Event: Elon Musk

Way back in the day, when Elon Musk stalked the halls of the federal bureaucracy swinging his giant, if metaphorical, chainsaw, we learned a lot about the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), created in 1961 to promote development projects, technological innovations, and investment in poor countries that might be vulnerable to Soviet demagoguery. USAID thus served America’s mission to shepherd the Third World into the Free World. Musk exposed a pipeline from USAID to progressive NGOs—a million for DEI in Serbia, a couple million to fund sex-change operations in Guatemala, 25 million a year for LGBTQ programs, millions more for “family planning” (aka, abortion), a few million to put Sesame Street on Iraqi television. You could hardly throw an egg anywhere in the world without hitting a gay rights or abortion advocacy group funded by American taxpayers. For progressives, all this is perfectly defensible. If you think democracy means abortion rights, same-sex marriage, gender fluidity, and forced diversity, then of course you want to devote federal funds to these righteous causes. After all, though the USSR has collapsed, the world still teems with illiberal Neanderthals, who have to be held at bay until natural selection gobbles them up once and for all. For non-progressives, the whole scheme was outrageous. My interest here is theoretical: USAID provides a useful window into the reality behind theories of secularization. For a very long time, sociologists have been telling us that economic and social modernization—consisting of technological advancement, a shift from subsistence farming to wage labor in factories, internal migration to gigantic cities, the intellectual dominance of science—more or less inevitably unleashes cultural forces that undermine traditional ways of living, thinking, and feeling. Religion slows, stumbles, then collapses in exhaustion. No one who has made pins on an assembly line can believe the…