The Quest for Vision in the Era of Confusion, Corruption and Foolishness
By founder and president of the Nexus Institute Rob Riemen, introducing the topic of the Nexus Conference 2024.
If history, in accordance with Cicero’s maxim, is to be our life’s teacher, then we will first of all need the courage to look in its mirror, because self-knowledge begins with what we recognize there.
Let’s take a mirror that is at least a hundred years old. In 1922 T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, a poetic evocation of a desolate, fugitive humanity, alienated from itself, in a world in which everything that lives withers. In that same year the novel Ulysses by James Joyce appeared, a work in which he demonstrates the complexity of the modern human as antihero and describes our existence as a journey to the lost meaning of life. The condition humaine in the still young twentieth century is perhaps most aptly expressed in a verse from Rilke’s Duineser Elegien — Duino Elegies, poems that also first saw the light of day exactly a century ago:
Jede dumpfe Umkehr der Welt hat solche Enterbte,
denen das Frühere nicht und noch nicht das Nächste gehört.
Each vague turn of the world has such disinherited ones,
To whom the former does not, and the next does not yet, belong.
The Great War that ended on 11 November 1918 with an armistice was just such a turn of the world. In the space of four years, Europe had destroyed its own civilization and world order. The surviving generation was deprived of the faith of the past, of before the war, in God or science, socialism or liberalism, and in human reason and humanism as ideas and values that held out to humankind the enticing prospect of never-ending Progress. As German philosopher Max Scheler observed shortly before his death in 1928:
In the ten thousand years of human history, we are the first age in which man has become utterly and unconditionally problematic to himself, in which he no longer knows who he is, but at the same time knows that he does not know.
What came next were the Roaring Twenties, with a society that, fleeing its own spiritual emptiness, allowed itself to be intoxicated by a craving for money, pleasure and happiness, as brilliantly portrayed in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, with its story set in the summer of 1922.
In his 1930 novel Vile Bodies, Evelyn Waugh painted a similar picture of the Bright Young Things, the post-war generation that realized everything the older generation held out to them as honourable, valuable and important had been unmasked as bogus, because life is in fact meaningless. These young, intelligent people desired only to drink, party and have sex. To drink as much as possible, to party and have sex as much as possible, if only in order to suppress that one great fear: of a new war.
Vile Bodies includes an episode in which an elderly wise Jesuit called Father Rothschild tells the prime minister there will be another war. He reacts with irritation:
– ‘What war?’ said the Prime Minister sharply. ‘No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told. I’ll be damned,’ he said defiantly, ‘if they shall have a war without consulting me. What’s a Cabinet for if there’s not more mutual confidence than that? What do they want a war for, anyway?’
– ‘That’s the whole point. No one talks about it, and no one wants it. No one talks about it because no one wants it. They’re all afraid to breathe a word about it.’
– ‘Well, hang it all, if no one wants it, who’s going to make them have it?’
– ‘Wars don’t start nowadays because people want them. We long for peace, and fill our newspapers with conferences about disarmament and arbitration, but there is a radical instability in our whole world order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions.’
Since he has greater insight into human nature and a sharper eye for history than the prime minister, the Jesuit possesses foresight. Less than ten years after his prediction, the ‘radical instability’ of the ‘whole world order’ identified by Father Rothschild led to a Second World War, in which the inhumanity of humankind would be branded for ever by the extermination camps of Nazism, the labour camps of Stalinism and the atomic bomb that destroys all living creatures in a flash.
After that war, won by the America of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, the Pax Americana was meant to bring about a new, stable world order so that universal human rights and the sovereignty of states could be guaranteed, and the horrors of world wars would no longer torment the human species. The institutions intended to safeguard this world order were the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the International Court of Justice in The Hague. With the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union that followed, the Pax Americana seemed accomplished. Everyone in the West who in the final decade of the twentieth century wanted to look around and ahead could see the following as though looking through a kaleidoscope: the ‘end of history’ in which capitalism and liberal democracy would soon triumph all over the world; the stability of a new world order guaranteed by the military hard power of the United States and the political soft power of the collaborating European nations; the unstoppable advance towards the universality of the values of the Enlightenment, such as the power of Reason; the natural goodness of humankind; the necessity of tolerance; the right to individual freedom and opinion-forming; and the separation of Church and State. In this new era, in which history was reaching its end, political, social and economic values would prevail over spiritual values; there would be renewed faith in Progress as a result of the omnipotence of science and technology; usefulness would become the ultimate measure of what was or was not important; the financial elite would be the heroes of society, because the rich would make everyone richer; all over the world the same consumer paradises would arise; and everyone would have a right to money, pleasure and happiness. The dominant conviction everywhere was that all social unrest could be resolved by more prosperity and entertainment.
Those who did wish to look into the mirror of history — and they were few in number — saw a very different world and future. Hans J. Morgenthau was one of those few. He had no choice but to look at the world through a historical mirror all his life, since at the age of eighteen in that now famous year 1922 in Munich he had attended a performance by the then relatively unknown Adolf Hitler.
