Don’t Go There
A basic fact of human nature is that we are meaning-seeking creatures. Amid the confusion and uncertainty of everyday life, human beings require an overarching story, a narrative, that grounds us in reality and helps us make sense of life as well as death.
In his critically acclaimed book from 2017, The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray, British journalist and author, explains how Europe and, by inference, the rest of the Western world lost touch with its defining story, the Judeo-Christian story, which both birthed the West and gave it meaning.
Now in its disquieting absence is revealed a malaise, an “existential tiredness.”
The source of this cultural dissipation is the speed and variety of pressures caused by constant change, as successive narratives give way to new ones, and with dizzying speed. Over time, the vacuum left by numerous failed utopian ideologies has resulted in a society “stripped of any overriding purpose.”
In Germany, where bad ideas arise with startling frequency, there’s even a popular genre of contemporary literature known as “burnout,” which chronicles the listless ennui of modern existential angst. Douglas wryly notes, however, that there’s been a backlash to the backlash, i.e. “burnout from the burnout.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
So how did we get here? According to Murray, it began with two “seismic blows” that first served to undermine the Judeo-Christian story, and, with it, the West’s self-understanding, from which, he adds, it has never recovered.
The first seismic blow came in the form of 19th century German biblical scholarship (where else?). Here the Bible, robbed of its hallowed lineage, was reduced to mere literature, myth, and legend – interesting, perhaps, but hardly anything to base a society on.
To this point, when I was in divinity school the Bible was taught not so much as a devotional or faith-forming document, but as something to be evaluated by “historical-critical method” or “higher criticism.” At worst one studies, critiques, and analyzes the Bible as if it were just another book.
One of my more astute professors likened this to studying a sugar cube. You can analyze it under a microscope, identify its chemical properties, measure it, describe its physical appearance, etc. etc. The only thing missing is putting it in your mouth and tasting it. One might learn everything there is to know about the sugar cube without ever discovering what it’s actually for!
The second seismic blow was the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Here divine design was destined to become a thing of the past, replaced by the random survival of hereditary entities.
While religion still vied with science in explaining the mysteries of life, it was fighting a losing battle. “It was still possible to find wisdom and meaning in the Scriptures,” Murray writes, “but the Bible had at best become like the work of Ovid or Homer…”
In time, with secular reason and science itself on the ropes, German composer Richard Wagner, like many of his late 19th century contemporaries, sought to locate meaning in art. The idea was to “save the spirit” and reclaim, as Murray writes, “the source of the other-worldly subconscious voice that calls to us all.”
The hope was that this would compensate for a lost religion and address the failure of science and reason to meet the necessary spiritual needs of the soul. Until, that is, it collapsed under the weight of decadent, narcissistic excess.
Enter the 20th century. First there was WWI, which effectively rang the death knell of any remaining confidence in European ideals. In a conflict that was presented as a short-term, high-minded defense of traditional Western values – in opposition to a depraved German barbarism – for many, such values proved false and hollow as the war devolved into a brutal, dehumanized war of attrition.
With its countryside in ruins, a generation of its men lost, and the foundations of European civilization on the ropes, new ideologies sprang up to fill the vacuum nature stubbornly abhors.
Postwar Europe flailed about, surrounded by death, loss, and disillusionment, its nihilistic despair more than well documented. Into this breach, and to the rescue, came new “totalizing” ideologies that promised to set things right again.
Two seemingly opposite ideologies, communism (or socialism) and fascism confidently stepped forward, promising not only to make the trains run on time but to provide a coherent narrative that would, once and for all, answer all questions and solve all problems.
This, as we know, led directly to the debacle of WWII. In a sense, WWII exposed in stark relief an underlying problem. From the war’s ashes, many concluded that any and all absolutes, any and all truths, were, by definition, not only false but dangerous.
Europe had taken all these ideologies to their logical conclusions, and all had been found wanting. Everything had been tried, and all had failed, leaving behind nothing but suffering and dissolution.
“An absolute, when it crashes” writes Murray, “leaves everything in the wreckage: not only people and countries, but all dominant ideas and theories.”
The only conclusion to be drawn, then, was that all gods, religions, philosophies, systems, principles, ideas, reason, truth, language, passion, and even human effort, if pursued, were doomed to solicit only failure and human suffering.
“They had tried religion and anti-religion, belief and non-belief, the rationalism of man and a faith of reason. They had originated nearly every one of the great political and philosophical projects.
“And Europe had not just tried them all and suffered them all, but – perhaps most devastatingly – seen through them all. Between them these ideas had left hundreds of millions of people dead, not just in Europe but around the world wherever versions of these ideas were tried. What could anyone do with such regrets, or such knowledge? An individual responsible for such mistakes would have either to deny them or to die of shame.”
In the end, “Christian Europe had lost faith not only in its God but in its people as well. Any remaining faith that man had in man was destroyed in Europe.”
Even philosophers, whose sole job is to pursue the truth, had lost interest in the subject. Instead, they seem intent on just one thing: to avoid speaking of truth. Their aim is to obfuscate all discussions by parsing words and meanings.
“The desire to question everything in order never to get anywhere,” Murray writes, “appears to be the point, perhaps in order to defang both words and ideas for fear of where both might lead.” To the truth, that is.
“If there remains any overriding idea it is that ideas are a problem. If there is any remaining commonly held value judgment, it is that value judgments are wrong. If there remains any remaining certainty, it is a distrust of certainty. And if this does not add up to a philosophy it certainly adds up to an attitude: shallow, unlikely to survive any sustained onslaught, but easy enough to adopt.”
The only alternative to pursuing truth and the great spiritual challenges that make life worth living, argues Murray, is to enjoy our consumerist culture. As long as economic prosperity holds, people can distract themselves with idle pleasures and easy comforts.
Because the past has been effectively cordoned off with “crime scene tape,” and facing an uncertain, undefined future shorn of purpose and meaning, the West stumbles around in a directionless haze wondering, if but vaguely, where things might go from here.
Ultimately, the problem, as well as the solution, lies in the fact that human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. Which is to say that finding contentment in meaningless pleasures will never satisfy the soul. And because of this, the human heart cannot help but seek truth and know the God who made it, however suppressed that desire may have become.
Though such cultural tiredness has not reached the levels of Europe, the United States is nipping at its heels. Which is all the more reason for the church to heed the clarion call to reclaim its true mission and purpose, leading the fight in this spiritual battle. Deferring to the solipsistic narcissism of our intellectual “thought leaders,” as seems all too common, just isn’t going to cut it.