Does the West Lack That Prerequisite for Survival: A Motive to Get Up within the Morning?
“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose,” noted Austrian psychiatrist/philosopher Viktor Frankl.
Much has been written about the need for meaning, in recent years especially. Without it, a person can descend into a morass of addiction, degradation, and self-destruction. The same, however, is true of those large collections of people called civilizations. And of ours an apropos question can be asked.
Does waning Western Civilization have a reason to get up in the morning?
Some wonder about this, commentators Erik and Todd Gregory among them. In a Monday article titled “On Civilizational Erasure,” they warn that the West is slouching toward subjugation. This topic has returned to the news, too, they state, with the “predations of Islam once again commanding center stage.” (E.g., Bondi Beach.)
Islam’s resurgence, predicted by Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen more than 60 years ago, is now underway. And it’s enabled, the Gregorys point out, by Western ignorance, decadence, and woke taboos against discussing the Truth.
Related to this, they lament how Islam’s 1,400-year history of conquest and bloodshed is whitewashed by anti-Western pseudo-intellectuals. (E.g., “historian” Howard Zinn.) Consequently, American schoolchildren aren’t taught actual history. Their parents and teachers don’t even know it themselves, either, and are too often blithely incurious about it. The Gregorys then write:
Armed instead with the fake morality of luxury beliefs about alleged Western racism or Islamophobia, and fetishizing whatever seems exotic, today’s decadent Westerner lacks the moral and physical courage that enabled his distant forebears to beat back the centuries-long Muslim onslaught, which finally ignited Europe’s Renaissance and Age of Enlightenment.
Memory-holed History
So what forgotten history are the Gregorys referencing? Do realize that by the 400s A.D., Christianity was the dominant religion in the Middle East and North Africa. In fact, North Africa had at the time more Christians than Europe did. What happened?
I addressed this in my 2010 essay “The Crusades: When Christendom Pushed Back.” Starting from the beginning, I wrote:
The year is 732 A.D., and Europe is under assault. Islam, born a mere 110 years earlier, is already in its adolescence, and the Muslim Moors are on the march.
Growing in leaps and bounds, the Caliphate, as the Islamic realm is known, has thus far subdued much of Christendom, conquering the old Christian lands of the Mideast and North Africa in short order. Syria and Iraq fell in 636; Palestine in 638; and Egypt, which was not even an Arab land, fell in 642. North Africa, also not Arab, was under Muslim control by 709. Then came the year 711 and the Moors’ invasion of Europe, as they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and entered Visigothic Iberia (now Spain and Portugal). And the new continent brought new successes to Islam. Conquering the Iberian Peninsula by 718, the Muslims crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into Gaul (now France) and worked their way northward. And now, in 732, they are approaching Tours, a mere 126 miles from Paris.
This is when an underappreciated hero, Charles Martel (“the Hammer”), outnumbered and “outgunned,” stopped the Muslim advance into Europe cold. His 732 victory at the Battle of Poitiers (aka Battle of Tours) was one of history’s great turning points. Martel very well might have saved Western Civilization.
The Saga Continued…
While Martel eventually drove the Islamic invaders from Gaul (now France), the story didn’t end there. As the Gregorys tell us, providing more history and naming various expansionist Islamic groups (summary by Grok AI):
- Moors (North African Berbers/Arabs): Conquered and occupied Spain/Portugal for nearly 800 years and parts of France; accused of murder, taxation, enslavement, and concubinage.
- Romanticized “Al-Andalus” narrative rejected as myth; reality described as brutal subjugation despite some cultural appropriation by Muslims.
- Saracens: Medieval Muslim invaders who plundered and stagnated Europe, blamed for prolonging the “Dark Ages.” [Note: These ages weren’t actually so “dark,” as illustrated here.]
- Barbary Corsairs (North African pirates): Kidnapped and enslaved over a million Europeans.
- Ottomans: Conquered Southeastern and Central Europe (Balkans, Hungary, parts of Poland/Austria); accused of slaughter, rape, forced conversion (e.g., Janissaries), and genocide (e.g., Armenian Genocide).
- Beyond Europe: Mughal Muslims in India caused massive Hindu deaths (described as history’s bloodiest chapter); contrasted with criticism of milder British colonialism.
So what ended this Muslim aggression and conquest? Did Islam’s sons change their ways? No, rather, as history professor Thomas Madden wrote in 2011:
The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic — no longer worth a Crusade. The “Sick Man of Europe” limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.
History Is ’a’-Rhymin’
Now, though, the sick man of Europe — of the West, really — is the West itself. Oh, Islamic armies, per se, no longer march. They don’t have to. Late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi explained why in a 2006 speech.
“We don’t need terrorists, we don’t need homicide bombers,” he stated. “The 50 million Muslims of Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”
And now, a generation later, the Gregorys write:
Many Christmas markets in Europe are now closed due to “uncontrolled vehicles” and related Islamist threats while church bells and caroling fall silent in order to avoid offending Muslims. Meanwhile, the Muslim muezzin sounds triumphantly throughout Western Europe and even in American cities of the Upper Midwest. Islamic supremacism is on the march, its triumphalism augmented by its alliance with Western progressives who denounce any reminders of Christianity, including celebrations of Christmas.
Burn a Koran or post a meme mocking Islam, and go to prison for a hate crime. Burn a Bible, and hey, you’re bravely speaking truth to power. Citizens of the West all know the drill by now.
… To paraphrase the otherwise cartoonish James Carville, it’s the demography, stupid.
Man in the Mirror
Looking even deeper, though, it’s the relativism- and comfort-born apathy, stupid. While “individual results may vary,” Western Civilization no longer has a reason to get up in the morning. It has lost its sense of meaning.
Our ancestors sure had it. Whether it was the Crusaders defending Western culture or later colonizers spreading it, they had conviction. They believed in their culture and faith and knew that spreading them was, objectively, a good. The Truth enlivened them.
Yet today, awash in relativism, all we see is gray. We subscribe to “diversity,” “equality,” secularism, and other frothy fancies, for the moment, anyway. But you don’t ardently defend, let alone risk dying for, tastes, only Truths. Hedonists don’t look toward Heaven — and they don’t forestall Hell on Earth.
In fact, a commenter under the Gregorys’ article summed the matter up succinctly. Westerners “have lost faith in their civilization,” he observes. “Their pews are as empty as the uteri of their indigenous women.”
Well said. Lose your faith, your fecundity is sure to follow — and, finally, your civilization itself.