As the son of a Jewish family, born in 1904 in Southern Germany, in Bavaria, he grew up in an environment that was to become a breeding ground of Nazism. Hence his curiosity as to who the Führer of the new Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei was. On a visit to his grandparents in Munich he decided to attend a speech by Hitler. What he experienced that evening was something he could never forget, nor did he wish to. He now knew that the hypnotizing charismatic power of a demagogue was a political factor in a mass society that should never be underestimated.
Having no illusions about what it would mean for the Jews if Hitler made his dream of power a reality, he left Germany in 1932 and after some time spent first in Switzerland and then Spain, he settled in the United States in 1938. There, along with two other Jewish exiles from Germany, Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt, he became one of the twentieth century’s most important political thinkers.
The first lesson that Morgenthau learnt from history was the need for realism in international politics. As an attentive pupil of Greek historian Thucydides — who with his epic about the Peloponnesian War had tried to explain the effects of the phenomenon of power 24 centuries earlier — Hans Morgenthau believed that the world, imperfect as it is, was the result of forces inherent in human nature. Thucydides discerns three forces that govern the human psyche emotionally: fear, self-interest and honour. If we want to improve the world a little, Morgenthau believes, then we must work with these forces and not, based on a misplaced faith in the goodness of humanity and the power of human reason, against them. So he expected that more good would come from an international politics of ‘checks and balances as a universal principle’ in dealing with the conflicting interests of the great powers than from blind faith in reason and rationality. Bitter experience shows that the world of power in general is not receptive to rational or moral arguments, only to confrontation with a superior force. Ideally the lust for power would be reined in by international legislation and international institutions, but because it is ‘dominant in war’, there would always have to be a countervailing power.
In a democracy this countervailing power would need to come from intellectuals. Politicians strive for power, intellectuals for truth. Intellectuals who do not strive to speak the truth because they prefer to conform to the world of power are ideologues and as such intellectually corrupt. And in order ‘to be wise and great’, political power needs truth. Political power based on lies will never be able to make a country ‘great again’.
The second lesson Morgenthau learnt from history concerns first of all the country that welcomed him as a Jew in exile: the United States of America. But it is nevertheless of universal importance.
America has a special place in world history as the only country based, by its Founders, on an idea and an ideal. The idea is expressed in the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
The ideal, ‘the purpose of American politics’ as defined in Morgenthau’s 1960 book of that name, is ‘equality in freedom’. Like every ideal, it will have to be investigated anew by each generation and brought up to date if it is to exist in reality. With the United States the largest superpower after the Second World War, it was of the utmost importance that, for the sake of its own future and that of Western civilization, it made its idea and ideal a reality in day-to-day politics. But in 1960 it was clear to Morgenthau that the country was entering a deep existential crisis. It had still not come to terms with its history of slavery, remaining a place of unremitting racism that was irreconcilable with the ideal of ‘equality in freedom’, and now the population had fallen prey to materialism, hedonism and apathy. The only moral precept that still applied was: grab whatever you can lay your hands on. Freedom had become license. The concept of democracy had been hollowed out to mean whatever the majority wanted. But the majority consisted of a mass that in its ignorance could be manipulated all too easily through the power of commerce and the media, and so was susceptible to the demagogues that Morgenthau so feared. In this ‘democracy’, Morgenthau writes, even the concept of quality would be lost as it was increasingly replaced by quantity, the power of numbers. Whatever most people think had suddenly become ‘good’ and ‘true’, simply because most people thought it was. The notion that quantity is the measure of all things had repercussions for American education, which in Morgenthau’s view had not for a long time been focused on excellence, the quest for knowledge and the shaping of young people into independent, thinking characters. Instead it had degenerated into a social instrument to make young people conform as far as possible to what was expected of them: socially respected behaviour as the royal road to a good career.
Morgenthau saw this decline of American democracy, brought about by the betrayal of its own raison d’être, as culminating in the corruption of the academic world. The cause célèbre of his fierce indictment of corruption in his own academic world was something known as the Van Doren Case.
In the 1950’s NBC broadcast the popular television quiz show Twenty-One. When one candidate, a prototype of the nerd with thick glasses, kept winning, Charles van Doren, a young and telegenic English teacher at Columbia University, was asked by the producers to take him on. To bring back some excitement into the programme, to increase viewing figures and thereby advertising income, and to satisfy the popular desire to believe that a person who looks attractive is better than a person who doesn’t, Van Doren was secretly given the correct answers beforehand. He won, and immediately became famous, so much so that on 11 February 1957, Time put him on its front cover.
The other candidate sensed that something fishy was going on. When after two years it became patently obvious that the quiz was fixed, Van Doren initially denied any wrongdoing. That in turn led to his being forced to testify before a congressional committee. He had no choice but to confess that millions of American television viewers had been duped.
Hans Morgenthau was deeply shocked when to his utter amazement he was forced to conclude that despite his confession of deceit, Charles Van Doren was still able to rely on great sympathy among viewers, most of the congressional committee and even his students at Columbia University. Morgenthau was shocked, because he had never forgotten his experience of how, as early as 1922, the German people wittingly allowed itself to be seduced into forgetting both the truth and all moral values.
