What way to a better world?

If we want our social and political efforts to be useful, their direction should depend on the way the world is going.

But people aren’t good at reading the signs of the times. As Yogi Berra observed, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” And in this case, predicting the future raises basic issues of social and political order, its sources, and their availability today. These are difficult questions.

Still, we must try. The most basic sources of social order have usually been informal connections like family, kinship, inherited ways, and local community. Even in America today, most people have some attachment to these things. Most of us live within an hour’s drive of extended family members, for example, and the typical American lives only 18 miles from his mother.

But such connections have long been weakening. Between 1980 and 2021 the proportion of 40-year-olds who had ever been married fell from 94% to 75%. And between 1960 and 1980 the United States fertility rate fell by about half, to 1.8 babies per woman—less than the replacement rate of 2.1. And that’s about where it is today—higher immigrant fertility has offset further declines among the native-born.

There has also been an especially sharp decline in religious affiliation in the past twenty years. Between 2009 and 2019 the proportion of Americans identifying as Christian dropped from 77% to 65%, while those identifying with no religion rose from 17% to 26%. These changes affected all age groups, some more than others, but all very substantially.

Likely causes include the multiplication of distractions and the declining role of specific human connections, in particular the household. These in turn were likely caused by developments including labor-saving devices, ready-to-eat food, and electronic entertainment, as well as the extension of formal education and third-party childcare. Such factors have recently been supercharged by the Internet and social media, which separate people from their surroundings and make human relationships transitory and interchangeable.

These material factors are supported by feminism and sexual liberation, which weaken the ties between the sexes, and an education system and public culture that reject traditional cultural ideals and promote careerism and individual gratification as the most important human goals.

It’s worth noting that all these tendencies increase the power of billionaires and bureaucrats since they make business enterprises and bureaucracies the only functional institutions left standing.

The ideological factors seem quite important. A survey last year found that 59% of Trump voters but only 19% of Biden voters said society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority.

That’s a large difference. It’s also a rather odd one, given that the strongest Harris supporters are the college-educated, but it is Trump voters who have sounder views on a topic of social science research. The apparent explanation, apart from possible class interest in suppressing traditional institutions, is that formal education means devoting time, energy, and talent to assimilating official views. At least, in some ways, that makes it less education than indoctrination.

Similarly, in a recent survey women said they placed more emphasis on career than men (74% vs. 69% saying it is extremely or very important) and less on marriage (18% vs. 28%) and children (22% vs. 29% saying they are important).

That seems surprising because in daily life women seem more concerned with family, children, and close human relationships in general. On the other hand, they also seem to be more concerned with social expectations and the feelings of others—and may thus be more affected by what others tell them.

Brazilian telenovelas (soap operas), which glamorize families with much money, few children, and frequent extra-marital affairs, provide concrete support for the effect of propaganda: where introduced they have demonstrably reduced fertility and increased the divorce rate.

If traditional informal connections are declining, partly because of material conditions and partly because of propaganda, can we expect good social order from the commercial and bureaucratic arrangements that are becoming ever more dominant?

It seems not, if only because formal institutions depend on informal ones.

A society needs the people who run things to be cohesive enough to work together and intelligent and competent enough to deal with events appropriately. It also needs a basis for overall unity, which is normally a combination of inherited habits and connections and a system of beliefs that explains why those on top should rule and the people obey.

Our current ruling class—businessmen, bureaucrats, and their media, academic, and professional hangers-on—is united by education, interests, common separation from the general population, and a common social vision that identifies social progress with comprehensive dominance by people like themselves.

That vision undercuts inherited habits and connections and replaces them with claims of scientific expertise and promises of efficiency, equality, and satisfaction of individual desire. As such, it is plausible, given the current faith in efficiency, equality, science, tolerance, and individual choice, but it has fundamental problems.

In particular, it has no place for substantive common goods, and so is unable to support ideals people can live by. And it intentionally weakens normal human ties and the beliefs and distinctions that sustain them. Where connections are too powerful to ignore, as with ethnic, religious, and sexual ties, it attempts to turn them into opposing identities struggling over social position rather than vehicles of functional traditions. It wants “Latinos” to be a voting bloc angling for benefits rather than a complex of communities with common cultures that help them live better together.

The result is that people become increasingly divided and self-seeking. That applies to the rulers as well as the people in general.

One result is the progressive degradation of organizational effectiveness as employees make choices based on personal or group interests rather than shared mission. Others include growing corruption and incompetence, abandonment of non-partisanship by institutions like science, scholarship, the judiciary, and law enforcement, and openly expressed hatred and contempt by leading public figures for large sections of the American people.

Even so, a system of rule can survive a great deal as long as people continue to believe in it. Our rulers seem likely to stick with our general political orthodoxy, if only because it is not clear how they could replace it while preserving their position. The rank and file seem likely to weaken in their attachment, but they too are likely to have difficulty finding a coherent replacement. Established orthodoxy is too firmly established in thought and practice, and the people are too fragmented and distracted to develop alternatives. Populist uprisings may suggest new directions, but by themselves lack the coherence and vision needed for lasting change.

So what to do? It is difficult to drop out of society, but Catholics need to regain the sense that their way of life must differ from mainstream life in some important respects. And given the importance of propaganda in supporting recent tendencies, they need to carry on sustained and intelligent counterpropaganda—including not only explicit arguments in favor of a different social orthodoxy but presentations that, like Brazilian telenovelas, convey implicit messages.

We have just had an election that unsettled established orthodoxies, and there are other indications that progressive tendencies are stalling and alternatives gathering force and looking for a voice. So now is an especially good time for a well-considered counterattack.

It is said that Vatican II wanted to open the windows of the Church to the world. But the secular world, it turns out, is self-enclosed and airless. We cannot look to it for salvation. Our task is to connect more closely to our own sources of salvation and open the windows of the world to what is above it.

But that, after all, was the ultimate intention of the Second Vatican Council. Now is the time for the laity and clergy together to make it real.