Understanding Europe (The Works of Christopher Dawson)

Introduction

vii Introduction George Weigel Christopher Dawson, who devoted most of his professional life to the study of the past, possessed an uncanny, even unnerving, insight into the future—or so a careful reader of Understanding Europe must conclude . More than half a century ago, Dawson understood that Europe risked coming apart at the seams, not so much because of the immediate dangers posed by the Cold War (although they were real enough), but because of an infidelity to the past—an infidelity to cultural and spiritual roots. Europe, Dawson proposed, was less a political entity than a cultural community: “a society of people who share the same faith and the same moral values.” But what if that faith atrophies? Could those common moral values (which, after all, were a by-product of that faith) long endure? In these early years of the twenty-first century, the answer to that question seems ever more clear: and the answer is no. What Dawson accurately described as Europe’s mid-twentieth century “spiritual crisis” has, as he foresaw, produced in its wake a loss of cultural confidence (or, as he puts it here, a loss of nerve), which in turn has led to a loss of faith in reason. And the results, as Dawson presciently saw, would not be pretty: This ..... breach with the old European Christian tradition is a much more serious thing than any political or economic revolution, for it means not only the dethronement of the moral conscience but also the abdication of the rational consciousness which is inseparably bound up with it. It is indeed doubtful if Western society can survive the change, for it is not a return to the past or to the roots of our social life. It is too radical for that. Instead of going downstairs step by step, neo-paganism jumps out of the top-storey window, and whether one jumps out of the right-hand window or the left makes very little difference by the time one reaches the pavement.1 1. Understanding Europe, 16. viii Introduction Where do we find the evidence today for this crisis of civilizational morale? Its most dramatic manifestation, I suggest, is not to be found in Europe’s fondness for governmental bureaucracy or for fiscally shaky health care schemes and pension plans; nor is the drama of the crisis captured fully by the appeasement mentality that some European leaders display toward jihadist terrorism. No, the most dramatic manifestation of Europe’s crisis of civilizational morale is the fact that Europe is depopulating itself. Several decades of below-replacement-level birthrates in Europe have created situations that would have been almost unimaginable at the height of Christopher Dawson’s fame and influence, the period between the early 1930s and late 1950s. By the middle of the twenty-first century, some demographers estimate, sixty percent of the Italian people will have no personal experience of a brother, a sister, an aunt, an uncle, or a cousin; Germany will lose the equivalent of the entire population of the former East Germany; and Spain’s population will decline by almost one-quarter. Europe is depopulating itself in numbers not seen since the Black Death of the fourteenth century. When an entire continent, healthier, wealthier, and more secure than ever before, fails to create the human future in the most elemental sense—by creating the next generation—something very serious is afoot. It makes eminent sense, following Dawson, to suggest that that “something” is a crisis of civilizational morale. Understanding its origins is important in itself; it is also critically important for Americans. Why? Because some of the acids that have eaten away at European culture during the past two centuries are at work in the United States, and indeed throughout the West, at a time when another civilizational enterprise , with a far different vision of the future, is contesting with the West for the definition of that future, often in aggressive ways. One of the reasons to read or reread Christopher Dawson today is that doing so prompts us to think about history in a fresh way. Twentyfirst -century Europeans and Americans alike typically think of “history” as the product of politics (the contest for power) or economics (the contest for wealth). But as Dawson understood so well, both “history as politics” and “history as economics” take a partial truth and try, un- Introduction ix successfully, to turn it...