It is, by now, almost universally accepted that civilizations rise with their gods, which is to say that all civilizations grow concurrently with their religions. Gods provide the justification for order, rules that define appropriate social behavior, and the implicit threat of punishment should those rules not be followed. It has been this way for all of man’s existence, or at least for all of “civilization’s” existence.

The first great civilization in history—indeed, the site of the very inception of history—took shape in the Mesopotamian region, between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq, between 7500 and 6000 years ago. Over the course of the next 2000-3000 years, the great civilization of Sumer became a regional hub of trading, travel, and migration. The proto-written history of Sumer dates to around 3000 BC or even earlier, placing this written language in roughly the same epoch as ancient Egyptian proto-writing, among the first ever created. The first written language in Sumer with decipherable syllabary dates to about 2300 BC, just before the region was to reach its golden age.

Over the next 250 years, the Mesopotamian region saw the rise and fall of various dynasties—the Akkadians and Gutians—until the region was united under the rule of Ur-Nammu, the king, fittingly enough, of Ur, the greatest of the five great walled cities of Sumer. Ur-Nammu’s kingdom did not last long but was enormously important.

To start, Ur was the first truly great city in man’s existence, the first “urban” massing of people. By the time Ur-Nammu had consolidated power, around 2050 BC, the city itself was as large as 50,000 people. While that may not sound like much by today’s standards, it was roughly four times as large as it had been just a few decades earlier, making Ur not only the largest city on the planet at the time but also the first city—in all of time—to reach such monumental proportions. In the ancient world, Ur was as big and as important as any place on earth.

Second, Ur-Nammu created the first (or at least the oldest known) code of law, covering everything from crime to labor to currency and credit. Ur-Nammu’s code predates the Babylonian Hammurabi’s much more famous code by nearly three centuries.

Ur-Nammu did not claim to be a god, but he did insist that he was chosen by the gods, that his rule was ordained by the gods, and that his legal code represented the will of the gods. As time went by and civilizations grew and evolved, this final notion—that just laws and the laws of the gods are one and the same—would also grow and would develop into one of the foundational principles underpinning self-government, the commercial economy, and all that modern man purports to hold dear.

In Ur and its king Ur-Nammu, we see the establishment and solidification of the concepts that would enable man to live together in massive communities in the clear absence of familial ties and hierarchies and yet in relative peace and harmony. In Ur-Nammu, we see the embodiment of the characteristics that would empower a select, elite group of men to govern over all others and to hold them accountable before their fellow men for violations of agreed-upon behavioral conditions. In short, we see the formation of the patterns of “society” that have held relatively constant for more than four millennia. We see, in real-time, the construction and ratification of that which the Enlightenment thinkers would, some 3700 years later, call “the social contract.”

What is less often discussed and far less universally accepted is the notion that civilizations also fall with their gods, that the collapse or abandonment of a civilization’s founding faith presages its own eventual collapse. History has shown that civilizations tend not to survive without their religions, without their gods. Ancient Israel’s struggles, wars, defeats, and exiles were, as the Old Testament makes clear, associated with periods of waning faith and religiosity. Likewise, Rome could not survive for long once Christianity had settled solidly among its population. The old rules—and the old justifications for the rules—lost their authority. And in time, so did the secular rulers.

In the West—the civilization formerly known as Christendom—our founding faith has been under profound and unrelenting attack for almost three centuries. The unique blend of Mediterranean influences—ancient Greece, Rome, Judaism, and Christianity—combined to create a civilizational ethos largely unprecedented in human history and entirely unprecedented in its delivery of cultural, political, economic, and personal liberties to its denizens. The Enlightenment and its aftermath, however, killed the Western God, as Nietzsche rightly noted, and set in motion the slow-motion destabilization of that ethos.

It is worth noting here that while the death of civilizational gods unleashes moral and cultural chaos upon the land—the natural consequence of the emasculation of the religion-based behavioral rules—perhaps the greatest damage done in this process is to the psyches of the civilization and its people. When the gods die and the religion fades, so does the defining purpose—the telos—of the civilization, leading to a broad societal ennui and an acute personal sense of emptiness. The elites lose respect for the civilization and question its usefulness, which serves only to exacerbate the civilizational ennui, generation after generation.

I have written before in these pages about the effect of this loss of telos, this sense of purposelessness, on individuals. In short, deprived of purpose, deprived of community, deprived of a sense of belonging anywhere or to anything, individuals can become desperate and, thus, seek solace in the grand fantasies they concoct. They become the heroes of their own narratives, the only people who can right the world’s wrongs and reaffirm the lost meaning of society. This desperate search applies equally to environmental Gnostics as it does to the masses demanding an end to an imagined genocide and the creation of a state dedicated to terror and mass slaughter.

As I discussed recently in a note to my readers, this urge to set the world right, to be the hero who smites the wicked ones, also applies to school shooters and to those who unironically see themselves as the savior of Ukraine from Russian advances as well as the savior of the nation (and the world) from the return to office of a man whom politicians and the media have labeled a grave and unparalleled “threat” to the American way of life.

In the wake of this latest attempt to assassinate Donald Trump, the media and the Democrats have absolved themselves of any wrongdoing. Sure, we said Trump was a threat, they conceded, and we said that he must absolutely be stopped by any means necessary, but we didn’t expect that anyone would take us seriously. Why would they?

In normal times, under normal circumstances, it is possible that no one would take them seriously. But these are not normal times. This is an era of disillusionment and desperation, in which a civilization’s God is dead and its people are searching fruitlessly for meaning. These are dangerous times, in short, when Western Civilization’s fate is in question.