The far-right Alternative for Germany party has won in one of the states of what was formerly East Germany. It may take power in that small state for the first time, having defeated the Christian Democratic Union, the country’s governing party, in the local elections. Every German media outlet, and British and American ones besides, counted this a calamity of a kind that had not befallen Germany since the Second World War.
The curious thing is that this far-right party takes great pride in the legacies of the former system in communist Germany during the Soviet era. So how are the two to be reconciled - a far-right with a Soviet heritage? It was voted for by the young and the old alike, many of whom said they had been wronged and were being discriminated against by the two large parties, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists.
Never mind; this is not the subject I want to discuss. What deserves discussion is the alarm that entered the German and Western media generally, some of which said that German civilization - yes, civilization- had broken. So, is Germany a civilization? And if it is, does it break with the loss of a local election? In an event of this kind, is civilization at stake, or is it the policies of governments, given that the far-right wave is still advancing in France and in the Scandinavian countries?
The curious thing, a second time and a third, is that the centrist governments still in place are preoccupied with the other fear, of Putin and Russia, while the young of the rising right hold that Russia does not deserve to be feared. Indeed the "bourgeois" governments are less alarmed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, than by American abandonment and gradual withdrawal, and by an inclination, like that of the European right, to make peace with Russia and to imagine a better future with it.
In the 19th century a scientific conflict broke out, if the expression is permissible, between the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans over what could properly be called “science”. While the British and the Americans held that the empirical disciplines were what deserved the name of “science” - and that history, philosophy, and the social disciplines, not being empirical, were therefore not sciences - the Germans insisted that the humanities, in which they excelled, deserved the name of “human sciences” even if they did not possess the precision of the experimental, empirical, and mathematical sciences.
In the end the formula "sciences of man" prevailed, but only after acquiring a good many of the features of experiment and testing, in social statistics and in psychoanalysis and its clinics. Philosophy, meanwhile, mingled with mathematics, while history, or the science of history, held out. The great historian Arnold Toynbee, who was closer to the German point of view, holds that it was philology that made history a science, and historicism a school of scholarly inquiry.
The Germans' great achievements in the humanities - the sciences of man, the humanistic disciplines of civilization - could not withstand the ambitions of the German state, which fought several wars to unify the country and then set off the First and Second World Wars, the two that brought America into Europe, where it remains.
Oswald Spengler, the German thinker and author of “The Decline of the West”, held that the sciences of man, which exposed man's savagery, were among the factors in the decline of Germany, and indeed of the whole West. He made frequent use of the phrase "the breaking of civilization," and his view was that it is violence that breaks civilization, by destroying the built world. And it is man who does this without hesitation, but not just any man: it is the man of the state. A single person does not make a civilization, however many the gifted among them. But when several states combine to set off wars, however their responsibilities may differ, the non-violent civilization that gathers these peoples, who have become nations and states, is broken.
Western civilization has passed through many crises and many wars. But Germany, which took part in setting off most of them, has remained the most abundant and the deepest in its knowledge of their horrors. The French long opposed German reunification, and opposed Germany's having an army, since they sit on its border and have suffered most from its wars. They are afraid now of Germany's rearming and enlarging its army, on two grounds: the Russian danger, and the disintegration of NATO should the US neglect it or withdraw from it.
Germany and France, in which apprehension and fears of civilizational breakage now prevail, are the two most threatened by the right rising within them. But the French have written the most, over the past two decades, about the collapse of the West and the breaking of civilization. What comes to mind, of course, is that the officials of the two countries should hasten to cooperate in warding off the evils of the right, despite French fears of Germany's renewed strength.
American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died last year, recovered in his book “After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory” Aristotle's proposition that living together is the greatest factor of peace among nations. MacIntyre remained convinced of this. But the theory was never proved correct in antiquity, as the wars of Greece and Iran demonstrate, nor in modern times, as the wars between Germany and France demonstrate. Johan Huizinga, the historian of the Middle Ages, says that it is true that nations build civilization, but states demolish it.
The curious thing, finally, is that the rising European right is against war, and accuses countries with imperial leanings of stirring it up.
