The widening gyre of spiritual unraveling

PUBLISHED: December 19, 2025 | www.baltimoresun.com

The sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken, wrote opinion pieces in The Baltimore Sun from 1906 until his last column appeared in 1948. In 1918, as the world was tearing itself apart with World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic, apocalyptic violence and societal breakdown, he wrote that civilization is based “upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation.” Of course, he was right. What he didn’t know or acknowledge is from where the order arose.

We, likewise, now live in a moment of an accelerating cascade of violence and chaos. On Dec. 13, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov were shot to death in an examination room at Brown University, and nine of their fellow students were shot and injured. That same day, two Iowa National Guardsmen and their civilian interpreter were shot and killed by a lone ISIS gunman in Palmyra, Syria. The day after, 15 people were shot and killed at a Hanukkah celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach by two gunmen. The victims there included a 10-year-old girl and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, Alex Kleytman, who died while shielding his wife. The celebration of the Festival of Lights, just like that, became a scene of unspeakable darkness.

Mencken was a savage critic of organized religion. He wrote that God was “the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable.” He believed, “All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men.” Yet here we are all these decades later, still swept with confusing alarms of violence, chaos, wars and death. Mencken saw the problem; perhaps the solution he rejected deserves reconsideration.

The restraint that civilization requires does not come from men; it comes from God’s Law, written in our hearts, there even before we learned to argue about it. If it comes from man, that begs the question as to which man. The ISIS shooter in Syria, like the murderer at Brown and the two at Bondi Beach, each had their own morals. Each believed himself justified. We learned in the Enlightenment that reason alone could guide us; with this, we were able to justify slavery, colonial oppression, eugenics, the Holocaust, that human life is no longer sanctified and every other manner of modern horror. What we can construct, we can soon deconstruct. Moral order as a human invention has no permanence. It can be revised, updated and eventually discarded.

In Jeremiah 31:33, we read that God “will put My law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” Here is a fundamental transformation: the Law is not now an external law imposed from the outside. It now is part of one’s own nature, arising from within. It is embedded within the folds of the heart itself, inescapably woven into the fabric of each of us. Independent of our culture or faith tradition or age or gender, there is the Law indelibly inscribed. It provides us all with conscience, which bears witness to us. It is an ordering premise, which we all share. It isn’t just for those who are religious but a basic tenant of our shared identity as human beings. We don’t need the Commandments or legalese to tell us that murder is wrong; it violates a code to which we are all heir. There was no written law when Cain murdered Abel, but there was the Law. That was then and is now the ordering element that resists the ever-widening gyre of lawlessness, violence, chaos and destruction. What gives the boat direction, stability and a steady course even as the wind whips and the sea lathers is the unseen keel beneath the hull. Absent the keel, the vessel is not seaworthy. Absent awareness of and adherence to the Law, our course is governed only by our passions and proclivities, like the shooters at Bondi Beach.

Mr. Mencken was entirely correct in writing on these pages decades ago that a thriving society requires an ordering influence. Just a look outside the window makes this plainly evident. What we can add now is that it is from within that this coherence arises, as the consequence of rooting about the heart, looking here and there for God’s Law, becoming hidebound to it and ourselves participating in the gathering force that resists the maelstrom that would otherwise consume us.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

Originally Published: December 19, 2025 at 1:31 PM ET

©️ 2025 Baltimore Sun