On 22 November 1959 Morgenthau published a long article in The New York Times Magazine entitled ‘The Great Betrayal’, and had no hesitation in beginning with the observation that for America the Van Doren Case was identical to what the Dreyfus Affair had been for France. Both cases concerned a fundamental moral choice that had to be made. And just as in reality not Dreyfus but the French institutions were in the dock, it was not Van Doren but the American people who needed to give an account of its decision as to which values it would allow to prevail.
That in the world of power and money, corruption is present like the snake in paradise is a fact as old as humanity. What was at stake here, Morgenthau said, was far more serious. Van Doren was a teacher at a university and as such he owed a duty to truth, to the search for and knowledge of truth, and to the opposition to lies. Now that he, as a representative of the academic world, had publicly corrupted the truth, only one verdict was possible: guilty! The fact that the majority of Americans did not blame Van Doren at all, and that he was able to pursue an academic career unimpeded, meant that in the United States objective moral values had been forced to give way to public opinion, to that which the masses wanted or would tolerate. In Morgenthau’s article, the fact that so many students at Columbia University preferred to carry on defending their good-looking, congenial teacher instead of defending truth and moral values raised the question as to where their moral illiteracy came from. The answer he gave was: the academic world. Instead of remaining faithful to its mission to educate young people in the discovery and dissemination of truth, the academic world had adapted itself to the relativism and instrumentalism that had become dominant in American society. By refusing to condemn Van Doren, Morgenthau concluded, Americans had convicted themselves of the charge of being a people without a moral compass.
When Van Doren was then sacked by Columbia University (only to be given a job as an editor at the renowned Encyclopaedia Britannica), many of his students wrote letters to Morgenthau. They felt hurt by his criticism, lamented the loss of a favourite teacher, and said they did not agree with the ageing European that their education must be focused above all on the knowledge of truth. University education, they impressed upon him, must also have a practical focus on the acquisition of all the knowledge a person needs in order to get a good job. Fearful that Morgenthau would now write another article, they asked him to keep their letters private and not to make known either their names or the content of what they had written.
Morgenthau responded exactly a month later, on 22 December 1959, with an open letter in The New Republic entitled ‘Epistle to the Columbians on the Meaning of Morality’. In it he deplored (without naming them) the students’ cowardice in fearing a public debate in which they would be risking nothing, whereas in Nazi Germany there had been people of the same age like Sophie and Hans Scholl who, as leaders of the resistance group Die Weiße Rose, had been courageous enough to protest publicly, at the risk of their own lives. Even more importantly, it seemed that for all these students the moral law was relative, something that needed to change with the times, the environment and the circumstances. Morgenthau asked a rhetorical question. If that is the case, then why are the Ten Commandments in the Bible, which really do stem from a very different era, still relevant to morality today? He then attempted to teach these young people something that, after everything he had experienced as a Jew since he saw Hitler speak in 1922, he regarded as his most important lesson in life:
The moral law is not made for the convenience of man, rather it is an indispensable precondition for his civilized existence. It is one of the great paradoxes of civilized existence that — in contrast to the existence of the animals and barbarians — it is not self-contained but requires for its fulfilment transcendent orientations. The moral law provides one of them. That is to say, human existence, not in its animal but in its civilized qualities, cannot find its meaning within itself but must receive it from a transcendent source.
He ended his open letter with the following conclusion:
For since your lives have lost the vital contact with the transcendence of moral law, you find no reliable standard within yourself by which to judge and act. You are frightened by the emptiness within yourself, the insufficiency stemming from a self-contained existence. And so you flee into the protective cover of the anonymous crowd — and judge as it judges and act as it acts. But once you have restored that vital connection with the moral law from which life receives its meaning, you will no longer be afraid of your own shadow and the sound of your voices. You will no longer be afraid of yourself. For you will carry within yourself the measure of yourself and of your fellows and the vital link with things past, future and above.
We do not know whether the students at Columbia University were willing to learn this lesson, but we do know that Morgenthau’s most important student, Henry Kissinger, refused to learn a crucial lesson from his learned friend, an unwillingness that had immense political consequences.
From the moment that America became involved in the conflict in Vietnam, Morgenthau was one of the first, and because of his status as an eminent political thinker one of the most important, opponents of the Vietnam War. The reasoning that led the Americans to believe they had no choice but to engage in a war on the other side of the world without themselves having been attacked — namely the domino theory, which said that if one country became communist, the entire continent would become so and therefore endanger ‘the free world’ — was dismissed by Morgenthau in a single word: stupid.
He was also convinced that because of that stupidity, tens of thousands of young Americans and even more innocent Vietnamese citizens would lose their lives, and America its moral compass and its credibility as ‘leader of the free world’. Since Morgenthau was one of the first to examine public sentiment, driven as it was by war propaganda, he found himself in a lonely position and was inundated with anti-Semitic hate mail. But Morgenthau did not give up, convinced that ‘power needs truth to be wise and great’. Sadly, that truth was lost even on his brilliant student Henry Kissinger. So stupidity was allowed to continue its triumphal march and cause yet more havoc. Sic transit gloria mundi, Morgenthau must have thought regularly in those years.
The war in Vietnam also prompted American historian and writer Barbara Tuchman to look in the mirror of history. She devoted a book to the phenomenon, called The March of Folly. The questions she asks are: Why does stupidity rule so often and everywhere? Why not reason? And why does intelligence provide no guarantee at all against stupidity or malevolence?
