Chapter 6: European Decadence, American Barbarism
The 20th century dawned to the slogan “God is dead.” It ended with the discovery that God had merely moved. The 20th century was not the twilight of the Gods, but the twilight of Europe. Europe had merely confused its own decadence and loss of moral absolutes with the abolition of all moral absolutes. That was understandable. The end of the 20th century had coincided with the collapse of the center of the world, a center that had reigned, not peacefully but continually, for half a millennium. Everything that European man believed to be true and beautiful was shattered in the 20thcentury. But the end of the century did not mean the end of everything. It meant only the end of one civilization and the emergence of another.
Europe exhausted itself in the wars of the 20th century. Paralleling thosewars were the great intellectual movements of the century, Marxism and existentialism. Marxism argued that history was moving toward the abolition of nations and classes through a political process that would annihilate all existing institutions. Existentialism argued that the universe was fundamentally devoidof meaning, and that what meaning there was, was simply imposed on the world by the individual mind. European culture—art, music, literature and philosophy-- revolved around the apocalyptically political and the utterly weary. Sophistication consisted in opposition to your own society, whether out of conviction or contempt. Europe tore itself to pieces politically. It also tore itself to pieces culturally.
American culture emerged as European culture declined. America has been called a melting pot and a stew. Its culture could be called chaotic except for one characteristic: all Americans were adventurers or their descendents. Most of the adventurers were voluntary. They left their own to seek their fortune, safety, or to forget their past. Some—African slaves—were involuntary adventurers, living a nightmare. But the American stew contained extraordinary stories of leaving home and creating new homes. That was as true of the Mayflower as it is of Indian computer programmers.
Add to the almost universal personal histories of American families the explosive emergence of America on the global scene. Deep in the American psyche, this was the triumph of the despised and dispossessed over their betters. As American became stronger and Europe weaker, there was an element of personal triumph in this. People rarely came to the United States because they were wealthy and successful elsewhere. They came because they had to do something. The triumph of the United States became a personal triumph, particularly for European immigrants.
American culture was a wild mixture of other cultures. It was focused on immediate, material success and not on spiritual subtlety. Indeed, success was the focus of the culture. For the most part, the definition was financial—what else should the “your tired and your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” care about? But it was success, financial, political, military, artistic, that mattered. The quintessential American art forms, movies and rock and roll, all measure success with money. It is a barbaric culture, rude, healthy and vulgar, facing a decadent culture, refined, sickly and sophisticated. The winner is predetermined.
The Concept of Culture in Geopolitics
The term “culture” is amorphous. What we mean by culture here is a nation’s collective sense of itself and of the world. All countries have multiple cultural rivers and streams. But at the same time, as with other things, every country has a cultural center of gravity, a sense of identity that says that “on the whole, this is who we are and that is what is important in the world.” These are called stereotypes pejoratively, and they should be if you assume that every citizen of a country is identical. That’s foolish. But it is equally silly to believe that there isn’t a core cultural identity that allows someone to have a general understanding of what it means to be English as opposed to Chinese, Mayan as apposed to Swedish.
Culture changes over time just as a nation does. Nations are human and therefore have cycles. Just as individuals are children, adults and then elderly, and just as we understand that children behave differently than adults or the elderly, something of the same sort can be said about nations. Obviously, nations are more complex than individuals and simply identifying life-cycles of nations can be misleading, still, there is a substantial difference between a young nation and an old one. They think of themselves differently, they think of others differently, they behave differently. National culture evolves over time, and in some ways, this evolution is predictable.
A young nationis emotional, simplistic and vigorous. One way to think about it is that they are barbarians. Nations mature. Over time, they settle down, they become more complex and gain depth and balance. They act, but with more caution and more effectiveness. This is civilization. They then grow old. History drains them and sometimes defeats them. They become less vigorous, less able to act, less certain about things. They become decadent.
Think of Rome. In its early years it was barbaric, but it used that barbarism to dramatically increase its power. Then, at its height, Romans created a magnificent civilization of depth and subtlety. Over the centuries, they tired and weakened. Faced by the new barbarians at their gates, they first resisted and later found it easier to surrender to them. They had become decadent. Sometimes it takes centuries to pass through this cycle; sometimes just years. Sometimes nations remain alive and decadent for a very long time. Sometimes they live and die as barbarians. The sequence varies. The timeframe varies. But we think this is a useful way to think about nations, because it allows us to roughly benchmark where they are in their cycle.
