The Origins of Western Civilization

In the Beginning, There Was the Father

Few words are more fraught, more malleable—more central to the rise and fall of civilizations—than “Father.” In our private mythologies, as in the great drama of nations, fathers are founders, failings, guides and ghosts. Their presence—or profound absence—resonates far beyond the family fireside, shaping democracy, economy, and that mysterious thing we call the West. On Father’s Day, as America and her allies contend with the tectonic rumbles of populism, new and old, let’s step back—not for nostalgia, but for first principles.
This piece inaugurates “Created in the Image of God — The Origins of Western Civilization,” an exploration of our shared roots and contested future. It asks one audacious question: How have our evolving ideas of fatherhood shaped the ways we build, break, and repair civilization itself?

Between Canada, Sweden, America, and Exile

My own journey began among three poles of the so-called Free World—Canada, the US, and Sweden—countries whose “fathers” wrote the operating codes of liberalism, social democracy, and everything in between. Incredibly, whether by prescience or accident, my father gave me the name “Wade”—a word that literally means “wanderer.” Whether he grasped its prophetic resonance or not, the name fit. I was a wanderer before I knew the word—a child born in Canada, kidnapped from America, then taken to Sweden. I grew up oscillating between systems, each promising a different vision of order, prosperity, and permission.
Starting with watching the Olympics in Sweden on TV, the question of my own identity was mirrored in the clash of economic and cultural titans fighting it out in the Hockey rink: North American capitalism glinting in one corner, Swedish social democracy in another, Soviet communism looming on the horizon. But behind the national banners was always the subtler drama of the home: Whose authority counted? Who provided? Who protected or failed to do so? I learned early that the ideological becomes intimate—that our public creeds are often faiths (or furies) inherited from the stories of our fathers.

Fatherlessness, Revolution — and the Hunger for Ownership

As I detailed in The People of the Sign, estrangement from my own father produced both longing and rebellion. I grew up among the ruins of broken homes and fractured founding myths, seeking belonging among shifting soil. It wasn’t just me: over the last half-century, the Western world’s “father question” has gone unanswered at scale. Divorce, migration, war, and economic upheaval rent the social fabric. Fatherhood—its blessings and its betrayals—became ground-zero for the culture wars.
By the time the Occupy Wall Street movement erupted (a chapter I explored in The Hardness of the Heart), I recognized in its chants something personal: a protest against absentee landlords—both literal and figurative. Yet I cautioned then, and still do, that “you should not try to occupy that which you do not own.” Ownership, in family or society, is more than legal title—it requires rooted stewardship, responsibility, a commitment to something beyond grievance.
In my third book, The Rod of Iron, I pressed further: without taking ownership—rather than remaining renters in our own lives, our own cultures—we risked ceding both competence and legacy. Renter’s mentality breeds not justice, but drift.

Lessons in Fatherhood… and the Canon We All Face

Yet as the years pass (and recent losses—most piercingly, the deaths of both my sisters—sobered my own reflections), I find myself circling back to a more ancient paradox. What is fatherhood—what is ownership—when none of us, finally, owns anything? Jesus, in one of his greatest wounds to ego and empire, told his followers: “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” When the rich man who had “done everything right” asked what to do, Christ answered: “Sell all you have, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven—then come, follow me.” The ultimate ledger, it seems, is written in a hand not our own.
The Báb, the 19th-century Persian prophet, put it this way:
“Every man of discernment, while walking upon the earth, feeleth indeed abashed, inasmuch as he is fully aware that the thing which is the source of his prosperity, his wealth, his might, his exaltation, his advancement and power is, as ordained by God, the very earth which is trodden beneath the feet of all men.”
And his successor, Abdu’l-Bahá, prayed, channeling the spirit of Jesus’ sacrifice, typified by his washing the feet of his disciples:
“Make me as dust in the pathway of Thy loved ones.”
A hard lesson amidst so many contemporary calls to mastery: What good is it to “own” the land if you forget the humility of stewardship? What civilization can long endure if its fathers—whether household or head of state—forget that their authority is borrowed, not inherent?

We, The Fathers, and the Unseen Hand

As fathers—of families, organizations, even nations—we rarely know, in the moment, the full weight or consequence of our choices. My own father could not have foreseen where “Wade the wanderer” would travel, or how his presence and his absences would echo in my life. We may try to pass down strength, wisdom, or legacy, but our impact is, at best, only partly within our grasp.
Yet, in this great uncertainty, there is comfort. Our Heavenly Father—the archetype embedded in Western civilization’s very core—knows every twist and turn. Where our earthly efforts falter, His guidance persists. The plan, as I’m only now beginning to see more clearly, is ultimately under divine control. Like the father in the parable of the prodigal son, He is always watching, always ready, running to meet us even “while we are yet a long way off.”

Civilization Begins—And Fails—at Home

As Atlantic Playbook readers know, every big story—migration, mobility, social order—is always also a family story. Civilizations rise when men and women, mothers and fathers, not only claim their inheritance but become steward-owners—taking up the hard duties of patience, humility, and responsibility. They falter when “fatherhood” congeals into privilege or vanishes into neglect.
From the thresholds of North America and Scandinavia, to the squabbles of Wall Street and beyond, our struggles in the public square are echoes of a deeper drama—the drama of fathers and children, of roots and wings, of borrowings and returns.

Invitation: Origins, Faith, and the New Inheritance

As we launch this series, “Created in the Image of God—The Origins of Western Civilization,” I invite you to walk with me—not as master, not as absentee landlord, but as steward and student. Let’s examine how our earliest stories, our family myths, and our very ideas of authority shape the future we are even now inheriting and, inevitably, bequeathing.
Each week, we’ll look beyond ideology and polemic and ask: Where do our notions of order and justice come from? What happens when fatherhood—biological, social, political, divine—fails or is reclaimed? And what might it mean, in our time, to once again “go home,” reconcile, and lay the foundation for a civilization that endures?

On this Father’s Day, may we remember: the best fathers—of families, cities, nations—understand that their greatest legacy comes not from the power they wield, but from the gifts they return, the humility they model, and the stewardship with which they serve.