Ten years ago or so, I was traveling in Sweden with my daughter Jessica, not in the heavily urbanized south nor in Stockholm, but in the area around Uppsala and west and northwest, into the province of Dalarna. That was by design since Jessica is an admirer of the old Swedish culture still to be found in Dalarna, along with the Dales’ own stubbornly surviving dialect and cultural ways. She speaks Swedish, and that warmed the hearts of the elderly Dales we met, as did our actually knowing things about times long ago, when the Vikings were brought into the Christian fold, and indeed what it meant to be Christian rather than pagan.
Three moments stand out in my mind. I think they are diagnostic of what is occurring in the West generally, with the connivance of Westerners who have been taught to detest anything that makes their cultures distinctive.
The first happened just after we arrived in Uppsala, and we wanted to get something to eat. We saw a sign reading “Pizza Napoli,” so we went there. I ordered, in Italian, una pizza cappriciosa, assuming that the fellow behind the counter, with a complexion as dark as mine, was Italian. I assumed wrong. He looked at me puzzled so I tried a little English instead, which he understood. He said he was from Iraq, not Italy, so he didn’t know a word of Italian.
I laughed and said, “Your sign says Pizza Napoli! How come it doesn’t say Pizza Baghdad?”
He laughed as well. “If it said Pizza Baghdad,” he said, “nobody would come in here.”
We soon found out that all the “grills,” that is, the diners where you can get pizza or kebab or steak sandwiches and the like, were run by people from the Middle East. In general, if we could afford the restaurant, it wasn’t Swedish. Not that I remember any specifically Swedish restaurants, even so.
The second happened when we were visiting a church that had been turned into a museum. I am not happy when I see such, but it was at least better than if it had been turned into a lawyer’s office or an antique store. In one of the large rooms, the walls were covered with late medieval frescoes, folk art of a very high quality. An elderly lady was stationed there for tourists who had questions.
The frescoes featured scenes from the Old Testament, and the artist who painted them imagined the characters in Swedish form—young King David, wearing knickers. When I began to read those quaint old paintings, with all the delight of a boy happening upon something new to him but not entirely strange, the guide was delighted. “Nobody who comes in here ever knows what they are about!” she said. We got the impression that they meant more than folk art to her. We saw such frescoes elsewhere, too, but sometimes we would enter an old church, look up, and see nothing but blank white plaster. Once or twice I noticed a strange shadowy area underneath the plaster. I guessed it was either water damage or some old painting that people had whitewashed over.
In the third incident, I found out what it was. We were visiting a pastor from the Church of Sweden, an extremely learned man, whose articles I had read in Touchstone Magazine. We will ever be indebted to his kindness to Jessica, who suffered a fall and a nasty injury after I had returned to the States. He made sure she got medical care and made it to the airport for her flight home. Such kindness was characteristic of him. He told me, when I asked, that the shadows I had seen on church ceilings were paintings, obliterated by a wave of rationalism and disdain for all things medieval. That wave struck in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The pastor was persona non grata in the Church of Sweden, regardless of his learning, his kindly humanity, his faithfulness to what had been the Church’s constant teachings, and his relative success in getting Swedes into the church doors on a Sunday. That was because he did not approve of women ministers, and he would not go along with blessing homosexual unions. Not that he campaigned against them. It was his silence that galled. Silence, as in the case of Thomas More, was not permitted. Indeed, the aisles of the cathedral in Uppsala then boasted large displays of enthusiastic support for such unions, wherein the bishop, who had been responsible for sending my friend out to pasture, said quite frankly that even though the Scriptures and doctrine condemned homosexual action, love was more important than doctrine. Love pastes a smile on a multitude of sins.
We walked with the pastor around his rural neighborhood, as he greeted people out in the garden or in the garage. None of them attended church services, he said. The default position in Sweden was atheist, not by conviction but by society-wide exhaustion and collapse. The government, he said, without raising his voice, was simply evil; it connived at the collapse.
When I asked him how he dealt with it, he said he tried to do the foundational work of appealing to the humanum, the human, what no government could entirely destroy. The grace of God saves men, but first there must be men to save; and here the work of grace must return men from the sub-human, the sub-cultural; not from the bestialities of the old Vikings, but from the weariness and pallor of nothing to believe in, nothing to fight for, nothing to raise the heart and mind; no David in knickers, no hymns to sing.
I put the three scenes together, thus.
The West will learn that without religious faith to unite men, there is no culture. They will learn it in either of two ways. They may get up from a life of feeding swine, regardless of how comfortable they find it or how sweet the slops smell, to return home, on a slow, deliberate, often embarrassing, always penitent, but exhilarating journey. Or they will learn it by waking up one day to discover that there is no Sweden, there is no England, there is no America, only geopolitical boundaries, otherwise of no significance.
Think of the Pizza Napoli. I don’t grudge the owner. He provided good food at a decent price, not easy to come by in Uppsala. But there was nothing Swedish about it, not much that was Iraqi, and, other than the recipes for the pizza, nothing Italian. It represents not the melding of cultures, but their reduction to a name here, a bit of cuisine there, in a location that happened to be in Uppsala but might as well have been in Aberdeen or Seattle.
Aristotle said that man is a “political animal,” by which he did not mean that you find politics wherever you find men, but that men thrive best in the context of a specific sort of thing oriented toward the common good, the polis, necessarily compact, wherein everybody knows everybody else by family or by reputation. A cosmopolis is a contradiction in terms. To this insight, we may add that man is a cultural animal. By culture, we do not mean a pizza here or a Celtic fiddle there, but a way of life that embraces the human and the divine, and that therefore is held as precious, to be handed over—the meaning of tradition—as a sacred patrimony, from generation to generation.
But for about three centuries, the West has been beset, not always in the same place at the same time, or in the same ways and to the same degree, with elites who pride themselves on despising what they have not created; specifically, despising their own roots. I observe it, as I might observe other outbursts of the unnatural and self-destructive, but I find it hard to feel the motives. Voltaire leaves me cold.
Yet lesser Voltaires are to be found everywhere. You find them among Roman Catholic prelates who despise the most energetically traditional among their flock; the sort who, when I was a boy, took a superior delight in whitewashing or pulverizing works of sacred art. You find them by countless thousands in Western schools and universities, teachers who delight in showing why we may despise Shakespeare and Milton, teaching them a lesson for a change. You find them among American elites who love “America,” a vaguely anti-cultural idea in the head, while they hate America, that is, Altoona, Cincinnati, Fort Wayne, Covington, Mobile, Shreveport, places that are still places, barely hanging on.
I do not look forward to a world without culture, technocratic, rootless, “one” not as a unity of nations sharply or sweetly distinct, but as an undifferentiated mass of people who all believe in the same nothings, now and forever. I am neither Swedish nor Iraqi, but I do not want there to be no Sweden, or even no Iraq, mad as the place has become. I grieve at the loss of languages, but even more, at the loss of the highest things the people once celebrated in and through those languages. People who have the strongest feelings for home, just because it is home and for no earthly ambition beyond it, also seem to harbor in their hearts the warmest longing for that home above, the home that earthly hands have not built. But those who despise people who love their homes despise also people who look above. Thus do they lose heaven, and the best of earth to boot.
Which way will America go?