What The European Phoenix Can Teach The World About Decline — And Rebirth

-OpEd-

TURIN — Spanish writer Javier Cercas wrote that the mystery of Europe is similar to that of time, as explained by St. Augustine in The Confessions (Book XI): “If no one asks me what Europe is, then I know it. But if I have to explain it to someone who asks me, then I don’t know it anymore.”

To the temporal element, a spatial one should be added. Just as the fish in American author David Foster Wallace’s parable do not know what water is, it is difficult for us Europeans to establish what the old continent really is. Yet after a week spent in Americas, Africa or Asia, that sentiment becomes clearer, maybe even stronger for Europeans.

The literary critic George Steiner argued that beyond our squares and coffee shops (magical everyday places and philosophical laboratories that have been incubators of political and artistic revolutions for centuries), our domesticated nature (Europe is the most anthropized of continents), and our culture (no continent is as full, or filled, of culture as ours), Europe would be indistinguishable from its own eschatology — from the awareness of its transience, the feeling of the end, the awareness; that is, that if there was or is a European civilization, this civilization will sooner or later be no more.

Acknowledging decline 

Just as the sunsets in the west, Europe — which could be considered the source of the west — bears the idea of decline, crisis and fall in its identity. Today, we talk a lot about the concept of “European decline.”

If the 20th century was the American Century — even though Europe still had strong political and cultural influence — then the U.S. would be in the 21st century what Europe was before. Meanwhile, new worlds — perhaps China, India, Brazil or Nigeria — would become central. Then, Europe would have nothing left but the ashes of a glorious past.

But maybe that’s not how things are.

Today’s world is constantly chasing new records, claims to be eternal and invincible, replaces death with an increasingly evident unhappiness. Yet remembering not only the importance but also the inevitability of limits — of the transitory and transient nature of everything — can be an antidote to the delusions of omnipotence from which no one among today’s major international players seems to be spared.

After ruling the world, even though it wasn’t for a long time, could Europe take on this challenge? Could Europe become a wise teacher of decline, therefore also a teacher of limits, of temperance, in a world that sometimes seems to be heading straight for catastrophe? Yes and no, one might answer.

A new paradigm 

Unlike the United States — to which the idea of decline, let alone an end, is inacceptable — Europe has died and been reborn many times. Europeans have become accustomed to living with catastrophe, one might say.

Cercas said that Europe is the product of a dual, contradictory and inseparable heritage: that of Athens and Jerusalem, of reason and revelation, of Socrates and Jesus Christ, who created something new precisely through their own end.

Yet, reversing paradigms is also part of Europe’s identity: the French and the October revolutions, Freud’s psychoanalysis and Einstein’s theory of relativity, Marx, Bruno, Nietzsche. In no other continent the assault on the established order — be it cultural, political or scientific — has been practiced as vehemently as in Europe, with liberating results in some cases, suicidal ones in others.

Will Europe manage to transform this vehemence into a creative energy suited to our times?

So maybe the question is: Will Europe manage to transform this vehemence into a creative energy suited to our times? Will it manage to teach others its inherent tendency of a “good end”? And will it be able to do so in the manner of Socrates rather than that of Wagner? And above all, will it remember that – as two of Europe’s most important, beautiful, central and forgotten texts, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Lucretius’ De rerum natura, teach us — that every end is a transformation?

The alternative is almost worse than oblivion and “damnatio memoriae” (condemnation of memory): to become the tourist destination of the planet’s new rich, the land where people only go to retire.