Tsar Alexander I: Father Of The West?
And: Broken Britain Breaks More; Fuentes As Symptom; Gay Marriage & Trans
In Warsaw this week, I asked a Pole which people the Poles hate more, the Germans or the Russians, having been mauled by both nations in the 20th century. “We hate them both,” she said, “but we hate the Russians more. The Germans were terrible, but the Russians were absolutely barbaric. They raped all the women, even children.” They also stayed a lot longer, she might have said.
Here’s a thought: could it be Russia that, in a real sense, made the West? That’s one conclusion raised in this superb review essay by the Russian-American historian Yuri Slezkine, of a new history about the meaning of “the West.” I can’t do it justice through selective quotes, so I hope you will read the whole thing. I went straightaway to Amazon and bought the Kindle version of the book under review, The West: A History Of An Idea, by Georgios Varouxakis (and please, withhold your criticism of me for using Amazon; if you were an English speaker living in Middle Europe, you would thank Jeff Bezos with all your heart that you can buy just about any English book in electronic form instantly).
Varouxakis’s argument is that historically speaking, there was no “West” until Russia defeated Napoleon in 1812. (Remember, his book isn’t a history of Western civilization, but rather one of the concept of “the West”.) It was only then, he posits, that Europeans began to think of themselves as a collection of nations that are of Christian heritage, but Not Russia. From Slezkine’s review:
Britain’s leading positivist, Richard Congreve, argued in 1866 that the European order based on the 1815 Treaty of Vienna had outlived its usefulness. “The elimination of Russia from the system is the first great rectification,” he wrote. “She is an Eastern, not a Western power,” insofar as she had not participated in the “intellectual cultivation of Greece,” the social life of the Roman Empire, “the Catholic-Feudal organisation of medieval Europe,” and the revolutionary convulsions of recent centuries.
By the end of the 19th century, Americans had taken up the idea that Russian might look Western on the outside, but it was, in fact, a force for “Orientalism” opposed to the West. (It should be said that at roughly the same time, there was a big debate among Russian intellectuals as to whether Russia was part of the West, as the Westernizing tsar Peter the Great believed, or a distinct and opposed civilization, as the so-called Slavophiles held; they considered the West to be, in Slezkine’s phrase, “artificial, superficial, and pragmatically commercial”.) Slezkine again:
By the end of the twentieth century the idea of “the West” as European civilization minus Russia plus British (and, arguably, Iberian) settler colonies had become well established. Most people agreed that it had grown out of classical antiquity and Latin Christianity, owed something to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and perhaps the Enlightenment, and stood for some version of liberalism.
Interestingly, and with more grounding than is comfortable to admit, the Soviets never considered themselves to be opposed to the West, but rather capitalism and imperialism. After all, Marxism was a Western invention, and the Soviets were proud of Russian literary and artistic achievements, which, to be honest, all of us in the West even today consider as part of our civilization. If you think Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are aliens to the West, I don’t know what to say to you.
Anyway, the West began to disintegrate when it turned on itself during the Great War. In fact, World War II was held by the Allies to be a defense of Western civilization against the barbarism of the Nazis. But if “Not Russia” was one of the ways the West defined itself, the other was a sense of its own decline, argues Varouxakis. For example (all quotes in this piece are from Slezkine’s review essay):
In Suicide of the West, published in 1964, James Burnham attributed the physical “contraction of the West” to a spiritual failing associated with “the decay of religion” and marveled at the “dazzling ingenuity” with which the “ideology of liberalism” managed to represent “defeat as victory, abandonment as loyalty, timidity as courage, withdrawal as advance.”
And then, after the collapse of the USSR, many Western intellectuals began asserting that Western values were in fact universal:
Many people disagreed: some assumed that Western values were universal but not Western (“natural” rights having become “human”), others that the West was unique but not liberal or that Western liberalism was uniquely predatory. German liberals, led by Jürgen Habermas and Heinrich August Winkler, congratulated Germany on being Western but not unique (attempts to chart a separate path known as a Sonderweg having led to Auschwitz). Huntington’s former student James Kurth argued that the West had abandoned Christianity and liberalism, adopted an eclectic mix of human rights, multiculturalism, expressive individualism, and popular culture, and turned into a global anticivilization waging war on all traditional cultures, especially its own. Michel Houellebecq described one possible outcome in his novel Submission: “Islam” means submission to God; “the West” means nothing in particular; the West’s future is submission to Islam.
But Slezkine himself says
[T]hirty-five years ago, when I was teaching two sections of Western civ every semester (not knowing I might be doing something unwholesome), the textbook I liked best was McNeill’s The Rise of the West, which defined civilization as—“probably”—the largest community united by “a shared literary canon and expectations about human behavior framed by that canon.” The advantage of this definition is that it introduces clear criteria; the problem is that “the West” no longer fits it.
It used to, of course. For about a thousand years, Western Christians shared a single sacred language, a supranational intellectual elite, and a stable Christian-cum-classical canon, thus clearly constituting a civilization comparable to the Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and other “transnational units” to which the term, as defined by McNeill and implied by Varouxakis, is usually applied. (None of the above applies to the Orthodox world, which had a core empire—first Byzantine, then Russian—but no unity as a civilization.)
