by Bruce Alan Johnson

"We must build a kind of United States of Europe," remarked Winston Churchill in Zurich in September 1946. Three years earlier, in a speech at Harvard, he had stated just what that confederation would require: "The empires of the future are the empires of the mind."

The authors of The Future of the European Past understand Churchill’s point, and they bend hard to the task of proving him right. As the editors state plainly, the book analyzes "[t]he attack on the moral and cultural achievements of European civilization." The essays—by authors such as David Pryce-Jones, Anne Applebaum, Roger Scruton, Ferdinand Mount, Mark Steyn, and Hilton Kramer—most of which appeared The New Criterion, all offer acute insights into the modern decay of the empires of the mind that have for centuries defined Europe.

For decades, Europhiles have made much of Churchill’s vision of a United States of Europe. But whereas the United States of America is a federation of fifty states under the leadership of one chief executive, Europe is a federation of independent nations, each of which is led by a democratically elected head of state. No amount of lamentation over this difference, and no gnashing of teeth over the expanded role of a European Parliament, will have a milligram of influence on the outcome. Brussels has launched a bold attempt to force an amalgamation of distinctly different cultures and perceptions of the modern world. Can such an undertaking succeed?

In his book Style in History, the American historian Peter Gay described culture as the pattern in the carpet of thought. The writers here argue persuasively that the carpet of thought that defines Europe’s past is unarguably one of the richest in all of human history—and that the design is, after many centuries, one of deep intricacy. The history of Europe is the story of vast empires, and the various threads that comprise European history were dipped in the distinctly different dyes of the cultures that demarcated each empire—Hapsburg, Huguenot, Ottoman, Tudor, and many others. Although it might be tempting to declare the result simply a beauteous pattern called European culture, the observant writers in The Future of the European Past discern a maze of smaller empires of the mind. They look deep within them to detect what the coming years might portend.

The writing is remarkably colorful and blunt. No scholars sniffing at modern culture here: their lamentations are over the passing off of feeling for thought, and of the banal clichés of political correctness for disciplined argumentation. It is Europe’s problem, they contend, that the waves of modernism are beginning to erode the sands of solid memory—the "historical consciousness," as John Lukacs would put it. Hear John Gross, in his essay "Knocking About the Ruins":

The . . . triumph of short-term memory can be widely observed in other areas—in the study of literature, for example. It isn’t uncommon to read about such things as the recent case of a headmaster whose school was accused of neglecting serious literature, and who protested that, far from it, his pupils were actually studying the classics: "this year we’re doing Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath." . . . Nor is the situation very different in the lower reaches of the British university system. It is now possible to study English at college level and emerge ignorant of almost everything written before the twentieth century.

And Mark Steyn in "Present-Tense Culture":

Across the swamp of our know-nothing culture, the Harvard professor reaches out to the Hispanic rapper, wallowing in the mud like two dozey hippos. All of our ancient institutions are vulnerable in a media age: when everything is brand-new, up-to-the-minute or, at any rate, all-improved and excitingly relaunched, what’s the point of anything whose authority derives from the fact that it was around before you were born?

Even music comes under scrutiny as an agitant in Europe’s murky future. After pointing out that Western musical culture depends on a radical divide between performer and listener, Roger Scruton argues, in "The Eclipse of Listening," that Arnold Schönberg’s attempted murder of tonality has, at the very least, poisoned many of Europe’s modern compositions:

. . . Schönberg helped to launch modern music on a course of self-destruction. For it was tonality, with its unique potential to synthesize the melody and the harmonic dimensions, that made counterpoint and voice-leading intelligible to the ordinary musical ear, and so made it possible for people not otherwise versed in musical theory to follow the argument of a symphony or a string quartet, and to understand the message addressed through tones to their emotions. Take away tonality, and you remove that which makes polyphony accessible to all but the experts.

The traditional European modes of musical expression—which enabled our parents to hum with equal facility an aria by Mozart or a melody by Nat "King" Cole—were a precious gift to humanity. You can hear their echoes still in the Beatles or Buddy Holly, and to sing or move to this music is to step across the divide between popular and classical culture. It allows the common person to think and feel musically—with an awareness of the voice not as a sound only but as an expression of the soul.

Like music, European humor exemplifies the continent’s cultural muddle (although not treated in this volume). German jokes about the French, Swiss jokes about the Austrians, and British jokes about virtually all of Europe reveal a jaundiced outlook that defies quick amelioration. These jokes display hardened views toward neighbors, ideas often based less on unthinking prejudice than on historical reality. Are Poles likely to forget the centuries of clashes with Germany? Are Austrians (and a good many other European countries, for that matter) likely to overlook the harshness of five centuries of Ottoman domination? And what about the French and the British?

