In the second half of the 1990s, a simple acronym swept across America: WWJD. You could spot it on license plates, on houses, on caps and bracelets. It stood for What Would Jesus Do?—a prompt meant to guide individual judgment in moments of uncertainty. Faced with a difficult choice, people would ask themselves what position or decision the biblical Jesus might endorse in that particular situation.
In practice, however, this is almost always an exceedingly difficult question. We simply do not know what Jesus would think about modern healthcare, contemporary childrearing, or even the appropriate level of public debt. In nearly every conflict, both sides are convinced that He would be on their side.
For some time now, I have relied on a different heuristic: How would this issue have been handled in West Germany in the mid-1970s—at a time when Western civilization arguably stood at its postwar peak? We know how people then viewed vaccination, divorce, social policy, migration—and for many other questions, we can make reasonably grounded inferences.
If our present-day position diverges sharply, there are only three possible explanations:
a) Advances in technology now allow us to achieve something they themselves desired but could not realize.
b) We have made a genuinely fundamental discovery that enables us to see the issue more clearly than they did.
c) And if it is neither of these, then the difference is not progress, but a symptom of decline.