Suicide of the West

You live in the age of what Jonah Goldberg calls the Miracle—a historically unique explosion of prosperity, rights, and longevity that began only a few centuries ago. For roughly two million years, humans struggled under conditions of poverty and violence that were, by today’s standards, unimaginable. Then, suddenly, everything changed. Life expectancy doubled, incomes multiplied, technology accelerated, and ordinary people gained rights once reserved for kings. Goldberg urges you to recognize how strange—and fragile—this accomplishment is.

He argues that this transformation was not inevitable or geographically determined by coal or trade routes. It was the product of ideas: a Lockean revolution that elevated the individual over tribe, reason over passion, and rule of law over arbitrary power. The central claim of the book is that modern civilization is an artificial achievement built atop ancient, tribal instincts. Sustaining it requires gratitude for the institutions and habits that tame our primitive selves.

The Fragile Nature of Modernity

Before 1700, per-capita income barely rose above subsistence levels. Then, in what economists like Deirdre McCloskey and J. Bradford DeLong call the Great Enrichment, wealth and health took off in a hockey-stick curve. Goldberg calls this an “accidental modernity” because it was not planned—it emerged when a cluster of cultural changes encouraged innovation and protected individual initiative. You live in an anomaly, not a permanent state. That means gratitude and vigilance are civic duties.

Human Nature Never Upgrades

Goldberg reminds you that evolution did not design the human brain for open societies of strangers. You are still wired for life in Dunbar-sized tribes—roughly 150 people—where loyalty, suspicion, and face-to-face trust ruled. Those instincts persist today as status games, group identity, and moralistic tribalism. Civil society and markets are ingenious human inventions that harness these instincts toward cooperation rather than conflict. But when they erode, the tribal self reawakens.

The Role of Ideas and Institutions

Lockean liberalism redefined the moral universe. Property became an extension of personal labor, contracts replaced kinship, and constitutional rules limited power. These ideas laid the groundwork for capitalism and democracy—systems that extended cooperation to strangers and rewarded innovation. Goldberg traces this lineage through thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, and the American Founders, whose constitutional design institutionalized mistrust by separating powers and enforcing law. The result: markets for goods and checks on rulers.

(Parenthetical note: Goldberg joins scholars like Douglass North and Deirdre McCloskey in arguing that rhetoric and norms, not raw resources, made prosperity possible.)

Why It’s Easy to Forget—and Dangerous To

Just as civilization is artificial, corruption is natural. The Miracle must be maintained against two corrosive forces: ingratitude and romanticism. Ingratitude forgets the labor of earlier generations and assumes freedom is self-replenishing. Romanticism longs for tribal authenticity—what Rousseau called the noble savage—and fuels populist and collectivist movements that promise unity at the cost of liberty. Individually, these impulses seem benign; together they erode the fragile latticework of modernity.

The Book’s Journey

Across its chapters, Goldberg explores how the Miracle arose (in “Accidental Modernity” and “Why Capitalism Emerged Here”), how our inner tribe undermines it (“Our Inner Tribesman”), and how romantic movements corrupted it (“Romanticism and Corruption”). He dissects how states evolved from predators to protectors (“Stationary Bandits”), how the family civilizes instincts (“Family as Keystone”), and how cultural narratives—from Frankenstein to pop culture—mirror our moral anxieties. Finally, he examines modern threats: administrative elites, identity politics, and populist tribalism. His message remains consistent: ideas matter. If liberalism is to endure, you must remember the Miracle’s origins, practice gratitude for its institutions, and defend them from the primitive longings they suppress.

Core Insight

The Miracle is not an evolutionarily natural state—it’s an intellectual, moral, and cultural invention. It emerged when we disciplined the tribesman within through law, property, religion, and family. It will persist only if we remain grateful enough to maintain those constraints on ourselves.

Goldberg begins with anthropology and psychology to show that human nature has not changed much since our hunter-gatherer past. You still carry tribal instincts that evolved to manage life in small groups—loyalty to kin, suspicion of strangers, hunger for meaning, and a craving for status. These adaptations helped small tribes survive but destabilize mass societies unless directed by institutions.

Our Evolutionary Programming

Psychologists like Paul Bloom and Jonathan Haidt document moral intuitions that appear early in life: babies prefer helpers over hinderers. That empathy is real but limited, mostly to close kin and allies. Frans de Waal’s primate studies confirm this: chimp coalitions mirror human politics. Our political and cultural evolution therefore requires learning to cooperate with strangers at scale.

Civilizing Instinct through Institutions

Markets, Goldberg explains, are moral technologies: they convert rivalry into cooperation. A baker sells to strangers because law and money replace personal trust. Civil society—families, churches, voluntary associations—performs the same function, teaching empathy and restraint. These are the mediating structures that civilize your genetic software.

Rousseau’s Mistake and the Violence of Nature

Goldberg disputes Rousseau’s idea of the “noble savage.” Archaeological and anthropological data show prehistoric societies were astonishingly violent—murder rates reaching 15–30% of adult males. Civilization is not a corruption of purity but an achievement over brutality. When you dismantle civilizing forces in pursuit of authenticity, barbarism resurfaces.

Essential Lesson

Human instincts cannot be erased—only redirected. Societies survive when they build moral infrastructures that channel aggression, belonging, and status toward productive cooperation.

Modern politics, for Goldberg, is a continuous argument between John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Locke provides the philosophical foundation of the Miracle: natural rights, consent of the governed, and private property rooted in labor. Rousseau offers its most seductive antithesis: equality through unity, collective will, and emotional authenticity. These conflicting myths explain the recurring tension between liberty and belonging.

