There was a time not so long ago when educated men and women read Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as a matter of course. Gibbon’s ultimate thesis was that Rome, the world’s greatest civilisation, collapsed because its citizens lost their virtue.

On that topic – civilisational collapse – I woke earlier this week to a bemusing  tweet from Daily Wire editor Ben Shapiro:

‘The President of the United States explains to a man cosplaying as a woman that it is “moral” to allow the mutilation of gender-confused children. Our civilisation is in a state of ethical collapse.’

Shapiro is referencing a short video in which Dylan Mulvaney, a flamboyant transitioner who dresses up as a ‘girlboss’ and runs TikTok explainers on why ‘some girls have bulges’, interviews the President of the United States. Channeling Jackie Kennedy in a pearl-white cut-away ensemble with a pink neckerchief, Mulvaney extracts a strident declamation from Joe Biden: There must be no intervention by States to restrict access to ‘gender affirming’ surgery.

Biden and Mulvaney’s conversation is prefaced by Mulvaney’s explicit claim that laws restricting trans children’s rights are ‘especially’ harmful. Their discussion is loaded with the assumption of an unlimited ‘right’ to underage trans healthcare.

Such is contemporary political culture’s superficiality, it might be tempting to dismiss with tired irony this latest debasement of Presidential gravitas. We should avoid that temptation, and take the debasement seriously. There are real issues at play in Biden giving this airtime – especially concerning its potential to influence the young.

It is no stretch, either, to raise the issue as a harbinger of civilisational collapse, as Shapiro does. Modernity has taught us that a culture that fails to protect its children is a culture that has abdicated its claim to moral virtue. Antiquity has proven that with this abandonment of moral virtue, societal collapse is all but assured.

In Decline and Fall, Gibbon deals meticulously with this subject of societal collapse. His remains a seminal work of historiography owing to its depth of insight into Rome’s crisis of decadence. In Chapter 6, he writes about 3rd Century Emperor Elagabalus, who ‘lavished away the treasures of his people in the wildest extravagance… The master of the Roman world affected to copy the dress and manners of the female sex, preferred the distaff to the sceptre, and dishonored the principal dignities of the empire.’

Sexual impropriety is not the only reason Gibbon identifies for the fall of Rome. But the upending of gender mores is for him solid evidence of a wider imperial malaise. Wrong-footed sexual culture appears at least as a symptom, if not always a cause, of a society which has lost its bearings. He may of course be wrong, but his thesis is not without compelling evidence.

Regardless, we read Gibbon because whatever his shortcomings, his work has proven valuable across the centuries in apprehending both unsettling personal truths, and dangerous civilisational tendencies.

Our drift away from these Great Books endangers us. Through our historical illiteracy, we blind ourselves to both the folly of our indulgences and the tragedies of society’s unthinking missteps. DH Lawrence said history is the mere study of one’s own struggle. Trotsky opined it was the victory ‘of consciousness over blind forces’.

The further removed an individual is from understanding their place within a wider civilisational span, the further they grow the tendency to indulge a subjective view of their own identity. Some social influencers do not appear to care about projecting objectively false propositions, or that impressionable children might do real harm copying adults: their life experience tells them that their subjective identities, whatever those may be, hold hegemony over every conceivable objection.

Another great 18th Century thinker contemporaneous with Gibbon, Edmund Burke, put the lie to self-defined expression of personal identity. Burke’s central insight in criticizing the French Revolutionaries was that the man who willfully alienates himself from custom, expectation, and traditional identity, unleashes a personal conceit that can only lead to civilisational destruction.

It is difficult to conceive that Burke would be supportive of any attempt to radically alter one’s fundamental identity. It is also true that in our modern liberal order, adults have every right to change their bodies in the name of progress toward an ideal personal identity. For one person that change may require a simple bench press. For another, it may require a complex penile amputation and a lifetime of burdensome choices.

Our young are not equipped to handle rule-by-subjective-identity. We limit their independent action for very good reason. As vulnerable and incompletely-formed members of the community, children are at grave risk of misinterpreting the screaming pressures of popular ideology as forming the real substance of their own identities. In the trans debate, many have already paid a terrible price not just for succumbing to this pressure, but for the reprehensible failure of adults to protect them from it.

We place children in a restricted ‘rights’ category to prevent the harm which results from these kinds of mistakes. Children do not, and should not, enjoy the unrestricted rights of adults because they do not yet possess full faculties of reason. Until such time as we agree they do – in adulthood – those rights are usurped by parental authority.

Childhood has not always had a happy story to tell in modernity. But for centuries, nations have broadly agreed upon the special classification of children, the age-conditionality of their rights, and the commensurate responsibility of adults who must mediate societal pressures in their stead.

In practice, shielding children from modernity’s madness is not principally a legal issue. It is what good parents call ‘common sense’. However, to an increasing segment of the population, that sense is being recklessly abandoned amidst an onslaught of giddy self-indulgence, and medical industry self-interest. A complicit political class indulges these forces further, hedging its bets that what is popular is not necessarily right, but is right-enough to get them elected.

Despite Joe Biden’s own apparent decline, he remains our civilisation’s leader. That he would lend the legitimacy of the Presidential seal to radical gender ideology – endangering the lives of vulnerable children the world over – deserves civilisation’s rebuke.

Ben Crocker is a Europa fellow at Common Sense Society, and Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation scholar in Washington DC. His substack is Crocker’s Columns.

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