At the start of her historical study, Tuchman quotes with approval a lament by John Adams, second president of the United States, in a letter to Thomas Jefferson of 9 July 1813: ‘While all other Sciences have advanced, Government is at a Stand; little better understood; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.’ Beginning with the story of how Odysseus comes up with the idea of entering the city of Troy in a huge wooden horse along with other Greeks and capturing it, speculating on the vanity and curiosity of the Trojans that led them to bring the horse inside the fortress walls as a trophy and telling the story all the way to the failure of the Americans in Vietnam, she looks at countless reasons why stupidity so often reigns: blindness caused by emotions; the desire for power; the arrogance of power; egotism; obedience; stubbornness or simply pure ignorance; illiteracy and gullibility.
If individuals behave stupidly, that is mainly a problem for them. With the help of various episodes in political history in which stupidity clearly reigned supreme, Barbara Tuchman wants to make us aware of the causes and enormous consequences for a people, even the whole world, when stupidity goes hand in hand with power.
When Tuchman published The March of Folly in 1984, she was 72 years old and knew she did not have very much longer to live. That was also the year in which Ronald Reagan was reelected president with a large majority. Great fear for the future of her beloved country prompted Tuchman to devote the final pages of The March of Folly to American democracy and an electoral process that, ‘drowning in commercial techniques of fundraising and image-making’, was responsible for the fact that it seemed you did not need any serious political experience or intellectual qualities to be elected to the highest political positions. A second problem that Tuchman identifies in the functioning of democracy is that people who have acquired a position of power by being elected spend more time and money holding on to their power than on policies that benefit the people. Hence her conclusion that: ‘Aware of the controlling power of ambition, corruption and emotion, it may be that in the search for wiser government we should look for the test of character first.’ However, conscious that in a democratic society the people determine who should rule them, she adds with a deep sigh: ‘The problem may be not so much a matter of educating officials for government as educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity of character and to reject the ersatz.’
Hans Morgenthau had been dead for four years by that point. Should he have had the chance to read that book by his friend, he would no doubt have sighed even more deeply on reading Tuchman’s observation on the final page and mumbled the contemporary equivalent of ‘Good luck with that!’
At the end of his long life, in the early 21st century, historian and chronicler of Russian totalitarianism Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn expressed the need to look into the mirror of history concisely, in a single sentence, by saying: ‘If the overall lesson of the twentieth century does not serve as a vaccine, the huge hurricane might well recur in its entirety.’
It was a warning not lost on French intellectual and diplomat Thérèse Delpech. Before her untimely death in 2012 at the age of 63, she was at home as no other in the world of the history of ideas, including ideas about international relations and the ultimate threat to the survival of humanity, nuclear weapons.
In 2005, with her book L’ensauvagement. Le retour de la barbarie au xxi siècle (published in English as Savage Century. Back to Barbarism), she holds up a mirror, like a modern Cassandra, to an early-21st-century Western society that has no wish to see itself reflected in the history of the past hundred years.
Delpech shows how, obsessed by the desire for political stability and the preservation of our current material prosperity, we are no longer mentally equal to the sudden storms, interruptions and instability inherent to history. Paying more attention to our new ‘virtual reality’ than to the forces that govern daily reality, we can no longer imagine new wars, despite the violence that is increasing worldwide. Like a mantra we profess faith in human reason, failing to recognize the explosive power of pent-up emotions and resentment. Emotions in China, which after its humiliation and plunder by the West in the nineteenth century now wants to control the world order as a superpower. Emotions in Russia, which also wants to be a world power again. Emotions in the West, where in a spiritual vacuum, passions are getting the upper hand. Politics has been reduced to a matter of economic and social problems. Political leaders have become travelling salesmen and those invited for state visits are mainly the ceos of large companies. For lack of ideas — and fear of responsibility — as much public policy as possible is contracted out to experts, who naturally know nothing beyond their own, by definition very limited, expertise. The notion of responsibility has in any case become scarce in an individualized and fragmented society where spiritual emptiness dominates.
The West is becoming weaker and weaker in the face of powers that are hostile to liberal democracy. It is a weakness fostered by intellectual poverty, a lack of spiritual and moral values, and the corruption of principles on which the European humanist ideal of civilization is based. In this intellectual and spiritual chaos, politics has been stripped of ethics, and the question is increasingly arising as to which ideas and values we as a society are still willing to defend if everything is relative and nothing any longer has any absolute value. What is the meaning of freedom if we have no idea where we want our society to get to, now that the status quo is vanishing into thin air? In a geopolitical sense, Europe is no more than a province that cannot defend itself against powers that do not share the European conception of the world order and idea of civilization. The United States has more than enough of its own worries and is therefore reluctant to take on those of Europe as well. By not looking into the mirror of history, we lose the wisdom and knowledge of the past, and because we are unable any longer to believe in the promise of a glorious future, in our confusion we are in danger of being caught off guard, even overwhelmed, by one fresh crisis after another. What now?
