Western Identity:_____

Europe's historic role as harbinger of progress is often easily forgotten in favor of that being a sick civilization limping into terminal decay. This theme is a constant refrain, expressed by many. The discussion has occurred regularly over the previous century, but the expressive approaches are divisible between the current views of the West's survival and those stated in the first half of the 20th century. Current discussions emphasize political arrangements such as the E.U., whereas those stated in the first half of the 20th century focused more on the cultural underbelly of the West. The former, especially, distinguishes the U.S. and Europe as separate components of the West. Regardless whether the analysis emphasizes political mechanics or penetrates deeper into a society's consciousness, both predict the death or eclipse of the West. The term West invites questions of its true identity. More or less I consider the "West" to be the U.S. and Europe. 

This theme of the West's imminent weakening fills the pages of many pundits' columns today. The depopulation of Spain and Italy, for example, that currently has the lowest birth rates in the industrialized world show that Christendom is a tired historical legacy leaving little vestigial influence. Also, Christendom's secular successors-Enlightenment, Social Democracy, the implied Social Contract-are withering away. The E.U. has faced two recent crises: one economic and the other political. Greece's fiscal insolvency and other nations rejecting the Euro Constitution (France May 2005, Netherlands June 2005) spark fears that Europe lacks the economic resources and the political will to integrate its member states into a functioning democratic super continent. Most discussions about the future of the West focus on political mechanics rather than on the cultural identity of Europe. 

Both supporters and opponents of the EU ground this discussion of Europe and or the West's future on political mechanics. For example, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher opposed England entering the E.U. In her speech entitled "The Bruges Speech" delivered on September 20, 1988 she discussed four guiding principles that the EU should heed when considering its modus operandi. [1] Thatcher focuses primarily on the distribution of power vested in the nation state versus the EU. This is obviously an appropriate discussion when debating how much power to cede to the EU, but little of this discussion focuses on the underlying edifice of Western Civilization. Moreover, unlike Thatcher, Jurgen Habermas who supports a more integrated EU believed the French and by, inference the Dutch too, rejection of the E.U. Constitution was a misguided rejection of western capitalism:

"It is in this spirit that I understand the invitation for me to become involved in the French electoral campaign. In my view, a Left which aims to tame and civilize capitalism with a 'No' to the European constitution would be deciding for the wrong side at the wrong time." [2] Habermas fails to explain how a "Yes" to the European constitution would more effectively tame capitalism. He just assumes that deferring to a continental governing body invested with more power will tame capitalism rather than be tamed by it. But, this debate emphasizes the importance of governing mechanics, ignoring edifice of the West as a civilization. 

  

Certain facts and figures are cited as distressing signs that the West will lose its vitality, resulting in vast populations being reoriented into civilizations showing little resemblance to that which they knew. So many other unforeseen factors can potentially minimize the impact of these troubling trends. Or, the West may actually decline, falling into a weak civilization subordinate to others. But, my motivation here is not argue what the West will become, or to assess its strengths and weaknesses. Instead, I believe it is important to recall that the West is obsessed constantly with predicting its own decline. And, the different observations seen as evidence of imminent death deserve being highlighted because they demonstrate a certain resilience of the West. Therefore, before we conclude that current conditions are fatal diagnoses, we should remember that similar and different, but equally troubling conditions, motivated predictions that the West faces its death.    

Modern discourse refers to every event with negative consequences as creating a "CRISIS." Crisis mongering is too pervasive to allow necessary discussions about Western Civilization in the aggregate. For example, in the July/August 2010 the magazine "The American Interest" features a series of articles from several authors commenting on the geopolitical future of Europe. Notice the constant refrain of CRISIS within an article of this series:

The euro will survive the Greek crisis and probably emerge stronger for it. European companies are doing better than many dared hope some years ago. The European welfare state has demonstrated its resilience even in times of global economic crisis. And while public opinion is divided, to all appearances America is trending European in the Age of Obama rather than Europe is trending American.  

Paradoxically, however, the financial crisis and its aftermath, instead of demonstrating the superiority of the European socio-economic model, has turned into a profound crisis of the European Union's political self-confidence. The crisis of the euro unraveled a dramatic clash: In order to sustain its economic model the European Union needs more political integration, but virtually all European publics are hostile to any move toward a more federal Europe. [3]

This commonly used description conjures an image of Europe in a perpetual cycle of crisis and recovery, something beautiful to behold only if it could overcome its inferiority complex. Europe needs a confidence boost, perhaps from a life coach. Europe is essentially good and holds potential to be even better, it just needs positive reinforcement to build on its strengths. The complete sense of decay motivating analyses of the Death of the West in the first half of the 20th century was too strong to describe Europe as someone needing to concentrate on his self esteem. 

