A crisis of demography — and of the spirit
MICHAEL NOVAK
The images we recently saw on the TV news suggest that Europe has, once again, lost its way. It looks as though Europe is set to repeat in the 21st century the disasters of the 20th.
Europe — especially France and Germany — seems to have a love affair with collectivism. Europeans refuse to learn the lessons of collectivisms past; they certainly fear liberty, especially in economics. Worse still, European elites have done their withering best to empty Europe of its Christian spirit. They have swept Europe clean just in time for the rapid rise of a rival faith prolific with children, vitality, passion, and confidence in long-term victory. What Muslims of the 16th century could not accomplish at Malta (1565) or Lepanto (1571), nor Muslims of the 17th century at Vienna (1683), they are beginning to accomplish in contemporary Europe. Europe is becoming Eurabia.
One could see this in “France ablaze” during the nights of October 27–November 12, 2005. On some of those nights, across some 300 French cities, more than 1,000 automobiles were being set afire. The young men involved did not look impoverished, and they did not look “angry.” Their clothing was modish and expensive, in the style of American “gangsta rappers.” Their faces radiated exultation. These young men are in the pay of the state, through unemployment insurance — paid for not working. But honor they do not receive: In French employment markets, Hamid and Abdul see that they are not held equal to Pierre and André. They are housed, fed, and clothed, and left to graze upon the land. In the eyes of others they can see that they are regarded as less than cultivated human beings. Few see in them any vision, enterprise, or energy to contribute to the glory of France.
When the French government had earlier said, with reference to Iraq, that Islam is not compatible with democracy, it said to these youths that their lives too are incompatible with democracy, at least in France. The young men could see that the government of France held them in fear, and as young men they enjoyed that. They will remember this lesson.
In all these sad events, we see that Europe has forgotten what made it great in nobility of soul and spirited accomplishment, and for many centuries great also in courage and victory in battle.
SOURCES OF GREATNESS
The distinguished sociologist Rodney Stark has just published a book, The Victory of Reason, about why Europe surged beyond all other civilizations in the past millennium. Europe’s greatness, he writes, arose chiefly from a vision of human possibility descended from the Creator of all things: a vision of reason, freedom, and progress — and also a drama of free will, refusal, and sin. Even some atheists, in honest clarity, admit how Jewish/Christian faith lifted up Europe among the continents, and inspired a vision of universal amity and mutual assistance — especially to the most vulnerable among us — that haunts persons of compassion still. One does not have to believe in God to see the power of that faith in lifting the horizons of human accomplishment. If you wish to see its monuments in Europe, look around you.
In the 20th century, sadly, Europe decisively chose against this faith, in favor of the lesser vision of the Enlightenment — and bathed the dream of Universal Reason in universal bloodshed. Neither Communism nor Fascism, once the passionate enthusiasm of hundreds of millions, left much behind of which to be proud, or even beautiful to contemplate. Instead Europe still suffers from nightmares, from spasms of guilt and unworthiness. Europeans today wear signs on their backs that read: Kick me again! Whence come these self-loathings? When one feels guilt, and there is no longer any God, there is no one to confess to.
Europe now carries a very heavy burden. Its two great passions are peace and security — but you cannot have peace unless you are willing to prepare for war; and you cannot have security unless you are willing to take risks. Few signs indicate that Europe is willing to do these simple things. In the past, that has always proved costly for America.
This lack of vigor shows itself in demographics. Very soon there will be far too few European workers to pay for the benefits of a much larger cohort of retirees, who will live longer and more expensively than any other retired generation in history. In an era of barely one child per married couple (with many couples not even marrying), we now have an Italy in which virtually no child has a brother or a sister. For the state, such families will mean fiscal bankruptcy; for rival ethnic groups, religions, and civilizations abroad, such numbers will telegraph fateful weakness.
There are still pockets of will and vitality. But having turned away from Jewish and Christian faith, a Europe based solely upon the Enlightenment cannot long survive. The Europe that is declining in population is a Europe more rational than Europe has ever been, more scientific, less religious, less pious, more mundane, wealthier, more consumerist, more universally close to living etsi Deus non daretur (as if God does not exist). A very large part of the “European crisis” is the crisis of the Enlightenment. On that ground, a civilization cannot be built, a civilization can only burn down to the last waxed threads of its wick.