The new is, almost by definition, barbaric. It lacks sophistication and moderation. It is precisely this barbarism, the simple and immoderate appetites, that allows someone to remake the world. Civilized people know their limits and decadent people are comfortable living within them. Barbarians are too ignorant to know what is impossible and too brutal to respect decent limits. The Europeans were once the greatest barbarians the world had known. They created a savage global regime that ultimately came to include most cultures in some sense or another. At the beginning of their Age, as they sacked ancient civilizations carrying off their wealth and culture with them, it would have been easy to see the Europeans’ barbarism as their permanent condition. A walk through the BritishMuseum or the Louvre will display the booty brought home by adventurers from around theworld.
A nation’s stage in its cycle obviously is going to effect how it behaves, just as a human’s stage in his cycle effects his behavior. Young barbaric nations behave differently than old and decadent ones. Europe behaved very differently in 1500 than it did in 1950. The United States behaves very differently today than it will when it is civilized, in a couple of hundred years if we use Europe’s cycle as a benchmark.
The definition of barbarism is the unreasoned conviction that the beliefs and values of your culture are and ought to be the highest expression of humanity. This gives a culture the spirit, or sheer gall, to challenge the world and to ruthlessly impose its will, trying to remake the world in its own image. The barbarian believes above all else that the laws of his village are the laws of nature. The definition of decadence is the belief that all beliefs are pointless and dangerous—that the good life is the one which demands the least and that beliefs are too demanding.
Civilization is that moment at which two contradictory principles coexist. The first is the belief in the ultimate superiority of your own culture. The second is being open to the possibility that you are open to error. It is the second that transforms the barbarian into a civilized human being. The barbarian cannot conceive of being in error. Decadence cannot imagine asserting superiority. The civilized person does not fall into complete self-doubt, but opens himself to other ways of thinking. It is the highest moment of civilization, but aswith Athens, it is a transitory moment. The contradiction cannot ultimately stand. But while it stands, its shines.
Young nations with a great deal of power tend to use that power carelessly if effectively. They are hammers looking for a nail to drive. Civilized countries tend to be judicious in the use of power. Decadent nations shy away from the use of power. The same nation in the same geographical location with the same amount of power relative to other countries, will behave very differently depending on itsplace in its cycle. The United States is now in a barbaric phase. It will be behaving aggressively and injudiciously, but it will be getting what it wants, however excessive its behavior. Europe, in its decadent phase, will be much more hesitant and cautious than its power justifies. It will appear—and be—much less powerful than it actually is.
The Rise and Fallof European Culture
European culture, like that of all great civilizationswent through a cycle: from barbarism to civilization to decadence. The European Age underwent these three acts. The first act was what we might call barbaric Christianity. It was the Christianity that could not imagine itself to be in error and which regarded itself as the self-evident model for the redemption of humanity. At a time when European Christians represented a small fragment of humanity, the Europeans imagined themselves as the epitome of humanity. Where Islam had fallen into complete decadence, barbaric Christianity drove the Moslems out of Europe and launched its conquest of the world.
The first act of the European Age was intimately tied to a Christianity devoid of self-doubt. It fueled the Conquistadors to convert, slaughter and enslave the heathen at the same time that an Inquisition was raging at home. Without that robust self-certainty, the idea that not only were they in the right, but that God was with them and would ensure victory, the fantastic risk taking of the 16th and 17th centuries would have been unthinkable. Empires are not built on doubt.
The second act of the European age, civilization, was the Enlightenment. Drawing on the Renaissance, the enlightenment was Christian in origins and in some ways remained Christian. The Enlightenment introduced skepticism and doubt—scientific reason—to the mix. Reason was not alien to Christian thought at all, but reason as a tool designed to challenge everything, including all that was sacred, was alien to Christianity. Radical rationality contradicted the essence of Christianity.
Christianity and enlightenment were basically at odds. But during the18th and 19th century, the tension was extraordinarily creative, combining profound self-confidence in European virtue with a restless skepticism that analyzed every premise it encountered. The tension fueled both the conquest of the world and the assault on nature—the global industrialization that was the triumph of European power. Christianity and the scientific method played off against each other on every level to create an extraordinarily rich and deep global civilization. Perhaps the greatest moment of European civilization came in the 19th Century, was when London Missionary Society sent ministers to the world at the same time thatBritain’s Charles Darwin sailed on the Beagle. This was the moment of civilized contradiction.
