Rubio imagines the West as religious and capitalist, monolithic and surrounded (as he would like) by impassable borders. But humanity has not developed as a tidy suburb of Eden surrounded by high fences.
By Tim STANLEY
Shortly after Marco Rubio gave a speech in Greece extolling the virtues of Western civilization, the Trump administration announced its intention to live-stream the execution of a terrorist. This may be the central paradox of modern nationalism. A movement on the verge of power across Europe is determined not only to preserve civilization but also to save and restore it—even by uncivilized means. Rubio will one day be read as a basic text. In the shadow of the Acropolis, he told a fascinating story according to which the Greeks invented the “Western mind”—its curiosity, reason, and passion for perfection—only for their “descendants,” us, to throw it away.
While the ancients would “build up” in pursuit of virtue, we “build down” at the behest of mediocrity, haunted by guilt. We have squandered our wealth, opened our borders, and handed over our governance to others, while other civilizations—Chinese or Muslim, tribes that think in civilizing terms—fill the vacuum. What does he mean? Well, imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury standing next to a veiled woman. On one side, liberal modernity; educated, liberated, but filled with self-doubt. On the other, an imported ideology that exploits our tolerance; because they care in ways we don’t, they are likely to win by persistence. When political scientist Samuel P. Huntington warned of a “clash of civilizations” three decades ago, the widespread assumption was that it would happen at the borders of our empire. Today it lies within the walls of Lambeth Palace, and Dame Sarah looked suspiciously as if she were signing the terms of surrender.
Huntington’s thesis was prescient. It had its critics. Some pointed out that if one assumes that civilizations are always in conflict, as Rubio suggests, then one rolls the dice against cooperation: preparing for war becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The tragic irony of the Trump administration is that it was elected to “put America first” and focus on the cost of living, yet its obsession with Iran led to war and the inflation that followed has devastated the economy. Rubio justified his boss’s aggressiveness by referring to the principle of preventive defense: “Either we choose to act now, or we lose the opportunity to choose to act.” But the threat from Iran was dubious; in the case of Venezuela, absent; and, in the ridiculous debate over Greenland, a figment of the imagination. Liberals say that Trump, a Dionysian figure, is not defending Western civilization. He is trying to secure quick profits for his country by monopolizing resources, bringing industry back home, and aggressively pushing tech sector interests into Europe — and that equating this narrow, crude interest with Western identity, from Homer to Goethe, is offensive to Europeans.
Rubio imagines the West as religious and capitalist, monolithic and surrounded (as he would have it) by impenetrable borders. But humanity has not developed as a neat, fenced-in suburb of Eden. Civilizations meet, converse, fight, and sculpt each other—and within the borders there is usually a counterculture. For every Henry Ford, there is a Karl Marx or Sigmund Freud, and the unrest that threatens to destroy France today is inevitably French—the last expression of the revolutionary tradition founded in the 1790s. In short, much of what the nationalist right hates about Europe is essentially European, a legacy of the culture of inquiry that Rubio thanked Ancient Athens for creating. Okay, he mentioned Plato and Aristotle. But what about the cynics who rejected convention and inauthenticity, who went naked, ate out of garbage cans, and had sex in the streets? When his critics threw a bone to the philosopher Diogenes as if he were a dog, Diogenes returned the insult by urinating on them. The Greeks invented punk. By drawing a straight line from Athens to America’s economic and military heyday, Rubio not only glosses over the unorthodox or ugly parts of our history—never mind that Athens was a slave-owning society—but also does Christianity a disservice. The American character, he told his audience, was born in Greece, “formed by Rome, baptized into Christianity,” shaped by English freedom, and so on. One might conclude that Christianity is not the “alpha and omega” of the West, but one step among many in its historical development.
This is evident in the way Rubio confounded the idea of martyrdom embodied by ancient heroes willing to “die for a cause worthy of [their] loyalty.” Think of Achilles, he said, who chose to fight at Troy and “die in pursuit of eternal glory.” But while the word martyr, meaning “witness,” is Greek, the Christian meaning is slightly different: one dies in imitation of Jesus nailed to the cross, not as a fighter for personal glory but to bear witness that He is the Son of God. This kind of faith is not “one thing,” it is “everything.” Although today we think of Christianity as a comforting blanket, it was once, and still must be, a disruptive force in the lives of individuals and society. The transatlantic slave trade, for example, was outlawed thanks to a campaign by British evangelical Protestants. Indeed, the ethical demands of Christianity often clash with what conservatives insist is necessary to save civilization—from the Vatican’s criticism of unregulated artificial intelligence to the deportation of refugees. Rubio is Catholic. The world’s most vocal critic of planned execution is the Pope. How do we reconcile this contradiction?
Debates about the death penalty are tedious and boring: the man who is scheduled to be executed, Nidal Hasan, killed 13 people and is undoubtedly a monster. But it is barbaric to turn death into a theater. It denies the prisoner his dignity. It will be used as propaganda by the enemy. It will surely provoke a sense of pleasure (England banned public executions, partly because many people enjoyed them). And what is the first thing we say when we want to contrast the brutality of the Iranian mullahs with our supposedly benevolent civilization? “They hang people in public.” Well, if we act like them, we become like them, and the moral justification for the nationalist project collapses. A recent poll by the think tank Theos finds that British voters whose views most closely align with the label “Christian nationalist” – that is, who want to protect us from foreign influence – are the least likely to go to church. I suspect this group confuses being Christian with being white. And while Rubio is by no means in this category, and while the broader effort to secure our borders and foster a healthy love of Western identity is to be commended, there are times when I fear that the new right is Greek both ethically and historically. From a certain perspective, it almost seems pagan.