WHEN SISYPHUS GIVES UP:

Is Europe Dying?: Notes on a Crisis of Civilizational Morale (George Weigel, March 17, 2005, AEI Online)

When an entire continent, healthier, wealthier, and more secure than ever before, fails to create the human future in the most elemental sense--by creating the next generation--something very serious is afoot. I can think of no better description for that “something” than to call it a crisis of civilizational morale. Understanding its origins is important in itself, and important for Americans because some of the acids that have eaten away at European culture over the past two centuries are at work in the United States, and indeed throughout the democratic world.

Reading “History” through Culture

Getting at the roots of Europe’s crisis of civilizational morale requires us to think about “history” in a different way. Europeans and Americans usually think of “history” as the product of politics (the struggle for power) or economics (the production of wealth). The first way of thinking is a by-product of the French Revolution; the second is one of the exhaust fumes of Marxism. Both “history as politics” and “history as economics” take a partial truth and try, unsuccessfully, to turn it into a comprehensive truth. Understanding Europe’s current situation, and what it means for America, requires us to look at history in a different way, through cultural lenses.

Europe began the twentieth century with bright expectations of new and unprecedented scientific, cultural, and political achievements. Yet within fifty years, Europe, the undisputed center of world civilization in 1900, produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, a Cold War that threatened global holocaust, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, the Gulag, and Auschwitz. What happened? And, perhaps more to the point, why had what happened happened? Political and economic analyses do not offer satisfactory answers to those urgent questions. Cultural--which is to say spiritual, even theological--answers might help.

Take, for example, the proposal made by a French Jesuit, Henri de Lubac, during World War II. De Lubac argued that Europe’s torments in the 1940s were the “real world” results of defective ideas, which he summarized under the rubric “atheistic humanism”—the deliberate rejection of the God of the Bible in the name of authentic human liberation. This, de Lubac suggested, was something entirely new. Biblical man had perceived his relationship to the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as a liberation: liberation from the terrors of gods who demanded extortionate sacrifice, liberation from the whims of gods who played games with human lives (remember the Iliad and the Odyssey), liberation from the vagaries of Fate. The God of the Bible was different. And because biblical man believed that he could have access to the one true God through prayer and worship, he believed that he could bend history in a human direction. Indeed, biblical man believed that he was obliged to work toward the humanization of the world. One of European civilization’s deepest and most distinctive cultural characteristics is the conviction that life is not just one damn thing after another; Europe learned that from its faith in the God of the Bible.

The proponents of nineteenth-century European atheistic humanism turned this inside out and upside down. Human freedom, they argued, could not coexist with the God of Jews and Christians. Human greatness required rejecting the biblical God, according to such avatars of atheistic humanism as Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. And here, Father de Lubac argued, were ideas with consequences--lethal consequences, as it turned out. For when you marry modern technology to the ideas of atheistic humanism, what you get are the great mid-twentieth century tyrannies--communism, fascism, Nazism. Let loose in history, Father de Lubac concluded, those tyrannies had taught a bitter lesson: “It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can only organize it against man.” Atheistic humanism--ultramundane humanism, if you will--is inevitably inhuman humanism.

The first lethal explosion of what Henri de Lubac would later call “the drama of atheistic humanism” was World War I. For whatever else it was, the “Great War” was, ultimately, the product of a crisis of civilizational morality, a failure of moral reason in a culture that had given the world the very concept of “moral reason.” That crisis of moral reason led to the crisis of civilizational morale that is much with us, and especially with Europe, today.

This crisis has only become fully visible since the end of the Cold War. Its effects were first masked by the illusory peace between World War I and World War II; then by the rise of totalitarianism and the Great Depression; then by the Second World War itself; then by the Cold War. It was only after 1991, when the seventy-seven-year-long political-military crisis that began in 1914 had ended, that the long-term effects of Europe’s “rage of self-mutilation” (as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called it) could come to the surface of history and be seen for what they were--and for what they are. Europe is experiencing a crisis of civilizational morale today because of what happened in Europe ninety years ago. That crisis could not be seen in its full and grave dimensions then (although the German general Helmuth von Moltke, one of the chief instigators of the slaughter, wrote in late July 1914 that the coming war would “annihilate the civilization of almost the whole of Europe for decades to come”). The damage done to the fabric of European culture and civilization in the Great War could only be seen clearly when the Great War’s political effects had been cleared from the board in 1991.

The Naked European Public Square

Contemporary European culture is not bedeviled by atheistic humanism in its most raw forms; the Second World War and the Cold War settled that. Europe today is profoundly shaped, however, by a kinder, gentler cousin, what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has termed “exclusive humanism”: a set of ideas that, in the name of democracy, human rights, tolerance, and civility, demands that all transcendent religious or spiritual reference points must be kept out of European public life--especially the life of the newly expanded European Union. [...]

The demographics are unmistakable: Europe is dying. The wasting disease that has beset this once greatest of civilizations is not physical, however. It is a disease in the realm of the human spirit. David Hart, another theological analyst of contemporary history, calls it the disease of “metaphysical boredom”--boredom with the mystery, passion, and adventure of life itself. Europe, in Hart’s image, is boring itself to death.

