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SPENGLER
Why Europe chooses
extinction
By Spengler
Demographics is destiny. Never in recorded
history have prosperous and peaceful nations chosen to
disappear from the face of the earth. Yet that is what
the Europeans have chosen to do. Back in 1348 Europe
suffered the Black Death, a combination of bubonic
plague and likely a form of mad cow disease, observes
American Enterprise Institute scholar Ben Wattenberg.
"The plague reduced the estimated European population by
about a third. In the next 50 years, Europe's population
will relive - in slow motion - that plague demography,
losing about a fifth of its population by 2050 and more
as the decades roll on."
In 200 years,
French and German will be spoken exclusively in hell. What
has brought about this collective suicide, which mocks
all we thought we knew about the instinct
for self-preservation? The chattering classes have
nothing to say about the most unique and significant change
in our times. Yet the great political and economic
shifts of modern times are demographic in origin. Three examples
suffice:
1) The great trans-Atlantic rift.
Europeans are pacifists, not merely in the Persian Gulf,
but on their own Balkans doorstep. If they cannot be
bothered to reproduce, why should any European soldier
sacrifice himself for future generations that never will
be born?
2) The shift in global capital flows to
the United States: old people lend money to young
people. The aging populations of Europe and Japan lend
money to younger people in the US.
3) The
deflation danger. To illustrate, an economist of my
acquaintance proposes a thought experiment. Suppose by a
magic spell all the inhabitants of the United Kingdom
instantaneously aged by 30 years. What would be the
effect on the current account balance, the rate of
interest, the price level and the exchange rate? (Answer
at the end of this essay).
Little enough has
been said about the "how" but almost nothing about the
"why" of Europe's demographic suicide. Suicidal behavior
is common among (for example) stone-age tribes who have
encountered the modern world. One can extend this
example to Tamil or Arab suicide bombers (See Live and Let Die, Asia
Times Online, April 13, 2002). But the Europeans are the
modern world. Have the Europeans taken to heart
existentialism's complaint that man is alone in a
chaotic universe in which life has no ultimate meaning,
and that man responds to the anxiety about death by
embracing death?
Detest as I might the whole
existentialist tribe, there is a grain of truth here,
and it bears on a parallel development, that is, the
death of European Christianity. Fifty-three percent of
Americans say that religion is very important in their
lives, compared with 16 percent, 14 percent and 13
percent respectively of the British, French and Germans,
according to a 1997 University of Michigan survey. Here
I draw on the German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig
(1886-1929), an existentialist of sorts. Few Asians
(including Jews) can make sense of Christianity's core
doctrine, namely, original sin, handed down to all
humans from Adam and Eve. Original sin motivates God's
self-sacrifice on the cross to remove this stain from
mankind; without it, Jesus was just an itinerant
preacher with a knack for anecdotes.
All
religion, Rosenzweig argued, responds to man's anxiety
in the face of death (against which philosophy is like a
child stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting, "I
can't hear you!"). The pagans of old faced death with
the confidence that their race would continue. But
tribes and nations anticipate their own extinction just
as individuals anticipate their own death, he added:
"The love of the nations for their own nationhood is
sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of death." Each
nation, he wrote, knows that some day other peoples will
occupy their lands, and their language and culture will
be interred in dusty books.
The early Christian
Church encountered a great extinction of peoples and
their cultures through the rise and fall of the
Alexandrine and Roman empires. Who now remembers the
Lusitani, the Illyrians, the Sicani, the Quadians,
Sarmatians, Alans, Gepidians, Herulians, Pannonians and
a thousand other tribes of Roman times? As nations faced
extinction, individuals within these nations came face
to face with their own mortality. Christianity offered
an answer: the Church called individuals out of the
nations and offered them salvation in the form of a life
beyond the grave. The Gentiles (as the Church called
them) embraced original sin, which to them simply meant
the sin of having been born Gentile, that is, to a
culture doomed to extinction. (The Jews, who think of
themselves as an eternal people, were having none of
it).