That magnificent contradiction could not survive. Rational doubt undermined Christian faith and ultimately undermined reason itself, until all that was left after the savagery of World War I was doubt, opening the door to the rabid nihilism of Hitler and Stalin. World War II put the nail in the coffin of European culture. Anti-colonialism, multi-nationalism, international stability, equality and social justice—literally all the things that had been the antithesis of Europe for almost five hundred years, suddenly became widely and deeply held principles. The reversal was startling and taken by Europeans as a sign of maturity, of having finally become wise.
Rabid European nationalism turned into the tepid pan-nationalism of the European Union. The end is to be found in the tired opportunism of the European Union, which offered to tame Europe’s nationalism through economic stability. Europe’s own great culture is now stored in its museums, while the earliest and most primitive forms of American culture, rock and roll video games and movies, defined the daily life of the European of European culture. To truly understand European culture in the 21st century, it is necessary to grasp this paradox. European culture has morphed into an imitation of American culture. At the same time, Europe is contemptuous of American culture. Imitation and contempt is the intellectual grid-lock of Europe. The Europeans were exhausted and called that exhaustion virtue.
The Nature of American Culture
American culture is barbaric. North America is in its first century as the geopolitical center of gravity of the international system. The beginning is by definition barbaric in the simplest sense. America is profoundly self-confident, to the point of self righteousness. It has this in common with 16th century Europe. But there is, as one would expect, a profound difference Europebegins with the single minded thrust of Christian certitude, that much later fragments between Catholicism and Protestantism. America begins as a multitude of cultural fragments, tied together by the experience of immigration, struggle and success.
There isn’t a fragment of Europe that is not present in the United States from the extreme Christian to the extreme secularist tradition; from Adam Smith to Karl Marx. Add to this the rest of the global mix ethnically and in terms of values. Politically, every European variety is present with some homegrown varieties. America contains extreme patriots and rabid-anti-Americanism. On the surface, it appears almost to be constantly on the verge of civil war.
It appears that there is no center to American culture. In fact, there is a center, but not one of ethnicity or principle. It is an emotional, almost spiritual center shared by virtually all Americans. Regardless of how much they differ, Americans are bound together in believing, with absolute certitude, in the righteousness of their own beliefs and way of life, and the vileness of those who disagree with them. Take an extreme political conservative and a left-wing radical, take a homosexual and someone who regards homosexuality as a sin, take a militarist and a pacifist and they appear to have nothing in common. Wherever one looks there is diversity in all things but one: the universal self-certainty of the barbarian. A conversation between a HarvardUniversity liberal professor and an Alabama Baptist minister would appear to be between two people completely unconnected. In fact, there is a profound unity. Both are utterly self-righteous and absolutely contemptuous of the other.
Barbarism is not a set of positive principles. It is a stance toward life and the world. Americans share only two things. The first is that their roots lie elsewhere and the second is a belief in themselves. There is a center of American culture, in the political principles that create the arena for discord. But the full and rich culture of a civilization hasn’t yet emerged. American culture, focused on the Constitution, focuses on the rules governing disagreement and not on consensus. The consensus is that Americans have the right and even obligation to criticize each other vehemently. The Enlightenment encouraged skepticism and that skepticism exhausted Europe. But it energized America, institutionalizing skepticism as the only moral principle.
If the European Enlightenment elevated skepticism to a moral principle, the United States turned it into mass culture. All Americans are militantly skeptical, particularly of each other but also the rest of the world. There is a deeper way that this works as well. Metaphysics, thinking about the nature and origins of the universe from a philosophical standpoint, turned in to physics in the Enlightenment, the study of the material world. That was all the scientific method could handle, but science was very good indeed at handling it. The enlightenment narrowed reason, but deepened its understanding of a narrower universe.
There is no metaphysics. There is only physics and by the time it got to America, only engineering. From Edison to NASA, the problem of science had turned into the problem of engineering. If the Enlightenment narrowed reason to a fine point, America narrowed it to a laser focus on practical applications. The concept of reason was changed by the enlightenment from the contemplation of the true and beautiful to the scientific examination of the universe. Americans narrowed it still further to the manipulation of data to achieve useful ends. All of this was embodied in the quintessentially American machine—the computer.