The New Vichy Syndrome

Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism

Theodore Dalrymple

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781594035678
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Western Europe is in a strangely neurotic condition of being smug and terrified at the same time. On the one hand, Europeans believe they have at last created an ideal social and political system in which man can live comfortably. In many ways, things have never been better on the old continent. On the other hand, there is growing anxiety that Europe is quickly falling behind in an aggressive, globalized world. Europe is at the forefront of nothing, its demographics are rapidly transforming in unsettling ways, and the ancient threat of barbarian invasion has resurfaced in a fresh manifestation.In The New Vichy Syndrome, Theodore Dalrymple traces this malaise back to the great conflicts of the last century and their devastating effects upon the European psyche. From issues of religion, class, colonialism, and nationalism, Europeans hold a "miserablist” view of their history, one that alternates between indifference and outright contempt of the past. Today’s Europeans no longer believe in anything but personal economic security, an increased standard of living, shorter working hours, and long vacations in exotic locales.The result, Dalrymple asserts, is an unwillingness to preserve European achievements and the dismantling of western culture by Europeans themselves. As vapid hedonism and aggressive Islamism fill this cultural void, Europeans have no one else to blame for their plight.

1.

SOMETHING ROTTEN

There is something is rotten in the state of Europe, but it is not easy to say what it is or where it comes from. Partly it is difficult because, short of the Big Bang, the Garden of Eden, or the Unmoved Mover, there is no final cause of anything; when tracing back the origin of social or political problems, it is always open to someone to say that the origin had its own origin in turn, and that this is therefore the real, the true, origin.

It is strange that Europe should be the sick man of Europe. In many ways, things have never been better on the old continent; to take but one illustration of this fact, life expectancy has never been higher. When my father was born, in 1909, his life expectancy was forty-nine; if he had been born today, his life expectancy would be approaching eighty. No doubt Keats, Schubert, and Mozart packed a lot into their lives, but most people would nonetheless opt for long rather than short life spans.

The increase in wealth and the physical standard of living has been startling, moreover; in 1960, Sicilian peasants still slept indoors with their farm animals, and my working-class patients remembered sharing outside lavatories with several other households. In France, the years in which it lost its colonial empire are known as les trente glorieuses, the glorious thirty, when the French economy grew so fast that absolute poverty was eliminated and the country obtained one of the best infrastructures in the world. Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder after the war really was a wonder; it was spoken of without cynicism, and transformed a country that the US Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., wanted to keep forever in a state of rural pre-industrialization into the largest exporter of manufactured goods in the world, a remarkable achievement. It did this, moreover, while creating the very model of a model liberal-democratic state.

And yet, for all this success, there is a pervasive sense of impending doom, or at least of decline, in Europe. For example, as a European, I cannot help but feel how far and how fast the continent is falling behind the rest of the world whenever I visit Singapore, Peking, or even Dubai.¹

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I am not concerned here to endorse the social or political arrangements of these places, or assert that I wish to copy them, let alone live in them. I remark merely on the strength of their economies, on the obvious energy and intelligence that they are able to engage at all levels of the population. Compare how a laborer works in England with how his equivalent works in China or Singapore! The latter works urgently, putting his heart and soul into his work, as if something important depended upon it. He is participating in something larger than himself. For the former, there is nothing larger, or at any rate more important, than himself, and therefore he is in no hurry and feels little compulsion, either internal or external, to exert himself mightily. Whatever the explanation for the extreme, urgent, and nervous energy displayed by workers in the East, I do not think that external compulsion can be the whole, or even the major part, of it. Slave labor, after all, is not particularly efficient. Nor am I saying that this energy is wholly good, beneficial, or attractive in itself. There is clearly more to the good life than working fantastically, one might even say fanatically, hard,² though we should not underestimate, either, the importance of work as a source of self-respect.

No, when a European sees all this energy he knows that his continent cannot hope to match it, as surely as an aging man knows when he sees a young athlete in his prime that he cannot hope ever to rival his loose-limbed strength or grace. His best days are behind him, and it is little consolation to him that he is now, thanks to his age, wiser, richer, or less tormented by ambition than the younger man.

