Across much of the West, a certain malaise seems to have set in. On a recent Uber ride in Zurich, Switzerland, my driver, a Romanian man likely in his fifties who has spent much of his life trucking across Europe, lamented the seeming loss of Judeo-Christian values and identity in Europe. The undergraduates I teach are similarly unsettled and anxious about the volatility in the world and their lives.
In a recent exchange with a friend, too, a simple question, “How are you?” left us both dumbfounded. Who knows anymore?
Amid Russian advances in Ukraine, the threat of wider war in the Middle East, an increasingly assertive China, the savagery of Oct. 7 and its terrifying aftermath displayed across college campuses and city streets, along with untethered migration and gender policies that subvert women and mutilate children, there is a sense that something is being lost, or perhaps it’s already gone, and replaced by something at once unfamiliar and unwelcomed.
Some might call this “something” values, identity, or culture. It is all these things and more. As I have written elsewhere, the challenge the United States and the rest of the West face is a civilizational one. At stake are our Western democratic and capitalist systems of governance, imperfect though they might be, threatened from within by a Left more brazen and organized than at any point in my lifetime, and from without by a similarly empowered axis of authoritarians.
At risk, too, are the Judeo-Christian traditions upon which our societies have been built and the arts and ethics they have nurtured.
Yet, it is one thing to recognize the challenge. It is quite another to confront it. While many seem to have come to terms with the former, they appear resigned when it comes to the latter. This is, in part, because the question of how to engage and prevail in this civilizational struggle demands clarity about who we are as a Western people, an understanding that has, over the years, been steadily eroded.
Just recently, in Turkey, Chora Church, the ancient Byzantine church of St. Savoir in Istanbul, was converted into a mosque.
In Buffalo, New York, St. Anne’s Church has met a similar fate. St. John the Evangelist in England, as well as hundreds of other Christian churches in the West, is likely to follow.
Jewish synagogues, too, are repeatedly vandalized. In Italy, artwork commemorating survivors of Oct. 7 was defaced on its one-year anniversary.
So, too, has been Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers, recently displayed at London’s National Gallery, and Ai Weiwei’s Porcelain Cube in Bologna, Italy, both the latest in a string of attacks on Western art and expressions of individual liberty. This is to say nothing of the countless historical statues destroyed in self-declared acts of anti-Western defiance.
Somewhat ironically, Weiwei’s work was part of an exhibition titled Who am I? at the Palazzo Fava.
How, then, are we to defend against this? How do we reclaim a sense of who we are?
On matters of governance, the tendency has been to look to the political class. Yet, given today’s dearth of political leadership, there’s not much to look to.
But what of ethics or identity?
At the heart of the matter is a broader philosophical inquiry into what defines a people. Though a detailed reflection here exceeds the limits of this column, I would posit that it is precisely those elements now under threat: faith, family, community, and the arts, including visual art, music, theater, design, and literature, that make Western civilization what it is.
Yet these disciplines are largely sidelined in public deliberations about the challenges we face today and are neglected in our schools. Academic budgets tend to prioritize science and technology, which are deemed more essential to our age of innovation. Last year, for example, West Virginia University cut 32 of its programs, nearly half in the arts and humanities. Other universities have since followed suit.
Yet, while advances in mathematics and artificial intelligence are undeniably critical if we are to progress and compete with the authoritarians at our gates, they are not the sources of our Western identity. We are the heirs of the Greek philosophers, who laid the foundations for our understanding of what it means to be a citizen, for society to be just, and for men to be virtuous. Our society draws from great writers and poets, including Homer, T.S. Eliot, Gabriel García Márquez, and countless others, whose works captured the shared human experiences of their times. Our notions of beauty and form have been fashioned and challenged by artists and architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Michelangelo, Le Corbusier, and Zaha Hadid.
It is ideas, the pursuit of beauty, sounds, and tastes that give us our humanity and actively define and redefine us as a people.
Those who now seek our undoing know this all too well. It is, for instance, no coincidence that China has long prioritized cultural exchange and what Beijing calls “people-to-people ties” in its foreign relations — an emphasis that has only deepened under Chinese President Xi Jinping. Around the world, so-called Confucius Classrooms teach K-12 students the Chinese language, as well as cultural and historical narratives sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party. Here in the U.S., between 2013 and 2023, $17 million in Chinese funding flowed into 143 school districts in 34 states for this very purpose.
In higher education, where the humanities are increasingly under threat, Chinese Student Scholar Associations pursue similar aims.
Through its Global Civilization Initiative, introduced in March of last year, Beijing now actively works to discredit Western values in regions of the Global South and advance its own. In so doing, it highlights our seemingly distorted sense of identity. If the West does not know who it is, according to Beijing, what can it possibly offer?
As the far-left agenda has further infiltrated our institutions, too, especially regarding gender ideology, Xi, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, has seized the opportunity to portray himself as the defender of traditional values against Western decadence. According to the CCP, Chinese art must be “about human decency” and education geared toward “virtue. “
Just this week, Beijing marked the one-year anniversary of “Xi Jinping Thought on Culture.” The doctrine calls for the “preservation and development” of China’s “cultural traditions,” including art, theater, literature, and music, no doubt in ways that serve the party’s interests.
Without slipping into the pitfalls of authoritarianism, heaven forbid, it is high time we adopted a similar commitment to our own Western heritage.
This means, among other things, safeguarding our places of worship from vandalism or conversion and pursuing policies that reinforce faith, family, and our Judeo-Christian foundations. It means stricter penalties for those who desecrate art, topple monuments, or violently call for the West’s demise on college campuses and city streets.
It also means increased support for the arts and humanities. Not only should we be teaching the narratives, ideas, and music that have shaped our Western civilization, but we should also be cultivating new forms of creativity to carry that heritage forward.
To reclaim a sense of who we are, we must also find ways to meaningfully elevate culture in public policy. This, of course, requires that our leaders take pride in our Western traditions rather than be consumed by woke politics.
It is for this reason, among others, that the November election carries such weight. The crossroads at which we now stand compels us to decide who we are and who we wish to be. It is, in the end, a choice between the survival of our Western civilization and its likely subversion by the forces now encircling us. It may seem improbable, though, after decades spent in the comforting illusion of an “end of history” and the supposed triumph of Western ideals.
The choice we face is ultimately a call to embody our highest virtues and, armed with the legacy of those who came before us, to fight.
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Aleksandra Gadzala Tirziu is CEO of the geopolitical risk and strategic communications firm Magpie Advisory, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, and a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum (iwf.org).
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