For the beginning of culture is cult. Apart from the worship of God, human beings cannot in practice (whatever may be said in theory) transcend themselves — not, at least, in the large numbers needed to sustain a civilization. Unless human beings have a vision of something larger than their own natures, and beyond the bounds of their own natures, they cannot be pulled out of themselves; they cannot be inspired; and they will not aspire, in the way that Gothic steeples aspire. To be sure, there are secular ways to interpret the word “transcendence”: as some potential already within human beings to break their own records, to go beyond what has already been achieved in order to achieve new marks, and the like. But that is not the sort of transcendence on which civilizations are built. Real transcendence is from outside, a new form of life, a new human nature, an uplifting into participation in the divine. This transcendence is known to all religions, and is sensed by many artists. It is a new dimension of the human spirit, which does not spring from human potential, but is given from outside. It is experienced as an uplifting, a newness, a vision and a vitality not within one’s own powers to achieve or to deserve. It comes as a gift.
Only the type of transcendence that points to the divine inspires a civilization or a culture, properly so called. Ancient Chinese culture, worldly in its practical Confucian wisdom, aspired to harmony with the stars and the will of Heaven. As yeast lifts dough, so the great religions of the world have informed and inspired cultures. A merely secular culture instead reduces human beings to creatures of chance, deprives them of any end for which they were purposely created, and renders universal moral principles into pragmatic bargains or subjective personal preferences. While it often promotes highly moral living, a secular culture can give few reasons for such living except personal preference, and in ethical practice it frequently borrows a sensibility and even concepts formed by an earlier religious heritage. The social morals of a secular culture these days tend also to depend upon moral credits stored up in the past. Even such supposedly secular values as compassion, liberty, fraternity, and equality sprang first from Jewish and Christian moral commitments, as even Richard Rorty notices — not from Greece or Rome or any purely philosophical source.
It might seem, then, that secular cultures are solely parasitic upon earlier religious cultures. But they sometimes play a creative role in putting questions to religious concepts that result in the deepening, revision, or withdrawal of earlier versions. For instance, the struggle for religious toleration in Virginia (1776–1791) led to a deeper comprehension of the grounds, in large part religious, of liberty of conscience. (If a rational creature owes a self-evident duty of worship to his Creator, no state, civil society, or individual may alienate him from that duty; and the Jewish-Christian God, to whom that inalienable duty is owed, wishes to be worshiped in spirit and truth, by a free conscience.) Thus, in America, even natural right had a historical religious content. The thinking of Judaism and Christianity has benefited greatly from this and other challenges by secular thinkers, just as the latter have borrowed much from the former. The contestation between believer and unbeliever has been very fruitful for Western civilization as a whole.
When, in 1948, Europe wished to preserve itself from absorption into the Communist bloc, it turned to the Christian political parties. Later, it turned to the religious leadership of nonviolent labor unions such as Solidarity, and to church human-rights activists, in order to find a bloodless, democratic path. Apart from the extraordinary skills and the saintly charisma of John Paul the Great, it is not easy to explain how so much happened — so fast, and so peacefully — during the years 1978–1991. The Pope began his pontificate in the late autumn of 1978 by saying that the “twin branches” of Christian Europe would be reunited soon. Impossibly utopian, I remember thinking at the time.
One must conclude that Judaism and Christianity are still great powers slumbering in the soul of Europe. But secular Europe unaccountably does not want to draw upon them. We live in the age of the Grand Refusal: the age of Denial.
OLD FAITHS AND NEW THREATS
Islamic thought up until this time does not separate religion from politics, either analytically or in practice, exactly as Westerners do. Today, for example, we who are American, Italian, French, German, and so on do not think of ourselves as “Crusaders,” although a fair number of Muslims call us by that name. They know as well as we do how secular France is, for example, and their best writers often write of that, a few in admiration, others in disgust. That fact does not prevent them from lumping the French into the “Crusaders.”
In the view of some Muslims, the religion of Islam is not really distinguishable from the one, united, universal Islamic caliphate and its military vanguard. This singular Islam has been at war with “infidels,” they think, since its founding. This unitary Islam — politics, military, and religion all grasped as one single entity — has been at war with “Crusaders” ever since the latter found the nerve and the gall to resist, after about four centuries of fairly supine retreat, and then the effrontery to take back the Christian heartland, from Constantinople to Jerusalem to Alexandria.
Then, quite shocked, beginning about 1150, the Muslims, in return, began gathering their forces for another protracted assault to subdue Christian Europe once and for all. City by city, they took back the whole once-Christian Middle East. Probing westward, they failed at Malta in 1565, in one of history’s greatest sieges, and failed again at Lepanto in 1571 (Miguel Cervantes, a warrior in that naval battle, called it the greatest occasion of all history). Their overland advance through Hungary then made great strides until, just outside Vienna, they were prevented from cutting Northern Europe from Southern by the cavalry of Jan Sobieski, bearing at its forefront the painting of Our Lady of Czestochowa. The year was 1683, the date was September 11–September 12, a date of high symbolic value to Muslims, a date in September Americans too will long remember.
