While Europe Slept Freedom, and More

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I n the great cathedrals in Europe, a few people—usually elderly women—can be found at worship. Everybody else is a tourist, cameras hanging around their necks, meandering through. I was recently in Scotland, While Europe Slept I read a newspaper story commenting on three hundred deserted churches dotting the Scottish countryside, asking if they should be destroyed or turned into bars and cafes. Europe herself, in her proposed constitution, refuses to acknowledge the heritage of Judaism and Christianity—although Greece and Rome and the Enlightenment are acknowledged. Europe cannot remember who she is unless she remembers that she is the child not only of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and the Enlightenment but also of Judaism and Christianity—the child, therefore, of Catholicism and the Reformation. If Europe abandons her religious heritage, the idea of While Europe Slept dies. What does it portend? If a culture forgets what it is, as I While Europe Slept Europe has done, it falls first into an agnostic shrugging of the shoulders, unable to say exactly what it is and believes, and from there it will inevitably fall into nihilism. Detached from its religious foundations, Europe will not remain agnostic. Difference tells us nothing in and of itself. Some ways of life and ways of being in the world are brutal, stupid, and ugly. Some a human rights-oriented culture cannot tolerate. A culture must believe in its own enculturating responsibility and mission in order to make claims of value and to institutionalize them in social and While Europe Slept forms. This a While Europe Slept Europe cannot do. Multiculturalism is then, in practice, a series of monoculturalisms that do not engage one another at all; rather, the cultural particulate most enamored of gaining and While Europe Slept power has an enormous advantage: One day, it proclaims, we will bury you. For that Europe, the window to transcendence is slammed shut. Human values alone pertain. But these human values are shriveled by a prior loss of the conviction that there is much to defend about the human person, and they are seen as so many subjectivist construals without any defensible, objective content. Unsurprisingly, what comes to prevail is a form of reduced utilitarianism that rationalizes nihilism. The territory as one's own property is the self itself, or While Europe Slept understanding of the self shorn of any encumbrances of the past, any shackles of old defunct moralities. The question of what the self is, and whether it has any transcendent meaning, is answered with a shrug. The late John Paul II saw the result of the belief that we are While Europe Slept of ourselves, wholly self-possessing. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Should no one attach value to us and we be too bereft or wounded to attach it to ourselves, we become dispensable. The final triumph of this notion will be a world in which the powerful have their way simply because they can and because the ethical and moral barriers to taking what they want have all been lost. The final fate of the disabled in a liberal society will not be a happy one. Over time human rights, now almost universally accepted among Europeans, will themselves come to be seen as so While Europe Slept arbitrary constructions that may, on utilitarian grounds, be revoked—because there is nothing intrinsic While Europe Slept human beings such that they are not to be ill-treated or violated or even killed. Even now, many do not want to be bothered with the infirm elderly or damaged infants, so we devise so-called humane ways to kill them and pretend that somehow they chose or would have chosen to die. Elderly patients are being killed in the Netherlands without their consent. The Australian utilitarian Peter Singer predicts confidently that the superstition that human life is sacred While Europe Slept be definitively put to rest by It is a softer nihilism than the past's, but it is nihilism all the same. In an interview for a British magazine during the summer ofSinger said that if While Europe Slept faced the quandary of saving from a raging fire either a mentally disabled child, an orphan child nobody wanted, or normal animals, he would save While Europe Slept animals. If the child had a mother who would be devastated by the child's death, he would save the child, but unwanted orphans have no such value. This is the entirely consistent result of the view that human life no longer possesses an While Europe Slept dignity, that we are only meat walking around, and we can be turned easily into means to the ends of others, just as we may turn others into means to our ends. It is the old master-slave scenario come to life, even as we congratulate ourselves on our enlightenment. Ironically, while While Europe Slept has become a champion of human rights and democracy as the political form that supports human dignity most fully and bids to be the political form within which human flourishing is most likely to take place, much secular reason has increasingly manifested itself as secularism. And secularism—a While Europe Slept cultural ideology that mocks religion as superstition and celebrates technological rationalism as the only proper and intelligent way to think and to be in the world—has developed into nihilism, into a world in which we can no longer make judgments of value and truth in defense of human dignity and flourishing. The Jerusalem side While Europe Slept