Any civilization, no matter how otherwise superior, can have a crisis of confidence. Even one that proudly calls itself American. Or Chinese.
One especially traumatic instance in recent history is China’s Century of Humiliation (c. 1846-1949) at the hands of the West (and, sadly, of Britain in particular). A distinctly ugly episode, at least in the Chinese experience, that the present regime in Beijing never tires of browbeating us into remembering and being ashamed of. Rather as if it had ended just 3 years ago, and lasted all of the previous 300. Indeed, almost as if we Christian Westerners were the only ones capable of such heartless atrocities. And yes, I'm sure there is something uniquely humiliating in having suffered the sort of crisis of confidence that engulfed 19th-century China. Imagine it: You're the kind of civilizational empire that produces all that it needs from within itself, and so believes itself to be both commercially and intellectually - maybe even spiritually? - self-sufficient. Only to be bludgeoned into finding out that an alarming segment of your population, at all social levels, has a craving for a foreign product as sordid and debilitating as opium.
Again, this is all to the West's permanent, irreversible shame. My point is that, throughout the period in question, the Chinese governing classes were suffering a crisis of confidence; they were experiencing nothing remotely like a crisis of conscience. They began to doubt the superiority of Chinese civilization; they didn't begin to wonder if that civilization was supremely horrible (say, because of its brutal settler colonialism, or because of all the adjacent occupied/absorbed peoples it had stripped of their identities). They questioned China’s competence to rule the greater part of Asia; they didn't doubt or disparage China’s right to exist.
Whereas I think many today - both pro- and anti-Western - would quite plausibly argue that the 21st-century West is undergoing a crisis of both kinds. I.e., our Western elites haven't been merely investigating, and self-recriminating over, what the West has done wrong; they've begun to doubt, and in some quarters even to deny, that it has ever done anything right. In short it would seem that, regarding belief in itself, and conviction as to its own basic worth, today's West is a royal mess. But if so, just when did it go wrong? Or, assuming it deserved to go wrong because of its unique and unprecedented awfulness, roughly when did it begin to go off the rails?
For some no doubt highly personal reason I keep coming back to the year 1970, and my native America. We had just successfully invaded the moon, and soon we would find ourselves rather audaciously invading a then-little-known place called Cambodia. A milestone - or even a blueprint? - book also came out that same year. In it, author (and soon-to-be National Security Adviser) Zbigniew Brzezinski proclaimed that no less than the entire industrialized West was in the throes of a massive, irreversible transformation: it was, quite literally, between two ages - both technologically and spiritually. He might just as well have termed them two aeons, or two epochs. Everywhere he seemed to suggest that the spiritual, no less than the technical and economic, implications of this new age were utterly revolutionary. So much so, indeed, that as it unfolded, there was no telling what ostensibly permanent truths (or even "eternal" revelations?) might prove themselves more or less obsolete. Or at best, mere artifacts of some narrowly agricultural or industrial phase of mankind's upward march. And so, of course, largely unable to survive the rigors of a "transition to technetronic society."
Which is not to say (at least as I read Brzezinski overall) that for him all pre-technetronic cultures were equally ill-equipped and unprepared. Years later, as an esteemed foreign-affairs guru and global geostrategist in the decades following his Carter Administration stint, he would go on to discern in both Chinese and Islamic civilizations a certain resilience, or perennial relevance, to the coming Age that might well be found sorely wanting in many Western traditions. Certainly he would show none of the elegiac pessimism towards the former's survival prospects that he displays, time and again, for what he calls Western "traditional religion;" possibly Western territorial democracy; but above all, Western traditions and practices of national sovereignty.
Now among these "endangered" traditions of the West Brzezinski nowhere, to my knowledge, directly specifies Christian orthodoxy. Rather, he seems merely to presuppose the durability, and enduring relevance, of core Chinese and Islamic traditions, as against the transience and fragility of their Western counterparts. But I find it interesting that, among our foreign-policy elites of the past generation, not a few have accepted what I like to call the Brzezinskian premise of a most-justly-aggrieved-against-the-West China and Islam: a Dynamic Duo to whom we Westerners owe at very least a kind of penitent deference, if not outright accommodation. And these even to the point of the very closest geopolitical/economic convergence and collusion. Certainly this accommodation has seemed to be a strongish current among certain of our Western elites at least up until, say, the watershed year 2016. My point is that, for much of the recent past, these elements seemed quite buoyed by the cultural resurgence and renewed confidence of mainland China and Sunni Islam; they appeared, and continue to appear, nowhere near as concerned about the challenging - some might say beleaguered and endangered - demographic prospects of Christianity throughout much of Asia and Africa today.
Anyhow, more and more I find it convenient to see 1970 as a kind of Great Turnaround Year for our time. A year in which at least we Americans began a long, slow progress - arguably culminating in the decade 2005-2015? - towards something that I myself (prejudiced observer that I am) can only call self-infatuation. A year in which, if not the majority of us Yanks, possibly the greater part of our elites? began to exchange hope for optimism. Or rather, more precisely, the point at which an influential many in the West started becoming more and more hopeless about everything God has made of Man, and ever more feverishly optimistic about everything Man could make of himself.
And not without reason, one might contend. After all, the latter was something we could see and touch, possibly even measure, document, predict. But above all, act upon (that sacred modern imperative). As for the former - the Divine making of us - well, it's not like any of us were actually present when God (assuming there is a God) created man. So just how, then, do you gauge, and gain access to, and utilize productively the effects of an event that you never saw take place? And which might never have even happened? Much less try to assess, or retrieve, its supposed fruits, benefits, virtues?
By a number of measures, then, one might plausibly argue that the period since 1970 has been one of immense progress. But in particular if, by "progress," one is measuring the extent to which loss of faith in Divine providence has been compensated by a proportionate increase of faith in human ingenuity, and audacity, and optimism. But especially, I think, when we consider this "new" faith against the backdrop of the kind of universe we were then coming to believe in: a world in which one's confidence and preparedness for the future are only as strong as one's contempt for the past. Or, to put it less starkly, a world in which one's power to accept, embrace and productively exploit change - aka PROGRESS - is only ensured by the degree in which one looks critically, skeptically, or even dismissively at what previous ages might have deemed permanent truths. Or perhaps even at the very notion of a permanent truth, accessible to all human beings?
Of course, just what all this might portend for a new papacy, or for the global and geopolitical future of the Catholic Church, I won't presume to guess. I know next to nothing about the new pope, and haven't got the faintest notion of whether and how far he will be either relevant or redundant to the challenges facing this present strange, extreme time. A time in which, one might argue - and wherever its masses throughout the world may be trending - its more globally-minded elites persist in putting their faith in truths that are continually evolving and "improving," rather than truths that are permanent. My one prayer and hope, then - though it's a prayer in which I invite all Catholics and other believers to join me - is that our new pope is, and will remain, a man of hope, rather than optimism; a man of permanence, and not of Late Twentieth-century Progress.
Pray for the peace of Kyiv (however it may be found).
Make Russia Catholic Again.