Sacks began by comparing the jubilant, peaceful celebrations that attended the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton with the London riots four months later, when hooded thugs ran through the streets smashing windows, starting fires, looting stores and hurling rocks at police. Rioters caused death to several bystanders — including a 68-year-old man who was attacked when he tried to put out a fire.

Rabbi Sacks wrote: “It was, as someone later called it, shopping with violence, consumerism run rampant, an explosion of lawlessness made possible by mobile phones as gangs discovered that by text messaging they could bring crowds onto the streets where they became, for a while, impossible to control.”

What could account for such a rapid transformation in that sceptred island, that “other Eden,” England? Had the country been suddenly taken over by devils? Well, in a manner of speaking, yes. If we reap what we sow, when had such bad seed been sown?

Here is Sacks’ answer: “Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned.”

Perhaps the most visible consequence of 1960s thinking has been the collapse of the family. Forty-one per cent of children born in England are born outside marriage. Absentee fathers are the new norm — 91 per cent of single-parent families are headed by the mother.

Sacks again: “The collapse of families and communities leaves in its wake unsocialized young people, deprived of parental care, who on average — and yes, there are exceptions — do worse than their peers at school, are more susceptible to drug and alcohol use, less likely to find stable employment and more likely to end up in jail.  The truth is, it is not their fault. They are the victims of the tsunami of wishful thinking that washed across the West saying that you can have sex without the responsibility of marriage, children without the responsibility of parenthood, social order without the responsibility of citizenship, liberty without the responsibility of morality, and self-esteem without the responsibility of work and earned achievement.”

One cannot imagine any Canadian politician having either the insight or the courage to say this. Nor, alas, any Canadian religious leader. The outrage (albeit most of it manufactured) that would greet such remarks in Canada would almost certainly be followed by a visit from the official straighteners, you know, those friendly folk from the Human Rights Commission.

Sacks thus concludes his prescient, disturbing essay:

“(Can the west) maintain its primacy on the world stage or is it a civilization in decline? . . . a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance . . . said: ‘At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system, capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.’ ”

It was a Judeo-Christian heritage that gave the West its relentless pursuit of a tomorrow that would be better than today. The Chinese have learned the lesson. Fifty years after Chairman Mao declared China a religion-free zone, there are now more Chinese Christians than there are members of the Communist Party.

China has learned the lesson. Will we?

That is, I believe, what is called an open question.

(Ian Hunter is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at Western University.)