Alas, we have forgotten that. Now we have only the weight of guilt on our shoulders, in both America and in Europe.
In the words of David Goodheart, we can witness a rift between the “Somewheres” and the “Anywheres” in the Western World. While the “Anywheres” have no longer real attachments to local communities, the “Somewheres” insist on their roots and traditions. From this perspective what are the importance of local communities, nations and patriotism in preserving values of Western societies?
No civilization can be built without “Somewheres.” Throughout history we understood that we live in a place and live in a time, we have a history, we pass on our tradition from one generation to the other. So the question is how did the “Anywheres” appear and what is that animates them in the first place? Tocqueville in the 19th century had a deep philosophical account of this. The longing of the “Anywheres” is to escape the limits of life and escape the stains.
So the cosmopolitans today look at people who believe in the nation and call them authoritarian
and all sorts of disgusting things because they think these people are limited and poisoned. Their desperate hope is that by fleeing from specific embodied life, they can free themselves from the stain. For example, many of my young students today say “I am not religious, I am spiritual.” Why do they say that? They are saying it because religion is supposed to be limiting. Being spiritual transcends the limits of any religion. This suggests a desperate hope to transcend limits.
Can we find any true freedom this way?
Well, the Christian insight is that we do not find freedom by escaping limits. Instead, we find freedom by accepting our limits. Saint Augustine wrote, “the fire that burns the chest purifies the gold.” Mortal life involves suffering. We have to decide how we will respond to our suffering, as individuals and as nations. The question is whether we will be purified by our suffering or we will give up entirely and say there is nothing here that is worth saving.
It seems that the major institutions of the European Union is leaning toward this latter conclusion…
The initial argument on the European Union is that it is an economic integration. Later, people said that an economic union is not complete, and we should think of it now as a political union. So now the effort involves constructing a political union. But what we are really missing in that conversation is a third thing: the European Union as a public atonement for the world of nations and the horror it produced that finally ended in 1945. It is an announcement to the world that we will have no more nations: we will be a transnational union. This is a tragedy. Without Christianity, Europe has only the weight of national guilt. The identity politics left comes along and says your atonement consists of fully renouncing your nations. And that is what Europeans are now doing, by the tens of millions. That is not all. You must also renounce capitalism, you must renounce your heteronormative family, you must renounce your homophobic church.. I see
the European Union as the prime embodiment of this project.
I see it not as a political project but a project of religious atonement.
Can one find atonement through politics?
No, because the problem of sin is deeper than what any nation does. It is in our heart, it is not that one nation is pure while the others are not. To be a human being is to be broken and to long for God to heel our wound. Christianity and Christians once understood this. When we lose sight of the insight that Christianity offers, but retain the guilt we arrive at what I call earlier The Great Exhaustion. Western Europe suffers from just this.
On the other hand, it seems that the Central European countries value and insist more on their traditions, religions and patriotism. What role the Central European approach might or should play in rediscovering that traditional way of life?
Central Europe is different. In Hungary and Poland, for example, the churches are stronger. Western Europeans have largely abandoned the church and religion. When they speak to Central Europeans and wag their fingers at them saying they should feel guilty, Central Europeans who still have strong religious faith look to the Western Europeans and say “we know where guilt has to be worked through. It is certainly not to be worked through by renouncing our nations. It is to be worked through our churches.”
So if you have a strong church tradition you have an anti-dote to the woke identity politics.
People understand that the problem of guilt is not a political problem: you cannot solve it by renouncing our nations. It is a religious problem so you solve it by atonement, penitence and forgiveness in churches.
What role nation states do play?
Our question today is what is the grandest political form that humans can live in, which allows them to participate and build a community. The answer is the nation. There will be no transnational or supranational government. The highest unit we can have is the nation. At the end of time God will gather together the nations.
But until the end of time, there will be nations.
That is why I am very suspicious of the current path of the European Union. I am not troubled by the transnational agreements and treaties between nations and group of nations. But the authority for them remains the strength of the nation itself. So I am not worried if the European Union sees itself as a supplement to the nations of Europe. The difficulty is that the European Union does not see itself a supplement; it sees itself instead as a substitute for those nations. That is not way that we can live together.
And on top of that, each nation is unique…
Yes, I think one of the lessons we have to pick up from liberalism itself is that we have to be very careful making universal claims about one particular form government. I myself think that democratic government is a wonderful form of government. However, I was born in the Middle-East, my father was with the United States Foreign Service. I grew up in Yemen and I spent more than half of the last fifteen years moving back and forth between Qatar and Iraq working in universities there. That long experience in the Middle-East has convinced me quite thoroughly that democracy is not a universal political form. Many of my student in the Middle-East say “why, Professor Mitchell, do you allow American students to come to us and give us lectures why we need to move toward democracy? We know that constitutional monarchy is the highest political form and we are tired of your American students telling us that democracy is the universal political form.” My view is that we have to live in a world that is pluralistic. We have to understand that it is impossible to agree on a certain governmental form that fits every region and every country around the world.
What we need is a frame of mind that is truly pluralistic,
that has no desire to impose the interests of one nation on the interest of another. In my view, each nation is an experiment that has to play itself out for hundreds or maybe even for thousands of years. We have to truly embrace the pluralism of the world and the pluralism of nations. The idea that we can have a universal government is short-circuiting God’s tremendous design, which is to bring about unity through pluralism, which may yet play out for thousands and thousands of years.
So pluralism, diversity and tolerance are virtues that come with human civilization…
Interestingly, diversity and tolerance are the words of the identity politics left. Yet the Left is not prepared to be truly tolerant and diverse. A liberal society understands that there are rules, and there are exceptions to the rule. But it recognizes that there is a range of ways of life and understandings that have to prevail. Because we are tolerant and we want to be diverse, we are happy to let others join in. But in reality the Left does not say that there are exceptions to the rule. Instead,
it says that the exceptions are rule.
So, its view is that if you accept the historic church or the traditional family, there must be something wrong with you. You are intolerant, unless the exception to the rule is your standard. That is a terrible mistake. In spite of all the talk about tolerance, the identity politics left is in reality extremely intolerant.
Since we celebrate Christmas these days I am curious what other Christian virtues you would consider essential in preserving the Western societies and their unique way of life.
I actually see guilt as a virtue. I think what Christianity understood was that through guilt the human soul is deepened. We ask the question, “how am I implicated in what has happened?” Many of the civilizations around the globe are called face-saving civilizations. They do not accept personal responsibility, as much as we in the West do. They are simply involved in trying to save face, and not being accountable for the transgression they commit. I do think that Western civilization has become the dominant civilization because
our acceptance of guilt makes us face problems and take responsibility.
If we discover there are problems, we hold people accountable for them. When there are errors made, there are punishments, and then we restart. This is an extraordinary advance, because most of pagan civilizations and many other civilizations are face-saving civilizations. They are “shame cultures” while Christianity is a “guilt culture”. If we do not have a way of absolving guilt, it is terrible because we become exhausted and immobilized. That is exactly where we are right now. But if we do return to the Christian way of absolving guilt, we can autocorrect and build something new.
The other thing
Christianity gave us is an understanding of representation.
Adam represents and stands for us, while Christ stands in for us. These are quite interesting theological concepts. But when you look at how government was thought through in the early modern period, it was arguments for representation that came out theology that gave rise to the idea of representative government. We take this for granted, but in large swaths of the Middle-East, there is no theory of representation because there is no theory of representation in Islam. It is not a theological category there. This is something to be cherished. We want to have representative government. It is a gift of Christianity.