The World Wars discredited their traditional cultures and their populations do
not appear concerned about their own survival. That cannot, of course, be
typical of the human condition, or there would be no human race to begin with.
Ethno-suicide follows on the death of faith in the future. My research supports
the conclusions of Philip Longman, George Weigel and others who link the
respective declines of belief and birthrates. But what belief is in question?
The families of humankind have learned to believe in only two things: a
supernatural god, or themselves. (For most of history, we worshiped ourselves,
or what amounts to the same thing, our image in nature).
Our ancestors cheated death through the perpetuation of blood
and culture. They could step outside their own culture as little animals could
shed their instincts. In peril of their lives, men marched to war and women
gave birth to perpetuate their tribes without second thoughts, indeed without
the capacity for second thoughts. Not until late antiquity does universal
empire encroach on the prerogative of tribe in culture, first with Alexander
and then with Rome. With the advent of empire, the peoples for the first time
consider their mortality from the vantage point of a social entity not
restricted to race. And with it also comes the first attenuation of the will to
live among the Hellenistic and Roman upper classes. How the encroachment of
empire in late antiquity might have influenced the will to live of tribes whose
names we barely know and whose customs and language are lost forever, we only
can guess. But we know that mere ethnicity no longer is a credible vehicle for
continuity in a world dominated by supra-ethnic states.
A great gulf is fixed between the successful supra-ethnic states, and the
ethnicities marking time until they die out of ennui and self-loathing.
Ethnicity is fading as a credible basis for personal identity or national life,
for the nations have learned that they are mortal, and their sentience of
mortality is a sorrow too great to bear. The great German-Jewish theologian
Franz Rosenzweig, writing at the end of World War I, understood the tragedy of
the nations, and formulated in a way that illuminates our present
circumstances. Rosenzweig is honored as one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of
the past century, but the academy has not given adequate attention to what he
called his "sociology of religion", perhaps because his conclusions are so
disturbing. He wrote, "The peoples of the world foresee a time when their land
with its rivers and mountains still lies under Heaven as it does today, but
other people dwell there; when their language is entombed in books, and their
laws and customers have lost their living power."
The love of the peoples for their own nation was "sweet and pregnant with the
presentiment of death" in 1919 when Franz Rosenzweig considered the
consequences of World War I, in which all the nations of Europe fought
unashamedly for their own supremacy. But the presentiment of death has turned
into a bitter, earthen taste in the mouths of the nations, who have lost the
illusions that sustained their national lives during the past two centuries.
Europe's Second Thirty Years' War of 1914-1945 destroyed the nations'
pretensions to eternal life in their own ethnic skin.
It is not only that nationalism is dead; nationalism itself carries the taste
of death, for the nations - "a drop of the bucket" and "dust on the balances" -
must perish. Only one nation conceives of itself as eternal, and that is
Israel, whose belief that the Creator God's love for its ancestor establishes
its immortality beyond the death of the universe itself (Psalm 102).
In the West, nations came by the hope of immortality through Christianity,
which offered the promise of Israel to the Gentiles, but only on the condition
that they cease to be Gentiles, through adoption into an Israel of the Spirit.
Israel is the exception that proves the rule, the single universal nation whose
purpose is the eventual adherence of all of humankind. The history of the world
is the story of man's search for eternity. That is what Rosenzweig meant when
he said that the history of humanity is the history of Israel. It is not the
tiny Jewish nation, but rather the promise of eternal life vouchsafed first to
the Jews, that stands at the center of Western history.
Christian Europe came into being by absorbing invader and indigenous alike into
a supra-ethnic Christian empire whose universality was expressed by a single
religious leader whose authority transcended kingdoms, a single church and a
single language for liturgy and learning. Europe arose from universal Christian
empire and it fell when the nationalities mutinied against their foster mother
the church and fought until their mutual ruin. The mantel of Christian empire
passed to the United States of America, which is Christian by construction if
not by constitution. The notion of national sovereignty that replaced the
Christian empire as Europe's defining principle after the Treaty of Westphalia
in 1648 overthrew the foundation on which Europe was built. The founding of
America as a non-ethnic state restored it, in a sturdier form.
America and China have nothing of importance over which to quarrel, and an
innate affinity for each other. China was never a nation, but a cultural
construct uniting many tongues and tribes through a unified administrative
platform and philosophy. Francesco Sisci, La Stampa's Asia Editor and a
frequent contributor to this publication, argues persuasively that Christianity
will play a crucial role in unifying China in the future (see
Change in the face of foreign devils Asia Times Online, July 3, 2008).
China's rate of Christian evangelization, moreover, may make China the fulcrum
of Christian life within a generation or two (see
Christianity finds a fulcrum in Asia Asia Times Online, August 7,
2007).
India is the hybrid of an ancient civilization embracing 30 modern languages,
united by the Anglo-Saxon import of parliamentary democracy. The adaptation of
Hindu civilization to modern democratic governance is one of the miracles of
modern times, and India's prosperity and stability are not in question.
Islamic civilization remains the great frustration of world polity. As I wrote
here recently (Please see
Should Islam be blamed for 'barbaric' acts? Asia Times Online, March
11, 2008), Islam parodies Christianity. Christianity proposes to incorporate
all of humanity into the new People of God, by effecting an inner
transformation of every individual. By this transformation, Christians believe,
all of humanity can become holy. Islam offers a universal religion not of inner
transformation, but of obedience. Precisely this form of surface universalism
ensures that Muslims carry the baggage of traditional life into the new
religion, for it offers no point of departure from traditional society. As a
universal religion, Islam can only universalize the aspirations of the tribes
it assimilates, rather than transform them, and cannot rid itself of its pagan
heritage. Instead, it lashes out against the encroachment of more adaptive
civilizations: Western, Chinese and Hindu.
The Great Divergence separates the supra-ethnic states - America, China and
India - from the vulnerable ethnicities of the world. All ethnic states are
failed states or eventually failed states. There is one exception, and that is
Israel, for Israel does not understand itself as a nation like other nations,
but rather as a bridge between man and the eternal over which all of humanity
ultimately shall pass. I do not think it is a coincidence that of all the
world's industrial nations, only Israel and the United States have a positive
population growth rate.
In some cases a sick culture may recover; in other cases it is only possible to
make the patient comfortable. Statecraft cannot decide ex ante which
cultures should persist and which should disappear; no human agency has the
authority, much less the right, to condemn peoples, languages and cultures to
the dustbin of history. By the same token, if whole peoples lose the desire to
continue and insist on disappearing, no outside agency can stop them from doing
so. Managed mortality is the correct response of statecraft to the
self-destructive impulses of peoples who no longer wish to exist. A healthy
polity has the responsibility to prevent terminally ill neighbors from dragging
it down with them.
The type of man we encounter in the dying nations, not only in the remote
rivulets of the human current but on the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Sea of
Japan, is a stranger to modern social science. He is not Sigmund Freud's man,
driven by libido, nor economic man, pursuing utility. He is averse not to
life's hardships and dangers, but to life itself, for he rejects life precisely
at a moment when hardship and danger have begun to fade. He suffers from the
restless heart that St Augustine ascribes to those who are far from God.
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