Thank you for the honor of inviting me to deliver the twentieth
Wriston Lecture.
Walter Wriston was, as Henry Kissinger eulogized him, "the
type of American who has made this country the hope of the
world." Let us all be grateful for Walter Wriston's
love of freedom, for his faith in the power of ideas, and
for his generosity; and let us try, in our own ways, to
emulate his example. At the outset tonight, let me also
thank the trustees of the Manhattan Institute and Institute
president Larry Mone for their invitation, and my friend
Peggy Noonan for her characteristically kind introduction.
For
years now, what seems to be a growing political gap between
the United States and its cultural parent, Europe, has been
a staple of transatlantic debate. This "widening of
the Atlantic" is usually discussed in terms of policy
differences: differences over prosecuting the war against
jihadist terrorism; differences over the U.N.'s role in
world affairs; differences over the Kyoto protocol on the
global environment; differences over Iraq. The policy differences
are real, and as Robert Kagan has suggested, they reflect
the dramatically different experiences that Europe and America
had in the 20 th century. Permit me to suggest tonight,
however, that attempts to parse these differences in political,
strategic, and/or economic terms alone will ultimately fail,
because such explanations don't reach deeply enough into
the human texture of contemporary Europe.
If I may state my thesis in the indicative rather than
the subjunctive: Europe, and especially western Europe,
is suffering from 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 for fiscally shaky health care schemes and pension plans;
nor is the drama of the crisis captured fully by the appeasement
mentality that some European leaders display toward jihadist
terrorism (most recently, in the Danish cartoons controversy
and the cancellation of a performance of Mozart's
"Idumeneo" by the Berlin State Opera). No, the
most dramatic manifestation of Europe's crisis of
civilizational morale is the fact that Europe is depopulating
itself.
Several decades of below-replacement-level birthrates have
created situations that would have been unimaginable when
what we now know as the European Union was taking its first
institutional baby-steps in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
By the middle of this century, some demographers estimate,
sixty percent of the Italian people will have no personal
experience of a brother, a sister, an aunt, an uncle, or
a cousin; Germany will lose the equivalent of the entire
population of the former East Germany; and Spain's
population will decline by almost one-quarter. Europe is
depopulating itself in numbers not seen since the Black
Death of the 14 th century. One result of these unprecedented
demographics is a Europe that, in British historian Niall
Ferguson's striking term, is increasingly "senescent"
– and senescence is not, to put it gently, a condition
conducive to political vigor.
Yet the issue, as I suggested a moment ago, goes far deeper
than politics. 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.
It is neither unfair nor Europhobic nor isolationist to
call that "something" a crisis of civilizational
morale. Understanding its origins is important in itself;
it is also critically important for Americans. Why? 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 West, at a time when another civilizational
enterprise, with a far different vision of the future, is
contesting with the West for the definition of that future,
often in aggressive ways.
Probing
to the roots of Europe's crisis of civilizational morale
requires us to think about history in a fresh way. Europeans
and Americans alike typically think of "history"
as the product of politics (the contest for power) or economics
(the contest for wealth). 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 the prism of culture.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Europe was the
acknowledged center of world civilization. Yet within fifty
years, that same Europe produced two world wars, three totalitarian
systems, a Cold War that threatened global disaster, oceans
of blood, mountains of corpses, the Gulag and Auschwitz.
What happened? Perhaps more to the point, why had
what happened, happened? Political and economic analyses
don't offer fully satisfactory answers to those 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, in 1942. De Lubac argued that Europe's
torments in the 1940s were the result of a constellation
of defective ideas which he summarized under the rubric
"atheistic humanism" – the deliberate
rejection of the God of the Bible in the name of 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
(as in 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 history could be bent in a more humane direction –
and that it was man's responsibility to do so. One
of European civilization's most distinctive cultural
characteristics is the conviction that life isn't
just one damn thing after another, about which little or
nothing can be done; Europe learned that from its faith
in the God of the Bible.
Several of the most significant figures in nineteenth century
European high culture turned this inside out and upside
down, however. Human freedom and human greatness required
rejecting the biblical God, according to such influential
thinkers as Auguste Comte, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx,
and Friedrich Nietzsche. Here, Father de Lubac argued, were
ideas with consequences. For when you marry modern technology
to Comte's positivism, Feuerbach's subjectivism,
Marx's materialism, and Nietzsche's will-to-power,
what you get are the great mid-twentieth century tyrannies
– communism, fascism, Nazism. The same point has been
made more recently by the English historian Michael Burleigh
in two important new studies, Earthly Powers and
Sacred Causes: ultramundane humanism, in its quest
for a worldly utopia, is inevitably inhuman humanism.