What indeed. In The End of Economic Man, the prescient management consultant Peter F. Drucker noted that "totalitarianism grew out of a collapse of values, beliefs, and institutions common to all Western countries." In the wake of World War II, he wrote, "unless a new order and a new concept based on the European values of freedom and equality can be found, Europe and the Occident are doomed." Hence one could argue that Europe requires a revival of these values, to create a more stable union.

The essayists in this book seem to think so, and with good cause. Moreover, they fearlessly extend this necessity to Central and Eastern Europe, where the Soviet hammer and sickle stripped all human values of meaning and the communist culture of secrecy created an atmosphere of perpetual doubt and distrust. Several of these nations have already applied for membership in the European Union and will almost certainly be admitted within the next few years. The admission of nations that suffered under Soviet domination for half a century will most assuredly affect European trade, defense, and judicial policies. And because as much as 12 percent of the populations of some of these applicant nations is Moslem, an entirely new cultural and religious element is being thrust into the EU environment—one that promises to undermine even further the Eurocentric policies of Brussels.

How these people will be assimilated into European culture is an open question. Certainly one of the most troublesome areas of EU policy is that of education. In recent years, European schools have consistently outperformed those of the United States. But the undercurrents of egalitarianism in Europe today are inclining the continent toward simplistic "improvements" such as those proposed by the current American administration, and the latter are slithering rapidly into European educational policy. As Mark Steyn puts it:

President Clinton’s answer to the woes of education is the Internet: he’s committed to wiring up every classroom, whether it wants to be or not. Heaven knows why. Children don’t exactly need to be encouraged to switch on their computers and other electronic toys, so it would be heartening to think that, for at least a few hours a day, they might be cajoled into opening a book. Besides, Mr. Clinton’s optimism flies in the face of even recent history. Radio was supposed to be an educational tool: it started in the early Twenties with serious talks and live drama from the Provincetown Players and "The American School of the Air"; today, it’s a jukebox. TV was supposed to be an educational tool: it started with Leonard Bernstein explaining symphonic construction in prime today; today, it’s a freakshow. Who seriously doubts that the Internet will follow the same trajectory?

This is by no means a sneer at technology. It is a no-nonsense infusion of responsible historical study into an important policy discussion. The authors of The Future of the European Past apply their considerable skills to this loss of historical consciousness as well as the assault of pop culture; changes in education, music, and the arts; and finally to philosophy itself. The word philosophy originally meant "love of wisdom," but most modern European philosophers reject the very idea of truth or wisdom. Phenomenology, deconstructionism, and so-called analytical philosophy all deny the very possibility of meaning. To make things even worse, their practitioners seem proud of the obscruantist writing style demanded by most university philosophy departments. Philosophy in their hands is little more than intellectual pretzel-loops and a feigned reverence for the nihilist notions of modern philosophers whose writings are little more than new ways to spill ink. One is reminded of Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s joint boast that when one writes, one wishes not to be understood.

Responding to this mess, Roger Kimball’s essay, "Experiments Against Reality," tackles the problem of philosophy in Europe today. Kimball rightly laments the grave impact of sloppy philosophical inquiry and consequent loss of the values that, for two millennia, gave Europe an underpinning of strength and resiliency (much as the ocean supports a massive battleship yet yields instantly to the penetration of a single finger). Wisely quoting Wittgenstein, one of the most penetrating European philosophers of this century, Kimball writes,

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein rightly remarked that "all philosophical problems have the form ‘I have lost my way.’" At a moment when so much of intellectual life has degenerated into an experiment against reality, perhaps our primary task is facing up to the fact that many of the liberations we crave have served chiefly to compound the depth of our loss.

Kimball is correct to trace Europe’s problems to philosophical confusion; Europe is trying to live under different assumptions from those that animated it in the past. The roots of European culture extend back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, and the idea of progress flowed inexorably from the thought of the classical Greeks and the Romans that followed them. It is a uniquely Western ideal, one that has been rightly venerated for centuries. Applying that notion to social problems led to the liberation of the European serf, the emancipation of the slaves in Europe and America, and universal suffrage.

Extended logically, the idea of progress engendered a natural reverence for individual liberty and led to the technological innovations that have given us more time with our families and more freedom of choice in the marketplace. Does Europe still believe in progress? Even after reading some of the more disheartening observations in this book, most readers are likely to agree that Europe is still anchored to its past—a past of rational thought, enduring truths, and inspired hope.

Bruce Alan Johnson is Senior Fellow and Senior Vice President for Worldwide Development at the Hudson Institute.

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