The arson attack on Nantes Cathedral is a terrible yet apposite metaphor for our troubled times. We do not know who tried to destroy this beautiful place of worship, but we should understand the significance of the action.

Attacks on churches in France, common in recent years, have been carried out by anarchists, nihilists, Islamists and others. But regardless of the cause or lack of one behind this attack, its symbolism is unmistakable.

Churches and cathedrals stand for religious faith, of course. They represent Europes Christian heritage, too. They are part of our cultural and national identities.

Some have stood for hundreds of years, physical monuments to the long sweep of history, and a reminder, through wars, plagues, recessions and depressions, of the continuity of the institutions and traditions of our societies.

The Church is just one institution, and Christianity just one traditional belief, that for generations have encouraged us to compromise with one another, and make sacrifices for one another, in the name of community. They have taught us to pursue not only our own material benefit but the common good.

Other institutions have played similar roles of course, such ascharities, trades unions and philanthropic foundations. And other beliefs systems, from other religions to political creeds such asconservatism and social democracy, have also sought to foster a sense of solidarity to build a cohesive society.

And yet Western countries are today hardly cohesive societies. In Britain, the wealth of the richest 10 per cent of families is five times higher than the wealth of the bottom half of all families combined. With children's life chances defined more by their parents' prosperity than talent, social mobility is in crisis. With the working class demonised and despised by many, social solidarity is in crisis too.

Then there is the pernicious effect of cultural liberalism and militant identity politics. While elites debate the number of black students at Oxbridge with guilt and urgency, few acknowledge that white students are less likely to go to university than any other ethnic group, and white working-class boys fare worse than anybody else at school.

While the powerful engage in exclusively elite equality debates, such asthe number of women on boards, they give little thought to the availability and affordability of childcare for low-income parents.

Those who try to raise the plight of the white working-class are often written off as racists and cranks. And those who argue in favour of unifying identities made possible by patriotism, or our attachment to more local communities are lampooned as reactionary and ridiculous.

Like letters through a stick of rock, running through each of these problems is liberalism, the ideology that made our modern Western world.

The pursuit of the common good has little place in liberalism, for liberalism is principally concerned with the maximisation of individual freedom. Liberals have always tended to underestimate how the freedom of the rich and powerful can undermine the freedom of the poor and powerless. But it is only now that this reality is becoming so blatant, prevalent and, in the eyes of many, inevitable and even legitimate.

So we have a mirage of meritocracy, in which many of those who reach the top do so not through their own achievement but the headstart handed to them by their parents.

Believing they succeeded on their own merits, however, they feel they owe little to those who "failed" to make it. This is just one reason we see a selfish corporate class, paying themselves sky-high wages and marking one anothers homework, tax avoidance by rich families and big business, and faltering support for progressive taxation and universal public services.

Also to blame is the misplaced universalism of liberalism. Partly because much of liberal thought starts with a misconceived "model" of human nature and political organisation, liberals underestimate the cultural and institutional context and history of communities and countries.

They assume we are all rational freedom-seekers, the same the world over. This leads liberals to all sorts of flawed judgments about foreign policy (think Iraq), democracy (think European Union) and immigration.

Viewing countries as little more than a platform, upon which anybody from anywhere in the world can live and work with only minimal obligations towards others, liberals support mass immigration.

In fact, they are often maniacally in favour of it, because for many of them, borders are a restraint on freedom, and culturally diverse countries are more likely to put irrational attachments to majority culture and identity behind them.

But study after academic study shows that the more diverse a society becomes, the less trust and reciprocity there is, and less willingness to pay taxes to fund universal public services and welfare systems.

Liberalism attacks the institutions and traditions that bring us together, in part because they are seen as hindrances in the pursuit of freedom. But this destructiveness is also down to the problematic relationship liberalism has with the idea of inevitable progress.

Because some liberal thinkers justify pluralism and tolerance on the basis that they create trial and error that leads to an increasingly perfect society, liberalism can become illiberal and intolerant: conservatives who worry that change can bring loss and not just gain, institutions and traditions that ask us to put others first, and beliefs that seek to achieve the common good are mocked, undermined and attacked.

The irony is, the more we see the full extent of the crisis of Western society, it becomes clearer that liberalism has always depended on those very institutions and traditions and ways of life it attacks.

Perhaps liberalism can survive without Christian virtues and stable national identities, but we cannot yet know that for sure.

And so we return to the tragedy of Nantes Cathedral. We saw on Saturday a place of worship going up in flames, but without a greater willingness to pursue the common good, it will be more than a cathedral that succumbs to fire. The very basis of Western civilisation will be in serious danger.

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Liberalism made the Western world, but now it is destroying it - Telegraph.co.uk