A crisis of confidence: what future for the West?

Seeing the Western world’s Christian heritage as ‘unwanted baggage’ only puts at risk our future, argues Toby Lees.

When I was studying in Rome, many Saturday nights I would sit down with some of my fellow students out there and watch an episode of a documentary. The best series we watched – for my money the greatest documentary series ever produced – was Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, Clark’s personal view on the history of Western civilisation. 

I’d highly recommend it to all of you, but I have to say it was a particular joy to watch it whilst living in Rome, where so many of the buildings and artworks he discussed were part of my day to day life – though London is not a bad second place, we have our fair share of treasures here too.

At the beginning of the series Clark reflects on civilisation in general and makes the astute observation that great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. 

He also reflects on what it is that causes civilisations to come to an end, as so many of the great civilisations of the past have, and he says that, in his opinion, more than anything else it is lack of confidence that kills a civilisation.

He says that we can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusionment, just as effectively as by bombs.

In some parts of the world, even as I speak, bombs are going off. But whilst there may be cessations to the bombing, in most of the Western world there is unceasing cynicism and disillusionment. 

I think my country, Great Britain, most certainly has a crisis of confidence, with our history increasingly understood or taught as a burden. And it sometimes seems we’d almost rather watch our politicians fail so at least we can be confident in our cynicism, saying “I told you they’re all useless”.

This crisis of confidence manifests itself in two main ways, each diametrically opposed to the other. On one side (we could simplify it as a ‘left-wing’ view), there is a hatred of all the past. And on the other (let’s call it a ‘right-wing’ view), there is an over-sensitivity about any suggestion that anything was wrong with the past, with any criticism of it seen as a failure of patriotism or loyalty.

Yet the two positions somehow feed into one another and live in an increasingly toxic symbiotic relationship, reliant upon the outrage of the other side for their dynamism. The refusal to lament what was lamentable leads to the condemnation of everything and the condemnation of everything leads to the defence of even that which was inexcusable.

The Far Right rarely has religion and so cannot see that what was good in our culture came from Christianity and what was bad came from sin. And the Far Left hates the idea that man is not perfectible under his own power, and so views as controlling and evil whatever came from religion in this country, which was pretty much everything that was good.

Right at the end of the series, Clark reflects on the state of civilisation as he finds it – the series aired in the late 1960s – and I remembered him going on to quote a poem by W. B.  Yeats that contains a line which, to this day, I find rather haunting: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”. 

The poem is a pretty gloomy one. It’s called ‘The Second Coming’, but it’s not about the second coming of Christ which would be a cause for hope and confidence. There is no joy to the world from Bethlehem or hope of Christ’s return in glory in this poem. Yeats writes:

“Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold – 

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.”

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” If you read ‘full of passionate intensity’ as ‘fanatic’, it’s an easy charge to make against others. They are either lily-livered wets or fanatics. 

This might well be true but the question should be asked of ourselves, first and foremost. And it does seem to characterise a lot of political discourse in our day and what passes for discourse on X, where popularity is valued more than truth, and appearances more than virtue. Many lack all conviction (they just want popularity) whereas the worst, fanatics, are full of passionate intensity.

But we can’t just ‘other’ that sort of conversation – thank God I am not like the tax collector – because as soon as we click on it, we’re a part of it. Social media is monetised by our presence and our clicks. Perhaps there is a better way of being social. 

Now I went back to the book based on the series to check exactly what Clark had said because I thought he had ended on a supremely pessimistic note. I also reflected that if things looked bad in the late 1960s, they look an awful lot worse now! I wanted to check if he had been predicting the decline of our civilisation as I thought he had.

But Clark wasn’t quite as pessimistic as I remembered or perhaps as I am. Looking back on the series he reflects that it has been “filled with great works of genius, in architecture, sculpture and painting, in philosophy, poetry and music, in science and engineering. There they are”, he says, “you can’t dismiss them.” 

And he adds that what he showed in the series is ‘only a fraction of what Western man has achieved in the last 1000 years, often after setbacks and deviations at least as destructive as those of our own time’.

“Western civilization”, he explains, “has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves?”

I’ll come back to that question in a moment.

Disagreeing with Yeats, he argues, “Plenty of good people still have convictions, rather too many of them. The trouble”, he says, “is that there still is no centre. The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism and that isn’t enough.”

“One may be optimistic,” he continues, “but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.” Well, I think I’m both more joyful than he was and more pessimistic: joyful because I believe as a Christian that the true centre is Christ, pessimistic because I see how many have forgotten Him.

