Emil Cioran predicts the end of European civilisation

Vacillating instincts, corroded beliefs, obsessions, and anility: everywhere conquerors in retreat, rentiers of heroism confronting the young Alarics who lie in wait for Rome and Athens; everywhere paradoxes of the lymphatic. There was a time when salon sallies traversed whole countries, foiled stupidity or refined it. Europe, coquettish and intractable, was in the flower of her age; — decrepit today, Europe excites no one. Even so, certain barbarians await their chance to inherit the finery, impatient at her long agony.

The Romanian aphorist Emil Cioran, in Syllogismes d’Amerture (1952) - the English translation of the book is here. 

It's interesting that he said this before the Algerian War, when Algeria still constituted three departments of France.

Pessimism was to Cioran what daffodils were to Wordsworth or butlers to P.G. Wodehouse. Cioran even achieved the feat of being too pessimistic for Samuel Beckett. This broke up their friendship.

Cioran in the thirties sympathised with Nazism and the Romanian extreme right Iron Guard. He later assumed a political position of complete passivity and nihilism whereas Beckett, who had fought in the French resistance, could not suppress some progressive instincts.

Cioran said in 1987

In 50 years' time Notre Dame will be a mosque.

He will be proven wrong about that, of course, but was he right in thinking European civilisation on its last legs? 

A lot of people nowadays agree with him, including Pat Buchanan, who published a bestselling book in 2001 called The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization. 

That's the argument about immigration and declining birth rates. Then there is post-colonial guilt and left-wing indoctrination in schools and universities. Mark Steyn has said

It's not just that our children are ignorant of the glories of Western civilization, it's that we are actually teaching them to hate those things.

And loss of religious belief. Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s theorist, said at a conference at the Vatican in 2014 that Godlessness, secularism and popular culture have

sapped the strength of the Judaeo-Christian West to defend its ideals

 which are under threat from Islam.

This is not the first time that pessimism has been in fashion, though there seem to be stronger arguments now than for a long period of time. Say between the defeat of Bonaparte and the defeat of Communism.

The idea that civilisation was in decay was in fashion as far back as Juvenal and well before him. By the 19th century the mood among writers and thinkers was generally very optimistic, except for a few unnoticed contrarian reactionaries like Joseph De Maistre and Arthur De Gobineau. But the horror of the First World War changed everything and the idea that civilisation was in danger or in decline took hold.

Albert Schweitzer, for example, in a lecture in Oxford in 1922 said

 It is clear now to everyone that the suicide of civilisation is in progress. 

Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, published in the summer of 1918 in German and translated into English in 1926-7, convinced many that they were living through a civilisation in decline.  The Rising Tide of Color: The Threat Against White World-Supremacy (1920) by Lothrop Stoddard accurately predicted that white men's domination of the world would not continue to go uncontested for long. The Frankfurt School Marxists thought that Western civilisation was an example of false consciousness on the part of the workers and would inevitably be overthrown. Fascists thought only they could save civilisation  from Marxism.

One great fear was that another war would end everything. 

'Who in Europe does not know that one more war in the West, and the civilisation of the ages will fall with as great a crash as that of Rome?’ 

asked British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1927. 

Civilisation survived the Second World War but it was not expected to survive a Third. In a sense, though, it had not survived the First. After 1945 other threats to Western civilisation were shouldered out by the fear of Communism defeating the democracies - Orwell's 1984 hung over the Western world as a threat - and the danger of catastrophic nuclear war wiping out humanity. 

After the end of Communism, climate change fears gave the liberals their own secular eschatology, while after September 11, 2011 many feared relentless immigration and the mooted Islamification of Europe.

Does the rise of China mean the long awaited decline of the West? Do the post 1950 mass migrations, in numbers which dwarf the barbarian invasions of late antiquity and the dark ages?

What does decline mean, since the rich world was never so rich or had so many technological or medical accomplishments?

It is noticeable that there have been no very important Western artists, thinkers, writers or ideas since 1950. But there have been huge, unprecedented, scientific and medical advances. They are worth a few great novelists.

Before 1900 it made sense to think of a civilisation being conquered by other cultures, though they were conquered by more civilised peoples, not by less civilised ones. Today there is only one civilisation, but there are still uncivilised people and even peoples.

What does civilisation mean? If it means running water and luxurious bathrooms the USA is much more civilised than Romania. By some other measures Romania is more civilised than the USA.

Assuming civilisation does not decline, will it continue to be Western? 

And what does the West mean?

Where is the West, exactly? Does it include Latin America? South Africa?

Western, by definition, is not universal. It presupposes an antithesis, which is Eastern. For Xenophon and the Greeks of his day the Persians and Egyptians were the East. For the ancient Greeks the East meant authoritarian rule, alien religions and barbarism.

Western values are not universal human values, but the values of a civilisation that began in Greece and extended to the Roman Empire, the Western half of which was conquered by pagan Germans in the fifth century, while the Eastern half was conquered by Muslims, culminating in the fall of Constantinople.

For Europeans the questions arise: will Muslims be in the majority in Europe one day and, if so, what will Western mean then?