In one respect, Christianity was an
enormous success. Its original heartland in the Near
East, Asia Minor and Greece fell to Islam, but even
while Arabs rode victorious over St Paul's missionary
trail, the Church converted the barbarians of Europe.
Christianity made possible the assimilation of thousands
of doomed tribes into what became European nations.
Something similar is at work in Africa, the only place
in the world where Christianity enjoys rapid growth. Yet
Christianity's weakness, Rosenzweig added, lay in the
devil's bargain it made with the old paganism.
Christianity's salvation lay beyond the grave, in the
wispy ether of heavenly reward. Humans require something
to hang on to this side of the grave. By providing the
pagans with a humanized God (and a humanized mother of
God and a host of saints), Christianity allowed the
pagans to continue to worship their own image. Germans
worship a blond Jesus, Spaniards worship a dark-haired
Jesus, Mexicans worship the dark Virgin of Guadalupe,
and so forth. The result, wrote Rosenzweig, is that
Christians "are forever torn between Jesus and [the
medieval pagan hero] Siegfried".
At the
political level, Christianity sought to suppress
Siegfried in favor of Christ through the device of the
universal empire, the suppression of nationality by the
aristocracy and Church. The lid kept blowing off the
pot. Just when the Habsburgs brought the universal
empire to its peak of power in 1519 under Charles V,
controlling Austria, Spain and the Netherlands, Germany
revolted under the banner of Reformation. There followed
a century and a half of religious wars, culminating in
the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that wiped out more
than half the population of Central Europe. France under
Cardinal Richilieu (See The Sacred Heart of Darkness, Asia Times Online, February 11, 2003) gave a
fatal twist to the Christian idea. Instead of universal
empire, the French nation would be the standard-bearer
for Christendom, such that French national interests
stood in place of divine providence.
All Europe
caught the French disease, substituting the warrior
Siegfried for the crucified God. Christianity's inner
pagan ran amok. A second Thirty Years War (1914-1944)
gave unlimited vent to Europe's pagan impulses and
drowned them in blood. The unfortunate Rosenzweig, who
saw the faultlines in Christian civilization so clearly,
died hoping that Europe still would embrace its Jewish
population as a counterweight against its destructive
pagan self. It never occurred to him that Europe would
choose destruction and take its Jews with it. Siegfried
triumphed over Christ during World War I. No shred of
credibility was left in the Christian idea of souls
called out of the nations for salvation beyond the
grave. In 1914 Europe's soldiers still fought under the
illusion of a God that favored their nation. Germany
fought World War II under the banner of revived
paganism.
For today's Europeans, there is no
consolation, neither the old pagan continuity of
national culture, nor the Christian continuity into the
hereafter. The French know that Victor Hugo, Gauloise
cigarettes, Chateau Lafitte and Impressionist painters
one day will become a matter of antiquarian curiosity.
The Germans know that no one but bored schoolboys will
read Goethe two centuries hence, like Pindar. They have
no ambition but to die quietly, no concerns except for
those amusements which might reduce boredom and anxiety
en route to the grave. They have no passions except
hatred born of envy. They hate America, a new kind of
universality that succeeded where the old Christian
empire failed. They hate Israel, which makes the Jewish
people appear all the more eternal in stark contrast to
Europe's morbid temporality. They will pass out of
history unmourned even by themselves.
[Solution
to the thought-experiment above: if the entire
population of the UK instantaneously ages 30 years, it
will spend less and save more for retirement. That is,
demand will shift from present goods to future goods,
that is, securities. The price level of present goods
falls. The price of future goods rises, that is, the
compensation for waiting for the future declines, and
the rate of interest falls. The suddenly-aged population
trades surplus present goods for future goods, that is,
exports goods and purchases securities with the
proceeds, shifting the current account balance to
surplus. The exchange rate will rise. In other words, we
have Japan.]
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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