Crumbling?
I'd like to quote something that my wife Angelee read to me last night from a book of essays by Joseph Pearce (a Catholic convert - British born but now living in the US apparently). This particular essay is primarily talking about the Chesterton poem "Lepanto", but the introductory remarks struck me as a possibly interesting starting point for some kind of discussion in this forum. I will say at the start that I really have no opinion about what Pearce says here -- whether he is being wildly presumptuous or making a valid point. I simply don't have enough information (partly from being an American, I'm sure) to decide whether it is valid. But it does pose an interesting point to consider, right or wrong, and it occurred to me that a place called Europeforum might be the ideal (though potentially aggressive:-) place to present it for discussion. I expect many here might disagree with it (though I don't know that for certain either), but I would be interested to hear any comments any here might have on it. What do you think? Emerging from the Wasteland (The Cultural Reaction to the Desert of Modernity) by Joseph Pearce Much of what could be called "Old Europe" was killed off by the First World War. I am aware that, to a degree, this is an oversimplification. If Hilare Belloc's assertion that "Europe is the Faith, and the Faith is Europe" is to be taken seriously, and I think that it should be, much of Old Europe was killed off with the Reformation four hundred years earlier. (Incidentally, Belloc was not suggesting in this statement that the Faith was only European -- indeed, he publicly and stringently denied that he had meant this when someone suggested that this had been his meaning. He meant that Europe, properly understood, was only the Faith -- in the sense that the concept of Europe was bound up with the concept of Christendom. Take away Christendom as a unifying principle and the whole ediface of Europe begins to crumble.) If this is so, and as I have said, I believe that it is, Europe has been crumbling since the heresies of Luther and Calvin undermined its unifying principle. This is the theme of Chesterton's epic poem, "Lepanto", written in 1912, two years before the start of the First World War. Europe in the sixteenth century is being overwhelmed by Protestant heresy and undermined by late-Renaissance decadence. This poison from within is being exacerbated by the Muslim threat from without. A weakened Europe is in danger of being overthrown by a resurgent Islam. (The more things change, the more they remain the same!) ... ... Again, as I said above, I don't really know what to think about it -- I'm simply not knowledgeable enough to say. But I'd like to hear opinions. --Stanley

This guy doesn't like Protestants much, does he?

Interesting (leaving aside the anti-Protestant polemic - I'd be more worried about post-modernity if I were him ;)).Christendom is of course no longer the unifying principle of Europe. The one unifying principle I do see is democracy, in slightly varying forms. In one sense, Europe is unified as never before - the EU, the currency, etc. But demographically it's much less homogeneous than it has ever been, and the great challenge for the European countries, it seems to me, is integrating the various religious and ethnic groups into their democracies in a way that preserves both the groups' culture/religion and allows all to live peacefully together (as we've done fairly successfully in the US). (The more things change, the more they remain the same!) Well exactly. I don't think that Europe is 'crumbling' (what does he mean by that, anyway?) It's transforming, in much the same way that the English language transforms when it encounters new words and ideas and incorporates them. Some of that transformation is to be lamented (I know I often do!) but some is not. The US is transforming in a similar way: A report in August 2008 from the U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2042 non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up the majority of the population. This is a revision of earlier projections that this would occur in 2050. Today, non-Hispanic whites make up about 68% of the population. This is expected to fall to 46% in 2050. The report foresees the Hispanic population rising from 15% today to 30% by 2050. Today, African Americans make up 12% of the population, in 2050 they are projected to comprise 15%. Asian Americans make up 5% of the population and are expected to make up 9% in 2050. The U.S. has nearly 305 million people today, and is projected to reach 400 million by 2039 and 439 million in 2050. Most Hispanics are Catholic, so that should make Pearce happy. ;) Anyway, I'm interested to read what some Europeans think.

I'd never heard about this Joseph Pearce fellow, but the Wiki suggests he's quite a character. I can't say the quoted passage made much sense to me. Maybe if I'm supposed to read between the lines that the 'enemy within' that replaced Protestantism these days is liberal democracy and the open society? Or maybe, more strictly, social/political liberalism? If so, I'm not sure it's too congenial a reading of Chesterton - though I freely admit I'm not overly well-read on him myself, I know him mostly second hand. Most immediately, I was reminded of George Orwell's comments on him in his 1945 essay Notes on nationalism (which is, incidentally, very readable and largely relevant today IMO): Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine — had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved. I haven't read Chesterton broadly enough to say with certainty whether those comments are quite fair, but I just read Lepanto online and I'd say Orwell had a bit of a point about that at least. Of course, other readings are possible. In my opinion Western society - which is, as Karen says, more or less defined by liberal democracy - is indeed under dangerous attack from within, much more serious and pervasive than any external threats. I'd say that threat is largely from above, from leaders and governments prepared to encroach upon civil liberties to strengthen their own power. I doubt this is what Pearce was thinking of, however.

