Posted on 06/08/2005 12:26:29 AM PDT by Liberty Wins
America's "Europe problem" and Europe's "America problem" have been staple topics of transatlantic debate for the past several years.
To put the matter directly: Europe, and especially western Europe, is in the midst of a crisis of civilizational morale. The most dramatic manifestation of that crisis is not to be found in Europe's fondness for governmental bureaucracy or its devotion to fiscally shaky health care schemes and pension plans, in Europe's lagging economic productivity or in the appeasement mentality that some European leaders display toward Islamist terrorism. No, the most dramatic manifestation of Europe's crisis of civilizational morale is the brute fact that Europe is depopulating itself.
Europe's below-replacement-level birthrates have created situations that would have been unimaginable in the 1940s and early 1950s. By the middle of this century, if present fertility patterns continue, 60 percent of the Italian people will have no personal experience of a brother, a sister, an aunt, an uncle, or a cousin;[1] Germany will lose the equivalent of the population of the former East Germany; and Spain's population will decline by almost one-quarter. Europe is depopulating itself at a rate unseen since the Black Death of the fourteenth century.[2] And one result of that is a Europe that is increasingly "senescent" (as British historian Niall Ferguson has put it).[3]
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."[4] 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 ofthe 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"[5]). The damage done to the fabric of European culture and civilization in the Great War could only been seen clearly when the Great War's political effects had been cleared from the board in 1991.
And the liberals in our country are rushing headlong toward the abyss. They think they're soooo very cosmopolitan and sophisticated, don't you know.
Please define what the author means by "civilizational morale"?
You only see what's on the surface of that movement. What's beneath the surface is altogether different and has nothing to do with choice of cocktails or fashion.
Should be retitled "Is Europe Committing Suicide". The answer: most definately YES.
My understanding of what the author meant by "civilizational morale" is that particular culture's will to survive.
Europe seems to have lost the vitality and energy needed to pass their heritage on to the next generation.
The Bible is ever true and we reject it and its God to our peril. "Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatever a man sows, that he will reap" (Gal. 6:7), is an everlasting warning. When a society kicks God out of its consciousness, He will allow the vacuum to be filled with materialism, violence, and evil of every sort. After centuries of human experience, one would think mankind would get the message, but we persist in our stubborn rebellion and prove the innate power of sin in the human heart, just as the Scripture says. God gave us the way to live and the way to die and live again. Don't blame Him for the mess man makes of the world.
Why is everyone so eager to avoid the elephant in the room?
There is a reason.
The reason is 'feminism'.
We are not far behind Europe. Our population is being padded by immigration.
You always knew it, now it has been said.
That depends on the question.
Noted Christian apologist and scholar Ravi Zacharias once said that Christianity was not dying in Europe. It was already dead there.
When the heart and soul of Europe (its Christian roots) died, the leaves shriveled. What is left is a rotting husk and stump.
"Is Europe Dying?"
YES
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the problem with Europe is that the smart ones came here. Think of it as a sort of rapture. The enterprising and adventurous, along with those unwilling to put up with whatever awful hand Europe dealt them, packed up their wives and kids and caught the first available ship for America. Left behind were the morally corrupt elitist and aristocratic governments that pretended to be democracies and the poor suckers that trusted them.
We may be seeing the Ayn Rand scenerio being played out in Europe. The capitalists abandoned the continent and look what happened: mass slaughters that would make Robespierre and Cromwell puke.
I think this is a huge stretch. Sorry. WW1 was not caused by Nietzsche's philosophy. In fact I would be willing to bet that all of the major protagonists were self-avowed Christians and few had even read the mad Pole, who, after all was not nearly as much a household name then as now. The author really offers no details on the connection between Humanism and everything that followed. To make the strong cause and effect case he points out I think he'd need to do a little more.
Ding ding ding. We have a winner. In fact even more then "feminism" I'd offer the wide availability of effect birth control. Where it is available populations decline.
Maybe this is a continuing European cycle.
Remember the Neanderthals also disappeared. Perhaps their loss of civilizational morale resulted in lower birthrates and an eventual extinction.
Socialism = Europe dieing....
Another take on this topic can be found in "Civilization Without Religion?" By Russell Kirk
http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/KIRK/kirk404.html
Excerpt -
"From what source did humankind's many cultures arise? Why, from cults. A cult is a joining together for worship-that is, the attempt of people to commune with a transcendent power. It is from association in the cult, the body of worshippers, that human community grows. This basic truth has been expounded in recent decades by such eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee.
Once people are joined in a cult, cooperation in many other things becomes possible. Common defense, irrigation, systematic agriculture, architecture, the visual arts, music, the more intricate crafts, economic production and distribution, courts and government -- all these aspects of a culture arise gradually from the cult, the religious de.
Out of little knots of worshippers, in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, India, or China, there grew up simple cultures; for those joined by religion can dwell together and work together in relative peace. Presently such simple cultures may develop into intricate cultures, and those intricate cultures into great civilizations. American civilization of our era is rooted, strange though the fact may seem to us, in tiny knots of worshippers in Palestine, Greece, and Italy, thousands of years ago. The enormous material achievements of our civilization have resulted, if remotely, from the spiritual insights of prophets and seers.
But suppose that the cult withers, with the elapse of centuries. What then of the culture that is rooted in the cult? What then of the civilization which is the culture's grand manifestation? ...."
Another take on this topic can be found in "Civilization Without Religion?" By Russell Kirk
http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/KIRK/kirk404.html
Excerpt -
"From what source did humankind's many cultures arise? Why, from cults. A cult is a joining together for worship-that is, the attempt of people to commune with a transcendent power. It is from association in the cult, the body of worshippers, that human community grows. This basic truth has been expounded in recent decades by such eminent historians as Christopher Dawson, Eric Voegelin, and Arnold Toynbee.
Once people are joined in a cult, cooperation in many other things becomes possible. Common defense, irrigation, systematic agriculture, architecture, the visual arts, music, the more intricate crafts, economic production and distribution, courts and government -- all these aspects of a culture arise gradually from the cult, the religious de.
Out of little knots of worshippers, in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent, India, or China, there grew up simple cultures; for those joined by religion can dwell together and work together in relative peace. Presently such simple cultures may develop into intricate cultures, and those intricate cultures into great civilizations. American civilization of our era is rooted, strange though the fact may seem to us, in tiny knots of worshippers in Palestine, Greece, and Italy, thousands of years ago. The enormous material achievements of our civilization have resulted, if remotely, from the spiritual insights of prophets and seers.
But suppose that the cult withers, with the elapse of centuries. What then of the culture that is rooted in the cult? What then of the civilization which is the culture's grand manifestation? ...."
Nietzsche was a German and he was very well known by the German public befrore and during WW1. Many German soldiers carried small copies of Nietzche with them.
This looks like an excrept from Weigil's new book, "The Cube and the Cathedral". I started reading it last night.
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