Snuffysmith
Nov 1 2006, 05:44 PM
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/774032.html w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m
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Last update - 13:11 13/10/2006
A right to wrong
By Evan R. Goldstein
The quality of thought that generally prevails in circles where the right of Jews to be politically self-determining is opposed rarely rises above the level of prejudice and innuendo.
But this enterprise was infused with a serious dose of intellectual gravitas a few years back when Tony Judt, celebrated historian and public intellectual par excellence, warmed to the cause. Writing in the influential New York Review of Books, Judt argued that we have moved beyond the parochial notion that the nation-state is the locus of political life. Harder words followed. He proceeded to declare the very idea of a Jewish state as hopelessly "rooted in another time and place." As Judt describes it, the transnational ethos of our age demands that Jews, once again, invest their trust in the collective humanity of civilization (and, more specifically, in the political competence and decency of Palestinians).
"In a world where nations and peoples increasingly intermingle and intermarry at will; where cultural and national impediments to communication have all but collapsed; where more and more of us have multiple elective identities and would feel falsely constrained if we had to answer to just one of them; in such a world Israel is truly an anachronism. And not just an anachronism but a dysfunctional one."
The Jews, it seems, were late to the party. But not just late, irremediably late. Judt warned his readers that, "the time has come to think the unthinkable." He sermonized that the troubles between Israelis and Palestinians had but one prudent remedy: binationalism.
In a surprise to no one, least of all Judt himself, this exercise in unthinkable thinking touched off a maelstrom of controversy. He was rapidly excised from his perch on the masthead of The New Republic. The conservative pundit David Frum charged Judt with "genocidal liberalism." A "pro-Israel" media watchdog group accused him of "pandering to genocide." But everything was not critical. Writing in The Nation, the leftist critic Daniel Lazare breathlessly rejoiced that "a long-standing taboo has finally begun to fall."
All of which brings me to page three of the October 9 edition of The Washington Post, which carried an article with the following, cringe-inducing, opening paragraph: "Two major American Jewish organizations helped block a prominent New York University historian from speaking at the Polish consulate [in New York] last week, saying the academic was too critical of Israel and American Jewry."
The organizations in question are the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Congress. The academic: Tony Judt. The event, titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," was organized by an independent nonprofit group that routinely rents space from the Polish consulate in Manhattan. This is a critical distinction. The gathering was not organized nor sanctioned by the government of Poland.
The ADL denies exerting pressure or issuing threats. Other accounts vary. (The Polish consul general diplomatically claims that the calls were "very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure.") However delicate the pressure, Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, was evidently satisfied enough by the cancellation to remark: "I think they [the Polish consulate] made the right decision. He [Judt] has taken the position that Israel shouldn't exist. That puts him on our radar."
I am not sure what it means to be on Abe Foxman's radar (nor would I like to find out), but the idea that Tony Judt being denied an audience and a microphone is a positive outcome to this dispute is outrageously stupid and counterproductive. Not only has our public discourse been cheapened, but those that seek to shut Judt up will succeed only in turning him into a free-speech martyr. He should not be silenced, he should be engaged, he should be challenged.
Somewhere in his writings Leo Strauss remarks that the moment "man abandons the task of raising the question regarding what is right - he abandons his humanity." Questioning, free debate, and diversity of thought are the cornerstones of a decent society. And at least since Spinoza, Jews have benefited from consistent and uncompromising criticism. We - Jews, Israelis, Americans, liberals - must be guarded in defense of these principles.
However pretentious, outrageous, and morally bankrupt Judt's views on Israel are, I do not doubt his sincerity, nor do I question his motives. Dissent is not necessarily disloyalty, and anti-Zionism is not necessarily anti-Semitism. Tony Judt has a right to wrong.
Evan R. Goldstein is a writer in Washington, D.C. and a contributing editor at Moment magazine.
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Snuffysmith
Nov 1 2006, 05:55 PM
The GCC and the Management of Policy Consequences
Remarks to the 15th Annual US-Arab Policymakers Conference
Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., USFS (Ret.)
October 31, 2006
Washington, DC
It is an honor once again to make the concluding remarks at the annual US-Arab Policymakers Conference. I do so, of course, as an individual and as an American concerned with the implications of events in the Gulf region, not on behalf of any organization or group with which I am affiliated. Speaking only for oneself enables one to call it like it is. I shall.
