"The Lights Are Going Out All Over Europe"

Dalrymple describes it:

Yet for all this success, there is a pervasive sense of doom. Prosperous and long-lived as never before, Europeans look into the future with fear, as if they have a secret sickness that has not yet made itself manifest by obvious symptoms but is nevertheless eating away in their vital parts. They are aware that, in Chinese parlance, the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn from them, and that in losing that, they have lost everything. All that is left is to preserve their remaining privileges as best they can; après nous, as a mistress of Louis XV is said to have remarked, le deluge.

The secularization of Europe is hardly a secret. Religion’s long, melancholy, withdrawing roar, as Matthew Arnold put it, is a roar no longer, and hardly even a murmur. In France, the oldest daughter of the Church, fewer than 5 percent of the population attend Mass regularly. The English national church has long been an object of derision, and the current Archbishop of Canterbury succeeds in uniting the substance and appearance of foolishness and unworldliness not with sanctity, but with sanctimony. In Wales, where nonconformist Christianity was the dominant cultural influence, most of the chapels have been converted into residences by interior decorators. Vast outpourings of pietistic writings molder on the shelves of secondhand booksellers, which themselves are closing down daily. In the Netherlands, some elements of the religious pillarization of the state remain: state-funded television channels are still allotted to Protestants and Catholics respectively. But while the shell exists, the substance is gone...

God is dead in Europe, and I do not see much chance of revival except in the wake of catastrophe...

He describes what post-God culture looks like:

For the person with no transcendent religious belief, this life is all he has. He must therefore preserve and prolong it at all costs and live it to the full...For most people, living to the full means consuming as much as possible, having as many experiences as possible, and not only many experiences, the most extreme experiences possible.

But the problem with consumption is that it soon ceases to satisfy. How else can one explain the crowds that assemble in every city center every weekend to buy what they cannot possibly need and perhaps do not want? Will another pair of shoes supply a transcendent purpose?

The same might be said of the experiences that people feel they must seek if they are to live life to the full. Sports become more extreme in their competitive urgency, holidays more exotic, films more violent, broadcasting more vulgar, the expression of emotion more crude and obvious. Compare advertisements showing people enjoying themselves 60 years ago and now. Mouths are open and screams, either of joy or pain, emerge. Quiet satisfaction is not satisfaction at all; what is not expressed grossly is not deemed to have been expressed.

...overall, most Europeans do not believe in any large political project, whether it be that of a social class, the nation, or of Europe as a whole. Most Europeans have no concept any longer of la glorie, that easily derided notion that can nevertheless impel people to the highest endeavor, to transcend themselves and their most immediate interests. Most Europeans now mock the very idea of a European civilization and therefore cannot feel much inclination to contribute to it.

This miserablism leads to a mixture of indifference toward the past and hatred of it. This is visible in the urban planning of Europe since the war. The monster Le Corbusier, whose main talent was self-promotion, wanted to raze the whole of Paris and turn it into a French reinforced-concrete Novosibirsk. This mania for destruction was by no means confined to France. Dutch Prime Minister Joop den Uyl wanted to pull down much of 17th-century Amsterdam, some of the most elegant domestic architecture in the history of the world, to build a highway and “socially just” housing projects.

Of course, too strong a sense of having inherited what is worth preserving can induce a paranoid defensiveness and incline you to see enemies everywhere; but too weak a sense inclines you to see enemies nowhere. And because of their history, or rather their obsession with the worst aspects of that history, Europeans do not feel able to admit that they wish to preserve their own way of life.

I think this holds true for the American Congregations of Women Religious currently fighting the Apostolic Visitation tooth and claw. I think this holds for a large swathe of post-Vatican efforts to change the Church and the churches. I think this loss of faith/secularization has much farther reach and broader implications than many have even begun to acknowledge. For more on the state of Europe, see this speech by Mark Steyn, later adapted into this book, as well as Benedict's book.