Europeans and Americans today do not think often of those battles of the Crusades, which seem so long ago and so irrelevant. Yet today the Muslim population of Europe is growing very rapidly, not only by immigration, but also by multiple births per family. Demographically, Muslim morale is very high. They are as it were investing with their bodies in the future, in a way Europeans are not. Already in various European states, there are important political districts in which Islamic constituencies predominate. In some cities, the number of new mosques is rising steadily, while the number of Christian churches actually in use continues to fall (partly from widespread lapses in religious practice). Some of the most ardent terrorists and political extremists among young Muslim radicals today are being raised in European cities, of second- or third-generation immigrants. Some Muslims in the past integrated themselves into European societies, mores, and political values. Many today, it appears, are making no effort to do so. On the contrary, they are resisting what some call the “moral decadence” of Western values, and some also resist the highest political principles of Western peoples.
Until recently, one of the expectations of Western democracies was that all immigrants would shortly embrace the core values, at least the political values, of their host countries. It is not yet clear what will happen to the functioning of democracies if sizable groups of immigrants do not wish to do so. A vulgar form of Euro-modern multiculturalism assumes that all cultures are equal in their moral and political preferences, as if underneath the skin, deep in their hearts, all peoples were universalist liberals. In a variety of circumstances, that is turning out not to be true: The long-term dangers of radical, alienated European Muslims feeding the leadership of worldwide terrorism are already being felt.
Europe needs to have a realistic understanding of the degree of benevolent competition, and long-term hostile threat, that it must expect from Muslim peoples, given the widespread lack of economic opportunity, and the fairly closed political outlets, of Middle Eastern societies during the past 50 years. One would think it in the high and urgent interest of Europe to set a new and different dynamic to work in that part of the world, which is so close to them. It is also necessary for Europeans to come to a clearer understanding of the intense hatred for and violent opposition to democracy of a small but intense faction of extremists who claim to be Islamists, for whom an adequate and accurate name seems to be Islamofascists. These are the factions led by the Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden and the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
LOSING THE FUTURE?
The resurgence of religious conviction in the Muslim world (often not at all fused with political radicalism, but imbued rather with a longing to live under a regime of rights and individual dignity) does bring into sharp relief the most acute weakness of European culture today: the desert it has made of religious conviction, once its richest source of vision, courage, and practical good sense. And this depletion of spiritual resources is not unconnected to the recent European habit of demonizing capitalism. European elites reserve a special hostility for Anglo-Saxon economic thought, especially the liberating ideas emanating from Austria by way of Friedrich von Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, with their emphasis on incentives, enterprise, risk, flexibility, and liberty. These ideas cut very sharply against Communist, statist, and social-democratic emphases on stasis, security, and privileges won, and against their intemperate denunciations of business, enterprise, corporations, and wealth-creation. Without going so far as to hold that losing money is chaste, the European Left even holds that making money, creating wealth, and reaping profits are all obscene. The economies of the Left rarely do make money, create wealth, or show profits. Their economic chastity is their own punishment.
Given the demographic crisis mentioned earlier, it will be essential for Europe in the near future to create much more new wealth than its economies have ever been required to create before, simply to pay benefits due to the large proportion of retirees (compared with workers) in their economies. Social-welfare economies were constructed on the basis of a proportion of about nine, or at least seven, workers to every retiree. In Europe, the actual proportion will all too soon approach three workers per retiree. To make matters worse, most retirees were originally expected to die not long after their 65th birthday, but now very large numbers of them are living past 85. They will require their pensions to be paid for many more years than the planners of the welfare state ever imagined. In addition, medical care for them has become far more sophisticated and vastly more expensive than anyone dreamed 50 years ago. In Europe, it really is time to stop the show of disdain for economies that work better than Europe’s, at least in creating new jobs for an ever-expanding workforce, and in steadily raising living standards for all.
Europe will find during the next 30 years that it desperately needs alliance with the United States, for many reasons. It is utterly clear to Americans that in the immense challenges looming ahead in the 21st century — from China and India, as well as the Middle East — we will desperately need an alliance with a strong and united Europe. That is why the prospect of a Europe beset with sickness of soul, and with illusions about its own spiritual health, worry us deeply. We very much need Europe to be successful — and soon.
Mr. Novak holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in religion and public policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he is director of social and political studies. This article is adapted from remarks he delivered in Venice, Italy, on November 18, 2005.
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