Western Civilization under Attack: Part Two

Western civilization, Islam, and secular elites formed the triangle that I began to develop in the first installment of this alarum. My thesis is that this precious thing, Western civilization, to which we all owe an unpayable debt of pietās, is under attack from hostile forces.

In the first installment, I drew from eminent thinkers (especially but not solely Catholic) to highlight essential components of Western civilization, elements that distinguish it from other civilizations and cultures, elements that elevate man and allow him to live freely and well according to his nature and divinely given vocation.

Persecution and dhimmitude

I did the same in talking about Islam, both its nature and its revealing history. Benedict XVI raised pointed questions about Islam’s voluntaristic view of God and man, and analyzed its defining commitment to Shari’a law. Robert Louis Wilken rehearsed Islam’s aggression toward Christian countries throughout its history, briefly sketched its ongoing inroads into Western societies, and asked plaintively: Where are our Charlemagnes?

I added a fundamental fact about Islam, that it divides humanity into two houses, one of submission to Allah’s Will as revealed definitively to the Prophet, the other the house of war, those peoples and countries disobedient to Allah’s Will and therefore rightly the objects of Islamic jihad and conquest. The reality of non-Muslims in Muslim-ruled countries shows where this logic ends: persecution and dhimmitude.

Of course, much more could have been said about these two topics. Long-time readers of Catholic World Report will probably be aware of Robert R. Reilly’s discussion in The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2011) of the decisive moment in Islamic history when it eschewed the incorporation of Greek philosophy and opted for Will as the Supreme trait of Allah and the norm of submission to Him.

On this same topic, one could also consult Rémi Brague’s discussion in The Law of God (2008) of the differences between Christianity and Islam when it comes to the relation between the Divine and what Brague calls “normativity.” In Christianity, God’s norms (such as the Ten Commandments) come from supreme Reason and are accessible in significant part by human reason, while Islam only knows divine positive Law.

Because of this, there is no theology, properly speaking, in Islam: its highest intellectual discipline is jurisprudence. For more on Islam’s nature and history, we could turn to the book On Islam: A Chronological Record, 2002-2018 (2018) by the late, great Fr. James V. Schall and published by Ignatius Press. In it, he reports and comments on Benedict’s and Reilly’s treatments of Islam, but also on that offered by Hilaire Belloc and Samir Khalil Samir, updates the “gory” empirical record of Islamist terror and murder, and adds the insights of a political philosopher.

Political Philosophy: Chantal Delsol

For reasons worth pondering, practitioners of the discipline of political philosophy have made signal contributions to our understanding of Islam, and indeed of the entire triangle. In her newest book, Prosperity and Torment in France (2025),⁴ the French Catholic political philosopher Chantal Delsol provides a contemporary vue d’horizon, as reported in a fine review of the book by John P. Royal at The Catholic Thing:

The statistics are startling: according to a 2015 survey, nearly a third of young Muslims in France prefer Sharia law to French law. In the near future, Arab-Muslims will represent one in four inhabitants. Every two weeks, a new mosque opens while a church closes; and many cities in France already appear more Arab-Muslim than French, with large neighborhoods that police dare not enter (the so-called “no-go zones”). A 2023 study found that 87 percent of the French said they feared civil war as a result of Islamic fundamentalism and liberal immigration policy.

87 percent! Here, in spades, is an undeniably popular concern. Unless it is denied:

In contrast, the author describes the “tortuous, hypocritical” support given to Islam by French media and intellectuals, even often-times radical Arab-Muslim immigrants. This stems from “colonialist” guilt, which undermines French ideas of unity and fraternity, and produces “a kind of redemptive self-flagellation.”

Probing deeper:

Delsol identifies the Achilles heel of French intellectuals: “We believed that religion was forever useless. We think it is a childish tale to lull children to sleep. When it reappears with such force, we have no intellectual means of grasping it. … just contempt and insults which are ineffective here.”

She reserves special scorn for the media: “…they understand nothing of the religious phenomenon, which to them resembles an unidentified [flying] object.” Nor is this just a French phenomenon and problem: “Assimilation and integration are common problems across much of the West, especially in relation to Muslim communities.”

For Delsol, “the problems are clear; solutions are lacking [however] without serious spiritual renewal.” Happily, there are some rays of hope: “Delsol describes France’s small, fervent Catholic community of young families (often among the elite class, surprisingly) which provides a glimmer of hope for the future.”

