Weigel on the “Europe Problem”

George Weigel has a characteristically clear-headed and insightful analysis of the “Europe problem” in the February issue of First Things. Weigel uses Robert Kagan’s Paradise and Power as a jumping off point, but claims that he does not press the argument deep enough, especially into cultural and religious issues. He asks a number of questions that point to a widespread European malaise: the tepid condemnation of communism following the collapse of the Soviet bloc; the increasing bureaucratization of European life and politics; the inability of European governments to make hard decisions about domestic policy; the avoidance of politics, especially on an international scale; the hostility to religion; and the demographic suicide on which Europe is embarked.

Weigel points to analysis of these pathologies from Slavic thinkers, who have recognized that these political and social questions have religious roots, but he depends largely for his discussion on de Lubac’s treatment of “atheistic humanism.” As he says, “the roots of the ‘European problem’ that thoughtful Europeans and many Americans experience today go back to the nineteenth century, to the drama of atheistic humanism and the related triumph of secularization in Western Europe. For that process of secularization had profound public consequences: it meant the collapse of a transcendent horizon of moral judgment in European public life and the triumph of what [Pierre] Manent calls the ‘self-adoration’ and ‘fateful hubris’ that led to the Great War and its progeny.” Again, “European man has convinced himself that in order to be modern and free, he must be radically secular. That conviction has crucial, indeed lethal, consequences for European public life and European culture; indeed, that conviction and its public consequences are at the root of Europe’s contemporary crisis of civilizational morale. That crisis of civilizational morale, in turn, helps explain why European man is deliberately forgetting his history. That crisis of civilizational morale helps us understand why European man is abandoning the hard work and high adventure of democratic politics, seeming to prefer the false domestic security of bureaucracy and the false international security of the UN system. That crisis of civilizational morale is why European man is failing to create the human future of Europe.”