The Gulf Cooperation Council began in a time of crisis 25 years ago. Since then the GCC has passed through many stressful strategic environments. It was, after all, formed to cope with the challenges that caused Americans first to declare the Gulf a region of vital interest to the United States - the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war. The GCC was also, of course, created to provide a means of dealing with the sudden rise in US interest and military activity in the Gulf in the wake of these events, the oil boom, and the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel.
The GCC functioned as a coherent alliance during the US-led war to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation that followed the end of the Iran-Iraq war. Its members separately provided essential staging areas and support bases for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq a dozen years later. Some have since deepened their reliance on the United States, while others have hedged their previous dependency.
Now the GCC member states may be facing their greatest challenge: the changes brought about by the progressive collapse of American policies in the region, including US efforts to transform Iraq, to block Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, and to achieve security for Israel by persuading it to respect the right of Palestinians to democratic self-determination in a secure homeland.
The US military have developed the useful concept of "consequence management." The idea is to set aside for later study the questions of why and how widespread devastation followed the use of weapons of mass destruction or a large-scale natural disaster, and instead to acknowledge the damage while focusing on actions to mitigate it and prevent it from worsening. It is time to apply consequence management to the mounting wreckage of our policies in the Middle East.
Only true believers in the neo-conservative dream can now fail to recognize that it has wrought a deepening nightmare in Iraq. The shattered Iraqi state has been succeeded (outside Kurdish areas) by near-universal resistance to the foreign occupation that supplanted it. The aggravation of secular and ethnic divisions by ill-conceived constitutional bargaining and elections has created a new political culture in Iraq in which theocratic feudalism, militia-building, and terrorist violence are the principal modes of self-expression.
The attempt to cure the resulting anarchy by building a strong army and police force for the Iraqi central government misses the point. The Baghdad government is itself a key participant in all of the pathologies of contemporary Iraq. In practice, it is more a vengeful tyranny of the majority in a temporary marriage of convenience with Kurdish separatists than a government of all the people. It is hard to disprove the thesis that it seeks a monopoly on the use of force only to consolidate either a Shiite version of Saddam's dictatorship or an Iraqi version of the Iranian theocracy. The sad fact is that, to many Iraqis, these outcomes now seem to offer the most realistic hope for renewed domestic tranquility in their country.
All but a small minority of Iraqi Arabs now reject the legitimacy of any continuing US military presence on Iraqi soil. On the one hand, the occupation has become the indispensable prop of the current order in Iraq, such as it is; on the other, the prolongation of the occupation is the main reason Iraqis wage an insurgent war against that order. The occupation thus supplies its own opposition; its continuation feeds the violence that makes its eventual curtailment inevitable.
The unpopularity of the occupation continues to provide a rewarding opening for outside agitators. Al Qa`ida now openly acknowledges a major stake in the US staying in Iraq for as long as possible. Our military presence is not just a potent motivator of anti-Americanism and a source of volunteers for terrorism, it has put us in the position of providing instructors to "Jihad U," the graduate school we have inadvertently created in Iraq for terrorists with global reach - an advanced curriculum, where failure is punished by death at our hands, but course completion is rewarded by a chance to take part in future terrorist operations in Europe, Asia, and North America. The costs of the occupation must be measured in much more than the hundreds of billions of dollars we continue to spend on it.
No one can predict how US forces will withdraw from Iraq, but no one now doubts that their departure is only a matter of time. While some wish to soldier on, few see any prospect that the United States will leave behind an Iraq at peace with itself, a united Iraq capable of playing a constructive role in regional affairs, or a strong Iraq willing and able to balance Iran as it once did. The United States invaded Iraq against the counsel of our allies and friends, drunk with our own self-importance, convinced by our own delusions, apparently invincible in our ignorance, and utterly unprepared for the quasi-colonial mission we assumed. Contemporary Iraq is a monument to American martial prowess and civil ineptitude.
It now seems likely our withdrawal will be undertaken for domestic American political reasons, again without much attention to Iraqi and regional realities. But withdrawal risks escalating the conflict inside Iraq, infecting other parts of the region with Iraq's sectarian strife, and providing an early graduation ceremony for terrorists bent on applying elsewhere what they have learned in Iraq. Unless diplomacy has first crafted a regional context that limits the damage, a politically-dictated withdrawal will crown our incompetence with disgrace and devaluation as a security partner. What kind of country is it that invades another, trashes it, sets it on fire, and then walks away to let inhabitants and neighbors alike die in the flames or perish of smoke inhalation? Who will wish to associate themselves with such a country, still less entrust their security to cooperation with it?