For my part, without denying the necessity and great desirability of “serious spiritual renewal,” I would also add that the problem cannot be addressed without renewed political will and concerted action. This thought is not just mine. It is also the thought of Charles Péguy, for whom the Republic and the Church stand together against “the intellectual party,” “the party of Progress.”

It is also the counsel of the French Catholic political philosopher Pierre Manent.

The thought and work of Pierre Manent

Manent is arguably the most discerning political philosopher in Europe today. He is preternaturally insightful about the West and its distinctive political, intellectual, and spiritual features, while he also knows Islam. Furthermore, he is among the most penetrating (and persistent) critics of today’s secular elites, self-professed proponents of (what I call) “DemocracyTM” and of a rainbow-colored “Humanity” (more below). In a number of writings, but especially in the magnum opus called Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic (2010; 2013 English translation), he has unearthed what he calls the “wellsprings” (ressorts) and self-assumed “tasks” (tâches) that make the West, the West. His explorations into the dynamism and Sonderweg (the special path) of the West are premised on two natural features of the human person: his political nature and his openness to, and desire for, the Transcendent. Western man has exercised these capacities in distinctive ways.

Alas, we cannot rehearse here the complex teaching of Metamorphoses; however, also in 2010, Manent was interviewed at length on his intellectual itinerary and works, including Metamorphoses. One section of the interview was entitled “What is the West?”. In it, he laid out a number of the distinguishing discoveries and tasks of Western man, among which were “to produce,” that is, to bring forth and maintain, “the common” (to koinón), a common world, a common way of life, by way of shared speech and deed, and the discovery of “the universal,” which gave thought a new lodestar. Political philosophy brought the two together with its exploration of the various political regimes and associations (tribe, city, empire) that human beings had formed, judging them according to universal criteria of justice and the good, themselves debatable and to be debated.

There were many more discoveries characteristic of the West: deep insight into the nature of human action (in Greek, praxis) and character, the discovery of the soul (psuché) and its powers, and the possibility of metanoía, conversion of the soul, common to the Platonic and biblical traditions. To these, one could add the New Testament contribution of “conscience,” extolled by Sts. Peter, Paul, and Augustine, and taken up, too often in a distorted way, by modern liberalism. These were all “dynamic discoveries,” that is, discoveries that constituted “tasks” and opened up new and vast horizons for Western human beings. Hence, the subtitle of Metamorphoses: On the Western Dynamic.

Manent has also written about Europe, the lengthy chapter in the West’s story after the advent of Christianity.¹ What is Europe, in its nature and its vocation? Here too, “tasks” constituted the thing:

From the time the inhabitants of our continent received the Christian proposition and began to pay attention to it, they found themselves confronted with a two-fold task: they had to govern themselves, and they had to respond to the Christian proposition of a “new life,” henceforth accessible to every person of good will, which consisted in participation in the very life of God in Three Persons. Both halves of this task were characterized by a high degree of indeterminacy. The task of self-government was made uncertain not only by the question of regime (monarchical, aristocratic, or republican), but also by that of the political form (city, empire, or an unprecedented form to be invented). … Given the great political as well as religious indeterminacy, so much greater was the breadth of indeterminacy that affected the articulation of the two, the difficulty of conjoining the religious and the political determination. …. Never was history more open, and Europeans have already been mistaken several times in declaring it over and done. This was, then, the starting point and the principle of European history: to govern oneself in a certain relation to the Christian proposition (italics added).²

Eventually, Europeans invented a political form that answered the double question. It was the nation-state with a “Christian mark,” as Manent terms it.³ This political form was unique to Europe. Ever since the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989-91, Manent has written extensively on this political form, articulating its nature and retracing its variegated history. That history is characterized by a truly remarkable inventiveness of political regimes and instruments and a consequent, equally remarkable, longevity. By means of the “device” of representative government, it allows for the kind of political life most suitable to the modern political animal. It allows for collective self-government, while protecting the rights of all citizens.

However, at least since the dawning of a new Europe after the collapse of Soviet Communism, this great work of European political invention and sagacity, the nation-state with representative government, has been under attack from secular elites and “the umma on the move,” as Manent phrases it. Elsewhere, I have written much about Manent’s defense of the modern nation-state, as well as his critique of the deeply misguided elites of the Europe of the European Union.

Here, I will report a few core elements of his critique of these elites that bear upon our topic, then turn to his sober discussions of Islam.

