Le Divorce: America Leaves Europe To Its Fate?
And: Americans Turning On LGBT; Weight Loss At Magyar McDonalds; Winter's Beauty
A lawyer friend in Texas texted me to say he was at a gathering of sophisticated legal elites this week, and not one of them gave a flying fig about Europe, or anywhere outside of America. “We have too many problems here,” is how my friend characterized the responses. Like it or not, this is the way the world is today. This new world. Better not to have any illusions, I suppose.
Well, I don’t like it, and not because I have any faith in or affection for the Rules-Based International Order. No, I don’t like it, deep down, because I love history, I love Western culture, and I love my faith — and I know that I am living in Europe, on the edge of the annihilation of both the faith and the cultures it shaped, and that shaped it. I too hold in a kind of contempt the progressive Europeans who have thrown their faith and their inheritance into the sea, though it is also easier to forgive that when you immerse yourself in the history of this continent’s 20th century wars, especially the first one, and try to come to terms with the maiming of memory they accomplished.
It has seemed to me that Americans not caring what happens to Europe is like a grown son not caring what happens to his parent. Well, from this last visit to my elderly mom, in which I once again — well, I shouldn’t violate her privacy by saying more, but let’s just say that there is nothing more I can do to save her from the fate she has chosen. I returned to Europe with grief, but also with a sense of resignation: this is how it is, and this is how it’s going to be, and I’ve done my honorable part to help her. But I cannot and will not take any pleasure in this, just try to be both merciful and stoic, and keep praying. There’s really nothing left to be done.
Maybe Americans today feel about Europe they way I came home to Europe feeling about my mom. I don’t want to overegg that pudding; most Americans don’t care much about the world beyond our shores, and rarely ever have. It’s easy to do given our geographic isolation, and status as an economic and military colossus. Still, maybe there’s something in it. If they are determined to court their own ruin, fine, let them.
That is emphatically not my view, but I get it. What I don’t get is the haughty sense of screw-them triumphalism that some Americans have. They have no idea, no idea at all, what we’re all losing as Europe disintegrates — even if you accept the thesis that Europeans have done it to themselves.
Here’s a really good review, from the Catholic Herald in the UK, of the new translation of Jean Raspail’s controversial 1973 novel The Camp Of The Saints. It really is a key book to read to understand the edge of the world now ending, and the world coming into being. As I’ve said many times, it can be a hard go, especially in its racist depictions of the Other. But there are times when people who hold repugnant views can see reality more clearly than the more pure-hearted.
The reviewer, Thomas Colsy, is exactly right in this passage:
For believers grappling with the influx of millions into the European first world, often contributing little to the common good of host societies, Raspail’s work illuminates how a Christianity reduced to boundless empathy can lead to disaster and spiritual betrayal. It warns that mass migration, when met with unchecked sentiment, exposes fractures in a gospel misinterpreted as pure self-abnegation, turning the virtues of mercy and hospitality into instruments of self-destruction.
The Camp of the Saints is not a book one soon forgets. In its cynicism it occasionally verges close to blasphemy, and for that reason I initially hesitated even to recommend it. Its tone is conspicuously severe. I would not advise the faint-hearted, or those whose faith is not already strong, to read it. Yet for those willing to endure its chill, it performs a necessary and unrivalled service. It steels the consciences of Western Christians and Europeans who find themselves, in this existential moment, at genuine risk of cultural and demographic submersion. It fortifies resolve. Above all, it delivers a mental and emotional cleansing of extraordinary potency against the pervasive, autoimmune-deficient sentimentalisms of the 1960s “John Lennon Christianities” and the equally untenable secular humanitarianisms with which we have been relentlessly bombarded since childhood. For precisely this reason, despite its harshness, the book is excellent.
Besides which, it is something of a canard to describe Raspail as racist. Yes, he was hostile to mass migration into Europe — the novel, as you will recall, is about the time between a million-man throng of migrants setting sail from India for Europe, and their landing on the shores of southern France. But it’s primarily a novel about European decadence, not the migrants. Colsy points out:
An explorer who traversed remote corners of the globe, from the rivers of North America to the icy slopes of Patagonia, he dedicated much of his life to defending the rights of indigenous peoples threatened by modernity. As the translators of his magnum opus note in the new edition published by Vauban Books, had his career ended there he would be remembered favourably by the left and by humanists. But he later committed the unforgivable error of extending the same concern for survival to the peoples of Europe.
Decorated by the French state and its presidents, and esteemed by intellectuals on both left and right, Raspail was no fringe crank. He recognised the nobility and humanity of all peoples, having lived among Native Americans, about whom he wrote with admiration. Above all, having witnessed the heartbreaking decline and near-extinction of the Kawésqar in Chile, he recognised the fragility of cultures, including his own. In The Camp of the Saints, he channels this insight into a narrative that is prophetic and prescient, pushing the West’s post-colonial guilt and humanitarian impulses to their breaking point.
That’s precisely it: Raspail, who cared greatly about what modernity was doing to the cultures of non-Western peoples, committed the great sin of asking: What about us? Don’t we Europeans have the right to defend our own culture?
In the novel, the greater enemy to European culture is the European elites themselves, who, out of suicidal empathy, conclude that Europe must allow itself to be destroyed by invaders who care nothing about what they trample. There’s one character, an Indian migrant who is a naturalized Frenchman, who fights alongside the defenders:
Among them is Monsieur Hamadura, an Indian who harbours no illusions about the societal, behavioural and cultural ills of his ancestral homeland, which he warns will follow in their wake. He names arbitrary caste hierarchies, fatalistic resignation, kin-bound morality prioritising clan over common good, and, as the novel controversially asserts, poor hygiene. Hamadura genuinely loves the French and European society he has made his home.
The reviewer, writing in a Catholic newspaper, is quite right to zero in on the hostility Raspail, a Latin massgoing Catholic, had for the Church of his era (he wrote this book in the early 1970s). Colsy:
Some [Catholic] enthusiasts [in the novel] even blaspheme by calling the migrants’ arrival a “Second Coming”. Almost everyone senses something apocalyptic in it. Leftists interpret it as reckoning for imperial sins, enacted through masochistic, godless piety.
Here Raspail exposes the danger of a faith poorly understood. Catholicism has always taught that virtues are interdependent. Mercy tempers justice, but justice anchors mercy, which becomes lawless without it. GK Chesterton captured this in Orthodoxy, writing that “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.”
In Raspail’s hands, this madness manifests as a Church captive to post-conciliar excess, where clerics trade rigour and orthodoxy for feel-good altruism. Priests, mortified by their own patrimony, abandon the cassock and celibacy for secular activism. A fabricated pontiff from the global south auctions ecclesiastical riches to subsidise the tide, calling the migrants “poor unfortunates whom God has sent knocking at our doors”, only for the multitudes to smash the sacerdotal greeters to a pulp, including those bearing the Eucharist. The Pope, despite his virtue-signalling, is merely resented for having been rich in the first place, rather than welcomed as one of their own. He too meets a sorry end.
Such scenes sting because they are not a million miles from an all-too-real crisis: the cannibalism within the Catholic world after Vatican II and throughout the 1970s, during which Raspail appears to have temporarily lost his faith.
What is there left to defend? Well, I think of the 20,000 young Catholics I saw on pilgrimage to Chartres. They are a small number within secular France, but I had the strong feeling that if Europe is going to be saved, it will be through the faith, in action, of young people like that. A French friend around my age, a faithful Catholic grown weary of the times, told me over dinner, “That generation is going to save us.”
Maybe. My generation, and certainly the Boomers, and most Millennials, are in one sense too much creatures of the Old World to perceive what’s happening now, and to take action to defend what is left of Western civilization, and the faith on which it was built. Lately I’ve written about the alarm I have over Zoomers of the Right in the US who are embracing anti-Semitism and racism. But what if that same generational rejection of received “respectable” opinion goes in a different way, a more virtuous way? That is, what if that generation has clearer eyes than we older people do — and, turning to the faith to purify their hearts and strengthen their souls, can mount the resistance that we older people have failed to do?
I keep thinking about that young French woman in Paris, at the start of the pilgrimage, who told me something along the lines of: “Our parents gave us nothing” — meaning spiritually and culturally — “so we are looking for meaning, for purpose, for community, for God.” Let’s not be falsely optimistic. The great majority of Europeans of that generation are not returning to the faith. Similarly, as the political scientist Ryan Burge, who studies religious demographics, tells Ross Douthat in the new Interesting Times podcast, the overall data do not show that Gen Z is returning to church.
But the future is not determined. We are not prisoners of fate. St. Benedict, when he planted himself in a rocky cave in a cliffside north of Rome around the year 500, had no idea what God would do for Europe with his prayer and spiritual labors there. We just don’t know. But we do know this: we have to try, with real hope, not false optimism, and certainly not with suicidal empathy.
My sadness over this turn in America away from Europe is because I strongly believe that we are all in this together. If we Americans “lose” Europe, then our own pillars begin to crumble. That is one thing I have learned from living here. It’s not something you can pick up from just being a tourist. I had thought that the new turn in American life, towards some kind of renewal based on realism, would allow us to help the Europeans who share our vision, recover themselves in their own way. Seems that I was wrong. I like to think that a President JD Vance would handle things with far more finesse. But really, I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things.
And I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. I re-read Little Way not long ago, and the earnest naiveté of its author, not knowing that he had just piously bumbled into the trap that would destroy him, was hard to take. His heart was in the right place, the effing fool. All that was a useful lesson, for a writer, in tragedy (if I’m being generous) — or the ruinous capabilities of sentimental stupidity if I’m not.
