PERSPECTIVE ON MODERN CULTURE : Freed of Its Moral and Religious Spine, Europe Collapses : The end of ‘superstition’ and church ‘authoritarianism’ paved the way to Auschwitz and homicidal ethnic wars.

A friend, mildly in his cups, recently cracked that “There are two kinds of Europeans: the smart ones and the ones who stayed.” I laughed, remembering with gratitude my great-grandfather, who got off the boat in April, 1861. But the current Balkan fiasco has made me think that my friend’s joke contained a bitter truth: Europe, as a civilization, is in awful shape at the end of the 20th century.

By any measure, Western Europe was the undisputed center of world civilization 100 years ago. Yet, that period now looks like the last brilliant flare of a candle about to be extinguished. In those halcyon days, a “grand tour” of Western European capitals was essential to any serious person’s education. Any such tour today would resemble a museum excursion far more than a trip to the cutting-edge of history.

Western Europe gave the world the industrial revolution, the radical transformation of natural science, democracy and a structure of order in world affairs. But within a span of mere decades, leadership in each of these fields had passed from European hands.

The Industrial Revolution was perfected in the United States; the postindustrial revolution began here and in East Asia. It took two cataclysmic world wars and a Cold War to save European democracy; in each instance, the forces of freedom only won because of the active intervention of the United States, the new guarantor of world order. The frontiers of scientific inquiry moved from Europe long ago; many of the continent’s most eminent scientists were driven from their homes by ideological maniacs. As for political ideas, Europe’s most influential 20th-century exports have been communism and fascism; their defeat has been followed by the rise of homicidal ethnic nationalisms.

The current scene does little to encourage the thought that Europe has learned the lessons of its terrible 20th century. The dream of a more politically and economically integrated Europe is choking on bureaucracy. Western European delegates, committed to the most extreme lifestyle libertinism, argued against the universality of human rights at the 1995 Beijing women’s conference. Meanwhile, Western Europe is committing demographic suicide, with below- replacement-level birthrates the norm throughout the European Community. As for Bosnia, even when discounting for the gross imprudence of the Bush and Clinton administrations, the fact remains that the current situation is primarily the result of European pusillanimity: the inability of Western European powers to gather the will to maintain a minimum of order in their own neighborhood.

None of this justifies that other form of political irresponsibility, American isolationism. For the fourth time this century, Americans may save Europe from its follies. But the North Atlantic community cannot revitalize itself unless Europeans confront some uncomfortable questions. Why did the center of world civilization implode between the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and World War I? Why has Europe been unable to break the downward spiral that began with the guns of August, 1914? Why did Europe first lose its mind, then its spine?

Europe’s collapse will remain an impenetrable mystery to those who insist that the secular Enlightenment was solely responsible for the triumph of European civilization in the 19th century. Shorn of religious superstition and freed from the heavy hand of ecclesiastical authoritarianism, rational, civilized, modern Europeans were supposed to build a society marked by equality, civility, tolerance, magnanimity. Instead, they built Auschwitz and the gulag and 50 years after that found themselves paralyzed by the killing fields of Srebrenica. How could such things happen?

But suppose the noble political ideas and institutions that Europe gave the world were primarily the result, not of Enlightenment secularism and rationalism, but of the enduring cultural effects of the Christian Middle Ages. Suppose, for example, that the idea of “human rights” derived not from Voltaire’s fevered brain, but from Jewish and Christian understandings of the human person as made in the image of God and therefore possessed of an innate dignity and value. Might it be that the political institutions created by the Enlightenment--like democracy--are dependent on pre-Enlightenment moral norms? And suppose those norms were to collapse because of a radical secularization of culture. What would you have? Europe, from 1914 to 1995.

Which is why, in trying to parse Europe’s catastrophic 20th century, no one should contemptuously dismiss Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s explanation for these horrors: “Men have forgotten God.”