Secular blindness

Delsol observed that the secular leadership and media of France and elsewhere cannot even see the phenomenon of Islam-in-Europe. Not only that, they dissemble about it. Manent concurs and gives reasons for this paradoxical, obtuse denialism.

To begin with, they are good citizens of the modern regime, the liberal regime, that is, they are formed by its view of things. When this regime turns to religion, it reduces it to the object of individual choice and locates it in the private sphere. This is a double obscuring of the religious phenomenon. Obtuseness is also a consequence of a leading idea about modern societies, one that modern intellectuals first put forth: that modernization is equivalent to secularization. Not even true of Western societies, this is a huge barrier to understanding religious bodies and movements vigorously active on the contemporary scene. They do not register, and they should not exist in the eyes of those raised on the secularization thesis of modern Progress.

Finally, there is the decisive cause of the current inability to see the Muslim presence for what it is, which is an alternative secular faith, an ersatz religion, a democratic-Humanitarian religion. This worldview has taken hold of European elites and is the official position of the European Union. In it, traditional democracy, the democracy of a self-governing people ruling itself through responsive representative institutions, is replaced by “DemocracyTM,” in which an ever-expanding litany of individual rights, including sexual, is enforced on a recalcitrant populace by ever-more authoritarian elites. They believe they possess the moral high ground that legitimates their high-handed suppression of “hate speech,” “disinformation,” and “misinformation”–that is, dissenting voices and views—and their constant reworking of traditional institutions and practices, including marriage, but continuing far beyond. For them, human rights are the new Sacred Code and justify their authoritarianism on its behalf. Once the populace has internalized its diktats and is fully on board, however, European democratic humanity will have entered the Promised Land.

Undergirding this reworked understanding of “DemocracyTM” is a particular view of humanity, a thoroughly autonomous Humanity,⁴ This Humanity is on the cusp of full and final unification, where, as Manent puts it, “all significant differences are insignificant” and pose no threat or barrier to human Unity. In this religion of a (virtually) unified Humanity, the two cardinal sins are the public recognition of real and meaningful differences among human groups and any failure of “compassion,” sentimental fellow-feeling, the secular substitute for charity, especially with respect to the migrant, “the stranger,” and the Other. Indeed, the latter often possess the trump card for primacy and privilege in social and political life. In Keir Starmer’s UK, for instance, displaying the Union Jack, the banner of a proud nation and people, is deemed “provocative” by the Labour government because “threatening” to Muslims and migrants. It would be hard to find a more vivid example of elite hatred of country in the name of “multiculturalism.”⁵

Given its fictitious and utterly imaginary character, this religion of Humanity was originally enforced by political correctness and laws against “hate speech.” (Those of a certain age can recall a famous indictment brought against the intrepid Italian reporter and hater of tyrants, Oriana Fallaci, in 2006.) From there, it has proceeded apace and in places like the UK and Germany is enforced by government spying, Eichmann-esque police, and a two-tiered justice system. What results is a mandated surreality–the sure sign of ideology and totalitarianism–on top of an unacknowledged, indeed unacknowledgeable, reality. Actual people are ground between the twin millstones of their self-appointed “betters” and “the stranger(s) in their midst.”

This, broadly speaking, is the world in which Muslims enter and operate in many European countries. A situation less conducive to candor and integration is hard to imagine.

Manent on Islam

Manent has been a longtime observer and regular commentator on matters Islamic and Muslim. In 2005, for example, he considered, not “the difficulties of assimilation” of French and European Muslims, but the home region of Islam, the Arab Muslim Middle East, and analyzed what he called “the political problem of Islam”: the religion’s inability to find a political form that would enable its members to be at once faithful to the Message of the Prophet and home to “free men and women.”⁶

In 2015, he wrote an entire book on “the situation of France” vis-à-vis the Islamist threat that had recently struck multiple times in Paris and elsewhere, revealing an enemy among us, as well as the civically and socially “undigested” Muslim communities from which they came.⁷ In 2018, he engaged in a wide-ranging conversation with Rémi Brague on the natures of the Christian and Muslim religions, as well as the awkward condition of Muslims in an aggressively secular France, while in 2020, he again wrote on “Islam in France”. And late last year, he (unintentionally) caused a brouhaha with his direct answer to the question, “Can we still live together?” on a television show. Employing the idiom of what he elsewhere calls “political physics,” he declared:

We still have to look at the masses, the forces, and realize that the pressure is such that we have to make decisions concerning, I say it bluntly, the number of Muslims in Europe. [That number] cannot grow indefinitely. If it grows indefinitely, as is the case in Europe today, we will face tragedies that no version of secularism will be able to control.

