because the arguments are unreasonable, but because it is a clear case of failing to see the wood for the trees. Both sides are exceptionally wealthy; yet the citizens of both entities appear to harbour deep discontent. They will not have children, drug use is escalating, and political and social discourse is marked by increasing violence and protest, to name but a few indicators. This is something noted by the chief economist of the Institute of International and European Affairs, Dan O’Brien, who suggested that the disconnect between financial wealth and people’s satisfaction is down to doomscrolling. I would argue that, in analysing the data in this way, O’Brien is inadvertently displaying one of the key characteristics of civilisational decline, as described by the 20th-century Catholic convert and journalist GK Chesterton.

In his book The Everlasting Man, while analysing the decline of the Roman Empire, Chesterton suggests: “Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society are no longer good that the society begins to decline.” This explains how it can be true that we are, by most modern metrics, happy – i.e. materially prosperous – and at the same time deeply depressed. The good thing that modern societies of the West offered was a level of prosperity and comfort undreamed of by our ancestors. Whether on the Left or the Right, socialist or libertarian, economic and material comfort has been the focus of our political debates. Now, that key metric is no longer representative; in a society such as ours, Chesterton suggests, it will be hard to find any means of measuring the decline because it is the good things that are failing. It is rather like looking at what appears to be a healthy crop of apples, not knowing that they are rotting on the inside.

But why have they rotted? What has caused this decline of a strong, prosperous society into one that is, on the surface, still strong and prosperous, yet deeply unhappy? Again, Chesterton has a convincing answer – it is because the society’s mythology, its source of ideals, has died. So it was in Rome, where the founding myths of its empire gradually faded away as people realised they were not a true religion grounded in reality, but myths to be rejected or else used in the service of one’s own ends.

Such, I think, could be said of the founding myth of our own age: liberalism, with its promise of absolute freedoms and human happiness for the mythical figure of the liberal individual. Liberalism promised that we could pursue whatever made us happy, because man determined his own ends, and that the political order would ensure a balance between conflicting needs without prejudice.

But that has devolved – suddenly from a secular perspective, inevitably from a natural law perspective – into factional identity politics. People gave up playing at the myth of neutrality and balance, reaching instead for what seemed to be liberalism’s central promise, the absolute free play of our personal desires. “Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense... they try to stab their nerves to life,” Chesterton wrote of Rome. He may as well have been writing of London or Dublin in 2026, marred as they are by drug abuse, perverse sexual practices, financial corruption and greed. Chesterton knew that the death of a myth leaves a void that must be filled.

The absurd thing for Rome, as it is for us, is that our present civilisation is dying at a time when it has never been stronger. Western culture, through American hegemony in this sphere, has become the dominant force across the globe. Everyone wants the prosperity we have attained. Even China, it is arguable, is more western than oriental in its outlook, having imbibed the doctrine of that quasi-Christian heresy, Marxism. The parallels with Chesterton’s Rome are once again striking. “There was nothing left that could conquer Rome,” he writes, before adding “but there was also nothing left that could improve it.”

That is, nothing of its own stock that could improve it; not unless some new ingredient was added to freshen it up. In this regard the Romans were fortunate, for along came Christ to fill the vacuum with a faith that was, as JRR Tolkien explained to CS Lewis, true myth. While most faiths made a compromise with Rome, nominally offering obeisance to the divine Caesar in return for free worship, one tiny sect began to cause trouble, refusing this shallow tolerance in favour of the truth. What did they get for their troubles? First persecution, but ultimately vindication.

For as Chesterton, and after him the renowned historian Christopher Dawson, argued, Christianity had a unique power of regeneration. Dawson identifies it as the key characteristic of western culture, in contrast to other great civilisations: its ability to resurrect and renew from within, balancing static and progressive forces. How can this be so? Because of the hope that lies within, “errant, extravagant, excessively fixed upon fugitive chances”, writes Chesterton. So while the rest of the world bickers over GDP, we know the problems lie deeper and the solution also, not in economics, but in faith. It is only through a return to Christ that Europe will “renew its youth like the eagles”, as it has done so many times already.

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