“The West in Search of Moorings” is a theme that runs through three of our key reviews this month: Yoram Hazony’s Conservatism: A Rediscovery emphasises the importance of a religious underpinning for ensuring a stable society, Alan Noble’s You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World analyses the defective anthropology of modernity which centres human existence on an autonomy with nothing to be free for – and so man is left without moorings in the most “inhuman environment” he has ever had to endure. This can only be remedied by a return to God. Mark Bauerlein in his thorough analysis of the cultural illiteracy of the upcoming generations, The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults, argues that this illiteracy is deeply problematic in that it deprives the young of a “meaningful framework” for their lives. The young have been unmoored from the orientation provided to prior generations in the West through a tradition contained in its history, literature, philosophy, and religion. But what is particularly tragic about their condition is that they weren’t the ones who chose this loss of meaning – it was their elders, and teachers in particular, who severed the lines binding them to these moorings, setting them adrift to be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine” (Eph 4: 14).
These three writers, Hazony, Noble and Bauerlein (an Orthodox Jew, an evangelical Christian, and a Catholic respectively), have come to the same conclusion about the malaise of the world we have created, and point to the same remedy: the recovery of the West’s great tradition of learning, culture and religion in particular.