Such a house, said the book that used to define our civilisation, will not stand. The same goes for the civilisation that book used to define.
Much as I dislike biologism as applied to humans, it does offer useful shorthand. Thus, when it comes to civilisations, one could say they all go through the biological cycle of birth, childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age, gradual decline – and death.
Or else one could eschew determinist biology and rely on historical analysis instead, such as the kind offered by R.G. Collingwood: “Civilisations sometimes perish because they are forcibly broken up by the armed attack of enemies without or revolutionaries within; but never from this cause alone. Such attacks never succeed unless the thing that is attacked is weakened by doubt as to whether the end which it sets before itself, the form of life which it tries to realise, is worth achieving.”
In other words, when the termites of self-doubt and disunity infest the foundations of a great civilisation, it can then, and only then, succumb to a push from within or without. If Collingwood were with us today, he’d doubtless shudder at the sight of the situation he warned against.
The push is being applied from the outside by the new axis of evil: Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. The bloodiest war in almost 80 years is already raging in Europe, with Russia leading the way and the other evil powers firmly in its corner. Commentators are drawing all sorts of dystopic scenarios, and many of them ring true.
One precondition for a civilisational demise is in place, but what about the other one? Is our civilisation united in its sense of purpose? In fact, what exactly is its unifying purpose, its binding mission?
The on-going NATO summit is expected to answer such questions, but it can’t do that. NATO is a defensive military alliance founded in 1949 to deter or, barring that, repel Stalin’s aggression.
That has now been transposed into the new aggressive reality created by Putin’s Russia. But NATO has always focused on what it was supposed to fight against, not on what it was supposed to fight for.
Such is the nature of all military alliances: they are ad hoc formations brought together by a specific strategic need, not the need to define core civilisational values. NATO realistically acknowledges this in its motto: Animus in consulendo liber (“a mind unfettered by deliberation”).
This slogan doesn’t obviate the need for deliberation. It only states, correctly, that such pondering is beyond NATO’s remit.
Yet those of us who aren’t part of the NATO command must identify the core values of our civilisation, and these have to be pro- rather than anti-. Great civilisations are defined by what they love, not by what they hate.
A civilisation is never static; it’s always work in progress. That’s why it can only ever be properly assessed in a historical context. We’ll never know where a civilisation is going unless we know where it has been.
In the centuries before the US graced the world stage with its entry, Europe, or the West as it then was, had been more or less united. But that unity came out of a conflict ever-present in human societies, that between universalism and particularism.
This conflict is still going on, but its pendulum is now swinging the other way. If in the distant past it used to swing towards universalism and therefore unity, it’s now noticeably swinging toward particularism and therefore disunity.
When the West still went by its original name, Christendom, it was Christianity that served as the binding universal agent. Nations in our sense of the word didn’t exist, and various kingdoms and principalities had more things bringing them together than those setting them apart.
This doesn’t mean Europe was war-free. It wasn’t: war is an ever-present part of the human condition. Yet medieval wars were strictly dynastic squabbles, fights for territory. They were never clashes between mutually exclusive views of the world – it wasn’t only nations that didn’t exist at the time, but also ideologies.
The great 11th century schism between West and East was caused by a fissure in the concept of religious universalism, exacerbated by an acute phase of secular particularism. Yet the West still remained more or less monolithic – it just no longer treated the Christian East as part of the same monolith.
The Reformation changed all that. Suddenly, France and Holland or England and Spain acquired a divisive difference, one that couldn’t easily be settled by nuptial arrangements or by bartering territory. From then on, European countries were no longer just Christian. They were either Catholic or Protestant, and their respective churches had to take political sides. Thus, one instant effect of the Reformation was the politicising of religion, a development that had to be harmful to that institution.
Above all, the Reformation represented the first triumph of particularism over universalism. Had that not been the case, the Church could have disposed of Luther and Calvin the same way it had earlier disposed of Jan Hus.
As it was, many German princes saw in the Reformation their chance to break away from the Holy Roman Empire and establish their unchallenged sovereignty within their own realms. By waving the banner of anti-Papism, the princes sacrificed millions at the altar of secular particularism. What today is Germany lost half of its population in the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century.
The house now stood divided, and it turned out defenceless against the battering ram of modernity known by the misnomer of the Enlightenment. Understood in my terms, it represented a triumph of particularism over universalism – the West quickly acquired a vast number of fault lines, each threatening to produce a deadly eruption at any time.
Christianity was tossed away as a universal blanket altogether, and it was replaced with a patchwork quilt of nations, ideologies and politics. Man was deemed to be nothing but an animal, but a sufficiently wise one to sort out his problems all by himself, without any need for divine intervention. That false premise was bound to produce deadly effects.
The West began to rend itself asunder, and the process has been continuing ever since, with the curve steadily moving in the same direction through assorted peaks and troughs. The house is still standing, but deracinated squatters have driven the original owners out and are now taking the building apart brick by brick.
It has turned out that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a poor substitute for Christian universalism, and the European Union is a far cry from a united Europe. The West has lost its Christian adhesive and failed to find any secular replacement offering the same binding effect.
There are indications that the West is beginning to realise that its whole way of life is under threat, and some signs of inchoate unity are appearing. Yet no civilisation can survive if it only defines itself negatively, by what it’s opposed to.
In the absence of a strong positive component, even its will to resist an outside threat will weaken, as Collingwood pointed out. That’s why fault lines are appearing in NATO, and weblike cracks are spreading fast.
The United States, the metropolis of the NATO empire, looks as if it’s losing interest in the organisation. Biden’s Democrats mask their growing indifference to Europe with fiery phraseology, but the mask is slipping away constantly. At the same time, MAGA Republicans and their peerless leader are quite upfront about that, questioning why America should pay for European defence.
This is a typically crude argument designed to pluck the thickest of the American heart strings. One could respond that America has methodically supplanted Britain as the West’s leading empire, and that ascendancy brings benefits that outweigh the costs. But one can’t argue rationally against slogans – and the underlying reality they communicate.
And the underlying reality is that the perennial clash between American proselytism and isolationism is going the way of the latter. Americans increasingly seem to treat themselves and Europeans as ‘us’ and ‘them’, with the erstwhile sense of familial unity attenuating all the time.
The fissures within Europe are even more noticeable. The travesty of the EU might as well have been designed by enemies of Europe craving its demise. The attempt to build a surrogate secular universalism on the basis of bureaucratic socialist megalomania was doomed to failure from the start – particularist pressures were always going to be too strong.
German and French patriotisms, to name one example, can happily coexist, but German and French nationalisms can’t. And nationalism is a natural, one is tempted to say inevitable, offspring of the very idea of a nation. The EU hoped to toss all the nationalisms into a cauldron and boil them together into a sort of universalist stew, but it was bound to end up with a pie in the sky.
It seems more and more that the Russian threat isn’t producing a sense that all of Europe is in it together. One detects instead the spirit of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.
The NATO summit has issued a declaration of unwavering support for the Ukraine’s struggle against Russian expansionism, but the words ring hollow. Nor is there any guarantee that Article 5 of the NATO charter will be invoked if a member comes under attack.
A unity that can only come from a sublime universal idea is absent, and our enemies sense that. That’s why they are likely to become even more recklessly aggressive. One can only hope that there’s enough residual spunk left to resist them in a civilisation no longer certain what it stands for. We should have listened to Collingwood.