the European heritage tells us that all are equally children of God—the disabled, the ugly, the bad-smelling, the boring, the lonely—all require our care and concern. As the anti-Nazi German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer insisted, even the most wretched life is worth living before God. Without God, without some transcendent principle, While Europe Slept wretched life is not worth living at all. And others have the power to decide whose life is wretched based on utilitarian criteria. The utilitarian ethic would annihilate the Christian ethic in the name of progress and decency and the ending of suffering. For three centuries, Europe was defined in and through a complex dialectic and dialogue between belief and unbelief. This unbelief was not While Europe Slept to secularism. This Europe is a capacious place and a beautiful one. Not all opinions are created equal. Not all views deserve respect. W hat happens when, unlike Camus, Europe loses—abandons or forgets—one side of the dialectic? She winds up with a monologue, and the unbelief side becomes exaggerated and distorted into an ideology of secularism fueled by subjectivism, with the results we have seen. She comes to believe as did Camus' German friend. Thinking of human beings as consumer subjects—as does the European Union, an econometric, highly bureaucratized, and legalistic construction—is not a sufficiently robust conception to commit people civically over time. One of the glories of Western pluralist democracies has been their capacity to forge unity out of diverse mixes of peoples—diverse in nearly every way in which people can differ. The United States has done this remarkably well, allowing immigrant communities to hold on to cultural aspects of their identities as long as these could be expressed in ways consistent with the constitutive norms, rules, and practices of democratic civil society itself. What happens when, having lost the belief side of its historical dialectic, Europe loses a sense of self-confidence about her enculturating and civic mission? The first thing that happens is that it ceases to engage in the determined making of citizens. Ethnic communities are excluded from the broader streams of life under the rubric of an allegedly benign multiculturalism, While Europe Slept they fester in resentment and isolation. Little is done to absorb and enculturate the newer waves of immigrants who have no experience of democracy and bring with them an officially sanctioned hatred of Western culture. In Great Britain before the attacks of July 7,radical imams used the cover While Europe Slept religious liberty to recruit death-dealing militants who openly preached virulent anti-Semitism, scorn of democracy, the replacement of the civic law by Shari'a law, and contempt for anything Western. A deadly deal was struck, apparently, that Britain would leave them alone if they left Britain alone and did their bad stuff elsewhere. Clearly, relations with unassimilated minorities do not work like that. Britain shrugged its shoulders, but the hatred spilled into the streets, the subways, the buses. France's Muslim majority lives in an angry subculture scornful of France and Europe, high in criminality and intolerance, often engaged in some circles in practices that openly defy constitutive principles of human liberty and freedom, such as arranged marriages for girls as young as eleven and honor killings and assaults. An antidemocratic, illiberal zone exists within the wider democratic body. Then the French government decides it must do something, and it takes a determined stand—against the head scarf! Resentment grows. In the Netherlands, the notion of pillorization got perverted to mean cultural isolation for the immigrant Muslim population. Unsurprisingly, it was in Europe that the killers of September 11 became radicalized, picking up on, perhaps, the ideology While Europe Slept anti-Americanism preached enthusiastically by French elites and the anti-Semitic strain on the left. Democracies often have a difficult task in figuring out how to deal with internal threats, with those within the body politic who would destroy it if they could: Witness Weimar dealing, or not dealing, with Adolf Hitler. Perhaps Europeans today are altogether too complacent, too convinced that economic rights and expressivist self-sovereignty can carry us through. But no one can miss the signs of cultural slackness and exhaustion all around in today's Europe. Demographic collapse is one sign of an existential loss of hope and a turning of the self While Europe Slept on the self, refusing to extend the self to a child and While Europe Slept abandoning the task of civic formation on this most fundamental and private level. Europe suffers from many self- inflicted wounds—the wounds of indifference, the wounds of self-absorption. Will Europe be able to deal with all the daunting challenges she faces, including destabilization, economic While Europe Slept, a resurgence of anti- Semitism, and all the rest? Only if she remembers who she is, with something precious and valuable to offer, which means accepting her religious heritage and its normative constraints on what people are permitted to do and how they may do it. Only if Europe can sustain principles and commitments that are historically derived from presuppositions of divinely sanctioned human dignity. I speak here not of faith but of sustaining cultural memory, including that which resolutely rejected the view that we are all forced to choose between faith and reason, which would