In the Name of Progress: The Abolition of the Family and the Crisis of European Civilization

Since the years of the Cultural revolution, the Western world — and not only the West — has faced rapid changes and challenges that have transformed and obscured concepts, values, the individual, and society. The nightmare of oppressive ideologies that legitimized the totalitarian state in different forms culminated in dehumanization, genocide, and world war. These horrors provoked radical criticism and reflection, calling into question everything — including the Enlightenment itself and the very foundations of Western civilization (though it remains debated to what extent these were responsible for creating the conditions under which such catastrophes arose).

The intellectual fruit of this new critical stance was postmodernism, which French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard famously defined as a reaction against the metanarratives of modernity, challenging traditional authorities, relativizing truth, and denying objectivity in order to liberate individual and particular interpretations.

In turn, the core ideas of postmodernism, as developed by thinkers like Lyotard, Derrida, and Foucault, have been transmuted, often in caricatured form, into political, cultural, and social activism. It is not the authors themselves who are at issue, but a selective appropriation of their theses that has fueled new discourses. Thus, certain groups of individuals, under this influence, often claim that moral values and traditional institutions such as the family and organized religion are nothing more than contingent products of history, while at the same time treating ethnicity, identity, and class as though they were primordial and ontological categories. In other words, they embrace two mutually exclusive ideological approaches, since postmodernism itself denies the ontological existence of all such categories: from moral objectivity, biology, family, and nationhood and ultimately risking the denial of human identity itself, reducing the person to a mere material, consumerist being, the accidental result of chance, and nothing more.

This ideological current, though more limited in scope, began to penetrate Eastern and Southeastern Europe after liberation from Communism. Today, it is often mistakenly perceived as a set of “progressive European ideas.” The confusion this created has surfaced in many ways, particularly in the cultural and social spheres. Thus, many individuals, including intellectuals, who consciously or unconsciously adopt postmodernist assumptions, hold, when it comes to nationality, rigidly essentialist views.

This same contradictory logic underlies the transgender legislative projects promoted in Albanian politics and even exists among Western right-wing parties — be they nationalist or postmodern. This manifests itself in the promotion of “non-binary” categories or a “third gender,” and in “alternative” family models in which “father” and “mother” are replaced with “Parent 1 & Parent 2,” and so on.

The central problem is that such legislation is not presented simply as an alternative for a minority, but as a denial of the very existence of the man–woman norm of marriage and gender altogether, dismissively labeled “heteronormativity.” Political advocates of these laws in the Balkans legitimize gender ideologies not only as a “sign of Western progress” but as a “necessary step” toward European integration. Yet, in reality, membership in the EU does not require the adoption of such laws, but only the protection of human and minority rights. After all, why have many EU member states — such as Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Slovakia, and Poland — not adopted such measures? It is worth recalling that the European project itself has deep Christian democratic roots, even if a part of today’s elites have embraced left-liberal approaches.

This raises a series of unavoidable questions: How can morality exist without objective norms and values? How can there be a nation without the family as its basic unit? How can there be a family without parents: father and mother? How can there be parents without gender? How can gender itself be endlessly fluid — today male, tomorrow female, the next day something else? By this logic, tomorrow a person may claim the right to self-identify not only in gender terms but also in race, species, or other forms of existence. This is not mere exaggeration but has already become reality in certain Western states. Logically, such an ideological trajectory leads toward transhumanism, a stage that C.S. Lewis, in his The Abolition of Man, described as the abolition of man itself. And if one set of human identifications is deemed fundamentally mistaken, what legitimizes the imposition of a new set as law?

One possible justification, according to postmodern adherents, would be “unlimited freedom.” This is not a concept easily dismissed, for freedom is essential to human life, and for this the liberal tradition — whether in its conservative or social forms — deserves recognition. Yet, the problem lies in definition: What is freedom? What is freedom without virtue, without order, without truth? Freedom without limits, in political philosophy, is called chaotic anarchy; in psychology, it is called existential crisis. In the classical Western tradition, freedom is understood as “the liberty to do what is good” (libertas maior), in contrast with the modern liberal idea of freedom as merely “the absence of constraints” (libertas minor). On this point, Polish theologian Karol Józef Wojtyła (later St. John Paul II) emphasized that freedom does not mean doing whatever one pleases, but having the right to do what one ought. He stressed that truth, love, and solidarity are inseparable dimensions of freedom. By contrast, modern ideological conceptions of liberty remain impoverished: liberals typically relativize truth, while conservatives often separate freedom from empathy and solidarity.

