Sunday, February 17, 2019

The West is Stirring

From First Things:
The failure of the “European project” has therefore also been a cultural, artistic, and philosophical failure. Michel Houellebecq aside, Europe in the era of what is called “the European Union” has had no great cultural iconographers capable of summoning up its spirit and essences, and Houellebecq does not flatter it. It is arguable that there never was a united art or literature of Europe, and that only Christianity served to create the impression that there was.

The late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once observed that, although each part of the American continent feels different from every other part, there is also a pervasive American essence. Europe is not like that. What became “The European Union” was never articulate about itself in cultural terms, but instead resorted to a language and logic of materialism and secular democracy, which writers and artists failed to plumb, bypass, or otherwise negotiate.

The bureaucratic nature of the E.U. has led it to treat culture as irrelevant and non-essential, soul as some residual anachronism, identity as a problem, and faith as something to be “tolerated” at best. In the absence of a cultural and spiritual vision, economics became everything and, inevitably, nothing. In its headlong dash to fulfill its aims in that idiom, the E.U. destroyed the European peoples’ hopes and finally demanded that they lie down and die. (Read more.)
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1 comment:

julygirl said...

There is only one 'E Pluribus Unum'