Any conceivable answer to this question will be arbitrary – even one provided by Erik von Kuehnelt-Liddihn (d. 1999), one of the most astute political thinkers in my lifetime.
“For the average person,” wrote the great man, “all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution.”
Kuehnelt-Liddihn’s books and articles took my intellectual virginity when I found myself in the West as a 25-year-old neophyte. Thus it’s with a sense of loving trepidation that I dare embellish his thought with my own arbitrary offerings.
To that end I crank up the time machine I always keep handy for such eventualities. That device instantly transports me to Paris, circa 1793, and deposits me on a different vehicle, a creaky cart trundling to the Place de la Révolution (Place Louis XV to me then, Place de la Concorde to you now).
There, in the shadow of the guillotine, I am greeted by Charles-Henri Sanson, a professional executioner who decapitated some 3,000 people in a career spanning 40 years. Another minute, and my head too will roll into the red-stained wicker basket.
However, while I still retain the use of it, the same question crosses my mind: When did the rot set in? How could this civilisational calamity become possible? (In reality, my thoughts would have probably turned towards more personal problems, but this is a hypothetical situation.) The question would have been legitimate even though I wouldn’t have had any advance knowledge of either World War.
The trip has been instructive. Having now come back to 2022, my head still topping my neck for the time being, I realise the decay didn’t start with the French Revolution. That event violently pushed the rot to the surface, making it visible to the multitudes. But the rot was already there, eating away at history’s greatest civilisation.
Any social explosion is preceded by social erosion. Revolutions may triumph within a few days, just as Vasily Rozanov described it in 1917 (“Russia faded away in two days, three at the most”). But for a storm to bring a house down, it has to be rickety in the first place.
Western civilisation, otherwise known as Christendom, was built on the foundations of another revolution, one that started in the outskirts of the Roman Empire during the reign of Tiberius. Unlike all other revolutions, it burst out in people’s minds, not in city squares.
Yet like all revolutions, it proved divisive. Some people joyously marched to the new tune, others plugged up their ears with their index fingers.
This isn’t hard to understand, for most people found the demands of Christianity too onerous. The morality of the Beatitudes sounded like an unreachable ideal, so unreachable that they even refused to try. And most rejected the freedom offered by Christ because, like any other freedom, it came packaged with concomitant responsibility.
This, many felt, was a yoke around their necks. Anyhow, it wasn’t the freedom to pursue salvation they craved but the licence to pursue bread. That’s why, as Chesterton once put it, “The Christian idea has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult – and left untried.”
As a result, many people, and their number grew constantly, cast themselves in the role of resentful pariahs. By the time Christendom reached its peak in the 13th century, anticlericalism had built up enough capital for the masses to start collecting the interest.
Their seething resentment was ready to strike out, armed with either the broadsword of violence or the rapier of mockery. Both weapons saw the light of day, if not in that order.
Thus the personage of a corrupt, lustful, crooked monk, priest or nun was ever-present in Southern European literature, from Rabelais and Boccaccio to Diderot and Voltaire. The Zeitgeist demanded witty denunciations, and even writers who were themselves devout, such as Boccaccio, had to comply.
Christendom was eventually caught in the two-pronged pincer thrust of post-Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. If the former did its subversive work slowly and by stealth, the latter was fuelled by a febrile revolutionary zeal similar to that of the subsequent French upheaval.
Luther and Calvin should have thought twice before throwing out the baby of ecclesiastical, apostolic Christianity together with the bath water of clerical corruption, graven images, indulgences and the rest. They should have sensed that the West wasn’t strong enough to withstand such a deafening explosion, that the shock waves would never become properly attenuated.
Yet revolutionaries are always driven men, blinkered to everything on the periphery of their tunnel-vision zealotry. Balanced thought, sagacity, foresight, an ability to see how nuances can undermine any idea, regardless of its intrinsic worth – such qualities are alien to revolutionaries of any kind.
By the time the French beheaders were ready to take a wrecking ball to the structure of Christendom, it was already tottering. Its foundations had been eaten away by the termites of Renaissance humanism and Reformation fanaticism, its walls shaken by the American Revolution.
Kuehnelt-Liddihn spent much of his life in the US, where for 35 years he was a columnist at National Review, then the bastion of American conservatism. Perhaps partly for that reason he followed Edmund Burke by denying the American Revolution a place in this subversive continuum.
At the risk of being smitten by a thunderbolt from the conservative heaven, I disagree with both of them. Obviously, the American Revolution was different from its French successor, although it produced a comparable number of victims if we legitimately regard the Civil War as its second act.
But the same strains of civilisational malaise came to the fore there as in France: post-Renaissance humanism, Reformational resentment of ecclesiastical and aristocratic tradition, Enlightenment secularism underpinned by exaggerated faith in human goodness.
Unlike, say, the Bolshevik revolution, the American one appealed not only to the nihilist in man, but also to the philistine. The two types dominate modernity, but neither had any role to play in forming Western civilisation. Both are hostile to it, consciously or otherwise.
The prominence of the philistine in US history made it a prosperous country and, in a world ruled by the philistine, prosperity redeems all sins. But the nihilist isn’t dead there; he is merely dormant.
The signs are he is beginning to rise from his slumber, perhaps to remind Americans that all revolutions are delayed-action bombs. The charges may stay buried in the ground for centuries, but expect a big bang sooner or later.
All this is offered with humble apologies to the spirits of Burke and Kuehnelt-Liddihn. I hope they realise that my disagreements with them in no way diminish the veneration I feel for them both.
If I were not a pessimist, Mr Boot, I would draw the obvious conclusion from your article (which I do not claim to have understood correctly), that the ills of humanity can be reliably traced backwards in time, ad infinitum. Either that or they started with Christianity.
With the rejection of orthodox Christianity, and Original Sin.
I prefer to think WW1 for Western civilization was the beginning. Prior to 1914 it was thought the Western nations of Europe and North America had found the answers to the plight of human kind. Enough education, good governance, technology and all problems could be solved given enough expenditure of time and money. Then the war and after four years all confidence lost and never seemed to be regained.
For people of my generation it would have to be 9/11- I was 8 at the time and in truth don’t remember the day itself. But it has often seemed to be the catalyst for all sorts of unpleasantness.
Surely part of dismantling of Western thinking was Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace theories that man was not created in the image of God, but rather evolved from apes. With God disposed of everything is just one big fluke, life a random event, and eternity has no consequences. With no all-seeing eternal creator people can get away with whatever, just don’t have civil authorities catch you… unless they also have no conscience and take bribes.
This was obviously a huge factor. The revelations delivered by the naturalists shook the Victorian world to the core, driving the likes of John Ruskin to the brink of madness. That theory (fact?) has done untold damage to European man, resulting in the uprecedented carnage of WW1 and the ever increasing nihilism of a good deal of culture ever since. Most Americans were able to ignore it for decades, thus preserving a good deal of their invigorating religiosity. Alas, the New-Atheism of the early twenty-first century has largely put paid to that. With nothing but the quavering voice of William Lane Craig to stem the avalanche.