*
A hundred years ago, on 20 November 1924, Thomas Mann published his novel The Magic Mountain — a work that seventy years later became the founding novel of the Nexus Institute. The story, told in almost a thousand pages, concerns the spiritual development of the young Hans Castorp and ends ten years before the book’s publication, in 1914, with the outbreak of the Great War during which a moribund Europe destroyed the foundations of its own ideal of civilization. Mann finishes his novel with a question that has unfortunately lost none of its relevance: ‘And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy sky all round — will love someday rise up out of this, too?’
The Dutch translation of Mann’s most famous novel, published in 1975, has an afterword by the late Austrian-Dutch antiquarian bookseller and librarian G.A. von Winter, who was one of the best interpreters of Thomas Mann’s oeuvre. That afterword, which amounts to an excellent introduction to The Magic Mountain, ends with the following brilliant characterization of the novel: ‘See, this is the image of a recently past era; this is its great stupidity and its great confusion.’
Now, almost half a century after 1975, only an ostrich could deny that the stupidity and confusion of the ‘past era’ to which G.A. von Winter refers, along with corruption, are the three main characteristics of our own time. Why, and what are the consequences, and what kind of vision do we need for an era to dawn in which love may one day rise and we leave barbarism and inhumanity behind us?
I Confusion, corruption, foolishness: causes and consequences
In the world’s theatre, as Goethe shows it to us in his Faust in a way never since surpassed, we find three citizens in the vicinity of Frankfurt in 1800 who share with us their view of the world:
A CITIZEN:
No, I don’t fancy the new burgomaster,
Insolent fellow! Why, he’s a disaster.
What’s he done for the town? Since they
Appointed him, things get worse day by day:
More and more regulations to obey,
Higher and higher rates to pay.
ANOTHER CITIZEN:
There’s nothing better, on a holiday,
Than talk and noise of war to while the time away.
Some far-off war, in Turkey, let’s suppose,
Some place where armies come to blows.
One watches from the window, sips one’s glass,
While down the river all those fine ships pass.
And back home in the evening, we congratulate
Each other on our peaceful happy state.
A THIRD CITIZEN:
Yes, neighbour, I agree, quite so, quite so!
Let them all split each other’s skulls out there,
Let the world go to pot for all I care,
But here at home, let’s keep the status quo!
This mentality of looking away from wars, of indifference in the face of problems elsewhere in the world, seems far from unfamiliar to us, more than two centuries later. Putting its own interests and its own people first is the hallmark of a society whose frame of mind was appositely described by Italian film director Federico Fellini, famous for films including La Dolce Vita and Amarcord, as follows:
Fascism always arises from a provincial spirit, a lack of knowledge of real problems, and people’s refusal — through laziness, prejudice, greed or arrogance — to give their lives deeper meaning. Worse, they boast of their arrogance and pursue success for themselves or their group, through bragging, unsubstantiated claims, and a false display of good characteristics, instead of drawing from true ability, experience, or cultural reflection.
This mentality has penetrated the highest regions of political power, as is clear from the fact that the new chair of the Dutch parliament had no hesitation in boasting about his ambition that ‘an end must come to the dictatorship of the highly educated’ — which is to say: power to stupidity!
It is not just the stupidity and arrogance of the provincial spirit that is coming to power in democratic societies everywhere but also resentment, xenophobia, a culture of hatred and fear.
In the mirror of history we see that almost a century ago, in 1930, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset characterized this political phenomenon as The Revolt of the Masses. It was a revolt that in 1936 led to the outbreak of a civil war in Spain. André Malraux, Nicola Chiaromonte and George Orwell are just some of the European intellectuals who went to Spain to fight. Orwell later wrote about that period in his life:
I knew there was a war on, but I had no notion what kind of a war. If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: ‘To fight against Fascism’, and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency.’
Italian writer Alberto Moravia summed up the intellectual climate of the 1930s in Italy in the title of his novel Gli indifferenti — The Indifferent Ones, because nobody was any longer interested in moral or spiritual values of any kind. It is no coincidence that Ortega y Gasset concluded of that same era at the end of his The Revolt of the Masses: ‘This is the issue: Europe has been left without a moral code.’
A society without morality; indifferent in regard to everything of value; lacking civilization; full of resentment, xenophobia, fear and violence; proud of its own ignorance and not interested in knowledge, truth, culture or the needs of others; obsessed with self-interest, its own identity and putting its own people first; featuring demagogues who come to power, and a liberal spirit that succumbs to a culture of lies and is forced to yield to authoritarian leadership… These are all phenomena of a democracy in decline in its ultimate form. To Fellini, Ortega y Gasset, Orwell and Moravia there was just one concept that could be used to describe such a decline, that of a confused, corrupted society infected by stupidity: fascism!
When we now look in the mirror of history it is impossible not to see that democracy is in decline everywhere in Western society and that the return of fascism can no longer be denied, or that the United States of America, once the flagship of liberal democracy, has more and more of the characteristics of Babylon, a great power in decline.
With all the wars and acts of terror that are going on, and the fact that 2024 is a year in which almost half the world’s population will go to the ballot box, we must urgently pose the following questions: Is Western liberal democracy the best model for a peaceful world order? If so, why are we witnessing everywhere the decline of democracy and the rise of autocrats? And what are the consequences of this for our world order and the ideal of civilization that is inherent to it?
