In the waning days of his life, the French monarchist novelist and essayist Georges Bernanos penned a meditation on the twilight of civilization. This preoccupation, born of myriad concerns, consumed him. Exiled in Brazil, his fortunes depleted and his spirits low, Bernanos harbored a profound distrust of modernity—its democratic institutions, its totalitarian impulses, its technological fervor. His rage echoes the invectives of Léon Bloy, his disenchantment mirrors that of Joseph Roth. It was in Mallorca where Bernanos had birthed his magnum opus, «Diary of a Country Priest,» and where he had witnessed the brutal pantomime of war—that dance of killers drunk on bloodlust. Jean Améry, reflecting on the Holocaust, once observed that he who has glimpsed the soulless man can scarcely maintain faith in humanity. If beauty is our salvation, then surely it is the progeny of a specific culture—or, if you will, a particular vision of humanity. From his Brazilian exile, Bernanos wrote: «A civilization does not crumble like a building; rather, it empties itself, gradually, of its essence until only the husk remains. More precisely, one might say that a civilization vanishes alongside the breed of man, the archetype of humanity, it once nurtured.»

This hollowing out is not unique to civilizations. In the absence of a shared inner life, families splinter, nations falter, creeds wither, and hopes dim. Most crucially, liberty—the bedrock of communal existence—erodes. For Bernanos, as I once wrote, liberty is the realm of conscience, of unwavering respect for personal love (as the wellspring of genuine service and devotion), of duty and honor (as precepts that trump even the rule of law). It is for this very reason that Bernanos rejects the grand illusion of a culture sustained by what he terms «the vast, immense, universal sterilization of life’s great values.»

My interest here lies not so much in unpacking Bernanos’s critique of modernity as in examining this colossal emptying and its ripple effects through our society. Can we reduce a country’s cohesion to a mere scaffolding of laws and institutions, bound by nothing more than bureaucratic tape or the increasingly meager offerings of a welfare state? Can a society stand firm when the notion of shared citizenship has been usurped by a corrosive narcissism or by the clamor of identity politics as the only alternative values? Such questions invite a healthy skepticism. The facile retort, of course, is that the past was never as rosy as we paint it. There will always be compelling arguments that today outshines yesterday—just differently so. Some might dismiss this as the perennial discomfort of the conservative mind. But such critiques, from either camp, skim only the surface. True, the fabric of society doesn’t tear overnight; the world becomes unrecognizable only when it’s too late to mend. Consider the Catholic Church from the aggiornamento of the sixties to the present day. We know the outcome all too well, as José Jiménez Lozano so masterfully distilled in «The Eyes of the Icon»: «What we must decide is whether these icons and their beauty still emit—and can emit—meaningful signals. But we must also consider whether it isn’t a damning indictment of the denizens of our systemic glass towers that this beauty neither moves nor devastates them: that the eyes of the icon have been blinded.»

And those eyes, lest we forget, were the very eyes of our culture, our civilization.