The significance of the title will become apparent further down in the post. For now I’ll start out with a 12 minute Neil Oliver monologue that sets the tone. The connection between what Oliver has to say and the title will also take on more significance as we proceed. I draw your attention to what Oliver tells us about Pfizer, among other observations—as you’ll see, the monologue is far more wide ranging than the title’s reference to “air strikes on Yemen” would suggest. It’s also far more wide ranging than the reference to “Britain” would suggest. The overall them could be said to be the disconnect in the collect West between the ruling class and the subject class. Two Doug Macgregor tweets today play into both the narrower and broader themes of the Neil Oliver monologue:
FACT: The ruling political class here and in much of Europe is largely divorced from its population.
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What's going on in Gaza is not going to stop.
Anyone who thinks this is finished is very much mistaken.
Netanyahu has made that very clear.
The longer this lasts, the more likely a regional explosion comes.
The video is a sort of impressionistic intro to a long tweet that presents the thesis of French public intellectual Emmanuel Todd in his new book, The Defeat of the West. I’m pretty sure I’ve referenced Todd in the past, but a quick search didn’t yield anything definitive. At any rate, despite Todd’s reference to the West, a quick perusal of the excerpts in the tweet (which I’ll past in below) will show that Todd is consumed, like so many European—and, perhaps, especially French—intellectuals, with America. That is confirmed by his Wikipedia page:
In After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order (2001), Todd claims that many indices that he has examined (economic, demographic and ideological) show both that the United States has outlived its status as sole superpower, and that much of the rest of the world is becoming "modern" (declining birth rates etc.) far more rapidly than predicted. Controversially, he proposes that many US foreign policy moves are designed to mask what he sees as the redundancy of the United States. In his analysis, Putin's Russia emerges as probably a more trustworthy partner in today's world than the US. The book has been much read although many of its more original ideas have been received with scepticism.
Coming in 2001, Todd’s thesis was certainly prescient—now in light of the events of more recent years. Nevertheless, the focus on America is, to some extent misplaced. And, in fairness, as you’ll see, Todd places Protestantism—originating in 16th century Europe—at the very center of the West’s decline and fall. There’s a bigger context to all this, and I’ll try to sketch this out before we proceed to Todd’s ideas specifically.
The big context is the centrality of Platonism for the intellectual tradition of the West. That’s not to say that the influence of Platonism in the West has been exclusive, simply that, overall, it has been dominant. By “Platonism” I refer to Plato’s inability to solve the problem of man’s knowledge of reality, due to his identification of Man with the Mind. That identification led Plato into the dead end that has plagued the West—how to connect Mind and Matter? Over two millennia any number of proposals have been made, but most have accepted the Platonic terms of the “problem”, and thus end up denying one or the other term (Mind/Matter) as the “solution”.
The key figure in this intellectual history is Augustine, because he ties the philosophical and theological threads together. Augustine’s “solution” to Plato’s problem was to posit “divine illumination” as the guarantor of Man’s knowledge of reality—which is to say, on the occasion of Man’s sensations God “illuminates” the mind with the appropriate concepts, ideas, “universals”. It’s easy enough to see that behind this, quite literal, Deus ex machina “solution” lurks the radical skepticism that lies at the heart of all varieties of Platonism. Most of the intellectual history of the West is the story of the effort to come to terms with this fundamentally Platonic conundrum. I embrace Thomas Aquinas’ radically non-Platonic philosophy, but Thomist philosophy—for all the lip service paid to it in the Church—has been a minority tradition in the West and has been consistently beset by attempts to platonize it. (That is the overall theme of Thomist Realism and The Critique of Knowledge. If you wish to explore the importance of this trend Western history, on this substack, see here.)
The Augustinian “solution” was considered acceptable into the High Middle Ages, but by the fourteenth century philosophers and theologians alike had increasingly come to embrace the radical implications of Augustine’s thought and to extend those implications in the forms of Voluntarism and Nominalism. These trends of thought were radically skeptical and radically pessimistic as regards Man’s relationship with God, and this skepticism and pessimism arises from their Augustinian roots. This duality of skepticism and pessimism dominated the late Middle Ages and is the background to the Protestant “Reformation” (Luther was a professor who embraced Nominalism), which was actually, as Voegelin argues, a revolution in the West. But it’s important to understand that that revolution came, not from outside the Church, but from inside its dominant intellectual tradition. Indeed, the “Reformation” in many respects represented a doubling down of the most damaging trends in the medieval Chuch’s Augustinian tradition. (Luther, Calvin—but Jansenism, etc.!) Skipping lightly over several tumultuous centuries, we can see the culmination of the Augustinian tradition—Platonism in the West—in the thought of Immanuel Kant. Kant’s solution took God out of the equation (except in the sense of “Practical Reason”) and asserted that Man imposes conceptual structure on a substrate reality that he doesn’t actually know.
So, enough for now. Let’s get into Todd’s thesis—with my interjections:
Emmanuel Hemmerlé @HanShanEH
“We are witnessing the final downfall of the West.” Emmanuel Todd.
Emmanuel Todd is a prominent and brilliant French intellectual: a historian, a demographer, and an anthropologist. He is one of France’s last independent thinkers, a category that has become a rarity… while we used to have so many.