The West's decline seen as the result of its own civilizational ills found in Oswald Spengler (Decline of the West) in 1917, and continued by Arnold Toynbee in 1940. Not the decline of the U.S. as a geopolitical power, but western civilization itself. England, the main custodian of the West before World War One, experienced a psychological shock after WWI from which it did not recover as Orwell described in Coming Up for Air:

Christ! What's the use of saying that one oughtn't to be sentimental about 'before the war'? I am sentimental about it. So are you if you remember it. It's quite true that if you look back on any special period of time you tend to remember the pleasant bits. That's true even of the war. But it's also true that people then had something that we haven't got now. What? It was simply that they didn't think of the future as something to be terrified of. It isn't that life was softer then than now. Actually it was harsher. People on the whole worked harder, lived less comfortably and died more painfully. The farm hands worked frightful hours for fourteen shillings a week and ended up as worn-out cripples with a five-shilling old-age pension and an occasional half-crown from the parish. And what was called  "respectable" poverty was even worse. When little Watson, a small draper at the other end of the High Street, 'failed' after years of struggling, his personal assets were 2 pounds 9 shillings, and he died almost immediately of what was called 'gastric trouble,' but the doctor let it out that it was starvation. Yet he'd clung to his frock coat to the last. Old crimp, the watchmaker's assistant, a skilled workman who'd been at the job, man and boy, for fifty years, got cataract and had to go into the workhouse. His grandchildren were howling in the street when they took him away……..The houses had no bathrooms, you broke the ice in your basin on winter mornings……and the churchyard was bang in the middle of the town, so that  you never went a day without remembering how  you'd got to end. And yet what was it that people had in those days? A feeling of security, even when they weren't sure. More exactly, it was a feeling of continuity. All of them knew they'd got to die, and I suppose a few of them knew they were going to go bankrupt, but what they didn't know was that the order of things could change. Whatever might happen to themselves, things would go on as they'd known them. I don't believe it made very much difference that what's called religious belief was still prevalent in those days. It's true that nearly everyone went to church……and if you asked people whether they believed in a life after death they generally answered that they did. But, I've never met anyone who gave me the impression of really believing in a future life.  I think that, at most, people believe in that kind of thing in the same way as kids believe in Father Christmas. But it's precisely in a settled period, a period when civilization seems to stand on its four legs like an elephant, that such things as a future life don't matter (124-6). [4] 

Orwell describes an "old English order of life" covering its brethren as an eternal, shiftless reality. The English became psychologically dependent on their imagined reality. Thus, life before the War with all its apparent harshness is preserved in the English consciousness as treasures lost in the trenches of the Somme and Verdun. Orwell's constructs his narrative upon an English worldview within which meaning only exists within the pathos of the Victorian era that evaporated into the mustard gas wafting over the Siegfried line. Orwell fictionalized a historical view showing an English consciousness permanently wounded by World War One. The casualties to English limb and life numbered over a million, but the single casualty of the collective English consciousness clinging to its way of life inflicted the worst wound on English civilization. In this context the English developed a psychological dependence to this particular civilization. Fragile though it was it featured a palpable way of life. Despite its fragility Orwell's narrative wherein he cites his characters' personal experiences suggests the underlying civilization was something deeper than a political creation. Within the next few years, however, Orwell's "civilization" degenerates into a political construct. Three empires that seize control of the planet reduce man into a malleable subject. Power now serves as the only dynamic affecting all living conditions, Orwell wrote a narrative of the Last Man in Europe, which was later published under the title1984. In effect, England died after WWI, and Europe died after WWII.

We continue in this vein of prophetic collapse to read Oswald Spengler's Death of the West, published in the closing weeks of WWI, wherein he argued that history had already exposed fatal wounds in Western civilization. WWI provided to Spengler a convenient and tragic climax, a focal point that added cache to his conclusion of western decline. His thorough analysis of Western Civilization and its future motivated his concluding his study with conflicting romantic and deterministic clarion calls:

"For us-as opposed to previous cultures-, however, whom a Destiny has placed in this Culture and at this moment of its development-the moment when money is celebrating its last victories, and the Caesarism that is to succeed approaches with quiet, firm step-our direction, willed and obligatory at once, is set for us within narrow limits, and on any other terms life is not worth the living. We have not the freedom to reach to this or to that, but the freedom to do the necessary or to do nothing. And a task that historic necessity has set will be accomplished with the individual or against them" (415). [5] Fate guides us willingly or we resist it only to be dragged along by its sheer power. This statement was both true and false. 

Caesarism quickly though not so quietly appeared thereafter in its Hitlerian and Stalinist renditions. Spengler, though, seems to believe that Money's demise ushers in dictatorship. Today, though, Money and Caesarism celebrate their respective triumphs without weakening each other. Goldman Sachs underwrites derivatives allowing Greece to hide its fiscal woes, while the EU spews platitudes of universal deference to humanity while constructing anti-democratic institutions (et al creating new approval referendums in Switzerland and Ireland, thrice and twice, respectively, until they pass it, and allowing for no withdrawals thereafter. Spengler's prophetic call reveals an insoluble problem in that we struggle to determine the range of things subject to our control versus the immutable reality over which we have none?    