At the time he wrote these words, Clark was not yet a Catholic: that would not happen until his deathbed, when he would ask for a priest and receive the Catholic rites. Surely it was his contact with so many monuments of Catholic civilisation which led to this decision.

Now Clark’s series and questioning words came to mind because of some Bible readings which I heard at a recent Sunday Mass. It’s from the book of Nemehiah and in it the priest Ezra is engaged in the sort of nostalgic despair which I am definitely prone to and in which Clark engages to a lesser extent. 

After years in exile in Babylon, Ezra and his fellow Jews have returned to a wrecked Jerusalem and a destroyed temple. And while Ezra had endeavoured to preserve his nation’s rich cultural heritage and faith in God, most of the people had compromised and simply adopted the culture of their Babylonian captors. It was heartbreaking for Ezra that his people had forgotten their religious identity, one given to them directly by God. And he therefore set out to re-educate them on their history, traditions, rituals and practises. 

And what about us today? Our temples may not be destroyed, but there are plenty that have been turned into flats or worse. And yet amongst our cultural ruins, there are signs of hope as Tom Holland, Ayan Hirsi Ali, and others start to realise that the blueprint for all that they love in the West had Christ as its cornerstone. 

How much has Europe retained of its deepest identity in relation to God? Not very much, it could seem. How much does Europe, for instance, realise that she owes the re-establishment of her civilisation to Christianity, at a time when the Fall of the Roman Empire seemed to point towards inevitable ruin and decline? 

How much are we attuned to our great Christian heritage, the gospel, the traditions, the rituals, and practises that define us as a people? People never live entirely without an identity. If they lose the source of their previous identity, something or someone else will rebrand them and I use the word ‘brand’ intentionally.

Think how much power brands wield in our age, often more than religion in most people’s lives. 

And if our identity is no longer formed from hearing in the gospels who we are and how we are called to live, the television, social media, pop music, movies, celebrities and secular culture will all tell you who you are and all you could be if you bought the right things. 

Google will promise to provide the answers to our life’s questions, and it will even prompt you to a different question as you’re typing it. No longer content with providing answers, it now provides questions too. As GK Chesterton said, “It is often supposed that when people stop believing in God, they believe in nothing. Alas, it is worse than that. When they stop believing in God, they believe in anything.”

There are people who would mock our beliefs but who wouldn’t think twice about going into a shop and buying crystals for their healing powers or tarot cards in order to know the future.

Clark said we should have confidence in ourselves. I’m not sure I agree. The 20^th and early 21^st century have been a time of increasing trust in ourselves and abandonment of God and the fruits have been far from positive. 

The promises of Marxism for a Utopian society couldn’t be kept, and instead millions died as Marxist leaders sought to create the conditions for Utopia by eradicating anyone who stood in the way of ‘progress’. 

And neither does Capitalism lead to Utopia and the universal prosperity it proclaims; the unfettered operation of the free markets all too easily ends up with little freedom for many and a concentration of wealth in a few.

But the choice is not Marxism or Capitalism. The choice is the same as it has always been for the past 2000 years, Christ or anything else! Clark said that there was no real alternative to Marxism. Well, eventually he realised on his deathbed that there was.

If you don’t desire that the poor should be lifted up, the downtrodden set free, there is something wrong with you. But if you think mere human government can do this, you either don’t know your history or you are naively optimistic.

Clark learnt that Jesus Christ was the source of the confidence of Western civilisation and many other fine cultures. If we remember Him, we will regain our confidence, because He is perfect love and perfect love casts out all fear and this fear is the great enemy of confidence.

Confidence in Christ gave people the courage, the hope, and the generosity to build the beautiful churches and paint the glorious works of art which Clark surveyed in his series, as well as delightful cathedrals and churches, small and large, up and down England.

Rather than seeing this nation’s Christian heritage as unwanted baggage, we should celebrate all it has given to this country while also being aware of its faults and failures.

It is not ‘unpatriotic’ or disloyal to faith to recognise where mistakes have been made, including more recent ones. 

Through his series Clark discovered a great civilisation. We are not more enlightened for rejecting beauty and thought where it can be found. And the empty trinkets and sound bites we are being offered today are hardly a better alternative.

This article is adapted from a reflection initially given on Radio Maria England, you can listen to the original talk here. It is republished in Adamah Media with the author’s permission.

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