It might be that the West’s greatest weakness is not military or economic, but moral and institutional. We continue to argue over the number of immigrants, quotas for refugees, and types of border technologies as if it were a technical question. But the more paramount issue may be whether the West still retains the moral authority necessary to justify enforcement. Civilizations do not sustain themselves simply because they have laws, but because they believe in the legitimacy of law enforcement. A society may continue to fund its courts, police, and criminal statutes long after it has lost confidence in their enforcement.

The crisis, in other words, is not primarily demographic. It is psychological and civilizational. Over the last fifty years, legal and justice-oriented codes of morality have gradually been replaced with therapeutic morality in the West. The former emphasizes rules, objectivity, hierarchy, and administering costs. The latter emphasizes emotional safety, inclusion, and minimizing harm. Helen Andrews has convincingly documented how the feminization of Western institutions turbocharged the triumph of the therapeutic. As women progressed from minority to majority in universities, media, HR bureaucracies, and professional management, institutional norms adapted accordingly. The feminization of the elite was not solely responsible for the rise of therapeutic morality, but it deepened and entrenched it. The point is not about individual women, many of whom defend law and order ferociously. The point is structural: once an institution tips over into majority-female, internal incentive structures tend to reward consensus-building over confrontation, emotional validation over adjudication, and reputational risk-avoidance over principled enforcement. Conflict becomes something to be managed rather than judged; standards become fluid rather than fixed; and authority, wary of appearing harsh, gradually relinquishes its nerve. Over time, institutions formed to uphold order begin instead to curate atmospheres. And when atmosphere displaces law, decline is not far behind.

A low-density culture regards norms as flexible and identity as mutable. When these two moral operating systems are layered on top of each other within the same society, it is the low-density system that bends to accommodate the high-density system. The result is tiny adaptations compounding over time. There need never be a cataclysmic clash. Immigrants self-select whether they will assimilate according to the language of enforcement versus the language of therapy. But the West hosts these immigrants and enforces its borders and laws on a much smaller scale because the reputational costs of enforcement are high. Enforcement is only legal, not metaphysically legitimate. Feminization will be objected to as a major cause of this crisis of enforcement, since there are prominent counter-examples of female leaders who enforce draconian immigration policy or maintain imposing armies. But this is a misreading. Young men raised in an era of feminism will be likely to obediently but unenthusiastically carry out administrative roles, rather than overturn the rules. The answer is not to put more men in charge of higher ed; again, we cannot go backwards. Ultimately, one wonders if the West can only sustain pluralism when justice, rather than therapy, remains its organizing principle—when rights are secured by enforcement rather than by sentiment, and when tolerance is protected by confidence rather than by apology.

A therapeutic order, however, delegitimizes the defense of boundaries. Once emotional harm mitigation is the highest public good, the state loses the ability to justify any enforcement except therapeutic enforcement. Civilizations grounded in God’s law have no such qualms; enforcement is obedience, not cruelty. Civilizations do not collapse when they lose control of their borders and their laws; they lose control of their borders and laws when they believe in their own legitimacy less. Each preemptive accommodation is justified as compassion. The potential for compassion, after all, is what makes our codes of morality distinctly Western. The tragedy would not be the Islamification of the West, but the destruction of the West’s ability to defend why it is unique and worth preserving in the first place.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)