Christian conviction continues to warp European high culture and erode European civil liberties. A vast immigration from North Africa and the Middle East has created immense social problems that feckless politicians seem incapable of addressing. Little good, however, is going to be achieved by the vice president of the United States heaping scorn on Europe, echoed by the U.S. Secretary of Defense declaring Europe “PATHETIC” (his caps, not mine). Old allies may respond to thoughtful challenge; they are not impressed by temper tantrums.
In The Cube and the Cathedral, I suggested three reasons why Americans cannot write Europe off. Those reasons remain valid today. The first touches on the Roman virtue of pietas—the respect owed to those on whose shoulders we stand. As I wrote, “Americans learned about the dignity of the human person, limited and constitutional government, the principle of consent, and the transcendent standards of justice to which the state is accountable… [from] Europe.”
The second involves national security. A Europe dominated by a vengeful, imperialistic, autocratic Russia or a Europe under Chinese economic hegemony is not going to make America great; quite the contrary. Nor is a Europe that is drawn into the orbit of radical Islam by powerful demographic undertows. 9/11 was hatched in no small part in Europe by jihadis who had moved there. To such minds, the Great Satan remains the Great Satan, and Europe would be a convenient base from which to wreak havoc in the United States again.
The third reason why we should care was articulated by the great English Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, who, in a 1960 essay on Europe, wrote that “a secular society that has no end beyond its own satisfaction is a monstrosity — a cancerous growth that will ultimately destroy itself.” Common efforts to treat the nihilist malignancy that threatens democracy on both sides of the Atlantic can help rebuild the cultural foundations of freedom here and in Europe.
American public officials are more likely to be heard if they call on our parent civilization to reclaim the nobility that defeated fascism, Nazism, and communism: a defense of human dignity in which Americans and Europeans contested for the future shoulder to shoulder. As we still can. As we still must.