If you have not yet read George Weigel’s “The Cube and the Cathedral,” and are interested in various reasons for the moral and cultural decline in Europe, this book is worth the read. The publisher’s note reads in part:
Weigel traces the origins of “Europe’s problem” to the atheistic humanism of the nineteenth-century European intellectual life, which set in motion a historical process that produced two world wars, three totalitarian systems, the Gulag, Auschwitz, the Cold War-and, most ominously, the Continent’s de-population, which is worse today than during the Black Death. And yet, many Europeans still insist-most recently, during the debate over a new EU constitution-that only a public square shorn of religiously-informed moral argument is safe for human rights and democracy. Precisely the opposite, Weigel suggests, is true: the people of the “cathedral” can give a compelling account of their commitment to everyone’s freedom; the people of the “cube” cannot. Can there be any true “politics”-any true deliberation about the common good, and any robust defense of freedom-without God? George Weigel makes a powerful case that the answer is “No,” because, in the final analysis, societies are only as great as their spiritual aspirations.
In continuing on this them, Dr. Weigel writes about a resent meeting that was arranged in Vienna by Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, O.P., and attended by a group of Catholic intellectuals including Professor Rémi Brague. Professor Brague sees reclaiming Europe’s hope by proposing a metaphysical question of being-and-nothingness.
Picking up on a phrase I had used in The Cube and the Cathedral, that Europe is “dying from a false story,” Brague suggested a fascinating way of looking at the last two centuries of western history. The 19th century, he proposed, was focused on the question of good-and-evil: the “social question,” posed by the industrial revolution, the emergence of an urban working class, and the demise of traditional society, dominated the landscape. The 20th century, he argued, had been the century of the question of true-and-false: totalitarian ideologies, built on perverse misunderstandings of the human person, defined the contest for the human future that drove history from the aftermath of World War I until the Soviet crack-up in 1991.
And the 21st century? Ours, Professor Brague said, is the century of the question of being-and-nothingness — the century of the metaphysical question.
Which may sound extremely abstract, but is, in fact, very concrete. For if nothing is “given” in the human condition, then everything is up-for-grabs. If, to take a salient example on both sides of the Atlantic, maleness and femaleness are mere “social constructs,” then “marriage” can mean anything someone wants it to mean, including not only “gay marriage” but polygamy and polyandry — and to deny that is an act of irrational bigotry.
Europe lives in a type of cultural debonair nihilism. Birth rates have decreased as religiosity has waned. Most Europeans are oblivious to their plight it seems. They in fact resent the fact that deep religious convictions can and do inform American opinion in politics. This resentment is shared by the American left to large degree.
For those who propose removing God from the public square, Dr. Weigel’s study should be (although likely will not be) a wake up call.
