An LAPD officer patrols through the smoke on Melrose Avenue during the George Floyd riots on May 27, 2020; grafitti on a foot bridge adjacent a massive homeless encampment in Lake Balboa Park on August 7, 2023; the sun sets through the smoke of the Palidades Fire on January 9, 2025. Photos by Christopher LeGras

France is burning. So, too, increasingly, are other European countries, with protests and riots spreading to Spain, Belgium, Italy, Greece and Albania. The unrest on the continent bears many of the hallmarks with which Americans have become familiar over the last few years: calls for socialist revolution, black clad and masked rioters, Palestinian flags and keffiyahs and expansive vandalism, looting and destruction.

Americans likewise will recognize the official response in France: hamstringing the police and imposing restrictions on law abiding citizens in the form of curfews and lockdowns. Military vehicles patrol peaceful neighborhoods while protesters in urban areas remain undeterred.

The rioters are overwhelmingly young men, which isn’t surprising given the desultory lives many teens and twenty-somethings live these days. Until the last 20 years or so civilizations had ways of channeling young men’ s testosterone-fueled energy. It was burned through manual labor, sports, adventure, travel, military service and the like.

In contrast, millions of today’s young men are adrift, raised on a baneful, sedentary combination of social media, video games, prescription and recreational drugs and physical isolation. Through media and entertainment they learn that the very things that used to make boys into men are toxic. That energy was going to explode, one way or another, eventually.

Meanwhile, antisemitism is on a historic rise, socialism is infecting political systems in Europe and the United States and the world feels increasingly on the brink of war.

Welcome to the Nihilistic Age.

Unlike the Civil Rights protests of the 1950s and 60s and labor unrest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, today’s unrest is playing out largely for its own sake. The pattern is predictable. Protests that begin over a just cause – outrage at the killing of an unarmed black man at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers, opposition to harsh enforcement of immigration laws, opposition to Donald Trump and MAGA – devolve into mere anarchy.

I covered the George Floyd protests and subsequent riots extensively throughout L.A. The first half of the first day was characterized by righteous rage. However, within a few hours, the looting, vandalism, destruction and violence began. The people looting the Foot Locker store on Melrose weren’t outraged by an act of fatal injustice. They were getting free sneakers. The people smashing storefront windows in Santa Monica weren’t making a statement. They were having fun at the expense of strangers in the most cowardly way imaginable.

The same has been true of anti-ICE riots. The people who set four Waymos on fire in downtown L.A. earlier this year (bless their hearts) weren’t raging against immigration policy. They were indulging in nihilistic violence for its own sake because they had nothing better to do.

The West has spent much of the last half century breaking down the pillars of our own civilization, starting with religion. In 1960 about half of Americans attended religious services on a weekly basis. Today the number hovers around 20%. That number tells only part of the story. We’ve also removed religion from its traditional place in secular society. From atheist groups suing to remove Christmas nativity scenes from public spaces to schools prohibiting prayer on campus to corporations resorting to bland “holiday” decorations in an effort to avoid offending the professionally offended, religion has retreated from most aspects of life.

I myself am not particularly religious. I do, however, recognize the value of religion in society. Like a constitution it provides basic organizing principles and norms. We are living the consequences of its absence. Survey after survey confirms that religious people tend to be happier in life than non-religious people.

The problem isn’t just that we eliminated religion, primarily Christianity, from society. It’s that we didn’t replace it with anything. That’s one of the biggest reasons Americans have become obsessed with politics. By our nature, human beings need to feel like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves. If it isn’t God, it’ll be a political party or candidate. A figure like Donald Trump rising to the apex of power would have been unimaginable 50 years ago.

Indeed, we bulldozed the nation’s religious foundations at the historical moment when we arguably needed them most. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and communism came the opportunity to rebuild the western world around a shared set of ideals. The Judeo-Christian tradition was an obvious starting point, or at least it should have been. For half a century in Eastern Europe and Russia, underground religious groups were essential to the brave resistance that brought down one of the two most evil political systems in human history. The days of religious wars in the west were centuries in the rearview mirror.

At that very historical moment we teetered into political secularism, and thus we left ourselves with the entropy of nihilism. It turns out that politics is a lousy substitute for religion. When a person’s faith rises no higher than a presidential candidate he is crippling the potential of his own soul, the spirit that makes him human. When someone replaces prayer with “mindful meditation” she places herself at the center of her own universe, which is an excellent recipe for narcissism.

Again, I say all of this as someone who is himself not very religious. I won’t go so far as to say I’m a nonbeliever – I view atheism as the most narcissistic of belief systems, the notion that a human being can know for certain that there is no higher power of any kind – I just don’t subscribe to a particular faith. That said, I find it thoroughly depressing to walk or drive down most main retail streets in most parts of L.A. and the Bay Area in December these days. In places like Santa Monica, save for a few bland strings of white lights and a handful of neutral colored “holiday trees” you’d barely know it’s Christmastime. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before a major retail corporation like Target introduces the gender neutral, non-binary Santa Claus.

Religion is the most consequential victim of the nihilistic age, but it’s far from the only one. Traditional education is buckling under the double barrel blasts of structuralism and what might be thought of as fundamentalist DEI. Neighborhoods are being torn asunder by policies premised on the notion that the single family and low density multifamily neighborhoods in which some 85% of Americans live are “exclusionary” and must be radically reshaped into dense urban cores. Membership in traditional civic organizations like Rotarians, Elks, VFW, League of Women Voters and others is at all time lows. Online retail and onerous laws are decimating retail cores where communities gather. The list goes on.

The problem with nihilistic societies is that they betray the core promise of civilization itself: that it exists to make life better, or, at the very least, more bearable than the anarchy of nature. In his Second Treatise on Government, John Locke famously observed that people surrender some of their natural liberties to form civil societies in order to secure “comfortable, safe, and peaceable living one amongst another.”

That “comfortable, safe, and peaceable living” rests on core shared values. Until the last half century those values came from the Judeo-Christian tradition which, for all its flaws, and they are myriad, has produced more human peace and prosperity than any other belief system. There hasn’t been a major internecine religious war in Christian civilization since the Thirty Years War resulted in the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

We take that fact for granted at our peril. What is playing out in Europe and, increasingly, the United States may, when history is written many decades and centuries hence, prove to be the final unraveling of that 378 year old peace.

When we started losing faith in faith, we started losing faith in ourselves. The tragic irony of the nihilistic age is that what started, at least ostensibly, as a quest for greater human freedom may ultimately resolve in less of it. The Judeo-Christian tradition places family and community at its core. Politics thrives on division and discord, what the Founders called factionalism.

It is, of course, far too early to know what will happen in Europe. This country, for now, is at peace. But ill winds are blowing. As W.B. Yeats famously wrote in The Second Coming, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Humanity will survive the current mayhem, of that I have no doubt. As tortured as human history is, it bends toward good. Would anyone rather be alive in, say, 1926, or 1826, or 1026 than today? The only question is how bad it will get before it gets better.

Regardless, lace up your boots and find a helmet. Because it’s going to be a rough few years.

Welcome to the Nihilistic Age.

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