Locke’s Individualism

Locke’s vision limited government to safeguarding rights of life, liberty, and property. It birthed pluralism and tolerance by denying divine hierarchy. In America, these ideas crystallized into a written constitution that shackled rulers with law. Markets, contracts, and science flourished under this Lockean framework because they assumed moral equality of individuals.

Rousseau’s Romantic Rebellion

Rousseau believed society corrupts innate goodness. He glorified the “general will” as moral unity that could justify coercion. His influence stretches from revolutionary radicals to modern movements that promise authenticity through collective purity. Goldberg sees every ideology that demonizes dissent—whether fascist nationalism or utopian socialism—as a revival of Rousseau’s dream to make the people one soul.

Key Contrast

Lockean societies protect individuals from power; Rousseauian ones empower collectives to remake individuals. The first sustains freedom; the second risks tyranny clothed in moral unity.

Goldberg reframes the rise of states not as a moral progression but as an economic adaptation. Following Mancur Olson, he notes that early rulers were bandits who discovered that predictable taxation yields more wealth than pillage. From these pragmatic arrangements grew the first durable states—institutions that simultaneously exploit and protect.

From Predation to Governance

Stationary bandits settled, defended territory, and began to provide incidental public goods like irrigation and roads. Written law turned personal rule into rule of rules—Hammurabi’s code turned sermons into statutes. By codifying norms, writing let justice outlive kings. Yet, Goldberg cautions, the old exploitative DNA of the state remains—it always risks reverting to predation when unchecked.

Why Liberal Institutions Matter

Constitutional democracy, as in the U.S. model, consciously restrains the stationary bandit through separation of powers, written limits, and pluralism. The state becomes servant rather than master only when citizens demand restraint and transparency. When bureaucracies accumulate unchecked discretion, they regress toward banditry under modern guise.

Core Message

States can be necessary without being benevolent. The civic task is to constrain power’s natural impulse to serve itself.

As modern institutions grew rational and impersonal, many people felt alienated. Romanticism—Rousseau’s child—offered emotional compensation by exalting feeling, unity, and authenticity. Goldberg argues that this craving for enchantment underlies much of modern populism, nationalism, and revolutionary utopianism. It promises wholeness but delivers coercion.

Romanticism’s Emotional Logic

Romanticism says that the heart knows better than reason, the tribe more real than the abstract citizen. Whether Marx’s brotherhood of labor or fascism’s national rebirth, the impulse is the same—sacrifice individuality for cosmic belonging. Goldberg draws parallels between populist chants and revolutionary manifestos: both seek purity by silencing dissent.

Cultural Manifestations

Romanticism saturates modern culture. In music, rock and roll glorifies rebellion as authenticity; in film, stories like Dead Poets Society and Fight Club valorize inner truth over civility. Monster myths like Frankenstein and Godzilla dramatize hubris and moral limits. Goldberg interprets these as collective self-critiques—a culture sensing that in chasing freedom without gratitude, we risk chaos.

Moral Warning

Romantic longing is natural but dangerous when politicized. Gratitude for institutions, not rebellion against them, sustains freedom and meaning.

Goldberg treats the family as civilization’s keystone—the smallest unit that transmits responsibility, empathy, and self-control. The liberal order depends on strong private bonds to shape citizens who can cooperate freely. When family and civic life crumble, the void invites either the bureaucratic state or the tribal mob to fill it.

How the Family Civilizes

Monogamy and parental commitment turn biological instincts into social stability. Anthropologists note that monogamous systems reduce male violence and promote investment in children. Sociologist Brad Wilcox links marriage to upward mobility and civic health. Goldberg stresses that this is not nostalgia but social math: civilization needs micro-communities that teach virtue better than policy ever can.

The Decline and Its Consequences

Since the 1960s, No-Fault divorce, policy disincentives, and cultural individualism have weakened marriage. Data from Sara McLanahan and Isabel Sawhill show children suffer—higher dropout and poverty rates, lower mobility. Welfare systems unintentionally penalized marriage, while elite culture celebrated self-actualization over duty. The result is a feedback loop of social fragmentation and political alienation.

Bottom Line

When mediating institutions fail, people turn either to ideology or the state for meaning. Rebuilding family and civil society is the real answer to loneliness and populist rage.

Goldberg examines the twin temptations of modern politics: expert control and populist revolt. Progressivism, he shows, replaced civic trust with bureaucratic management. Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Croly envisioned experts directing society from above, creating today’s administrative state. Populism, conversely, erupts when ordinary citizens feel exploited by that elite apparatus.

The Rise of the New Class

Progressive reformers idolized Bismarck’s bureaucracy and used pseudoscientific theories—like eugenics—to justify social engineering. Modern agencies legislate through regulation, execute through enforcement, and adjudicate through in-house judges. Goldberg warns that this blurs separation of powers and turns government into a professional guild insulated from voters.

The Populist Reaction

As creative destruction displaces jobs and experts dismiss dissent, resentment fuels populism. Populists promise revenge and authenticity; Donald Trump’s rise exemplifies this impulse. Populism becomes dangerously tribal when it substitutes loyalty to a leader for loyalty to institutions. Goldberg compares it to Rousseau’s general will applied to mass media politics.

Lesson

Neither technocracy nor populism preserves the Miracle. Only a renewed culture of civic humility—strong families, voluntary associations, and constitutional restraint—can balance expertise with liberty.