The first explosive result of this profound shift in European
high culture was World War I. For the Great War –
not only in its origins (as described by David Fromkin in
Europe's Last Summer), but even more in its
mindless continuation after the impossibility of a rapid
military resolution was plainly obvious to all – was
the lethal by-product of a crisis of civilizational morality,
a failure of moral reason in a culture that had given the
world the very idea 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 could only become fully visible after the end of
the Cold War. Its effects were first masked by the illusory
peace of the interwar period; 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 European civil war that had begun with the guns
of August 1914 had ended, that the long-term effects of
what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once called Europe's "rage
of self-mutilation" came to the surface of history
and could be seen for what they are. Europe is experiencing
a crisis of civilizational morale today because
of what happened in Europe ninety years ago, and because
of what paved the way, culturally, for that political catastrophe.
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.
Contemporary Europe is not bedeviled by the rawest forms
of de Lubac's "atheistic humanism;" the Second
World War and the Cold War settled that by putting an end
to fascism, German National Socialism, and Marxism-Leninism.
Europe today is profoundly shaped, however, by a kinder,
gentler cousin, which the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor
has termed "exclusive humanism:" a set of ideas
and political default positions according to which (and
in the name of democracy, human rights, tolerance, and civility)
all transcendent religious or moral reference points must
be kept out of European public life – especially the
life of the European Union. This conviction led to two recent
episodes that tell us a lot about Europe's crisis of civilizational
morale, and where that crisis can lead politically.
The first episode involved the drafting of a new constitutional
treaty to govern the now 25-member European Union. That
process set off a raucous argument over whether the Euro-constitution's
preamble should acknowledge Christianity as one of the sources
of European civilization and of contemporary Europe's
commitments to human rights and democracy. The debate was
sometimes silly, not infrequently bitter, and was finally
resolved in favor of Taylor's "exclusive humanism:"
a treaty of some 70,000 words could not find room for one
word – "Christianity." Yet while following
this debate, I had the uncomfortable sense that the real
argument was not about the past but about the future –
would religiously-informed moral argument have a place in
the European public square?
A disturbing answer to that question came in October 2004,
when Rocco Buttiglione, a distinguished Italian philosopher
then serving as Minister for European Affairs in the Italian
government, was nominated as E.U. commissioner of justice.
Professor Buttiglione, who would have been considered an
adornment of any sane government since Cato the Elder, was
then subjected to a nasty inquisition, during which numerous
members of the European Parliament made it unpleasantly
clear that Buttiglione's convictions about the nature
of marriage disqualified him from holding high office on
the European Commission – despite Buttiglione's
sworn commitment, substantiated by a lifetime of work, to
uphold and defend everyone's civil rights. Buttiglione
ultimately withdrew when it became clear that too many Euro-parliamentarians
agreed with one of their number who claimed that Buttiglione's
moral convictions – not any actions he had undertaken,
and would undertake, but his convictions –
were "in direct contradiction of European law."
Buttiglione described this to a British newspaper as the
"new totalitarianism," which is not, I fear,
an exaggeration. Six months after the Buttiglione affair
came to its disgraceful end, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger described
the same phenomenon as "the dictatorship of relativism,"
in a sermon opening the papal conclave of 2005. That this
new dictatorship marches under the banner of "tolerance"
only makes matters worse. But from whence does it spring?
One of Europe's wisest men, the French philosopher Rémi
Brague, wrote recently that, while the nineteenth century
had been the century of good-and-evil (with the "social
question" posed by the Industrial Revolution dominating
public life) and the twentieth century had been the century
of truth-and-falsehood (as great ideological systems contended
for the human future), the twenty-first century would be
the century of being-or-nothingness. A nihilism that had
soured on the very mystery of being itself had settled like
a thick fog over European high culture, Brague suggested;
that nihilism was informed by a deep skepticism about the
human capacity to know the truth of anything with certainty;
and it had given rise to a moral relativism which had eaten
away at 
Europe's
capacity to give an account of its commitments to freedom
and justice, civility and tolerance. The net result of this
witches' brew, Professor Brague proposed, could only be
a politics of coercion, for the arts of democratic persuasion
could not function in a cultural climate marked by nihilism,
skepticism, and relativism. Thus Buttiglione's "new
totalitarianism," or Ratzinger's "dictatorship
of relativism," are real and present dangers, and the
struggle to resist them defines one pole of Europe's bipolar
culture war.
Europe's other culture war is brought into focus by the
relentlessness of Europe's demographics. To repeat: the
wasting disease that has beset this once-greatest of civilizations
is not physical, but rather a disease in the realm of the
human spirit. The Orthodox theologian David Hart, in a variant
on Rémi Brague's theme, has called 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 that is
having the most profound strategic consequences.
