The Great Unmooring
On the consequences of discarding meaning and calling it progress.
One of the most striking features of the modern West is the belief that we can remove the supports that held our civilisation together and yet expect everything to continue functioning as before. We treated the shared moral grammar of the past as though it were a decorative heirloom: outdated, sentimental, kept only out of habit. So we discarded it, and proudly.
But foundations are not optional. Sooner or later, the building shifts.
For generations, Christianity provided a set of assumptions that did not need to be stated. Even if many people did not believe in its doctrines, the culture it shaped gave us a common understanding of human nature: that we are all capable of cruelty, that we require restraint, that forgiveness is necessary if we are to live together at all. It placed limits on power, and limits on the self.
I don’t believe in the metaphysical claims of Christianity, and I’m not alone in that. But disbelief is not the same as indifference. A civilisation cannot simply abolish the worldview that produced its values and expect those values to continue indefinitely. That is not how cultures work.
We replaced shared moral assumptions with the idea that the individual is the final source of meaning. Identity became something one invents rather than inherits. Morality became a matter of personal sentiment. And society became increasingly incoherent.
Into that vacuum came the new ideology now commonly labelled “woke.” It is, in essence, a moral system, but a strangely punitive one. It has the certainty of religion without the mercy. It categorises guilt and innocence by group identity rather than behaviour. It denies the possibility of redemption. And because it cannot persuade, it polices.
We see this most clearly in the capture of institutions: universities, charities, cultural bodies, media outlets and HR departments. These organisations now act as enforcers of a worldview that demands conformity but cannot articulate why. Ordinary people sense they are being instructed to deny things they know to be true, and told to keep quiet about it.
Recently, time spent in Thailand brought this into sharper focus. Not because Thailand has discovered some hidden solution, it hasn’t, but because it retains a cultural centre of gravity. People there do not wake each morning needing to renegotiate reality. They do not experience identity as a performance project. Their social norms are not made up on the spot.
The contrast reveals what we have lost: not belief as such, but coherence.
The tragedy is that Western civilisation remains unmatched in its achievements, in science, freedom of thought, legal rights, and the protection of the individual. But these achievements did not spring from nowhere. They depended on a view of the human person that was stable and shared.
We can no longer rely on the residue of that worldview. Memories fade. Institutions decay. Without continuity, without a story that explains who we are and what we owe each other, a society does not progress. It fragments.
This is where we now find ourselves: technologically advanced, morally uncertain, anxious, and strangely hollow. The problem is not that people are evil. The problem is that they are unmoored.
The solution is not to return to a past that cannot be restored, nor to pretend belief where none exists. It is to recognise that a civilisation cannot sustain itself on the basis of individual whim and bureaucratic diktat. It requires shared purpose, shared memory, and a sense of the human being that is older than our current enthusiasms.
Rootlessness is not freedom. It is drift.
The question is not whether Christianity was true. The question is whether we can function without the structure it provided.
So far, the answer appears to be: no, not really.