Fjordman

Is Europe Dying?

The demographics are unmistakable: Europe is dying. The wasting disease that has beset this once greatest of civilizations is not physical, however. It is a disease in the realm of the human spirit. David Hart, another theological analyst of contemporary history, calls it the disease of "metaphysical boredom"-boredom with the mystery, passion, and adventure of life itself. Europe, in Hart's image, is boring itself to death. And in the process, it is allowing radicalized twenty-first century Muslims-who think of their forebears' military defeats at Poitiers in 732, Lepanto in 1571, and Vienna in 1683 (as well as their expulsion from Spain in 1492), as temporary reversals en route to Islam's final triumph in Europe-to imagine that the day of victory is not far off. Not because Europe will be conquered by an invading army marching under the Prophet's banners, but because Europe, having depopulated itself out of boredom and culturally disarmed itself in the process, will have handed the future over to those Islamic immigrants who will create what some scholars call "Eurabia"-the European continent as a cultural and political extension of the Arab-Islamic world. Should that happen, the irony would be unmistakable: the drama of atheistic humanism, emptying Europe of its soul, would have played itself out in the triumph of a thoroughly nonhumanistic theism. Europe's contemporary crisis of civilizational morale would reach its bitter conclusion when Notre-Dame becomes Hagia Sophia on the Seine-another great Christian church become an Islamic museum. At which point, we may be sure, the human rights proclaimed by those narrow secularists who insist that a culture's spiritual aspirations have nothing to do with its politics would be in the gravest danger. It need not happen: there are signs of spiritual and cultural renewal in Europe, especially among young people.

posted by Unknown @ 10:23 AM