By now it is obvious to all who wish to see that we are experiencing a profound crisis of the welfare state. Several crises, in fact. There is the financial crisis now evident in all the Western democracies, where all governments--whether left or right of center--are trying desperately to limit government spending and government commitments. Though it is this crisis that grabs most of the headlines, it is probably over the long term the least serious. That is because of the two basic laws of economics: what can't happen won't happen, and what must happen will happen. Governments will succeed in edging the welfare state back from the brink of bankruptcy--though at a considerable political cost. That cost will be seen in political convulsions that can be quite scary. Still, after the dust has settled, the welfare state will have been sufficiently trimmed to avoid national bankruptcy, which would be the worst convulsion of all, and one that no government can contemplate as an option.

Flowering of Pathologies

There is also a social crisis of the welfare state. Fifty years ago, no advocate of the welfare state could imagine that it might be destructive of that most fundamental social institution, the family. But it has been, with a poisonous flowering of those very social pathologies--crime, illegitimacy, drugs, divorce, sexual promiscuity--that it was assumed the welfare state would curb if not eliminate.

This has come as such a shock to welfare statists that they have been busy explaining it all away. Their most common hypothesis, by now a dogma of the Left, is that the persistence of economic inequality and the absence of economic opportunity are the root causes of it all. But only those who have succeeded in repressing all historical memories can actually believe that. There are just too many people still alive who can testify that in times past, when economic inequality and lack of opportunity were certainly no less evident than today (and for most people were probably much greater), such social pathologies were far less troublesome.

One may anticipate that the reining in of the welfare state will ameliorate these problems, at least to some degree. In the United States, where the welfare state has encountered strong resistance from a much older tradition of individualism, and has therefore never sunk such deep roots as in the other western democracies, a reformation of the welfare state could be less controversial, certainly less convulsive. But trimming the welfare state is unlikely to affect the deepest crisis of all, which is spiritual.

From Citizens to Wards

It may sound odd to talk about the welfare state as if it had a spiritual dimension, as well as an economic and social one. But it does, though less visible to the naked eye and less quantifiable by social scientists. It is a dimension that involves the often subtle way in which a democratic citizen envisions his government and his political community--envisions rather than simply sees. It is implicated in the ways the souls of the citizenry are formed and shaped by the welfare state. What we are witnessing is an alienation from the interest-group politics that incessantly clamors for governmental subventions and that is now an integral part of our democratic politics. It is an alienation that then serves to undermine the legitimacy of the state itself.

Contemplating the decadence of Imperial Rome as contrasted with the virility of Republican Rome, the German philosopher Hegel wrote: "The image of the State as a product of his activity disappeared from the soul of the citizen." Today, it is the mission of the welfare state to convince the citizen that he is the product of the state's activity, that he is an importuning subject of the state, no longer a citizen in the classical sense. Since this is a state without a national soul, all talk about the need for "vision" on the part of our leaders is just so much empty chatter.

The fully developed welfare state is a modern version of the feudal castle, guarded by moats and barriers, and offering security and shelter to the loyal population that gathers around it. Ironically, this means that in world affairs the poorer nations that are not welfare states, not nearly as risk averse since they have so little to lose, will be (as they are already becoming) the activist countries, the ones that create the crises and set the international agenda. The most powerful nations in the world--economically, technologically, even militarily--will become citadels of resistance and nothing more.

In this process, the citizen is metamorphosed into the subject. The subject yields up only the right of self-government in return for cradle-to-grave security. He retains many other rights, and even achieves some new ones. He now possesses the right of "individual autonomy" in the sexual sphere, for instance, so that he is "liberated" from all the older social institutions that inhibited promiscuous or near-promiscuous behavior. Unfortunately, it is precisely in the sexual sphere that autonomy is most self-defeating, since the most important joys of sex come from commitments in which others (wives and children most notably) possess claims on us that make of our supposed autonomy a fantasy. Nor does evading those claims give us any help in "the pursuit of happiness." Never has any younger generation found so much loneliness and melancholy as it matures into "sexual liberation." The climbing suicide rate is witness to this fact.

But, then, the welfare state has a constricted notion of the happiness we ought to be pursuing. Since "security" is its keystone and its very reason for being, our welfare state societies are the most risk averse societies the world has known. Physical health and longevity are the focus of its passions. In this area the welfare state can continually find more and more protective things to do for us.

As a result, patriotism--real patriotism, which implies a readiness to die for one's country--is regarded as a form of psychological "extremism," and it is to discourage such mental unbalance that the modern welfare state has practically abolished military parades. The new World War II memorial to be constructed in Washington may show some respect for the endurance of our soldiers, but little for their heroism. The Iwo Jima memorial was the last such to be constructed. It probably could not be built today.

A Spreading Spiritual Malaise

All of this contributes to a spreading spiritual malaise in all our welfare states. As Charles Murray has written: "Responsibility is what keeps our lives from becoming trivial." The transfer of major areas of responsibility to the welfare state, combined with a bland, permissive toleration of moral irresponsibility among the citizenry, is about as fair a description of national decadence as one can imagine. A healthy nation and a respected government have to be capable of idealization--in fiction, poetry, drama, movies, popular songs. Our welfare states are not only incapable of that. They are today actually treated with contempt in these crucial modes of human expression. If you are not willing to die for your country, you will soon refuse to take it seriously, and insolent disrespect will replace reverence.

But the welfare state, determinedly secular in its orientation, does not really believe in reverence, an attitude it associates (correctly) with religion. Not that it is openly hostile to religion; it simply treats religion as another consumption good (as an economist would say). The individual is free to shop and choose among all the religions that exist or have ever existed, so long as he takes care to keep his religious beliefs and behavior a private affair, never impinging on the public square. But religion that is merely a private affair has been, until our time, unknown in the annals of mankind--and for good reason. Such religion quickly diminishes into an indoor pleasure, a kind of hobby of one or more individuals, like reading a book or watching television. So it is not astonishing that the search for spirituality has become so fashionable. It is what individuals, liberated from religion, desperately seek as a substitute.

An Epidemic of Identity Crises

Spirituality is indeed an integral part of all religions--but a minor part, and it cannot be a substitute for the whole. Religion is not some kind of psychic exercise that occasionally offers a transcendental experience. It either shapes one's life--all of one's life--or it vanishes, leaving behind anxious, empty souls that no psychotherapy can reach. And for religion to shape one's life, it needs to be public and communal; it needs to be connected to the dead and the unborn. Religious liberation, like sexual liberation, fails to help us pursue happiness. Together they induce in us an epidemic of "identity crises," which is the peculiar hallmark of our civilization.

It was not supposed to be this way. The secular, social-democratic founders of the modern welfare state really did think that in the kind of welfare state we have today people would be more public-spirited, more high-minded, more humanly "fulfilled." This gross miscalculation, based on a simplistic understanding of human nature and the human condition, may yet turn out to be the saddest of political tragedies in our tragic century. Not the bloodiest, of course, but merely the saddest, as when decent and benevolent political intentions give birth to an increasing and inexorable discontent, individual and national.

Irving Kristol is the John M. Olin Distinguished Fellow at AEI.