*
Woodrow Wilson, the American president who helped the English and French to defeat Germany in the First World War and then had great plans ‘to make the world safe for democracy’, was convinced that consumption was the best basis for a peaceful, egalitarian world. On Monday 10 July 1916 he therefore addressed the first World’s Salesmanship Congress in Detroit as follows:
Let your thoughts and your imagination run abroad throughout the whole world, and with the inspiration of the thought that you are Americans and are meant to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever you go, go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America.
These are words that could be seen as the mantra of globalism and neoliberalism. But are those still forces that strengthen democracy, or do they actually weaken it? And what influence does an economic system have on democracy? Liberalism and socialism are the political children of the Enlightenment, with its values of rationality, secularization, knowledge, equality, individual freedom and solidarity. So why have ideas like liberalism and socialism lost so much of their appeal and why are nationalism and fascism gaining in popularity? What is it that the masses are revolting against, and what is the role of social elites? Why is faith in the power of human reason waning and irrationalism gaining in strength? Where do the polarization that fragments society, the resentment and xenophobia come from? Why have knowledge of truth and social trust become scarce in democratic societies? What is causing the loss of the ‘decency’ for which Orwell chose to fight, and the morality that Ortega y Gasset was concerned about? What is the political attraction of autocrats like Xi Jinping, Putin, Orbán and Erdogan? Where do they derive their popularity?
Socrates was convinced that only justice, truth and freedom could guarantee a peaceful world order. How can we make such a world order a reality? Now that the Pax Americana is over, will the multipolar world order desired by China, Russia and the Global South create more order in the world or bring chaos? If pluralism must replace universalism, how can the unity of humankind be secured? And if America once again retreats into isolationism, what does that mean for the future of Europe? What future is there in any case for a Europe that is not sovereign and united? How great is the likelihood that, as at the time of the First World War, European leaders are sleepwalking, unprepared for a new catastrophe?
To the question of how it is possible that a great power like the United States with the most powerful army, the most powerful economy, the most powerful technology and the most powerful universities is showing so many signs of being a civilization in decline, the answer could be: corruption.
Corruption is a social autoimmune disease that destroys the social fabric. The fact that the desire for ever more power and money has a corrupting effect is as old as humanity. The notion that regulatory authorities, armed with countless laws and even more rules and supported by an army of accountants and bureaucrats, can combat such corruption is modern. Why was it that Roman historian Tacitus at the start of the second century wrote in his Annals ‘Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges — The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government’?
In the sixteenth century, after an extensive study of the fall of the Roman Empire, Machiavelli concluded in his Discorsi that corruption cannot be combatted by means of laws, since the legislation itself will be corrupted. A century later, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, Spinoza remarked: ‘He who would fix and determine everything by law would inflame rather than correct the vices of the world.’
In his famous 1978 speech at Harvard University entitled ‘A World Split Apart’, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn observed that although Western society is undoubtedly familiar with the letter of the law (and therefore offers employment to millions of lawyers) it is losing a sense of what is good and just, of self-sacrifice and unselfishness.
In De l’esprit des lois — The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu’s magnum opus, published in 1748, he warns that the decline of democracy begins with the corrupting of its principles and the corruption of its elites, who then out of self-interest spur the corruption of the people:
To keep the people from seeing their own ambition, they speak only of the people’s greatness; to keep the people from perceiving their avarice, they constantly encourage that of the people. Corruption will increase among those who are already corrupted. […] One must not be astonished to see votes given for silver.
We need to ask whether this corruption is partly responsible for the decline of contemporary liberal democracy.
An important source of today’s confusion is the perpetual conflict between religion, with its absolute values, and secularism, which has no place for values that are absolute because transcendent. Hans Morgenthau was convinced that the loss of absolute moral and spiritual values was the ultimate form of corruption because with it the idea, the certainty of human value was lost. Thérèse Delpech shared that conviction, and they both blamed the absence of absolute values for the lack of a moral compass.
In opposition to this stands the intellectual legacy of secularism and liberalism in Western society, with its conviction that freedom lies precisely in the fact that all values are relative, since humankind itself determines what is or is not of value, that we need only go in search of new values if we can no longer believe in the old ones, and that all of existence, from life until death, is shaped by human activity, or ought to be.
Albert Camus put this fundamental conflict into words in a notebook in 1943 as follows: ‘L’Homme peut-il à lui seul créer ses propres valeurs? C’est tout le problème — Can man alone create his own values? That is the whole problem.’ The answer to that question could bring an end to the great confusion, but what is this answer?
Furthermore, how much stupidity, or shall we say how many things of a bogus nature, are there in our own time, and what is the cause of them? Almost all of education and research is focused on what is useful. The benefits of this for science, technology and the knowledge economy are obvious. But the ideals of the founders of our great seats of learning, intellectual development with historical knowledge and the quest for wisdom, have de facto been banished from the universities. Why, and what are the consequences?
And why is it that countless young people now allow themselves to be led by what are currently called influencers? What part is played by media, including social media, in our democracy — which can function as a liberal democracy only if the people are well informed?