He has just published a new book: “The Defeat of the West”. In it, he proposes a dispassionate analysis of the world’s geopolitical scene, laying out facts without taking moral stances.
In Todd’s assessment, the disappearance of American Protestantism is the key factor in the fall of the West. This fall of the Protestant religion in America has given rise to this new American ideology reigning over the whole Western space: Nihilism. This is the central concept of the book. This Nihilism is both the trigger of the West’s final downfall and the driving force behind the West’s renewed violent imperialism.
Not having read Todd’s book, let me say this. I can see that in the post-Reformation world—leading up to the dominance of the British Empire, and extended by the American Empire post-WW1—Protestant nations were the dominant geopolitical forces both in terms of military force but also ideologically. That ideology was a blend of Kantian philosophy (extended by Hegel and Marx) and Classical Liberalism—Protestant centric ideologies, although rooted in the Augustinian tradition.
Here are some of his quotes from interviews he has given over the last couple days:
"My book is basically a sequel to Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. On the eve of the 1914 war, he rightly believed that the rise of the West was at its heart the rise of the Protestant world - England, the United States, Germany unified by Prussia, Scandinavia[Holland deserves a major mention]. France's luck was to be geographically glued to the leading pack. Protestantism had produced a high level of education, unprecedented in human history, universal literacy, because it required that every believer should be able to read the Holy Scriptures for himself. In addition, the fear of damnation and the need to feel chosen by God induced a work ethic, a strong individual and collective morality. On the negative side, there were some of the worst forms of racism that ever existed – anti-black in the United States or anti-Jewish in Germany – since, with its conceptual dichotomy of "Chosen by God" and "Damned by God", Protestantism renounced the Catholic principle of equality between all people.”
David Goldman aka Spengler has maintained that Protestantism actually represents a “Judaizing heresy” of Christianity, especially with regard to the embrace of “chosenness” and the consequent rise of Zionist ideology. Notably, within the Catholic Church, from the 19th century on there was a revival of Augustinian thought—often underground but coming out into the open at Vatican II. With that has come a Catholic rapprochement with the Augustinian currents in Protestantism.
"Today, symmetrically, the recent collapse of Protestantism in the U.S. has set in motion an intellectual decline, a disappearance of work ethic, and its substitution by mass greed (official name: neoliberalism). After the rise of the West comes its downfall. This analysis of the religious element does not denote any nostalgia or moralizing lamentation in me: it is a historical observation."
“I emphasize the industrial deficiency of the United States with the revelation of the fictitious nature of the American GDP. I deflate this GDP and show the root causes of industrial decline: the inadequacy of engineering training and more generally the decline in educational levels. The US GDP is a bubble.”
Speculation: Could there be a connection between the rise of financially driven “bubble” economies and Kantian and post-Kantian ideology, the imposition of Man’s thought on reality? Does that also tie in to Todd’s next topic—transhumanism? Again, we see the Platonic derived notion of “mind over matter” in a breath takingly radical fashion! Todd is right to see this bizarre phenomenon as a symptomatically central—”defining”—character of Western decline:
"The fixation of the Western middle classes on transgenderism raises a sociological and historical question. To constitute in the social horizon the idea that a man can really become a woman and a woman a man is to affirm something biologically impossible, it is to deny the reality of the world, it is to affirm the false."
"Trans ideology is, therefore, in my opinion, one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy, not just things and humans but reality."
“The collapse of Protestantism in the United States has caused a decline in the level of education.”
“The disappearance of religion: Americans don’t go to church anymore, they don’t believe in God anymore."
“There is a powerful nihilistic impulse in the US: the search for war and violence. This is a lost society without meaning, that provokes or fans conflicts everywhere in the world.”
“Something important has happened in the West : the transition from liberal democracy to liberal oligarchy.”
“France does not exist because it is now aligned with the United States.”
The preceding excerpts illustrate Todd’s obsession with America. What he says is true, but is perhaps even more true of European society. Radical secularism, nihilism, loss of meaning, a failure of religion—this is as dominant a trend, if not more so, in Europe as it is in America.
Similarly, in what follows, I believe Todd needs to differentiate more clearly between “Americans” and “American leaders”. He does draw the distinction, but—at least in this excerpt—fails to explain where this anti-Russian “obsession” comes from. For example, he strangely fails to mention the origin in British imperial designs that developed over a period of centuries.
In the concluding paragraphs we again see this obsession on Todd’s part with America, and a failure to account for the passivity of the European ruling class. From my perspective I see an utter failure of the European elites to take charge of their own future—pathetically waiting for a US “retreat” from Europe rather than taking positive charge. The reason is the collapse of spiritual substance in the West from the late Middle Ages onward, as Christopher Dawson argued over his long life. It’s hardly only America that is devoid of morality and religion or which has embraced a radical secularism.
“The Americans' obsession is to prevent the cooperation between Germany and Russia. This is American leaders’ terror. But it's going to fail because the West is going to lose. It's reality that's going to win.”
“The best thing that could happen to Europe is the retreat of the US.”
“The West is on an aggressive trajectory.”
“The American ruling class is devoid of morality, it has no more religion, all that remains with it is an obsession with money and war and a kind of enjoyment at creating a mess all over the world.”
Love Neil Oliver , thank you for this !
I should explain that I thought the closing video made a sort of bookend with Neil Oliver. :-)