Bernard-Henri Lévy laments the death of the West

From a review in the Wall St Journal of ‘The Empire and the Five Kings’, the latest book by Bernard-Henri Lévy.

'...Mr. Lévy used his growing trans-Atlantic prestige to champion Western intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya and Syria. He did this in part by cultivating a style of unembarrassed brio, which his detractors called self-promotion or shallowness. But, to those who’ve loved him, Mr. Lévy’s romanticism is more than justified by his almost cosmic ambition: to bring an older reality to the doorstep of a newer one, often from the front lines of the most dangerous places on earth.

Now Mr. Lévy is reckoning with the fact that his project appears to have failed. The new world—the “Empire” of his title—no longer wants much to do with the old; cares not a whit about the Syrians or the Kurds or the Uighurs; will not face what Mr. Lévy calls the “Five Kings”—the “cartoonish yet terrible” actors China, Russia, Iran, Turkey and Sunni radical Islamism—that are taking advantage of our confusion to persecute peoples and limit our reach. On the surface at least, Mr. Lévy responds to this failure in ways longtime readers might expect: by conjuring the spirits that have always powered his romanticism—the Hellenists and Virgil; Voltaire, Husserl, Sartre—to advocate for a replenishment of the breadth and depth of the Western soul.

'But what is most striking about these 250 pages of often arresting, always heartfelt prose is the doubt, even despair, that this most self-confident of men is honest enough to disclose. Sometimes the despair is overripe—you sense the author using language to evade his own emotions: “The idea of the West,” he says, “having become gaunt, plain, and barren, has begun to melt in the sun like a beached jellyfish.” Elsewhere he is less overpolished—simple, sure and almost heartbreaking: His heritage is now “the empire of nothing, a West that no longer knows what it is or what it wants but that, in knowing nothing, risks demoralizing those within it who still believe.”'

I loved Virgil as a schoolboy, do not care for the ideas of Voltaire and hate those of the Communist Sartre. About Husserl I know nothing. But the idea of the West is Christianity. The enlightenment, Marxism and Mr. Levy's liberalism are all Christian heresies. It is the decline of Christianity that leaves the West with no ideas. 


If one idea that is disappearing is the idea that the West should make war to spread democracy so much the better. Let's go back to the old idea that a just war has to be in self defence or in defence of an ally.

Mr. Levy was the man who originally had the idea of overthrowing Gaddafi to show Muslims that the West could do a good thing for them. He is an essentially frivolous man. Fatally for the Libyans he persuaded his patron, Nicolas Sarkozy.

The history of the civilised world starting with the French revolution can be seen as the search to find something to believe in. People have tried to make substitutes for Christianity out of liberalism, human rights, welfare considerations, evolution, socialism, art, paganism and New Age ideas. 

A religion is very much more than values and values do not make a continent. Still less do they make a country, though we are seeing in the New and even the Old World attempts to use values to define nations. They are doomed to failure, especially in the Old World.

Of Mr Levy's five kings Turkey and Iran are no threats to the West. Russia has the will to threaten us but not the strength. Islamism is a threat but Islamification is a much bigger one. 

Saudi Arabia is therefore a much bigger threat than Iran. There are far too few Shia Muslims. 

China is a very big threat, but in economic and political terms. China does not represent an alternative to the liberal ideas that Mr Levy champions. Islam on the other hand does.

The biggest threats, though, are internal not external.