We did not consult the GCC countries or others in the region about the strategy or tactics of our invasion of Iraq. We would do well to seek their advice, counsel, and support - and they would do well to insist on our consulting them - as we make our next moves, whether these are within Iraq or away from it. Techniques of asymmetric warfare pioneered in Iraq now find their way within weeks to Afghanistan and elsewhere. The targeting of GCC rulers and oil and gas facilities by terrorists with connections to the mayhem in Iraq underscores our common interest in countering spillover from the jihadi intervention in that country. Similarly, the well-founded concern that areas in the Gulf with mixed Sunna and Sh`ia populations might suffer contagion from the religious struggles in Iraq emphasizes the imperative of containing them.
These are closely connected and clearly anticipatable problems that affect many countries in the region. They must not be left to be addressed ad hoc and at the last minute.
Then, there are the problems presented by Iranian ambitions, not just for nuclear weaponry but for preponderant influence in the Gulf. These go well beyond the issues of whether bombing Iran would not provoke it to attempt regime change in the countries from whose bases the attack had been launched, or simply confirm it and others in their judgment that the only effective protection against preemptive attack by the United States is the possession of a nuclear deterrent.
Assuming, as we must, in light of the results similar US policies toward north Korea have produced, that Iran will eventually acquire a nuclear deterrent, how do the GCC countries plan to deal with Iran as a nuclear power? Will each respond separately or will the response be collective? Will there be piecemeal appeasement or defiant reaffirmations of sovereign independence? If a nuclear umbrella or deterrent to the nuclear threat from Iran is deemed necessary, will this be collectively managed or will each country seek its own protection? In either context, what role, if any, do the Gulf Arabs desire for the United States or other nuclear powers? Is the role they envisage for us one that Americans can or will undertake?
Then, too, having destroyed Iraq's utility in balancing Iran, we and the GCC have yet to concert a strategy for a new and sustainable balance of power. Such a balance cannot be sustained if, as was the case in Saudi Arabia, the American military presence becomes not an asset to national security but its principal liability, thanks to the provocation it offers to political extremists. How do we propose to manage the contradiction between our desire to assure the stability of the Gulf and the fact that our presence in it is inherently destabilizing? If we are to avoid a strategic debacle, we cannot leave Iraq without agreeing on answers to these questions with our Gulf Arab partners.
Iran is emerging as yet another proof that diplomacy-free foreign policy does not work. Neither do lack of planning or the refusal to talk to interested allies and adversaries. It's not hard to anticipate the questions that will arise from the probable future course of events in Iran itself and in Iranian relationships with Iraq and other countries in the region. These too must not be left to tactical responses, improvised on the spot in the absence of strategy, sprung with no warning upon those whose cooperation or forbearance is essential to enable them to succeed.
Finally, let me allude briefly to the issue of Israel, a country that has yet to be accepted as part of the Middle East and whose inability to find peace with the Palestinians and other Arabs is the driving factor in the region's radicalization and anti-Americanism.
The talented European settlers who formed the state of Israel endowed it with substantial intellectual and technological superiority over any other society in the Middle East. The dynamism of Israel's immigrant culture and the generous help of the Jewish Diaspora rapidly gave Israel a standard of living equivalent to that of European countries. For fifty years Israel has enjoyed military superiority in its region. Demonstrably, Israel excels at war; sadly, it has shown no talent for peace.
For almost forty years, Israel has had land beyond its previously established borders to trade for peace. It has been unable to make this exchange except when a deal was crafted for it by the United States, imposed on it by American pressure, and sustained at American taxpayer expense. For the past half decade Israel has enjoyed carte blanche from the United States to experiment with any policy it favored to stabilize its relations with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors, including most recently its efforts to bomb Lebanon into peaceful coexistence with it and to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle.
The suspension of the independent exercise of American judgment about what best serves our interests as well as those of Israelis and Arabs has caused the Arabs to lose confidence in the United States as a peace partner. To their credit, they have therefore stepped forward with their own plan for a comprehensive peace. By sad contrast, the American decision to let Israel call the shots in the Middle East has revealed how frightened Israelis now are of their Arab neighbors and how reluctant this fear has made them to risk respectful coexistence with the other peoples of their region. The results of the experiment are in: left to its own devices, the Israeli establishment will make decisions that harm Israelis, threaten all associated with them, and enrage those who are not.