One instinctively hopes that in pointing this out, Manent does not end up playing the role of Cassandra, but rather of the geese (ansares) that alerted Rome to the Gauls.⁸ Be that as it will, confirming Delsol’s earlier observation about “French media and intellectuals,” Manent was pilloried from the left, with his accusers twisting his words and saying he wanted “to number,” that is, “to put numbers on,” individual French Muslims. Such is the environment within which these things are “discussed.” Moral and civic courage are therefore de rigueur.

Trois leçons

From this rich body of reflection and commentary, I extract three points, all of which tend to show that Manent is a true son of the West and provides a model for our thinking and comportment toward Islam, its adherents, and “the umma on the move” in the West.

First, he seeks dispassionately to understand Islam. Unlike Islam’s bowdlerization of Jewish and Christian Scriptures,⁹ Manent makes a good faith effort to understand Islam. Only after having done this does he apply his own categories as a political philosopher to the phenomenon of Islam. This, in turn, is very illuminating and helpful to Muslims. Islam does have a “political problem”. Helping it articulate this fundamental problem is assistance of the first order.

Second, Manent treats Islam and the problems it poses to France and the rest of Europe with candor and the requisite (but rare) honesty. In his 2015 book, he called a spade a spade: we are at war with Islamists, and there are huge chunks of the umma that are imperia in imperio in France and elsewhere. This is an intolerable situation, both for the Muslim communities and the host nations.

Having called a spade a spade, he proposed steps that both parties in France can and should take to effect a rapprochement and, more deeply, to incorporate Muslim communities into the body politic, the wider national community. As is the case with such things, both sides will have to give to receive, in this case, to “receive” active membership in a coherent national community. On one hand, the French state, and partisans of extreme secularism, must give up the pipe dream of turning French Muslims into good “secular liberals,” and must make certain public accommodations to Muslim mores, whether dietary or concerning female modesty.

As for what Manent proposes that Muslims must do, they are few (just three) but cut to the heart of things: 1) the hajib must go, because it violates the legitimate human expectation of the visibility of the members of the community; 2) Muslim citizens must submit to the rules of the game of democratic life, which include free speech and the criticisms that such freedom entails; and, finally, perhaps most importantly, 3) all mosques and Islamic centers must cut off all financial support from the countries of the Arab Muslim Middle East, especially the Gulf States (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the Emirates, and so on), thus making it clear in a most material manner that they have joined their fate with the host country, now become their “community of shared destiny.” As an incentive and bonus, if they accomplish this separation-cum-incorporation, they will provide an example not just to Muslims in Europe but in the Middle East itself, that the nation-form can provide the political form that Islam itself seeks but does not provide.

Third, while offering these forward-looking and positive options, Manent is extremely clear that the status quo and its continuation are both undesirable and unsustainable—“tragedies” await inaction. Important debates must be conducted, important decisions taken. They must be made concerning the character and humanitarian worldview of secular elites, they must be made about the nature—the real nature, the full nature—of the national community, they must be made about the current capacity of the national body to incorporate new elements, they must be made about the essentials and non-negotiables of democratic life. And all parties must come to terms with the historical and essential Christian contributions to the nation and to modern democracy.

Challenges, Prayers, and Guides

As the range and depth of these decisions indicate, these are extremely challenging and even momentous times. Pierre Manent has done everything he can to illuminate the issues and the stakes. One prays that leaders of the Christian community listen to the lessons and counsels of the French political philosopher as they think about guiding their flocks in and through them. And pending that, may Christian laymen and women recognize the power of illuminating “the signs of the times” by political philosophy, as practiced by fellow Catholics Pierre Manent, Chantal Delsol, Fr. James V. Schall, and also Alain Besançon, a French Catholic polymath who has written incisively of the Church, Islam, and their relations. It was he who first wrote of the problematic relation between the Qur’an and the Scriptures of the Jews and Christians, as well as called into question the widespread notion of “the Abrahamic religions” (Abraham is conceived totally differently from Jews and Christians by Muslims).

Thanks to these fellow believers and guides, in addition to increasing our understanding of Islam and the state of Muslims in Europe, we will not be tempted to confuse Christianity with the religion of Humanity. More positively, we will be confirmed in the truth that as members of Europe and the West, we are both imagines dei and political animals. And that in Catholic teaching, the virtue of pietās encompasses the patria along with one’s parents and God.

Endnotes: