Last week, Bill O’Reilly
let it all out in
one of his most bizarre rants of late, discussing what he sees as the
moral decline of America, and the imminent fall of our empire — much
like the way of the Romans.
He said:
“Any
student of history knows that when a nation turns inward toward the
pursuit of individual gratification, the country is in trouble. Rome
[is) the best example. The citizens there ultimately rejected
sacrificing for their republic…and the empire collapsed.”
O’Reilly
is certainly correct about the decline of the American empire — the
ship is sinking, but not for the reasons he seems to think. The Fox News
host attributes our impending fall to a moral decline, which to him, of
course, means the decline of Christian faith. In some fresh
new Pew polls,
it was revealed that Christian affiliation in America has continued to
drop, while the percentage of unaffiliated (including atheism and
agnosticism) has gone up a whopping 6.7 percentage points since 2007.
Protestant affiliation dropped by 4.8 percentage points, while
Catholicism dropped by 3.1 percentage points.
To O’Reilly, this
signals a moral decline in America, a harbinger of our ultimate
collapse. The reason for such a dire assumption is simple: O’Reilly, and
a significant part of the population, believes that atheism, or any
kind of doubt, is synonymous with nihilism. This comes from a
presumption that religion is the ultimate moral guide, and without it,
human beings are morally bankrupt. As one character famously remarked in
Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov”:
“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
Predictably, O’Reilly attributes the rise in disbelief to things like drug abuse, rap music and the liberal media:
“There
is no question that people of faith are being marginalized by a secular
media and pernicious entertainment. The rap industry for example often
glorifies depraved behavior and that sinks into the minds of some young
people, the group that is most likely to reject religion. Also many
movies and TV shows promote non traditional values.”
This view is hopelessly naive, and once again
sprouts from the assumption that atheism and nihilism are synonymous. It
is inconceivable to O’Reilly that the rise in non-affiliation is more
likely because of education and the rejection of unprovable myths than
because of a moral decline. Even William Jennings Bryan, nearly a
century ago, understood that education and scientific advancement were
causes for rejection of faith, saying of schoolchildren at the famous
Scopes Trial: “If they believe (in evolution), they go back to scoff at
the religion of their parents.” The more one understands the natural
world, the more likely they are to reject the myths of their parents.
What
makes O’Reilly’s conjecture truly insulting is his assurance that
non-religious people are somehow more likely to be immoral. This shows
not just a remarkable measure of O’Reilly hypocrisy — if increasingly
dire reports on his personal life are to be believed — but also his
ignorance of history. Before the modern era, it was more or less illegal
to be an atheist in the Western world; the further we go back, the more
violence rises, as documented in Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of
Our Nature.” Today, violence is the lowest it’s been in documented
history, while religious disbelief is presumably at its highest point.
In his book, Pinker describes what he sees as the likeliest causes of
this humanitarian revolution:
“The growth of writing
and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change
that helped set off the Humanitarian Revolution. The pokey little world
of village and clan, accessible through the five senses and informed by a
single content provider, the church, gave way to a phantasmagoria of
people, places, cultures, and ideas.”
The rise in
literacy and education, along with the centralized state, have
contributed to the most peaceful and moral era in history — not
religion. Furthermore,
studies have found that
non-belief is more common in wealthy industrialized societies and that
rates of the most violent crimes tend to be lower in less religious
states.
Another report shows that just 0.2 percent of America’s prison population is atheist, while more than half are Catholic or Protestant.
What
does all this reveal? Not that atheists or Christians or Buddhists are
more or less moral; but that human beings exist in a complex moral
landscape, shaped by any number of factors; and that the environment one
grows up in plays a crucial role in developing this morality. So, Bill
O’Reilly’s fear that the drop in Christianity is contributing to a moral
crisis, and that this moral crisis in contributing to the imminent
collapse of the American empire, is hogwash.
But this doesn’t mean he’s entirely incorrect about that impending collapse.
Indeed,
the American empire that was built up during the 20th century does seem
to be heading toward a decline; but it is not because of some great
moral crisis. In fact, the moral crisis that O’Reilly attributed to the
lack of religion is really just a natural result of our economic system.
O’Reilly says “pernicious entertainment” is causing this collapse; but
in reality, this entertainment is simply the result of the consumer
society, which emerged during the latter half of the 20th century, after
capitalists and corporations found that all the basic needs and wants
of the people had been satisfied. An entire industry of advertising and
marketing was born to create new and increasingly specialized (and often
pointless) needs. This grew out of the system of capitalism — the very
system that O’Reilly loves so dearly.
When O’Reilly praises the
capitalism, he is praising the old Protestant ethic that Max Weber wrote
about. But that capitalism is gone, and today we live in what naturally
forms from that ideal. So, if there is anything that can truly be
blamed for the moral ills that O’Reilly is so concerned about, it is our
economic system, based on materialism and self-interest. Ironically,
this O’Reilly-backed free-market impetus may very well be a major
contributor to our fall.
The United States has been importing and
consuming more than it has produced and exported for many years now, and
this is simply unsustainable. When a country’s citizens put everything
on credit to satisfy their ridiculous consumption, a fall from grace is
bound to occur. This happened in the late 2000s, when the housing
bubble collapsed, and there is no reason to think it can’t or won’t
happen again in the future.
The reality is that the American
empire will collapse (barring some miraculous act of God responding to
the prayers of O’Reilly), and another empire will likely take its place,
just as it always has throughout history. It is also possible that
there will be no new empire equatable to modern America, and instead
regional powers. Regardless, O’Reilly and his followers will blame this
fall from superpower status on the decline of faith and moral decay,
because they like to think that America is somehow special; that we are
God’s chosen ones. But that is childish, and childish fantasies will
only accelerate this inevitable decline.
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