Tragically, despite all the advantages and opportunities Israel has had over the fifty-nine years of its existence, it has failed to achieve concord and reconciliation with anyone in its region, still less to gain their admiration or affection. Instead, with each decade, Israel's behavior has deviated farther from the humane ideals of its founders and the high ethical standards of the religion that most of its inhabitants profess. Israel and the Palestinians, in particular, are caught up in an endless cycle of reprisal and retaliation that guarantees the perpetuation of conflict in which levels of mutual atrocities continue to escalate. As a result, each generation of Israelis and Palestinians has accumulated new reasons to loathe the behavior of the other, and each generation of Arabs has detested Israel with more passion than its predecessor. This is not how peace is made. Here, too, a break with the past and a change in course are clearly in order.
The framework proposed by Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah at Beirut in 2002 offers Israel an opportunity to accomplish both. It has the support of all Arab governments. It would exchange Arab acceptance of Israel and a secure place for the Jewish state in the region for Israeli recognition of Palestinians as human beings with equal weight in the eyes of God, entitled to the same rights of democratic self-determination and domestic tranquility within secure borders that Israelis wish to enjoy. The proposal proceeds from self-interest. It recognizes how much the Arabs would gain from normal relations with Israel if the necessary conditions for mutual respect and reconciliation could be created.
Despite the fact that such a peace is so obviously also in Israel's vital and moral interests, history and the Israeli response to date both strongly suggest that without some tough love from Americans, including especially Israel's American coreligionists, Israel will not risk the uncertainties of peace. Instead, it will persist in the belief, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that it can gain safety through the officially sanctioned assassination of potential opponents, the terrorization of Arab civilians, and the cluster bombing of neighbors rather than negotiation with them. These policies have not worked; they will not work. But unless they are changed, the Arab peace plan will exceed its shelf life, and Arabs will revert to their previous views that Israel is an ethnomaniacal society with which it is impossible for others to coexist and that peace can be achieved only by Israel's eventual annihilation, much as the Crusader kingdoms that once occupied Palestine were eventually destroyed.
Americans need to be clear about the consequences of continuing our current counterproductive approaches to security in the Middle East. We have paid heavily and often in treasure in the past for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel's approach to managing its relations with the Arabs. Five years ago we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home. We are now paying with the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines on battlefields in several regions of the realm of Islam, with more said by our government's neoconservative mentors to be in prospect. Our policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are adding to the threats to our security and well-being, not reducing them. They have added and are adding to our difficulties and those of allies and partners, including Israel. They are not advancing the resolution of these problems or making anyone more secure. They degrade our moral standing and diminish our value as an ally. They delight our enemies and dismay our friends.
In the interest of all, it is therefore time for a change of course. But, as Seneca remarked almost 2,000 years ago, "if a man does not know to what port he is steering, no wind is favorable." It is past time that we agreed on our destination and devised a strategy for reaching it. As events belatedly force us to come up with a workable approach to consequence management and lay a course to take us beyond it, Americans will need the advice of our partners in the GCC and others in the region.
If we pay no attention to the opinions and interests of these partners, we should not be surprised to discover that we have forfeited their friendship and cooperation. Without both, we cannot hope to manage and overcome the consequences of the series of policy disasters we have contrived or to devise new and effective policies. And we here, like our friends in the region and elsewhere, will all pay again for this failure, and pay heavily. We must not allow that to come to pass.
Snuffysmith
Nov 3 2006, 11:02 AM
Forum readers may find the article below of interest. This is the 2006 Walt Wriston lecture given by George Weigel. It follows a complex analytic path to what has established itself as the default position among many cultivated American conservatives: that the once-great civilization of Europe is -- in a word -- kaput. Like the 'jihadists' (meaning Muslims) whose shadow looms so large for them, they revisit the great dates of history, Poitiers in 732, the reconquista of 1492, Lepanto in 1571 and Vienna in 1683 and fear that these were not final victories, just skirmishes in an everlasting battle between Christianity and Islam that must be joined again today from the New World.
forum members with a penchant for Weltschmerz may have their own thoughts on this topic.
Subject: WEIGEL ON EUROPE
Wriston Lecture
October 24, 2006
Europe and America: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow
George Weigel
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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).
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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.