I agree with both Karen's and Theo's comments. However, the most interesting phrase that jumps at me from the OP is 'Desert of Modernity'. It all sounds like nostalgic reactionism to me. And when exactly was this spurious golden age of European 'unity' anyway? Anyone with even the most basic knowledge of European history (cough :oops: ) knows that Europeans have always squabbled, fought and even tried to annihilate each other, both before and after the Reformation. I cannot think of a single era in which Europe was truly united, even (or especially) under the Catholic church. I think the kindest thing one could say about the OP quote is it's wishful thinking.

Well phrased Juju. I don't understand the word 'crumbling'. What is crumbling exactly? I know people talk about a United Europe, but even the United States of America isn't that United at times, let alone Europe. A lot of nation states on the European continent have signed various treaties to work ever closer together, share a currency, etc etc., and some people see that as a road towards a United Europe, although I sometimes doubt they themselves know whatever they mean by that. But I must admit it beats sending out the armoured columns big time. We make far more money not fighting in general and it's a lot less grievous and messy. But the system itself is far from ideal and needs a lot of work. It's not as democratic as we'd like and far too bureaucratic at times.

Ha, if the Romans were to be considered a United europe, we'd have a funny Europe right now. Including North African coastline, large parts of the Middle East and none of the landmass north of the Rhine river. Nor the Scots. :) And the Roman Empire was hardly homogeneous irrc.

Perhaps I'm veering off a bit, but I guess I'm sort of interested in what exactly (or even vaguely, I suppose :D ) the "idea" of "Europe" is. I can remember in grade school, thinking strictly in geographical terms and wondering about how arbitrary it all seemed. Of course on the western side there is the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea to form a border -- although the UK seemed tenuous in this sense. But on the eastern side it seemed pretty geographically arbitrary (Scandanavian contries being tenuus in this case), and yet there seemed --at that time at least -- to be clearly defined political boundaries of what was called "Europe". But of course I think Pearce is talking more about a cultural or social or religious (or mix of all three) concept of the "idea" of Europe. Is there something besides pure EU law or simple geographical proximity that makes one want to lump France and Spain and England and Germany and Italy and Greece and all the other bits and pieces together? And is it something one proudly thinks it is pleasing to be a part of. Is it becoming more of a concrete distinction or more of an abstract distinction? (I can imagine good and bad aspects of both directions, so I'm not thinking of concrete/abstract as a value judgment, only a wonderment) I suppose one could ask similar questions about the "idea" of the US and its states. It's a big complicated question that has evolved over time of course, but I think whatever the answer was, it would seem substantially different from the equally likely big and complicated and evolving answer about the idea of Europe. I'm thinking (and only shallowly and recently) that the "idea" of Europe, at least originally, may in fact be, as Pearce suggests, related to Christianity, and to Catholicism in particular (though of course before 1000 AD, the distinction would have been minimal -- that "forming" idea certainly seems less influential today, so the idea of Europe may be increasingly abstract and "legal"). And that seems to me in contrast with, say, the more "rebellious" origins of the US as something wanting independence and separation both from "Europe" and, to a degree, even internally within its own "parts" (ie, states -- although again this evolved radically too in connection with the Civil War). The "idea" of the US as a collection of states lumped together and the reasons for lumping them together has a different feel to me, than for what (little) I know of the reasons for lumping the countries of Europe together as an idea. And as I think about it, the split between East and West in terms of the Orthodox and RC is another distinction that "separates" the idea of Europe from its neighbors to the east, possibly reinforcing Pearce's contention of the RC "foundation" of the idea of Europe. (but I'm not sure of any of this) Well, at this point, I'm way beyond my comfort level of opinion about such matters, but I'm curious to hear what others think constitutes the "idea" of Europe, if it is anything more than simply geographical or arbitrary political boundary collections. (and even whether such an "idea" matters much anymore -- ie, does it matter whether the "idea" of Europe is crumbling? For that is what I think Pearce is talking about -- not whether or how strong the "EU structure" is, economically or politically) --Stanley