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Europe's Perplexities--Three Decades Ago
| Article
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12528 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
4,577 Words |
| Author
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Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk is the author of more than thirty books,
including The Conservative Mind, now available in its seventh
revised edition. |
The more things change--so a French aphorism instructs us--the more they are the same. The other day, in the course of writing my ruminative memoirs, I reflected that we have gained no ground in our attempt to restore some political and economic and moral stability to our civilization over the past thirty years--not even in Western Europe. All the pother about a reinvigorated Europe, invincibly democratic, triumphantly modernist, prosperous beyond the dreams of avarice--why, it has turned out to be pother. The deadly flood of chemicals down the Rhine from Switzerland is a recent demonstration of the gross misunderstandings of the evangels of "development."
So perhaps my reminiscences of European conferences and European conflicts of opinion just thirty years ago may be of interest to some people concerned for the health of our culture. In the autumn of 1957, being then the editor of a new quarterly, Modern Age, I took ship to Europe.
At that hour--when communists and others were wrecking havoc in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe--people of a different cast of mind were stitching together once more that old garment variously called "Christian civilization," "Western civilization," "the North Atlantic community," or "the Free World." Not by force of arms are civilizations made to cohere, but by the threads of moral conviction and right reason. In the hand of the Fates are no thunderbolts: only threads and scissors.
I attended two large international conferences during 1957. One was held at St. Moritz, in Switzerland: the tenth-anniversary meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society, composed mainly of political economists. The other met at Bruges, in Belgium: the Conference on North Atlantic Community, an assembly of political theorists, serious journalists, political leaders, and men of business. Both groups talked for a week, stitching away at their work of restoration. Materially, by the late fifties Western Europe had recovered from the devastation of the Second World War; but politically, Europe was unstable, and morally, all was adrift. These two groups aspired to establish an intellectual footing for the democracies of the West.
The common bond among the members of Mont Pelerin Society was belief in the enduring relevance of the "classical" political economy to the gravest and grandest concerns of the social order: classical not in the sense of Greek and Roman learning but as signifying the doctrines and substance of a competitive industrial economy, developed principally during the closing three decades of the eighteenth
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