Should this matter? No one travelling through Europe would conclude from what he saw that life there was unbearable, far from it. In many countries, on the contrary, life seems distinctly good. The people are healthy (the Dutch are by now the tallest people in the world, a tribute to the abundance, if not to the excellence, of food there), they do not have to work excessively to survive, they are housed and warmed, they have disposable income enough to secure their entertainments, of which there is a greater choice than ever before. Viewed from the perspective of absolute standards, there is nothing much to be morose about.

Alas—or perhaps it is a good thing—man is a comparing animal, at least when he has the knowledge necessary to compare himself with others: which, in these times of unprecedented access to information (indeed, it is not necessary nowadays to go to information; it will come to you whether you want it or not), and of mass travel, he is more than ever liable to make comparisons. What makes him happy is not so much a high standard of living for himself, as a higher standard of living than someone else. As Gore Vidal remarked, it is not sufficient that I should succeed, it is necessary that someone else should fail. And this applies not only to the standard of living, but to achievements of other kinds.

The awareness that the gap between Europe and much of the rest of the world, in point of both wealth and achievement in other spheres, has dramatically decreased, and in some instances reversed, was bound to give rise to unease, even if it was regarded as inevitable in the long run.³ No one likes to see his place in the pecking order decline.

But there are even darker worries haunting Europe. It is one thing to fret over a decline that leads you to inhabit a static, but rich and genteel, country that is more like museum of past achievement than a living, breathing power,⁴ but another to contemplate absolute decline. For once the machinery of international competition is set up, there is no standing still: you can go only forwards or backwards. If you don’t keep up, you will go back, not relatively but absolutely, and Europe is blessed neither with natural resources nor huge tracts of virgin land upon which its population might lead a simpler life than that demanded by advanced economies.

ANXIETY

The arrival of at least two giant industrial nations on the scene—India and China—disquiets Europeans for three reasons. The first is that it is inherently difficult to compete with the combination of cheap labor and high technology; the second is that the only means of doing so, by technological advance that keeps ahead of the competition, looks increasingly beyond the continent’s capacity. The continent that invented science as a self-conscious method of accumulating more knowledge about nature and the means by which it might be used to achieve human ends (evil as well as good, of course) has increasingly lost its position of leadership, and is now reduced to the application of what others discover or develop. A crude illustration of the decline of European science is the ratio of the number of Nobel Prizes won by British and American scientists in the fields of physics and chemistry for the periods 1940–1975 and 1976–2005. (British scientists were the most prolific winners of Nobel Prizes in Europe.) In the former period, British scientists won 37.5 percent as many prizes for physics as American scientists; in the latter period, 4.5 percent. For chemistry the figures were 93.3 percent and 16.7 percent respectively. Moreover, the figures declined not only relatively, but absolutely: from 9 to 2 in the case of physics, and from 14 to 6 in the case of chemistry.⁵

No doubt the relation between success in pure science and industrial or economic prowess is not a straightforward one. Entire countries have overtaken Britain economically without contributing a twentieth as much as Britain to the sum total of man’s scientific knowledge. Not only Britain, however, but the whole of Europe cannot be said to be in the forefront of world technology, either, though there may be isolated areas in which it leads. And this relative decline—which in some cases may even be absolute—is both humiliating in itself and bodes ill in a competitive world. Moreover, there is not much confidence anywhere that change for the better is at hand, or indeed that anyone knows, even in principle, let along practice, how to bring it about. I shall explore the deep-seated reasons for this later in the book.

The third cause for anxiety in Europe over the rise of India, China, and other lesser, but still considerable, countries as competitors is Europe’s strategic vulnerability. It is almost entirely dependent for its energy on foreign and distant resources. These resources are in areas or countries that are either politically unstable or potentially hostile—competition for their resources could easily turn acute. The economic downturn that caused a decline in the price of oil will probably not last forever, as downturns in the past have not lasted for ever;⁶ and often a period of exuberant growth follows. Then competition for energy resources will be fierce, and resort to force or the threat of force might be necessary. How would Europe fare if such an eventuality came to pass?

