A European existential crisis

There is a sense in Europe that the story has run out – a sort of European existential tiredness, if you will. In his well-argued polemic The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, Douglas Murray begins with a bold statement: “Europe is co

While there are many facets to this crisis, I’d like to draw your attention to one aspect in particular, which is Europe’s endemic feeling of existential tiredness – something the Germans call ‘ geschichtsmude’, meaning ‘weary of history’.

This is a sentiment that is constantly felt by Europeans, and can strike by surprise at any moment. Some of us feel it all the time, while others catch it in waves or in surprising moments. Some might even voluntarily trigger this feeling through literature, as I found is often the case when reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Others might get a whiff of it in their daily encounters, when a conversation takes a turn towards meaning and purpose upon which no readily available answer springs to mind.

This feeling is not entirely new. For centuries, Europe has come up with terms describing some variant of this phenomenon, including pseudomedical ones detailing symptoms of apathy and nervous exhaustion. Indeed, there was such a thing called ‘neuroasthenia’ – a 19th-century psychological disorder characterised by elevated stress levels and existential weariness.

The subject was also written about by thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche, among others, from whom a consensus emerged that the accelerating rate of change due to worldly pressures meant, among other things, that there was a persistent draining of the European spirit that was specific to modern life. Those who sought to address this problem found themselves pursuing different lifestyle variations, ranging from physical and dietary changes, exemplified by the pre-antibiotic culture of the sanatorium, to the teachings offered across the orient – where Europeans could take their mind off the overwhelming weight of their past and present.

Today, we often refer to this as ‘burn-out’, although to our advantage the connotations vary slightly in that this term has perhaps caught on because it is more flattering than ‘tiredness’, implying that people have nobly given too much of themselves. Many books and articles offering insights about this phenomenon have emerged in recent years, with the historically familiar symptoms being cynicism, depression and lethargy resulting from overwork and lack of social support, among other things.

If working for little reward might push an individual to suffer from burnout, might it not be the case that an entire society can experience this too, provided that enough individuals suffer from it?

In Oswald Spengler’s pes- simistic Decline of the West, it is argued that civilisations are like people: they are born, flourish, decay and die, and the West has reached the latter stages of this process. The normal rejection of this point of view is that the West constantly fears its imminent decline, but it might just be the case that, at some point, the self-pitying and self-flagellating West could be onto something. Nietzsche also considered this, lamenting that “we are no longer accumulating… We are squandering the capital of our forebears, even in our way of knowing.”

Nietzsche makes it easier to recognise that it was not a dietary change or a lack of physical fitness that was causing this decline, but an exhaustion resulting from a loss of meaning, implicitly acknowledging that the West is living off a dwindling cultural capital.

Irrespective of one’s personal opinions about Christianity, it must be acknowledged that, for centuries, the greatest source of energy came from the spirit of the continent’s religion. It was a readily available foundation from which one could draw existential sustenance to go to war, or to defend the homeland. It inspired Europeans to reach the greatest heights of human creativity – St Peter’s in Rome, the works of Bach and Beethoven, Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks and Caravaggio’s Beheading of St John, to name but a few.

In the 19th century, however, this source was dealt a series of seismic blows, and was scruti- nised to the point at which its very foundations began to give way. When the texts of the Old Testament were beginning to be treated with the same scepticism as any other historical text, it had an effect that still remains largely unacknowledged today. Europe had explored the knowledge of its great myths and legends, yet the Christian story was the continent’s foundational myth and had thus remained untouched.

Recalling to his biographer – after having seen the works of German critics on the Old Testament, and in anticipation of their translation to English – Oxfordian Edward Pusey said: “This will all come upon us in England; and how utterly unprepared for it we are!” Needless to say, it didn’t take long for the same sceptical sentiment to extend its reach towards the New Testament, with David Friedrich Strauss releasing his critique titled The Life of Jesus Critically Examined in 1835.

What was once an incontrovertible system of belief turned into a new area of inquiry all over the Western academic world and beyond. Just as today’s Islamic scholars hopelessly attempt to divert criticism away from the foundations of their faith, in the knowledge of what it will do to them, the Christian clergy across Europe also tried to keep such criticism at bay, to no avail of course.

The tide of merciless scrutiny washed across the continent just as Pusey said it would. This was a fundamental turning