That shared order began to break down in the sixteenth century. …
As I wrote here recently, what used to be called “Christendom” — European nations loosely united by their shared Christianity — ceased to think of itself as that once the Islamic menace, which had harried the Christian world since Islam’s burst with bellicosity onto the world scene in the 7th century, was at last defeated by Christian armies in the late 17th century Siege of Vienna. After that, ironically, it wasn’t shared faith — Catholic and Protestant — that defined European civilization, but the rise of nationalism. Plus, the Enlightenment was upon Europe, and Christianity went on the defensive.
There’s much more here, and I strongly encourage you to read Slezkine’s thoughtful essay. He concludes by saying that within the West today, nobody really talks about defending “Western civilization” (except, he notes. Ukraine and Israel, which are ethnonationalist democracies, both fighting existential wars against Others). The argument within the West (“the West”) is between Nationalists (e.g., Trump, Orban) and Universalists (most other European leaders). Slezkine writes:
In his speech at the Munich Security Conference in February, J.D. Vance asked the question Varouxakis’s subjects had been asking one another for almost two centuries:
I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from, and of course that’s important. But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me, and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe, is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?
Public pronouncements by European politicians suggest two answers. The first—the more urgent and deeply felt by far—is that defending “for” is the same as defending “from” because Russia is always a threat. The second is “values,” which the EU treaty equates with liberal democracy. Vance’s argument in Munich was that the outside threat had been overblown and liberal democracy given up in pursuit of new dogmas. His bigger point, which he spared his dazed listeners, was that the West stood for something much more fundamental than “values.”
Speaking at the Heritage Foundation a month and a half later, he called for a return to “some of the very founding ideas of the West, the Christian faith on which all Western nations were…really based.” He did not say what that might mean politically or institutionally, and it seems safe to assume that nothing along those lines is in the offing or even conceivable. His recommendation, which he attributed to Rod Dreher’s “prophetic” “manual for Christian dissidents,” was to “live not by lies.” In Dreher’s account, Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 appeal to captive Soviets was timely again because the West was under siege from a new “social justice” totalitarianism.
(In Warsaw this week, a Polish journalist who interviewed me said, “We were all so thrilled by your vice president’s Munich speech, because we are Christians and conservatives.”)
Slezkine’s conclusion: whatever “the West” is, it is a concept bounded by “the threat from Russia on the outside and the fear of decay on the inside.” Read the whole thing.
One of the great counterfactual thought experiments is whether or not Russia could have somehow been brought into “the West” in the period immediately following the Cold War. I think perhaps it might have happened, had Western nations been more strongly Christian, and aware of themselves as Christian. That, and had they perceived the need to develop and solidify a civilization in opposition to the rising one in China. But then, the accelerating internal decay of the West would have still been there.
One Polish journalist asked me why some American conservatives idealize Putin’s Russia. Don’t they know how decadent it is? he asked. How many divorces and abortions there are? How few Russians go to church? I hadn’t anticipated that question, but I told him the answer is probably that they admire that Putin is at least not ashamed to speak of Christianity (Orthodox, in his case) as at the core of Russian civilization, however weakened it may be there in reality, and that they — the US intellectuals of whom he speaks — idealize Putin’s Russia as a response to their own anxious despair over the decline of the post-Christian West.
In a couple of the many interviews I did in Poland, I had occasion to bring up Hungarian PM Orban’s oft-stated claim that Christianity is what made our civilization, and that it will not survive without returning to it. I agree with that, I told them.
On my last day, I spoke briefly to a Polish editor, whose reporter had just concluded an interview with me. The man asked me what the hell we can do to save Western civilization. It was emphatically clear from the tone of his voice and the look on his face that for him, this question is by no means theoretical. I told him I have the same concern, but aside from a mass return to Christianity, in a real, not merely ideational, way, I can’t see it happening. And will there be a mass reconversion? We have to work for it, but have realistic expectations. Anything could happen, and there are signs of revival here and there. But I am not optimistic, not at this point. Hopeful — God remains with us, no matter what, and even our losses can be redeemed if we offer them to Christ — but not optimistic.
Last night, I dined with a French journalist who had been several times to the Ukrainian front. We talked about whether or not Europe would be prepared for war. I pointed to a poll from a year or two ago showing that a shockingly small number of Europeans say they would fight for their own country if it were invaded. He was skeptical. Whatever they say now, you never know what people will really do in the event of war. The war correspondent said that in Ukraine, he met many middle-aged people — businessmen, lawyers, and so forth — who had volunteered to go to the front out of a sense of deep patriotism.
“These are not the kind of people who would normally be willing to take up arms, but they did,” he said.
I’m wondering now, as I write this: if the dread predictions of imminent European civil war come to pass, might Europeans start going to church again, feeling in their bones that their very civilization, or what’s left of it, is under existential threat by its first and greatest enemy, Islam?
Today’s newsletter continues below the paywall. You American readers will not believe the authoritarian measures the UK Labour government is taking now. There ought to be no doubt that the greatest threat to traditional English liberties is not faraway Russia, but right there in Westminster. More on this below…