Europe is not only non-militaristic, it is anti-military.⁷ The profession of arms has no prestige whatever; on the contrary, it has the very reverse of prestige. No thought is more alien to the modern European mind, brought up in a lasting peace that followed two of the most catastrophic wars in history, than that he who desires peace must prepare for war. Even to entertain such a thought is to be branded a warmonger, as someone who secretly or openly glorifies the cull of young men, and increasingly of others, known as war.

WEAKNESS

A lack of military preparedness and capablity, however, has its consequences. When, in the wake of the Danish cartoon affair, the Danish embassy in Damascus was attacked with the obvious connivance of the Syrian government, how did, how could, Europe respond? The impression was given, and it was a correct one, that Europe had no means of dealing with a couple of cunning and treacherous mullahs who stirred up trouble for Denmark, other than by virtually giving in to demands that certain important subjects henceforth be placed, de facto, off limits for discussion. Even if the policy of appeasement were not officially enunciated, what was made abundantly clear by the whole episode was that there would be no retaliation by European countries for threats made to their own citizens: and that there would be no retaliation because there could be no retaliation. The quiet life was clearly preferred to the costs of securing a free one; if only we appeased enough, there would be peace in our time.

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Europe has hardly navy enough to suppress the Somali pirates, let alone protect its interests against a more serious ill-wisher with a hold over its energy supplies. Merely because bellicosity is a vice, cowardice is not a virtue. Nor will the latter earn the respect, but rather the contempt, of those who do not share an anti-military point of view.

Prosperous as never before, long-lived as never before, Europeans look into the future with anxiety or even with fear, as if they had a secret sickness that had not yet made itself manifest by obvious symptoms or signs but that was nevertheless eating them away in their vital parts. They are aware that, in Chinese parlance, the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn from them; and in losing that, they have lost everything. All that is left to them is to preserve their remaining privileges as best they can; après nous, as a well-known mistress of Louis XV is said to have remarked, le deluge.

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2.

DEMOGRAPHIC WORRIES, OR THE DEARTH OF BIRTH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES

In The Sonnets, Shakespeare tells the young man to whom they are addressed that he must have children, in particular a son, or else he has lived in vain, indeed badly and selfishly. The very first lines of the sequence are:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty’s rose might never die . . .

The message is conveyed ad what would be nauseam were it not for Shakespeare’s sublime poetic gift:

Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.

Or:

Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye
That thou consum’st thyself in single life?
Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,
The world will wail thee like a makeless wife,
The world will be thy widow and still weep.

Or:

Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold
Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day
And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?
O none but unthrifts! Dear my love you know,
You had a father; let your son say so.

In fact, I could cite scores of passages that convey this, or a closely allied thought, which for most of human history has been a commonplace: namely, that the passing on of one’s life to another generation is both part of what makes human life worth living, and testimony that it is in fact worth living.

But modern Europeans, it seems, do not agree. They are not concerned to replace themselves, and have other things on their minds. Here are the fertility rates of several European countries in 2004:

Ireland: 1.99
France: 1.90
Norway: 1.81
Sweden 1.75
UK: 1.74
Netherlands: 1.73
Germany: 1.37
Italy: 1.33
Spain: 1.32
Greece: 1.29

The replacement fertility rate for developed countries such as those in the above list is generally taken to be 2.1.⁸ Not a single western European country, therefore, has a fertility rate that will ensure that its population will maintain itself at its current size.

Moreover, life expectancy is continuing to rise. Some of the countries with the lowest fertility rates (Spain and Italy, for example) have among the highest life expectancies in the world, and they are still rising. This rise in turn raises fears that the economically active proportion of the population will decline, and that those unfortunate enough still to be in employment will have to devote ever more of their labor-time to the mainten...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Preface
• PREFACE
• 1. - SOMETHING ROTTEN
• 2. - DEMOGRAPHIC WORRIES, OR THE DEARTH OF BIRTH AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
• 3. - THEY BREED LIKE . . .
• 4. - SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS SO FAR
• 5. - THE ROLE OF RELATIVISM, MORAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL
• 6. - WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS (I)?
• 7. - WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS (II)?
• 8. - WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS (III)?
• 9. - WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS (IV)?
• 10. - WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS (V)?
• 11. - WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS (VI)?
• 12. - WHY ARE WE LIKE THIS (VII)?
• 13. - THE CONSEQUENCES
• INDEX
• Copyright Page