rule Europe's historical dialectic irrelevant. In a recent essay, Benedict XVI a European intellectual, after all writes that, in Europe today, those who abuse Judaism and Islam are shamed or fined. Europe [must] reclaim what is best in its heritage and thereby place itself at the service of all humankind. But Camus understood the dilemma and Sartre did not. When I was an undergraduate more than forty years ago, I attended a lecture by Sir Julian Huxley, scion of the Enlightenment, a distinguished branch off the tree Huxley, a proponent of scientism, enthusiastic about eugenics as the forward march of progress. Without qualification of any kind, he pronounced that by the year religion and nationalism will have disappeared, having been supplanted by the total victory of scientific rationality and a benign world order. There is While Europe Slept soul to fret about, only mastery to achieve. As his body was carried into St. Peter's, the pallbearers made a circle through the crowd and then carried his body into the basilica as the people wept and applauded and the litany of the saints rang out with its beautiful, haunting chant that tells us we are not alone on our earthly journey. Here we witness another sort of reality, another future, even another international order embodied. The view of the human person celebrated in the litany of the saints and honored by the presence of the millions, While Europe Slept of them young people, who poured into Rome to celebrate and to mourn, is very much that of the ensouled body, keeping body and soul, spirit and flesh together. This life is exquisitely social, its While Europe Slept and purpose immanent yet framed by the transcendent. Which represents Europe? There could scarcely While Europe Slept a wider gap than that between a view of human life as encompassed entirely by birth and ending definitively with death, with both birth and death coming increasingly under rationalistic and scientist control, and a view of human life as a gift and a blessing, given meaning because we understand that our good is not ours alone but a good that links us to a world of others, our brothers and sisters, although they may be While Europe Slept and strange and even hostile. That Europe should wind up poised between two such powerful and contrasting worlds results from no incoherence, as a moral philosopher might claim, but rather While Europe Slept the intrinsic telos embedded in each distinctive understanding and deeded to it by its history. Europe was defined for centuries in and through an energetic dialogue between belief and unbelief and, having lost belief, finds nihilism. It can take the form of medical practitioners killing handicapped newborns or infirm patients, While Europe Slept than healing and caring for them; the form of isolating and neglecting immigrants; the form of ignoring antisocial behavior and cruelty until it turns into open and widespread criminality; the form of an indifference that, in the name of toleration, permits a zealous minority to call for the murder of those While Europe Slept have drawn cartoons however stupid those cartoons may have been and for more suicide bombers and the killing of innocents. Evil can take the form of refusing to be what one is. The retreat While Europe Slept defining Europe in relation to her Jewish and Christian heritage is the face of European nihilism. When a reaction comes, it is likely to be extreme and distorted because indifference prevailed too long. The Europe Camus described will one day die if, forgetting the heritage of Judaism and Christianity, she withers into something no longer recognizable as herself. Close Login. Web Exclusives First Thoughts. Intellectual Retreats Erasmus Lectures. While Europe Slept - Wikipedia

Reviewed by Robert Spencer. Middle East Quarterly Fall Bawer, a gay American writer who lives in Norway and also spent several years in The Netherlands, provides numerous chilling examples of this creeping Islamization and how it challenges core European values of pluralism, While Europe Slept freedom, and more. Massive immigration into Europe from Muslim countries has been unaccompanied—at the insistence of the Arab League and with While Europe Slept acquiescence of the European Union, as Bawer notes—by any large-scale organized attempts to assimilate these populations. Bawer demonstrates that this failure even to attempt to inculcate European values in these new Europeans has negative consequences not only for the immigrants but also for the native populations. Their lives have become more difficult, more precarious, and more expensive because of both the necessity to institute antiterror measures and because of the comprehensive challenge to European mores that the immigrants are posing. In response to all this, Bawer chronicles how Europe's elites remain wedded to a "mindless, self-destructive multiculturalism" that has even led them more than once to shortsighted alliances with While Europe Slept most intransigent of Islamic hard-liners. Meanwhile, the political mainstream has abdicated its responsibility on this issue, leaving the field open for resurgent neofascists. The suicide of Europe that Bawer so ably recounts is yet in the While Europe Slept of playing itself out. Latest Press Releases. Latest MEQ Articles. Middle East Quarterly. Turkish Islamism and Pedophilia. Iran to Begin Weapons Exports. Diliman Abdulkader on U. Policy toward the Kurds. Sign Up for Forthcoming Webinars. Iran's Advances in Latin America. Does Jordan Want the West While Europe Slept While Europe Slept by Jean Bethke Elshtain | Articles | First Things

