When the final chapter closes on Western Civilization, there will be a wide variety of theories as to what the primary catalyst was in hastening our downfall. Certainly, it would be shocking at this point to think it will occur due to outside pressure. China and Russia may be geopolitical threats to our interests globally, but it's a truly fantastic scenario that sees either one invading and overrunning our territory.
But the ideological polarization, moral splintering, and social fragmenting that is unfolding at supersonic speed these days all prefigure a thunderous civilizational implosion. Is there time to reverse course? Perhaps, but any student of history can testify that the tea leaves would suggest it has likely become a question of when rather than if at this point.
So what societal practice, what decadent obsession, what tragic moral miscue precipitated it all? Ask a million different cultural observers and you'll get a million different answers to that question. My generalized answer would be our culture's rebellion against God and His moral order. But if asked to give one specific example, let me offer a factor that should be near the top of every list, but likely won't be:
We allowed pornography to become ubiquitous in American society.
Mail-order magazines gave way to pay-per-view, which gave way to back rooms of video stores, which gave way to an explosion of internet sites, which gave way to a do-it-yourself porn industry on social media. It went from the stigmatized-and-thus-unspoken vice of a few, to the normalized-and-celebrated face of a generation.
Author Sean McDowell calls this the "pornified generation," and he's not wrong. From TikTok to OnlyFans, young people have been bathed in pornographic imagery from the earliest ages. It's one reason why, upon reading the recent comments of megastar singer Billie Eilish, I couldn't help but feel some sympathy for her despite the depravity that she promotes in her music.
"As a woman, I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was like 11," Eilish said. "I think it really destroyed my brain, and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn."
"It got to a point where I couldn't watch anything else unless it was violent. I didn't think it was attractive," she said. "I was a virgin. I had never done anything. And so, it led to problems."
"The first few times I had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that's what I was supposed to be attracted to," Eilish noted.
The moment I read that, my mind went back to a horrific article from the New York Times magazine in 2018. In that story, it became startlingly clear that pornography was stunting the healthy development of kids as young as 8-years-old:
"As [one young man identified in the study as ‘Q'] told me over several conversations, it wasn't just porn but rough images on Snapchat, Facebook and other social media that confused him. Like the GIF he saw of a man pushing a woman against a wall with a girl commenting: ‘I want a guy like this.'"
The article went on to cite some truly graphic and galling examples.
It's why I wrote at the time that if the #MeToo movement didn't become the most vocal and vociferous enemies of legal porn in America, they were ultimately a futile, and perhaps even fraudulent cause. Ditto that for all those aggressively condemning the patriarchy and the abuse it engenders against women. On that front, there is no greater foe than the prevalence of pornography.
And that's apparently even more true than many of us knew it to be:
Licentiousness isn't liberty. It never has been. And our society is paying the deadliest price for pretending otherwise.
