The famous description of the spirit of what we call today the Collective West, “le culte de la chose bien faite,” sounds sadly hollow nowadays.
A few weeks ago, she published the tape recording of a disgraceful bribe offer made to her by the state chairman of her own party. After requesting a confidential tête à tête conversation, that individual visited Lake in her home to inform her that wealthy and powerful “people back East” (in America that is a universally understood metaphor for deep state power centres) were prepared to satisfy Ms. Lake’s financial requirements if she would withdraw from the Senate race, presumably to make way for a controllable Establishment candidate. She only had to name her figure. To her credit, she flatly refused.
Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s famous description of the spirit of what we call today the Collective West, “le culte de la chose bien faite,” sounds sadly hollow nowadays.
Once upon a time, Amiel’s words referred to a palpable, vibrant, reality. In countries associated with the civilisation of the West, and as noted by Weber in particular where the Protestant ethic prevailed, doing things right and efficiently used to be a fanatical cult, just as Amiel observed. The beneficial results, especially by comparison to the performance of civilisations and cultures rooted in different principles, were plainly visible and indisputable.
Amiel lived in the nineteenth century. There is a contemporary French philosopher, Emmanuel Todd, who has noted processes that are markedly different. He has the reputation of a prescient analyst and uncanny forecaster. His recently published book, “The Defeat of the West,” will unsettle many. Its tenor is in sharp contrast to Amiel’s self-confident and optimistic view that the West has got the winning combination with its defining characteristic of “doing things right.” According to Emmanuel Todd, the West no longer retains its perfectionist edge. Its fundamental task now is merely to avert the impending downfall, if it still can. As Todd cogently argues, the West has not only passed its “active stage,” which is reflected in Henri-Frédéric Amiel’s cited remark, but also the ensuing civilisation-on-auto-pilot “zombie stage”. It now finds itself in the terminal “stage zero,” the religious mainsprings whence its civilisation drew its vitality being completely sapped. In the West, there is no longer a cult of efficiency and perfection capable of nurturing and sustaining a corresponding cultural articulation.
The implications of such a view, if correct, are monumental.
As encapsulated in Curzio Malaparte’s deliberately chosen raw Germanic expression, that would mean that the once fabled West has gone kaputt.
Todd has an enviable track record. In the mid-1970s he published a remarkable and at the time incredible volume, “The Final Fall,” where he predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. This writer’s reaction to Todd’s arguments when they were put forward forty years ago was deeply sceptical; they were enticing, yet also seemed unrealistic. To most contemporaries, the Soviet Union appeared to be an unshakable, enduring reality. Todd’s meticulous analysis of Soviet demographic data in support of his thesis was impressive, but seemed unconvincing as a cause capable of producing an effect of such magnitude. Few could imagine then that barely a decade later processes would commence that eventually led to precisely the outcome that Todd had predicted.
It would be unforgivably simplistic to attribute the implosion of the Soviet Union mainly to unfavourable demographics. That was a complex operation in which a multitude of factors played a role. But the virtue of the diagnostic investigation conducted forty years ago by Emmanuel Todd was that he demonstrated how seemingly minor yet tell-tale signs could point to undercurrents and important processes that unjustifiably may have been overlooked.
And indeed, it is in the West now that tell-tale indications of disarray are increasingly emerging, to the consternation of those who have eyes to see and historical perspective to make comparisons. These signs point to a variety of breakdowns, only some of which are purely mechanical. They appear mostly to be cultural in essence, and therein lies the danger. A few recent random examples will serve to make the point.
Exhibit A: Political corruption.
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