Western civilization is dying and Europeans don’t seem to care | Opinion

Charles Todorich is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and a resident of South Portland. He can be reached at [email protected].

It’s been said that nothing penetrates as deep into the soul as music. And so it is with Dutch conductor André Rieu’s Johann Strauss Orchestra and his open-air concerts around the world, but most memorably in Vrijthof Square, Maastricht, the Netherlands.

The maestro and his orchestra are a staple in public television fundraising campaigns with their magnificent renditions of the works of history’s greatest composers — a celebration of the apogee of Western civilization.

But Western civilization is dying, and Europeans seem not to care.

The civilization that stood up the modern world from the intellectual degeneration of the Middle Ages has become a shadow of its former self — a silhouette on the cave wall — as one by one its once great nations have surrendered to the anti-Western, guilt-ridden screeches of the progressive-leftist-nihilist mob.

The Christian culture that birthed the Crusades saw German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 open the gates to refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

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In 2023, Muhammad was the most popular boy’s name in England and Wales. Last year in France, a leaked classified report from the Ministry of the Interior warned that the Muslim Brotherhood had built “an extensive ideological infrastructure in France … to install a form of ideological hegemony by infiltrating civil society under the guise of religious and educational activities.”

In his 2019 City Journal article “Elites Against Western Civilization,” Joel Kotkin writes of how the intellectual class in the West has sought to “dismantle the values that paced its ascendancy” and to replace those traditions with multiculturalism.

In medieval times it was the priests and monks — the Church — that nourished the civilizational soul. But a new clerisy has emerged, says Kotkin, “university professors, scientists, public intellectuals and heads of charitable foundations,” abetted by “an ever-growing section of the workforce that largely works outside the market economy — teachers, consultants, lawyers, government workers and medical professionals” whose self-assumed moral superiority justifies, in their minds, their right to rule.

It is these elites whom conservative commentator Heather MacDonald says “are waging war on meritocratic standards, on our civilizational inheritance, and on the West’s unparalleled accomplishments, all in the name of atoning for what is said to be America and the West’s unique racism and cruelty.”

The West, MacDonald writes, “has liberated the world from universal squalor and disease … has given the world plumbing, hot showers in frigid winters, clean water, steel, antibiotics and just about every structure and device that we take for granted … It was in the West that the ideas of constitutional government and civil rights were born. Yes … we had slavery. What civilization did not? But only the Anglosphere expended lives and capital to end [it] … Every idea that the Left uses today to bash the West — such as equality and tolerance — originated in the West.”

And yet, Western leaders cower before the mob.

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I am reminded of a brutal glimpse into the relationship of predator and prey on the African savanna provided by a video of a gazelle lying upright, head in the air as though nothing was amiss, while a lion was tearing flesh from its hind quarter.

Such is the reaction of the current-day descendants of Charlemagne, Columbus, Leonardo, Shakespeare and Mozart, for whom the acceptance of guilt isn’t an admission of moral failure. Instead, it’s the modern-day ticket to feeling morally superior since your tolerance, empathy and eager self-flagellation check all the boxes of today’s virtue scorecard. You acknowledge you are evil, therefore you are good.

“Europe’s erasure as a civilization is underway,” writes author and researcher Guy Millière. Stifling regulation encumbers business. Global warming hysteria has exploded energy prices. None of the world’s top 10 tech companies is European.

In 1980, the nine states of the European Economic Community comprised about 27% of global GDP. By the end of 2025, those same states (plus the former East Germany ) had fallen to roughly 15% of global GDP. By comparison, the U.S. in 1980 comprised 25% of global GDP. Today it is about 26%.

All of this has made Europeans pessimistic about the future. A majority believe life will be harder for their children economically.

In 2025, there were 3.46 million births in the EU and 4.81 million deaths. You say, “Ah … this is the case for allowing massive third world immigration.” But such folks, especially Muslims, have shown little interest in assimilation, bringing with them instead the values that, in the words of classicist Victor Davis Hanson, when added to “steadily expanding socialism, will turn the continent into a third-world hell hole.”

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Avoiding hell usually means turning to God, but Europeans and the West have been turning away from God for generations. In 2021, the new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz eliminated the “God reference” from his constitutional oath.

Conservative writer Rod Dreher speaks to all of this in his book “The Benedict Option”: “We cannot understand the West apart from the Christian faith, and we cannot understand the Christian faith … without understanding the history and culture of the West. If future generations fail to learn to love our Western cultural heritage, we will lose it.”

This brings us back to André Rieu and his summer of 2024 Power of Love concert in Maastricht, which ended with a performance of the “Hallelujah Chorus.” But it was the penultimate work, the old Christian hymn “Nearer My God To Thee,” that touched the souls of the audience, many of whom streamed tears down their faces to its achingly moving strains.

The last song played by the band on the Titanic before it slipped beneath the waves is believed by some to have been “Nearer My God To Thee.” Perhaps souls still able to be touched by old Christian hymns can once again be aroused to defend their civilizational inheritance and embrace the spirit of God. But time is growing short.

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