Another frequently invoked concept, though often distorted, is “human dignity.” But what, in fact, is human dignity? According to St. Thomas Aquinas, natural law is the universal moral order inscribed in human nature itself, through which we can distinguish good from evil. By natural law, man is created in the image of God (Imago Dei), with a sacred and inviolable dignity that forms the foundation of fundamental human rights and responsibilities. This concept, integrating Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, has underpinned European civilization since the Middle Ages and was later articulated in Enlightenment thought as the basis of human rights. Nietzsche himself noted that Kant’s categorical imperative was nothing more than a rationalization of the moral order inherited from Christian tradition.

Of course, the Enlightenment idea of secularism was no accident; in its healthy form, which does not exclude God or religion, it is not wrong. Religion and the Church, as institutions, have indeed at times been abused by corrupt hierarchies or rulers, so the demand for limits on power was not without justification. Yet, as Augusto Del Noce argued, the Enlightenment belief that morality could be accessible to all rational persons purely on humanist grounds was excessive optimism. Morality cannot exist in such a vacuum, confined to mere logical boundaries.

Modern ideological experiments ended in horrific tragedies, often greater than those of the so-called “dark Middle Ages,” wrongly caricatured as an age of fanaticism. Persecutions, genocides, and bloody wars of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries testify to this. During this time, millions were denied their dignity in the name of the state, nationalism, science (eugenics, Darwinism, etc.), social class, progress, and more. This is not surprising, since the relativization of morality is the logical presupposition of materialist and totalitarian ideologies such as Marxism, Nazism, and Fascism—all of which recognized human dignity only for their “political friends.” The same holds for theocracy, which in practice applies moral relativism by making a ruling class the arbitrary interpreter of “Divine Will” and morality according to its interests.

Even so, many today continue to view moral absolutism as a potential threat. To avoid the specter of totalitarianism, liberal thinkers such as Karl Popper and Richard Rorty have promoted a “pluralism of values,” which in fact rests on relativist assumptions, requiring every individual or group to renounce claims to absolute truth.

In Man and the State, philosopher Jacques Maritain emphasized that human dignity is assumed to be a natural right even by those who hold that morality is relative. He posed the contradiction in questions such as: How can we believe in absolute natural rights like human dignity if we think the natural moral order is relative? How can we affirm natural rights while denying truth as an absolute, objective category? And with what authority can anyone moralize or judge if morality is considered arbitrary and subjective? If we deny the essence of human nature and the moral order, how can we continue to affirm dignity and humanism? In the end, to speak of relativizing everything is to admit that even human dignity will become nothing more than an imaginary phantom, worth no more than its absence.

That said, the treatment of every person with dignity, without exception, is non-negotiable. Indeed, reforms and support in this direction are needed, but not at the cost of distorting reason, ethics, biology, and sacred institutions like marriage and family in the name of a vague “humanism.” The dangers of such an approach can be summarized briefly. The first victim of moral relativism, according to C.S. Lewis, is Truth itself, which intellectual and ruling elites can easily manipulate, imposing arbitrary, totalitarian-leaning rules. The second victim is culture and freedom; as Roger Scruton explains, through moral relativism, the transition to a totalitarian regime occurs via propaganda, which gradually replaces culture and corrodes the foundations of liberty. Finally, the great theologian Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) warned that dictatorship does not only appear in its classical forms; in our times it also takes a new form: the “dictatorship of relativism,” where, in the name of tolerance, truth itself is forbidden.

As these philosophers and theologians warned, if we deny truth, the moral order, and human nature, we will paradoxically create a dictatorship of relativism that destroys both liberty and man himself—all in the name of freedom and tolerance, born of a misguided ideology pursued with good intentions.

Human experience, whether recorded in the chronicles of antiquity or the pages of classical literature, teaches us that good intentions are never enough in great decisions; above all, prudence is required, a virtue our confused age seems to lack. No wonder the Anglo-American poet and thinker T.S. Eliot observed that the surest sign of a society’s decadence is the misuse of its virtues. His words capture perfectly the nature of the radical ideology that has overtaken much of the Western world and is rapidly spreading into our own societies. It is reminiscent of Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Emperor’s New Clothes, a story of collective deception, in which fear and conformity lead all to praise the monarch’s “invisible garments” until a child speaks the simple truth that the emperor is naked. Some truths are so simple that they only require the childlike courage and common sense to sweep away political, pseudo-artistic, or pseudo-intellectual fashions.

Regardless of one’s political leanings or preferences, the ultimate aim must remain the common good, grounded in the moral order and respect for human life. Human dignity is inviolable, but ideologies are not sacred. Faced with the sophistries of our time that promise utopias lead to catastrophe, we must not remain silent.

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