The ultimate consequences of spiritual confusion, political and commercial corruption and pure stupidity can only be more wars and more destruction. So, once again, what now? What to do?
II The quest for vision
It is written how long ago, very long ago — almost three thousand years — a young king ruled over Israel. His name was Solomon, son of King David.
When his father died, realizing that he would have to rule his people at a young age and with little experience, he prayed to his God:
Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?
God was pleased with Solomon’s request and said to him:
Because you have asked this, and have not asked for yourself long life or riches, or for the life of your enemies, but have asked for yourself understanding to discern what is right, I now do according to your word. Indeed I give you a wise and discerning mind; no one like you has been before you and no one like you shall arise after you. (1 Kings 3:9-12)
And so it came to pass. To ensure that the generations that would come after him would profit from the wisdom conferred upon him, King Solomon left us a scripture with proverbs including the following warning:
Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18)
Vision! That’s what we need more than ever if we are to move on as quickly as possible from this dangerous era that threatens all of humanity, with its confusion, corruption and stupidity. But where can we find the necessary wisdom? If God is dead, then He will no longer be able to give wisdom to kings who request it. But perhaps, fortunately, there are still wise people in the world. Will they again come, in threes or otherwise, from the East? Or from Africa this time?
Why look with longing to the other side of the world? In the heart of the Old World, Davos in Switzerland, our own most powerful rulers gather regularly to formulate a contemporary vision for our world from a position of responsibility. They recently announced the Great Reset. In words that sound prophetic, this is their vision of a new era:
Innovation; Globalisation; Digitalisation; Cooperation; Sustainability; a Fourth Industrial Revolution; A New Business Model…
The need for a new vision is now beyond doubt, in light of growing economic and social inequality (and the social unrest that goes with it), and given the huge challenges posed by human-caused climate change (and approaching catastrophes, if we are to believe the predictions). But the big question, which is dividing the world of economic power, is this: what should that new vision be? And since everything has its price, how much are we prepared to pay and for what?
If truth is allowed to speak to power, then there are other questions to be raised. Is this Great Reset sufficient to put an end to the spiritual emptiness, the great confusion, corruption and stupidity? Will this Great Reset offer us a moral compass again, with knowledge of the moral values that are now, according to Hans Morgenthau, so sorely missed? Or do we need to reverse the sequence and first seek a moral compass, put an end to the confusion, corruption and stupidity, before we can find a sustainable economic vision that can adequately rectify climate change and the growth of economic inequality?
Thérèse Delpech, the Cassandra of our time, warned that the greatest threat awaiting humanity is nothing less than a fatal combination of automated technology and all-pervading nihilism. If that is the case, how can we neutralize the threat?
The potential of science and technology seems unlimited, but can Artificial Intelligence ever offer us that which Solomon requested from God, which is indeed not included in the vocabulary of the Great Reset: wisdom. And if Artificial Intelligence can’t offer that wisdom, but could become more powerful than we human beings are now, then what?
Moreover, in our own era the vision sought, a vision worthy of the name, will need to be able to help us with what Max Scheler rightly identified in 1928 as the fundamental cause of all our difficulties: man has become utterly and unconditionally problematic to himself. Thirty years later, an expert on the human soul, Carl Jung, in a long essay entitled Gegenwart und Zukunft (published in English as The Undiscovered Self), described the fate of modern humans as follows:
We all say that this is the century of the common man, that he is the lord of the earth, the air and the water, and that on his decision hangs the historical fate of nations. This proud picture of human grandeur is unfortunately an illusion and is counterbalanced by a reality that is very different. In this reality man is the slave and victim of the machines that have conquered space and time for him; he is intimidated and endangered by the might of the military technology which is supposed to safeguard his physical existence; his spiritual and moral freedom, though guaranteed within limits in one half of his world, is threatened with chaotic disorientation, and in the other half is abolished altogether.
This is indeed the reason why ‘man has become utterly and unconditionally problematic to himself’, an existential problem almost a hundred years old. Who will give us the wisdom to address this problem? Because what are the nature and destiny of the human being? Are we still the homo dei, are we the homo economicus, or have we already evolved into the homo technologicus?
If we then turn our eyes to the East after all, in the hope that it can be a source of wisdom, then we do at least have the good fortune to meet there Confucius, about whom the following has been said:
Confucius, the legendary wise Chinese Master, was once asked where he would begin if he had a country to rule. ‘I would improve the language skills,’ the Master answered. His audience was amazed. ‘That has nothing to do with our question,’ they said. ‘What is the point of improving the use of language?’ The Master replied: ‘If the language is wrong, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then no work can be accomplished; if no work is accomplished, then morality and art do not flourish; if morality and art do not flourish, you will find no justice; if there is no justice, the nation is rudderless. So never tolerate any arbitrariness in the use of language. That’s what it all comes down to.
It is sensible advice that identifies the first important step towards putting the chaos and confusion behind us: learn again the meaning of words like freedom, democracy, human dignity, love, justice, culture, beauty, good and evil, wisdom, truth, the human soul and God.