For while Europe is boring itself to death, it is allowing
21 st century jihadists – who regard their 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 green banners of the Prophet,
but because Europe, having culturally disarmed itself to
the point where it cannot give a robust account of its commitments
to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law, and having
depopulated itself out of the boredom that is an ever-present
danger in what Zbigniew Brzezinski once called modernity's
"permissive cornucopia," will have handed the
future over to those immigrants, and their children and
grandchildren, who wish to make Europe a cultural and political
extension of the Arab-Islamic world. Should that happen,
the irony would be unmistakable: the drama of an exclusivist
humanism, emptying Europe of its soul, would have played
itself out in the triumph of a thoroughly non-humanistic
theism. Europe's contemporary crisis of civilizational
morale would reach its bitter conclusion when Notre-Dame
becomes Hagia Sophia on the Seine – a great Christian
church become an Islamic museum. At which point, we may
be sure, the human rights proclaimed by those exclusive
humanists who insist that a culture's spiritual aspirations
have nothing to do with its politics would be in very, very
serious trouble indeed.
It need not happen. There are signs of spiritual and cultural
renewal in Europe, especially among young people; the most
influential of contemporary European philosophers, Jürgen
Habermas, who once defended a hard form of exclusivist humanism,
now argues that a humane and democratic politics requires
a foundation built of moral norms that we can know to be
true; 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 Dutch-Moroccan, the July 7, 2005 bombings in
London, and the depredations attendant on the Danish cartoons
controversy have reminded Europeans that "roots causes"
don't really explain jihadist ideology or jihadist
terrorism. Perhaps most importantly, the outlines of a new
European conversation that challenges the sterilities of
exclusivist humanism, while engaging both believers and
non-believers alike, has come into focus in the past year,
thanks to the collaborative work of Joseph Ratzinger, now
Pope Benedict XVI, and Marcello Pera, a nonbeliever and
philosopher of science who is a member of the Italian Senate
(and was, until the recent change of government in Italy,
the Senate's president). In a jointly-authored book,
Without Roots, Ratzinger and Pera advanced strikingly
similar analyses of Europe's crisis of civilizational
morale, the roots of which both located in a loss of faith
in reason, including moral reason – moral reason being
one of the distinctive characteristics of the culture that
arose from the meeting, in what we now know as "Europe,"
of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome.
Moreover,
these two distinguished intellectuals agreed, in a variant
on Toynbee's theory of historical change, that a "creative
minority" of men and women, convinced that the truths
the West lives politically are truths susceptible to rational
defense, can be the agents of Europe's rebirth as a culturally
self-confident civilization, capable of giving an account
of its democratic political aspirations – which is
to say, a civilization willing to face squarely and respond
imaginatively to the threat posed by the aggressive elements
of the far different civilizational project now housed within
it. Indeed, now that the dust has settled after Pope Benedict's
recent lecture at Regensburg, perhaps we can see that Benedict,
in cooperation with men like the nonbeliever Pera, has given
the world a vocabulary through which a discussion of the
sources and threat of jihadist ideology can be engaged by
believers and nonbelievers alike, and without falling into
the trap of xenophobia: the vocabulary of "rationality"
and "irrationality." If Europe begins to recover
its faith in reason, then at least some in Europe may, in
time, rediscover the reasonableness of faith; and in any
event, a renewed faith in reason would provide an antidote
to metaphysical boredom – and thus open the prospect
of a new birth of freedom in Europe.
Europe's current distress is a reminder to all of
use who are "Europe transplanted" – and
who should feel a deep filial piety toward Europe because
of that – that societies and cultures are only as
great as their spiritual aspirations. It is not an act of
ingratitude toward the achievements of the Enlightenment
to suggest that the soul-withering secularism – the
exclusivist humanism – that has grown out of one stream
of Enlightenment thought threatens the future of the West,
precisely because it prevents us from giving an account,
to ourselves and our children and grandchildren, of the
noble political ends embodied in the western democratic
tradition. As Marcello Pera put it in Without Roots,
"Absolute [worldliness], supposing there is such a
thing, is an absolute vacuum in which neither the happy
majority nor the creative minorities can exist."
For a people whose democratic birth certificate begins
with the assertion of "self-evident" moral truths
built into the human condition by "Nature, and Nature's
God," Professor Pera's brave words should be
taken, not as an elegy, but as a call to renewal –
a moral and cultural call to arms.
GEORGE WEIGEL is a Senior Fellow of Washington's
Ethics and Public Policy Center and the author, most recently,
of The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and
Politics Without God (Basic Books) and God's Choice:
Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church
(HarperCollins).
# # #
In 1987 the Manhattan Institute initiated a lecture series in honor of Walter B. Wriston, banker, author, government advisor, and member of the Manhattan Institute’s Board of Trustees. The Wriston Lecture has since been presented annually in New York City with honorees drawn from the worlds of government, the academy, religion, business, and the arts. In establishing the Lecture, the Trustees of the Manhattan Institute—who serve as the selection committee—have sought to inform and enrich intellectual debate surrounding the great public issues of our day, and to recognize individuals whose ideas or accomplishments have left a mark on their world.