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to While Europe Slept saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. The struggle for the soul of Europe today is every bit as dire and consequential as it was in the s. Then, in Weimar, Germany, the center did not hold, and the light of civilization nearly went out. As an American living in Europe sinceBruce Bawer has seen this problem up close. The European political and media establishment turned a blind eye to all this, selling out women, Jews, gays, and democratic principles generally—even criminalizing free speech—in order to pacify the radical Islamists and preserve the illusion of multicultural harmony. The few heroic figures who dared to criticize Muslim extremists and speak up for true liberal values were systematically slandered as fascist While Europe Slept. The mounting crisis produced by these deeply perverse and irresponsible policies finally burst onto our television screens in Octoberas Paris and other European cities erupted in flames. This brave and invaluable book—with its riveting combination of eye-opening reportage and blunt, incisive analysis—is While Europe Slept reading for anyone concerned about the fate of Europe and what it portends for the United States. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. Published February 21st by Doubleday first published January 1st While Europe Slept More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about While Europe Sleptplease sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Curious, to say the least. Let me get this straight no pun intended : Bruce Bawer is a gay New Yorker who hooked up with a European lover and now currently resides in Oslo, Norway. Yet, he is also a proud American and yeesh proud conservative who takes pot-shots against the US quite personally, even going so far at While Europe Slept point to chastise German kids for wearing Che Guevarra T-Shirts? Grow the fuck up, you idiots. Herein lies the problem regarding European mostly Western immigration with North Africans and Middle Eastern extremists as opposed to immigration here in the United States and Canada: In Europe, they tend to be coddled and practically forced to reside in self-segregated neighborhoods -- Paris, Madrid, London, While Europe Slept, Oslo, Amsterdam, Rome, Marseille, Berlin, etc. As a result While Europe Slept that, and the odd passive-aggressive assertation that, as a politically correct Union, they won't help these people acheive a level of integration necessary to help them get off of welfare and become Dutch, Danish, French, Spanish, German, Norweigian, or Swedish or whateverthe newly arrived immigrants read: extreme Islamists have basically created pockets of the Middle East in the Western World and have imported some of the worst their section of the world has to offer: Honor Killings. Forced Marriages. Female Circumcision. Gay Bashing. Holocaust Denial. Religious Attacks on Churches and Synagogues. Wife Beatings. I was able to finish it because I have been there on occasion While Europe Slept have seen them with my own two eyes. From time to time whilst reading this book, I had While Europe Slept crings when Bawer would stray from his treatise which is, and I agree with, "Islam wishes to conquer the West and While Europe Slept sharia law"and begin griping that the While Europe Slept papers "don't like Bush. Bush isn't worth liking. Yes, there's an element of racism here, but what Bawer is talking about here is how after World War II, European society set about in itself a deep-rooted self-hatred; and that particular self-hatred manifested itself into a haphazard throat-baring to the While Europe Slept of the Middle East. Through little fault of its own, however, immigrants to these peaceful nation-states of Western and Northern Europe have, through coddling and massive welfare programs, ceased to While Europe Slept TRY to integrate. Forced marriages are still common, with wives being exported from the home countries, and, when children are born, refusing to let them learn the language of the host nation and, instead, shipped off to Pakistan or Iran or Algeria to attend Koran schools where they are taught that infidels are "less than human" and "not While Europe Slept obeying for they are the scum of the Earth. Worthwhile reading, all in all. It's sickening sometimes how the press in Europe just rolls over on terrorism time and time again, but a wakeup call, nonetheless. Worth a read, especially when this has such serious repercussions for the rest of the Western world. View 2 comments. Aug 13, Leftbanker rated it it was ok Shelves: politicscrime-gangsters. His conclusions on many of the events described in this book are completely the opposite of mine. However, I am a firm believer that this religion is a very destructive force in the world. I believe all religions are pretty much poison, but Islam is especially dangerous. As a long-time resident in Europe, I also feel that the immigration policy in While Europe Slept countries here is fatally flawed and what they have are not immigrants but economic colonists. Many of the immigrants be they Muslim or Chinese are not really interested While Europe Slept becoming citizens, of becoming integrated, or adopting the values and lifestyles of the host country. The author was mugged, gay-bashed a couple of times, and found himself in innumerable verbal skirmishes with Europeans who insulted While Europe Slept and Americans. They say that if you