M&M ROUNDS:

REVIEW: of The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars by Richard Overy (Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph)

Richard Overy’s book examines the intellectual currents that coursed through British life in the Twenties and Thirties, but also picks out the thinkers and other characters who pursued them. He does not confine himself to those who had intellectual sympathies with either Hitler or Stalin; one of the most illuminating parts of the book is his dissection of the philosophy of the contraception activist Marie Stopes, to this day regarded by the women’s movement as something of a liberator.

Stopes was also a eugenicist, and so devoted to that way of thinking that she refused to attend her own son’s wedding. He was marrying a woman who wore glasses (and who happened to be the daughter of the distinguished scientist Sir Barnes Wallis) and Stopes accused him of squandering his own allegedly magnificent genetic inheritance. For good measure, she cut him out of her will, too.

Overy’s title is well chosen, for the principal obsessions he catalogues during these decades are with death and the disease of the race.

One was not aware that Europe had moved past those obsessions.

MORE:
While Europe Slept (Jean Bethke Elshtain, March 2009, First Things)

Europe cannot remember who she is unless she remembers that she is the child not only of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and the Enlightenment but also of Judaism and Christianity—the child, therefore, of Catholicism and the Reformation. If Europe abandons her religious heritage, the idea of Europe dies. And Europe has abandoned, or forgotten, her religious heritage. Europe is now “post-Christian.” What does this mean? What does it portend?

If a culture forgets what it is, as I believe Europe has done, it falls first into an agnostic shrugging of the shoulders, unable to say exactly what it is and believes, and from there it will inevitably fall into nihilism. Detached from its religious foundations, Europe will not remain agnostic. The first result is manifest in those ideologies of multiculturalism that make “difference” a kind of sacred, absolute principle, although no principle is considered to have any such status. Difference tells us nothing in and of itself. Some ways of life and ways of being in the world are brutal, stupid, and ugly. Some a human rights-oriented culture cannot tolerate. A culture must believe in its own enculturating responsibility and mission in order to make claims of value and to institutionalize them in social and political forms. This a post-Christian Europe cannot do.

Multiculturalism is then, in practice, a series of monoculturalisms that do not engage one another at all; rather, the cultural particulate most enamored of gaining and holding power has an enormous advantage: One day, it proclaims, we will bury you. A sign carried by radical Islamist protestors in London during the fracas over the Dutch cartoons proclaimed, “Europe is a cancer / Islam is the answer.” A perverted idea of Islam confronts a Europe that has lost a sense of who she is and what she represents.

For that Europe, the window to transcendence is slammed shut. Human values alone pertain. But these human values are shriveled by a prior loss of the conviction that there is much to defend about the human person, and they are seen as so many subjectivist construals without any defensible, objective content. Unsurprisingly, what comes to prevail is a form of reduced utilitarianism that rationalizes nihilism.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 23, 2009 8:28 AM