Spengler's prophetic doom withered while Western Civilization worked to recover from its nearly fatal self-inflicted wound in 1948 when Arnold Toynbee pondered a theory of Christianity and Western Civilization decaying and/or surviving independently of each other:

"On this view [the view that religion is dependent and subordinate to civilization] of the history of religion and of the civilizations, it has not been the historical function of the Christian Church just to serve as a chrysalis between..….catastrophe." [6]

The exact role of religion in either of these interpretations of historical development suggests that Toynbee sees that Western Civilization can die while Christianity will serve as a catalyst to help nurture a new civilization or a grand entity that once developed depends on no underlying civilization. We can indulge all of the semantic debates over the real meanings of "civilization" and "religion" and the conceptual notion of their being indissolubly linked together. But, the relevant point here is to see Toynbee's vision of Western Civilization dying. HIs vision places Western civilization in a post-Christian secular civilization:

"If civilizations are the handmaids of religion and if the Greco-Roman civilization served as a good handmaid to Christianity by brining it to birth before that civilization finally went to pieces, then the civilizations of third generation may be repetitions of the Gentiles. If, so far from its being the historical function of higher religions to minister, as chrysalises, to the cyclic process of the reproduction of civilizations to serve, by their downfalls, as stepping-stones to a progressive process of the always deeper religious insight, and the gift of ever more grace to act on this insight, then the societies of the species called civilizations will have fulfilled their function when once they have brought a mature higher religion to birth; and, on this showing, our own Western post-Christian secular civilization might at be best be superfluous repetition of the pre-Christian Graeco-Roman one, and at worst a pernicious back sliding from the path of spiritual progress." [7]

Toynbee's vision of a deadened West is similar to Spengler insofar as they both focus significantly on the development the secular trends. Toynbee, though, conceives of Christianity surviving the death of the West, whereas Spengler assumes that both will die together. A close reading of both Toynbee and Spengler seem like separately polished revisions of Nietzsche's passionate yet sketchy vision of the coming death of the West written during the closing 10-15 years of the 19th century. Nietzsche expresses his death of the West in raw, unpretentious terms that would offend academic discourse today:

"'Mankind' does not advance, it does not even exist. The overall aspect is that of a tremendous experimental laboratory in which a few successes are scored, scattered through all ages, while there are untold failures, and all order, logic, union, and obligingness are lacking. How can we fail to recognize that the ascent of Christianity is a movement of decadence?-That the German Reformation is a recrudescence of Christian barbarism?-That the Revolution (the French Revolution) destroyed the instinct for a grand organization of society? Man represents no progress over the animal: the civilized tenderfoot is an abortion compared to the Arab and Corsican; the Chinese is a more successful type, more durable, than the European (55). [8]

Nietzsche's sees Europe as a shallow illusion, a caveman donning various costumes-Christianity, Civilization, democratic putsch of the French Revolution. The European whimpers, sniveling in the shadow of the ascending Chinamen. Nietzsche offers another example of this view that Europe is always on life support, awaiting its burial.             

Many distressing signs abound from those who either fear or welcome the Death of the West, but the 20th century's most sobering lesson should temper such confidence motivating such cocksure prophecies: nothing is inevitable. Some trends show such strong evidence that foreshadow the direction we will take. But, the overall direction though visible shines no light on our destiny.  

Neither God's nor nature's laws dictate that Western (or European) civilization will endure, but too many unforeseen events confound the most articulately argued theses that it's destined to fall within the next generation. 

1. Margaret Thatcher, The Bruges Speech, www.margaretthatcher.org/document/107332.

2. Jurgen Habermas, "The illusionary 'Leftist No' Adopting the constitution to strengthen Europe's power to act." Sign and Sight, May 13, 2005, www.signandsight.com/features/163.html.

3. Ivan Krastev, "A Retired Power," The American Interest vol v, no. 6 (July/August 2010): www.the-americaninterest.com/europesplash.cfm.

4. George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 124-26. In his essay entitled "On European Unity" published initially in 1947, Orwell did discuss under what conditions Europe could integrate into a political, economic, and social state. In fact, Orwell stressed that a federation of social democratic states in Europe was, in spite of the difficulties encountered uniting different European cultures, a "less improbable concatenation than the Soviet Union or the British Empire." But, in this same essay Orwell also stressed that an apathy affecting the citizens of Europe prevents their forging a more social democratic continent. They had an "inability to imagine anything new." Orwell's comments here foreshadow his description of civilization in "The Last Man in Europe"-published with the title 1984 as that which is reduced to a dictatorship governing humanity who lacks the free will to oppose all-both subtle and raw-applications of power. 

5. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Vintage, 2006), 415.

6. Arnold Toynbee, Christianity and Civilization in Christianity on Trial, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), Myriobiblos library: a part of artopos online cultural center, www.myriobiblos.gr/texts/english/toynbee.html.  

7. Ibid.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, European Nihilism in The Will To Power, ed Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), 55.