Importing Meaning
In the 1960s, the Western left encountered an outcome its own theory had not prepared it for.
Marx had assumed that industrial capitalism would intensify exploitation until the working class could no longer bear it. Instead, capitalism adapted. Productivity gains were shared just enough. Wages rose. Credit expanded. Consumer goods multiplied. The worker was not immiserated into revolt but integrated into comfort.
The proletariat did not become a revolutionary subject. It became a stakeholder.
This was not a betrayal of capitalism’s logic. It was its refinement. Rather than confronting labor as an enemy, the system absorbed it through consumption, welfare, and status. Class conflict was not resolved; it was anesthetized.
Marx had underestimated the pacifying power of abundance.
By the mid-twentieth century, the Western working class no longer experienced itself as historically trapped. It experienced itself as upwardly mobile. Revolution ceased to feel necessary. And without necessity, revolutionary identity collapsed.
Moral energy, however, does not disappear when material conditions improve. It looks for an object.
It found one abroad.
Colonialism, imperial wars, and poverty in the so-called Third World offered a clear moral horizon. The suffering was real. The outrage was justified. But the structure mattered. Solidarity operated at a distance. One could condemn Western power while still inhabiting Western society as a functioning home.
That posture required confidence.
Oswald Spengler described this condition precisely: a civilization still stable enough to criticize itself without calling its own legitimacy into question. Critique presupposed form.
That form has eroded.
Over time, critique outlived construction. The West refined its moral language while steadily abandoning any shared sense of ownership. History became accusation. Tradition became embarrassment. Power became something that always belonged to others and never to “us” in a defensible way. The civilizational “we” thinned until it became morally suspect.
A civilization that no longer trusts itself cannot remain still. It cannot criticize and return to balance. It must intensify. Moral pressure replaces confidence. Motion replaces direction.
This is where the shift occurs.
Injustice is no longer primarily something to oppose. It becomes something to absorb. The suffering Other is no longer a cause located elsewhere. The Other becomes a presence, a function, a source of moral legitimacy made tangible. Distance collapses. Meaning must be immediate.
This does not deny suffering. It presupposes it.
The suffering is real. The humanitarian impulse is real. What has changed is the role that suffering plays. It is no longer encountered as a problem to be solved within constraints. It is used as a metaphysical resource by a civilization that no longer generates meaning from its own form.
At this point, a practical question almost asks itself:
If the goal is to reduce global suffering, relocating a small fraction of the world’s poor to Europe or North America cannot plausibly achieve it. There are too many. The underlying conditions that produce poverty, instability, and conflict remain untouched. At best, symptoms are moved. At worst, new strains are introduced.
Political opponents point this out, and on its own terms, the argument is correct. You cannot fix the Third World by importing one percent of it.
But the objection misunderstands what is happening.
The practice is not driven by a rational expectation of solution. It is driven by the need for meaning.
Migration, under this logic, is not a strategy. It is a ritual.
A ritual does not aim at resolution. It aims at reaffirmation. It must be repeatable, morally legible, and emotionally charged. Its success is measured not by outcomes but by the maintenance of meaning.
The arrival of the oppressed serves this function perfectly. Each arrival reenacts the moral drama: innocence, rescue, virtue. The scene must remain open-ended. Closure would end the ritual.
This is why success is undefined. Integration is discussed, but never allowed to conclude. Capacity is acknowledged, but never permitted to bind. Limits would terminate the rite.
The system does not fail despite these tensions. It depends on them.
To resolve the underlying causes of suffering elsewhere would be to remove the sacramental object. To pause intake would be to interrupt the liturgy. What appears as moral urgency is in fact structural dependence.
This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy implies distance. This is identification. Meaning now arrives embodied. To question the process is to threaten the source itself.
The predictable rebuttal is that this analysis cynically reduces genuine humanitarian concern to psychology. But this objection assumes a separation that no longer holds. Motive and function have fused.
One can act compassionately and still participate in a system that converts compassion into moral infrastructure. The sincerity of individual actors does not negate the structural role their actions now play.
Indeed, the more sincere the participants, the more stable the system becomes. Moral conviction is not a safeguard against symbolic misuse. It is the mechanism by which it operates.
This is why limits are not debated. They are treated as moral threats. Capacity, cohesion, and integration cease to be practical questions, because answering them would require admitting that the motion is symbolic rather than corrective.
What looks like irrational persistence is momentum.
Once moral identity is sustained by incorporation, restraint feels like self-erasure. To slow down would be to admit that the source of meaning is external and temporary. So the motion continues. Not because it works, but because it must.
This is why disagreement hardens into heresy. Why tone eclipses outcome. Why hesitation is treated as violence. The argument is no longer about policy. It is about keeping the engine running. Moral intensity becomes fuel.
Spengler described how late civilizations moralize because they no longer command. They argue because they no longer shape. Argument becomes activity. Acceleration substitutes for direction.
The left still speaks the language of universalism, equality, and progress. The vocabulary remains intact. The rituals remain intact. The institutions remain intact. What has vanished is authorship.
This is pseudomorphism turned inward. Western moral language continues to operate, but it floats free of any shared civilizational subject. Claims grow more universal as attachment to any concrete “we” weakens. Ethics detach from soil. Responsibility expands while belonging evaporates.
Human beings cannot live indefinitely without bounded loyalty. Universal concern without a home base does not elevate the psyche. It overloads it. Moral responsibility grows until it becomes unpayable. Fatigue follows. Then resentment. Then denial.
This is not a failure of empathy. It is empathy conscripted as a substitute for identity.
At this stage, the question naturally arises what a renewed form of civilizational self-trust would look like in practice.
That question already assumes what is missing.
Civilizational self-trust is not a policy option, a program, or a communicable design. It is not something that can be specified in advance and then implemented by will. The demand to describe it presupposes the very thing that has eroded: a shared sense of form from which such descriptions could arise.
Late civilizations do not lack blueprints. They lack ground.
This is why calls for alternatives sound hollow. They mistake exhaustion for confusion and disintegration for indecision. The problem is not that the West has not yet found the right narrative. It is that it no longer believes in itself strongly enough for any narrative to bind.
The absence of prescription here is not a gap. It is part of the diagnosis.
Earlier civilizations could draw boundaries without panic because they believed in themselves. Late civilizations fear boundaries because boundaries imply form, and form implies exclusion, and exclusion forces the question that has been postponed for too long.
What are we?
The contemporary left did not radicalize out of cruelty or stupidity. It radicalized out of loss. Loss of confidence. Loss of narrative. Loss of civilizational self-trust. The motion continues not because no one sees the strain, but because stopping would require standing still long enough to feel it.
The pattern does not resolve itself.
A civilization that no longer knows what it is accelerates, hoping momentum will generate meaning. Sometimes it does, briefly. More often, motion replaces purpose and intensity replaces direction.
Compassion cannot carry a civilization by itself. When it is asked to replace identity rather than express it, it corrodes the very structures that make compassion possible.
History does not correct this.
It simply continues until something else takes its place.