In 2005, I published a small book entitled The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God.It had a fair sale in the U.S. and was translated into French, Spanish, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, and Hungarian. British historian Niall Ferguson got one key part of my argument right by describing the book as “an elegy for a vulnerable culture that is being effaced by a vacuous secularism.”
Europe, I suggested, was hollowing itself out, befogged in a post-biblical, world-weary ennui that was expressed in the continent’s self-induced demographic winter and its political subservience to a gargantuan bureaucracy in Brussels. The former center of world historical initiative was becoming something of a spiritual no man’s land where elite nihilism was having grave effects on Europe’s willingness to defend itself — or to imagine itself worth defending.
It was not all bad news. I hoped that the new democracies of central and eastern Europe, auto-liberated in 1989 from the unwanted embrace of the Soviet Union, would breathe new spiritual and political life into the European project. That new vitality, I thought, might strengthen an expanded NATO (which the new democracies were eager to join, for reasons underscored when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022). And the accession of countries like Poland, Lithuania, and Slovakia to the European Union might, I thought, remind the 21st-century EU of its Catholic roots.
For the European Union we know today began as the brainchild of three great Catholic statesmen, intellectually formed by mid-20th century Catholic social doctrine: Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman of France, and Italy’s Alcide De Gasperi. A key tenet of that social doctrine was the anti-totalitarian, indeed anti-statist, principle of “subsidiarity.” Reclaimed, that principle might help rescue the European project from the dangers of a vast over-bureaucratization symbolized by EU regulations on the acceptable circumference of tomatoes (to take one absurd example).
Or so I hoped in 2005.
Thanks to Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, and his manifest determination to claw back into the Russian orbit countries that have no desire to live under Muscovite suzerainty, there has been a welcome, if still insufficient, stiffening of European spines, politically and militarily. Yet wokery — an ersatz religion filling the spiritual void left by the demise of Christian conviction — continues to warp European high culture and erode European civil liberties. And a vast immigration from North Africa and the Middle East has created immense social problems that feckless politicians seem incapable of addressing.
Little good, however, is going to be achieved by the vice president of the United States heaping scorn on Europe, echoed by the U.S. Secretary of Defense declaring Europe “PATHETIC” (his caps, not mine). Old allies may respond to thoughtful challenge; they are not impressed by temper tantrums.
In The Cube and the Cathedral, I suggested three reasons why Americans cannot write Europe off. Those reasons remain valid today.
The first touches on the Roman virtue of pietas: the respect owed those on whose shoulders we stand. As I wrote, “Americans learned about the dignity of the human person, about limited and constitutional government, about the principle of consent, and about the transcendent standards of justice to which the state is accountable…[from] Europe.” To contemptuously dismiss Europe in a spasm of pique is not just an exercise in ingratitude; it is a self-mutilating rejection of our civilizational roots.
The second involves national security. A Europe dominated by a vengeful, imperialistic, autocratic Russia or a Europe under Chinese economic hegemony is not going to make America great; quite the contrary. Nor is a Europe drawn into the orbit of radical Islam by powerful demographic undertows. 9/11 was hatched in no small part in Europe by jihadis who had moved there. To such minds, the Great Satan remains the Great Satan, and Europe would be a convenient base from which to wreak havoc in the United States again.
The third reason why we should care was articulated by the great English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, who, in a 1960 essay on Europe, wrote that “a secular society that has no end beyond its own satisfaction is a monstrosity — a cancerous growth that will ultimately destroy itself.” Common efforts to treat the nihilist malignancy that threatens democracy on both sides of the Atlantic can help rebuild the cultural foundations of freedom here and in Europe.
American public officials are more likely to be heard if they call on our parent civilization to reclaim the nobility that defeated fascism, Nazism, and communism: a defense of human dignity in which Americans and Europeans contested for the future shoulder to shoulder. As we still can. As we still must.
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