To speak of a “moral civilization” or an “immoral civilization” is to misapply the language of ethics. Civilizations are not saints or sinners; they are organisms of culture, faith, and survival. Their vitality is measured not by their moral rectitude but by the endurance of their traditions, their conception of the divine, and their will to perpetuate themselves through centuries of trial and sacrifice.
What endows a civilization with grandeur is not its claim to goodness, but its ability to forge a culture that gives meaning to existence. Generations suffer, labor, and perish so that a vision of man’s place in the cosmos, and of God’s sovereignty, might persist. This act of transmission—the handing down of myths, rituals, and principles of order—is the highest achievement of any people. A civilization’s true worth lies in its capacity to produce men and women of courage, character, and conviction, who, in turn, stand sentinel over its temples, scriptures, and laws.
Nor do I deny that survival requires not only culture but also strength, not only the poet and the priest but also the soldier. Warfare has always been one of the grim but necessary instruments through which civilizations are forged and preserved. No great culture has endured without a race of warriors to guard its borders, defend its honor, and, when destiny demanded it, to seize new frontiers. To fight, to conquer, and to secure the ground upon which one’s people may flourish—this belongs to the tragic yet unavoidable conditions of history.
But here lies the paradox of our time: those who proclaim themselves the guardians of tradition—the conservatives—are seldom true warriors. For all their bellicose rhetoric, they lack the harder courage: the courage of reform. They cling to the illusion that civilization can be preserved merely by denouncing outsiders, by railing against foreign influences, by imagining the source of all decline to be external. Yet no civilization survives by exclusion alone. To endure, it must ceaselessly renew itself from within. It must bring forth not merely yesterday’s soldier but a new breed of warriors, equal to the changing trials of their age. Without such renewal, no army, however numerous, remains unconquerable.
The conservative’s gaze remains fixed outward, upon the alien and the enemy, while his own house decays. He imagines that civilization is secured by building walls against others, but fails to see that the deeper work lies within: the cultivation of institutions, the purification of customs, the reform of spirit. A people that cannot confront its own corruption, that cannot wrestle with its own contradictions, cannot long endure. It is not the foreigner who defeats such a people, but their own refusal to change.
Thus the destiny of civilizations rests not on any illusion of moral superiority, nor on the endless denunciation of the outsider, but on the harder, nobler task: to preserve their essence without succumbing to arrogance, to reform without erasing their foundations, and to endure without pretending to perfection. A civilization lives when it produces warriors not merely of the sword, but of the soul.
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