We can listen to the echo of this advice in the Democratic Vistas of the American poet Walt Whitman. That work is the best analysis of the gap between the idea of America and the American reality — a gap that is not much smaller in Europe. Whitman already knows that a system, political institutions, and the right to vote are not by themselves sufficient for true democracy. As Whitman claims, the purpose of democracy is that the highest freedom becomes law, and then goodness and virtue will follow. Political freedom alone is not enough; a different climate has to arrive, the era of literature has to emerge.
But who can help us to do this? Freud had little confidence in religion (‘religion belonged to the infancy of humanity’), but his friend and admirer Thomas Mann knew better in that respect. Religion, Mann said, has everything to do with the secret that humans are to themselves, and therefore religious thinkers will have to help us to rediscover the meaning of words.
Mann also recognized his duty in this sense as an artist. Like poets Anna Akhmatova and Paul Celan, he knew that where the meaning of words goes up in smoke, the truth and soon people themselves will be incinerated too. He also knew that only the language of the Muses could give a voice to our human soul and all its emotions. But if we rediscover the ‘Republic of Letters’, with its guides eager to teach us the meaning of words, how can we convince generations that no longer read literature to enter such a Republic? Or can the world of cinema offer a solution in this visual age?
If we cannot adequately cure the disease attacking society’s immune system called corruption by means of laws, regulations and supervisory authorities, because they result only in a paper reality, what medicine is left to us?
In his speech at Harvard, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn rightly lamented a lack of courage, civil courage:
Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage by the entire society. There remain many courageous individuals, but they have no determining influence on public life. Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements.
Barbara Tuchman had been struck by this too, hence her cry: ‘We should look for the test of character first.’ Carl Jung would concur. In his essay Gegenwart und Zukunft he likewise observed: ‘Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations.’
So the question arises: how do we shake off the obsession with numbers and return to a striving for quality? How can we once again establish an education system in which, with knowledge, the intellectual development of the human being is central, rather than merely a person’s usefulness to the economy and the false promise of ‘a nice life’? How can we overcome the mass stupidity that allows itself to be influenced every day by bogus facts, fake news and breaking news?
The mirror of history can once again teach us something. In 1938 Thomas Mann published a speech he had worked up into an essay, with the title ‘Achtung Europa! — Europe, Beware!’, in which he makes countless observations that have lost little of their relevance to this day:
The higher and better are being warped and deformed by the grave follies of the time. […] Civilization in the higher and deeper sense of work on oneself, of individual responsibility, has been forced to give way to a collectivism that has taken an everlasting vacation from the self. What people want is intoxication. […] There is a spectacular loss of culture and a moral decline. […] Modern man is the victim and product of wild, confusing and at the same time thrilling impressions that assail him. The adventurous development of technology with its triumphs and catastrophes, the noise and sensation of sporting events, the frantic overpayment and adoration bestowed upon ‘stars’ attracting millions, boxing matches with awards in the millions and hordes of spectators. The nineteenth century believed not only in the blessing of liberal democracy but in a socialism that aspired to elevate the masses, to educate, by imparting to them science, development, art and cultural heritage. Nowadays people have discovered that the masses can be ruled better and more completely by propaganda than by education. […] Pseudo-sciences, obscure sects, ridiculous third-rate religions, downright humbug, blind faith, in short a flourishing irrationalism and abject mass superstition now determines the zeitgeist. Ideas such as truth, freedom and justice are passé and even hated.
Fortunately, this is only one part of our reality. We can also point to a renewed consciousness of social justice and resistance to all forms of racism and sexism, along with growing activism. But again we need to ask what the outcome will be of clashing social forms in our fragmented, if not strife-torn, society.
Mann contrasts this with the return to a principle that is the foundation of the European ideal of civilization: a religious humanism that knows the secret and the vital questions of humanity, that believes in the existence of absolute spiritual and moral values, that detests all forms of fanaticism, that holds the human mind and reason in high regard and is convinced of the fact that every person has the capacity and must have the freedom to live in dignity, to create beauty, to show compassion and to be righteous. He therefore ends his indictment of this era with the following observation:
In all humanism there is an element of weakness, which in some circumstances may be its ruin, connected with its contempt for fanaticism, its patience, its love of scepticism; in short, its natural goodness. What is needed today is a militant humanism, conscious of its virility and inspired by the conviction that the principles of freedom, tolerance, and honest doubt shall not be exploited and destroyed by fanatics who have themselves no shadow of tolerance or doubt.
Thérèse Delpech, Barbara Tuchman and Hans Morgenthau would wholeheartedly endorse the stand taken by Thomas Mann. But the final question in our search for the vision that can release us from all confusion, corruption and stupidity is: can this humanism of Thomas Mann and his friends, an almost forgotten tradition, still be the cornerstone of a new world order that will prevent a return to the barbarism and inhumanity of the twentieth century, and so do justice to what Primo Levi asks of us in the moving poem with which he opens his factual account of his survival of Auschwitz, If This Is a Man:
You who live safe
In your warm houses,
You who find on returning in the evening,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if this is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for a scrap of bread
Who dies because of a yes or a no.
Consider if this is a woman,
Without hair and without a name
With no more strength to remember,
Her eyes empty and her womb cold
Like a frog in winter.
Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street,
Going to bed, rising;
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.
(Translation Stuart Woolf)