Welcome to Lament for the Nations

Dictionnaire populaire illustré d'histoire, rédigé et édité par Edmond Alonnier & Joseph Décembre, tome 2, Paris : Imprimerie parisienne. 1867.

For Westerners, “civilization” was once a reassuring word. It conveyed notions of a shared tradition and a common achievement. It was a hearth beside which Westerners could relax in the comfort that that their intuitions were correct; it was a refuge from the crueler corners of the earth. Those days are gone. Westerners now discuss “civilization” in the context of anxious reflections on their own decadence, decline, desecration, or destruction.

In the present moment, concerns about the future of the West are part of the air we breathe. Yet they are met most often with exhortations for self-improvement. Consider, for instance, how Western leaders and intellectuals are responding to one of the biggest upheavals of the past decade: the rise of China as America’s chief geopolitical rival. The 2016 philippics against China are bland compared to what gets written in 2024. China’s ascent is stunning evidence that Western civilization is no longer necessarily associated with success, not least because Chinese leaders studied the American experiment for decades and concluded they wanted nothing to do with it.

But in Western media, instead of reckoning with American and Western flaws and limitations, op-ed after op-ed insists that we need to renew our resolve in the face of yet another international struggle. The underlying assumption of these arguments is that the West still has the resources to do this—that we are still capable of winning major power struggles, and thereby of pulling ourselves together and putting things to rights. All Western failures, on this view, are failures of nerve or will. We just need to try harder.

These calls to action too often distract us from reckoning honestly with how the West has changed and what it has become. That’s the project of this Substack.

“To lament,” as Canadian philosopher George Grant put in his 1965 classic Lament for a Nation, “is to cry out at the death or at the dying of something loved.” Grant wrote about the death of Canada as a sovereign state, but his lament implicated deeper themes. It addressed the troubled, darkened nature of Western civilization more generally. Grant saw that behind the political issues of the 1960s--of eroding sovereignty, fading commitments to liberal constitutionalism, and protracted foreign wars--lay a more profound, existential problem. A technological revolution was devouring the West. Grant foresaw that this would destroy the modern Western political order. The remnants of liberal constitutionalism would be displaced by a mixture of unbounded, aimless technological progressivism and a diabolic will to self-creation.

This diagnosis is what gives Grant’s reflections their haunting power, and it’s why I take my title from him. To live as a Westerner today is to recognize that something you love is dead, dying, or desecrated. Take your pick: Christianity, Enlightenment rationalism, liberal constitutionalism, the rule of law, peoples, nations, virtue, excellence, innovation, love of life itself—any and all of these are under threat or passing away, if they haven’t passed away already.

A lamentation isn’t just a cry for lost loves. It also exposes the banalities that have replaced good things. Unlike a civilizational exhortation, which rallies us to preserve and defend what is good, a civilizational lament explores the extent to which we dwell in a world that has repudiated what is good. Of course, good things persist, and we certainly should focus on protecting those things. But there’s a superficial pragmatism in the insistence that all of our energies should focus on protecting the remaining scraps of our civilization and letting go of what has been lost. If we are to live in hope, I increasingly think we have a serious responsibility to reveal and ridicule the ignoble delusions that have led us to this point.

A lamentation is premised on an awareness of human tragedy, and this is perhaps hardest for contemporary Westerners to grasp. We have an absurd faith in the permanence of our own way of life and the inevitability of progress. Society is always supposed to get better. The widespread malaise that many feel is an intuition that something is wrong with this picture. This malaise is not philosophically sophisticated, but it is based off a sense that the promise of progress isn’t being fulfilled, if it hasn’t been broken outright. However, Western progressives regard this malaise as a temporary detour; once they are back in charge, they assure us, things will get better again. Their confidence produces a peculiar reading of the human situation. From those in Western leadership who always believe history is on their side to those who regard anything less than Pollyanna-esque cheerfulness about the future of the United States as unpatriotic, Western leaders have altogether too much faith in themselves. They believe that human actions and exertions will always bring about comedy. But in the last analysis, the only comedy is a divine one. Lamentations help us see both the human tragedy and the divine comedy.

Inevitably, to speak this way is to invite the charge of pessimism. I tend to think that preparing for the demise of the West after nearly three thousand years of, among other things, a fruitful tension between reason and revelation is actually to have a rather optimistic view about the rise and fall of human civilizations. Three thousand years is a pretty good run.

But the deeper problem with those who deny the possibility of collapse is that they embrace the technical servitude and mediocrity that now defines the Western way of life as a permanent fixture of human existence. They banish and denigrate anxieties that these dispositions might lead to our destruction. This way of thinking allows evil to have the last word. As Grant says, “it would be the height of pessimism to believe that our society could go on in its present directions without bringing down upon itself catastrophes.” It would be pessimism “because it would imply that the nature of things does not bring forth human excellence.” We have elites who are ready to look upon our desolation and call it progress. A lamentation encourages us to recognize that a better world once existed, and therefore raises the question of whether another one is possible.

Here, the materialist cannot follow: our outlook becomes directly spiritual. A materialist lament returns us to dust. A spiritual lament reminds us that we return to dust, but it isn’t an exercise in cynicism or in despair. In part, this is because it is a celebration of our collective memory of what was once good, noble, and beautiful about us. But it is also because it is oriented by something deeper and greater than human contingencies. If all that is beloved about our temporal order is coming to an end, that is not in itself the last word. As Grant writes:

“It is also possible to live in the ancient faith, which asserts that changes in the world, even if they be recognized more as a loss than a gain, take place within an eternal order that is not affected by their taking place. Whatever the difficulty of philosophy, the religious man has been told that process is not all: tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.”

Looking towards a better world requires resilience. In the first place, it requires challenging those who think that nothing good will ever come again. However, it also requires confronting those who think that what we have already is good and that it will endure. A lament schools us in the virtues we need to counter both the pessimists and the optimists. The pessimist tempts us with despair, yet the proper response to pessimism is not optimism. Optimism is a cheap substitute for hope, and in a time shaped by the belief in progress, it’s readily available. We must have the fortitude to resist it. The French thinker Georges Bernanos--a more militant writer than Grant—understood this well. “Optimism approves of everything, submits to everything, believes everything,” he wrote. “It is the virtue above all of the taxpayer.” Optimism transforms us into men without chests who lack the resilience to say no; into cattle who prefer servitude. Optimism is often the attitude of fools, but above all it is the attitude of cowards. To counter optimism with courage requires hope. The best way to acquire hope is to wrestle directly with the despair that comes from putting our civilization on trial and judging what has been lost. “To find hope, it is necessary to go beyond despair,” writes Bernanos. And if you read me, it is because you see the need to go beyond despair, to find hope and courage instead.