One of the fascinating sentiments that has been doing the rounds on social media over the past few weeks as been the idea that the Coronavirus pandemic is going to lead to some sort of major societal reset that will change the world for the better.
It's a lovely idea, but it's a romantic notion disconnected from the true reality of how cultures actually work in this regard.
It's not enough to simply realise that your society has developed aberrant cultural traits, you also need several other vital things to happen before meaningful change can actually take place.
Firstly, when it comes to the initial issue of recognising that that there is a problem, this recognition needs to be widespread amongst the members of a society.
Unless the majority of people recognise and accept that there is a problem with the way they have been living their lives then there is very little chance of meaningful change for a whole society.
And even if a critical mass of people come to agree that there is disorder at the heart of their society, other vital factors are also needed before big change can occur.
Firstly, there needs to be a will to change.
This is challenging enough at a micro level (the culture of an individual human being's personal life), but at a macro level (the culture of a whole society of human beings) this will to change doesn't happen without a major 'come to Jesus' moment.
We are talking here about the sort of crisis situation that has been so serious, so prolonged, and where what existed before has been so decimated that an immediate return to business as usual, or something closely resembling it, is simply not possible or tenable.
The current crisis is likely to cause big disruptions, and a temporary new normal that will exist for the next few years, but it will not be so devastating to our societies that we will be forced to rebuild from the ground up.
The simple truth is that there will be no societal will to change unless the need for change becomes so great that returning to things as they were, or some version of it, becomes nigh on impossible or untenable.
Here's the other thing though; Western society has become extremely hedonistic, and cultures that have made self-gratification and personal happiness their guiding star are not particularly fond of, prepared for, or good at choosing the alternative path of self-sacrifice for the sake of a greater good.
This is why people who spend most of their time eating junk food, drinking beer and lying around on the couch daydreaming about sports are less likely to become world class athletes than the people who practice self-discipline, regularly train and set themselves a goal to become competitive athletes are.
Which brings me to the other absolutely essential factor for cultural change...
Truth.
If your society has embraced a culture that is harming authentic human flourishing and inflicting injustice, misery and death upon human persons as a result, then your society has lost sight of truth and embraced a deception.
Unless it chooses to reject that falsehood and embrace truth instead there simply isn't going to be any meaningful cultural change. A person who has become sick because they are eating toxic things isn't suddenly going to become well again until they stop consuming the poison and start eating healthy foods instead.
A pandemic might expose the cancer of vice in a culture, but it can't teach a society what true virtue is or heal them of that sickness.
The modern West has another major problem as well though, in that it now also has an underlying cultural comorbidity - the sickness of relativism.
Our wholesale rejection of the very existence of truth itself leaves us culturally blindfolded and naked as the last glimmers of autumnal warmth and light fade over the horizon.
It is the equivalent of a patient who is both physically sick and also refuses to believe that doctors and medicinal therapies are real things. Without a rejection of the later, the patient can never actually become well.
As Hillaire Belloc masterfully annunciated in his 1931 essay The New Paganism:
"The New Paganism delights in superficiality, and conceives that it is rid of the evil as well as the good in what it believes to have been superstitions and illusions. ...Men do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say that the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism."
The cold hard truth is that human societies generally don't undergo major resets and then become better versions of their former selves. Instead, after a sustained period of serious cultural self-sabotage, they tend to collapse when a major catastrophe hits them.
Then, after their demise, something new and different arises in place of what once was.
Instead of hoping for fruitful cultural resets to begin growing in barren and untilled soil we should actually start daily living a culture of goodness, truth and beauty in our own lives in lots of big and small ways.
Then, if the moment of societal collapse does happen to unfold in our lifetime, we will be both prepared and ready to offer that something new, different, and - most importantly of all - authentic to a culture in great crisis.
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