And in the process, it is allowing radicalized twenty-first century Muslims--who think of their forebears’ military defeats at Poitiers in 732, Lepanto in 1571, and Vienna in 1683 (as well as their expulsion from Spain in 1492) as temporary reversals en route to Islam’s final triumph in Europe—to imagine that the day of victory is not far off. Not because Europe will be conquered by an invading army marching under the Prophet’s banners, but because Europe, having depopulated itself out of boredom and culturally disarmed itself in the process, will have handed the future over to those Islamic immigrants who will create what some scholars call “Eurabia”--the European continent as a cultural and political extension of the Arab-Islamic world. Should that happen, the irony would be unmistakable: the drama of atheistic humanism, emptying Europe of its soul, would have played itself out in the triumph of a thoroughly nonhumanistic theism. Europe’s contemporary crisis of civilizational morale would reach its bitter conclusion when Notre-Dame becomes Hagia Sophia on the Seine--another great Christian church become an Islamic museum. At which point, we may be sure, the human rights proclaimed by those narrow secularists who insist that a culture’s spiritual aspirations have nothing to do with its politics would be in the gravest danger.

It need not happen: there are signs of spiritual and cultural renewal in Europe, especially among young people; the Buttiglione affair raised alarms about the new intolerance that masquerades in the name of “tolerance;” the brutal murder of Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh by a middle-class Moroccan-Dutch has reminded Europeans that “root causes” do not really explain Islamist terrorism. The question on this side of the Atlantic, though, is why should Americans care about the European future?

It would be nice to peel off our old friends and allies, the Brits and Poles, but were the rest of them ever worth much to begin with?

MORE:
The birth of Europe: Our challenge to the anti-Europeans is: where's your story of the future? (Timothy Garton Ash, March 17, 2005, The Guardian)

Over the last fortnight, I have been in six European cities: Oxford, Madrid, Paris, Hamburg, Gdansk and Warsaw. In all of them, I have been reading Jacques le Goff's wonderful new history of The Birth of Europe, a book that every sentient European should know. Through a sequence of rich but small courses, as in a gourmet meal, Le Goff explores the formation of Europe from the ruins of the Roman empire to Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of America at the end of the 15th century. Turning from the book to the streets, and the streets back to the book, I have been thinking about the great adventure on which this continent is now engaged. Shall we call it the second birth of Europe?

The birth of Europe, that is, no longer just as a self-conscious cultural, historical and religious unity, the heir to Christendom evoked against the encroaching Muslim Turks in Pope Pius II's magnificent essay of 1458, but as a European Union, soon to include Turkey, which is a single commonwealth, with a set of shared laws and political institutions of which medieval Europeans could only dream. And, increasingly, as an actor on the world stage.

The connections between that old Europe and this new one are complicated.

Mr. Ash accidentally invokes the apposite question: absent its Christian culture, history and unity what is the point of Europe? Union itself is a poor excuse for union. What is the end towards which that Union would strive? Continued union?

-The Specters Haunting Dresden (Theodore Dalrymple, Winter 2005, City Journal)

The moral impossibility of patriotism worries Germans of conservative instinct or temperament. Upon what in their historical tradition can they safely look back as a guide or a help? One young German conservative historian I met took refuge in Anglophilia—his England, of course, being an England of the past. He needed a refuge, because Hitler and Nazism had besmirched everything in his own land. The historiography that sees in German history nothing but a prelude to Hitler and Nazism may be intellectually unjustified, the product of the historian’s bogus authorial omniscience, but it has emo- tional and psychological force nonetheless, precisely because the willingness to take pride in the past implies a preparedness to accept the shame of it. Thus Bach and Beethoven can be celebrated, but not as Germans; otherwise they would be tainted. The young German historian worked for a publishing house with a history lasting almost four centuries, but its failure to go out of business during the 12 years of the Third Reich cast a shadow both forward and backward, like a spectral presence that haunts a great mansion.

The impossibility of patriotism does not extinguish the need to belong, however. No man is, or can be, an island; everyone, no matter how egotistical, needs to belong to a collectivity larger than himself. A young German once said to me, “I don’t feel German, I feel European.” This sounded false to my ears: it had the same effect upon me as the squeal of chalk on a blackboard, and sent a shiver down my spine. One might as well say, “I don’t feel human, I feel mammalian.” We do not, and cannot, feel all that we are: so that while we who live in Europe are European, we don’t feel European.

In any case, can a German feel European unilaterally, without the Portuguese (for example) similarly and reciprocally feeling European rather than Portuguese? From my observations of the French, they still feel French, indeed quite strongly so. Nearly half a century after the Treaty of Rome, they can’t be said to like the Germans; to think otherwise is to mistake a marriage of convenience for the passion of Romeo and Juliet.

A common European identity therefore has to be forged deliberately and artificially; and one of the imperatives for attempting to do so is the need of Germans for an identity that is not German (the other, which dovetails neatly, is the French drive to recover world power). And since the Germans are very powerful in Europe, by weight of their economy, their need to escape from themselves by absorbing everyone into a new collective identity will sooner or later be perceived in the rest of Europe as the need to impose themselves— as a return to their bad old habits. New identities can indeed be forged, but usually in the crucible of war or at least of social upheaval: not, in the context, an inviting prospect.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 17, 2005 11:14 PM