meet more than two While Europe Slept in a day, you're one of the assholes. Both physically and While Europe Slept he seems incompetent at self-defense. He also has a lot of completely ridiculous and absolutely childish ideas of what America has done for the rest of the world and how grateful they all should be. He chides Europeans for being gutless pantywaists for not standing up to their Muslims immigrants, and he constantly mocks their socialist views. He obviously likes something about Europe or he would never had stayed so long. I defy him to point to a conservative society where an educated person would care to While Europe Slept. Were it not for the hyper-liberal mindset of many European intellectuals, Europe would be as backward and intolerant as much of the American south that the gay Bruce Bawer fled in fear and with loathing. A right-wing While Europe Slept man and a Christian: could there be a more conflicted, self-loathing soul than this guy? Even though I agree with his harsh criticism of Islam and European Muslims, his views on almost every other subject just I find to be ridiculous. Almost any time immigration is mentioned, someone cries racism no While Europe Slept what is being While Europe Slept, but there really is a huge problem with immigrants not caring one bit While Europe Slept becoming a part of the societies in which they now live, and rejecting everything modern European countries have to offer except the high wages. Half of British Muslims feel that homosexuality While Europe Slept be illegal, While Europe Slept just on example of the divide between this religion and society. With that said you are treading a very fine line between warnings about immigrants, and racism. The author relies a bit too much on anecdotal stories of the crimes of Muslim immigrants. It's almost impossible for me to take a man seriously who claims that the serial liar and drug addict, Rush Limbaugh, often has "to set the story straight" when the liberal press gets it wrong. Like so many on the American right he takes everything he sees in politics and pounds it in a square hole to fit his ridiculous narrative. To conclude, I don't feel that radical Islam is the problem. I think Islam is the problem as this religion desperately needs a reformation. Until that happens, radical and observant Muslims are basically one in While Europe Slept same. Aug 05, Skylar Burris rated it really liked it Shelves: politicsislam. Despite its subtitle, this book is not so much While Europe Slept radical Islam as it is about the While Europe Slept cultural differences between the United States and Western Europe that make it less possible for Muslims to assimilate and liberalize in European countries While Europe Slept in the U. Although it made me concerned for the fate of Europe, it actually made me more optimistic about the future of Islam in America than did a sugar-coated apologetic like While Europe Slept Really Speaks for Islam? Leave it to a gay New Yorker who fl Despite its subtitle, this book is not so much about radical Islam as it is about the essential cultural differences between the United States and Western Europe that make it less possible for Muslims to assimilate and liberalize in European countries than in the U. Leave it to a gay New Yorker who fled for Europe because he so loathed American evangelical Christians to make me feel proud to be an American and a Christian. For nonfiction, the book is a fairly quick read and is interestingly written. While Europe Slept reminded me of what I love about my country, of the importance of a nation having vibrant religious feeling when coupled with true religious freedomand it also While Europe Slept some great insight into the anti-American sentiment so prevalent among Western Europeans a sentiment which, popular misconceptions notwithstanding, pre-dates George W. Bush and has been alive and well for decades. Bawer talks of many cultural difference, but the primary distinction he explores is the way Americans While Europe Slept multiculturalism as compared to western Europeans. While he does not claim America is without its problems and racial prejudices, his analysis made me appreciate the machine of assimilation in America, the way people really can be relatively easily incorporated into the fabric of the nation within a generation, which is not so much the case in Europe, where people of non-western descent will often be thought of as "second" and "third" generation immigrants rather than as, say, Norwegians or Dutchmen or Frenchmen or Germans. For Europeans, race and ethnicity is more defining than it is for Americans. An African immigrant who became a citizen of Holland, for instance, remarks that when he went to the U. This is a problem While Europe Slept it While Europe Slept to Islam because it means that, "As a rule, the [European] establishment strives to overlook the fact that being Muslim is a matter of holding certain beliefs and living and dying by them. It prefers instead to think of Muslim identity as having to do with cuisine, clothing, and skin color. Thus, Muslim immigrants are not generally encourage to accept Western values of tolerance and gender equality and religious freedom and are held to different standards of judgment for their actions than a native would be. European multiculturalism, Bawer implies, is not so much a matter as in the U. Don't let me change your wonderful culture in any way, and don't try to come over here and become a permanent part of mine. For most Europeans, a foreigner was unalterably foreign.