Our Only Hope: Western Civilization Reawakened

Western relativism and nihilism can’t possibly combat a radical Islamic worldview so strong that its adherents volunteer to die. Time to rediscover the roots of the West.

By Jim Tonkowich Published on March 30, 2016

Shutter the windows! Bar the doors! Brussels was another wake-up call, we’re told. Be more vigilant — more proactive! We have to do a better job as we collect intelligence, screen immigrants, control borders, hunt down terrorists and terrorist cells.

Thus, from the shut-the-barn-door-after-the-animals-have-run-away department, the Wall Street Journal reports, “The Brussels bombings have accelerated U.S. efforts to close off the last remaining Islamic State route out of Syria through Turkey, which officials suspect was the main thoroughfare for militants who carried out deadly attacks in Belgium and France.” And was the main thoroughfare for who-knows-how-many other militants planning further deadly attacks.

Greater vigilance, greater sharing of intelligence and more resources are certainly called for. Coming as they did during Holy Week, however, the attacks in Brussels strike me as a different kind of wake-up call altogether: a call to wake Western civilization from its sleep. Not just Western politics or Western unity or Western police or military power, but Western civilization itself.

The suggestion seems dated, I know. It smacks of intolerance and an unseemly brand of cultural superiority. We’ve lost track of what Western civilization is, and we’ve allowed it to be replaced with an emptiness that the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus wrote about in Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus on the Cross:

It is not necessary to call oneself a nihilist or even an atheist. Relatively few, in fact, adopt those labels. The attitude is one of practical atheism and assumed nihilism, it is not so much thought about or even explicitly stated. Of course we live in a meaningless world that came into existence by accident, and yet… we insist that our lives have meaning. And they do, we insist, because we say they do.

All this is expressed by a combination of tolerance and multiculturalism. Tolerance assumes that it’s bad taste or possibly even evil to make exclusive truth claims. Everyone’s opinion (and that’s all we have — subjective personal opinions) is as good as anyone else’s opinion. This, of course, rapidly breaks down either into indifference to truth or even facts, or ironically into totalitarianism. Witness, for example, the handwringing at Emory University over someone writing “Trump 2016” in chalk on campus. Students claim that they now feel “unsafe” and are looking to Big Brother in the form of the administration to swoop in as a totalitarian savior. Presumably they are so exquisitely tolerant that they can’t brook Trump’s intolerance toward immigrants and Muslims. So to protect their cocoon of toleration they retreat to a totalitarian stance to stamp out any whisper of support for Trump.

Add to that multiculturalism, which demands that we love and cherish every culture. All people and all their ways need to be affirmed because no culture is superior to any other. The exception, of course, is Western culture, which in the past was considered superior to all others, and for that reason alone is now completely inferior to all others.

So what happens when radical Islamists begin blowing up people and places in “the heart of Europe”? Either nothing or else something very bad.

The nothing includes holding vigils and lighting candles, insisting that these terrorists are not really Muslims, and blaming the West. It’s the response of a culture and worldview so enervated that it won’t rise to its feet to defend itself.

Radical Islam is, for its adherents, a strong, clear and powerfully unifying worldview. Contrast that with the prevailing European worldview of toleration, multiculturalism, practical atheism, and “debonair nihilism” is soft and vague. Guess which worldview wins in the end?

The something very bad is the kind of populist response we see in American politics with those whose idea of a president is that he be the strongman who will save us. We see it in European politics, too, with the rise of anti-immigration nationalist candidates and the revival of fascism. And it’s there at Emory University where the poor dears don’t realize that a garden hose could ease their pain, and instead demand authoritarian solutions, protection and retribution.

Sophisticated “practical atheism and assumed nihilism” cannot cope with evil. Terror and death laugh at the limp meanings of life we conjure up on our own. They eat toleration for lunch. They co-opt multiculturalism for deadly ends. This de facto Western worldview can’t possibly combat a worldview so strong that its adherents volunteer to die. You can’t fight something with nothing.

Which means we had better fill the nothing with something — something that can compete with the Islamist worldview. The good news is that we don’t have to go far to look for it. Historic Western civilization built on the religion of Jerusalem, the reason of Athens and the laws of Rome is the superior worldview. It’s the powerful worldview that gave the world science, medicine, universities, human dignity, freedom, democracy, prosperity and morality beyond the will of the strong — to name only a few of many benefits.

And since Western civilization today lives on primarily among Christians, this would seem to be our hour.

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