Emmanuel Todd is a sociologist, historian, but also an anthropologist. It is perhaps this specialization centered on human behavior that makes his essays acute, his analyses pithy. He was the first, as a young scholar, to imagine, in 1976, the implosion of the USSR in The Final Collapse, based on demographic statistical data that showed the dysfunctionality of the Soviet system and the social disintegration it had brought about. In 2003 in After the Empire, he prophesied the decomposition of the American empire at its peak. In 2018 he criticized the institutional set-up of the European Union and the euro.
In short, you have to listen carefully to the Parisian intellectual, who is back in bookshops with La défaite dell’Occident. The thesis, excruciating for those who believe in “Western values”, is that the West is a defeated civilization. Alongside the sociological and political investigation, Todd adds illuminating glimpses of cultural anthropology. For Todd, the observation of the defeat – military, economic, values – of the West is based on three factors. The first is the industrial deficiency of the United States with the revelation of the fictitious nature of GDP. The immediate causes of the US industrial decline lie in relocations and in the serious error of judgement (a typically American lack of geopolitical vision) that allowed, at the beginning of the century, to associate China with the WTC, considering it a supplier of low-technology goods, buyer of more sophisticated products of Western origin.
But the structural reason for the defeat is cultural: the inadequacy of technical-scientific training and in general the decline in the level of education since the 1960s. The alarm was raised in vain by a university lecturer, Allan Bloom, in 1987, in The Closing of the American Mind, a successful book opposed by the liberal cultural and educational apparatus in the USA. We recognize sinister similarities with Italy, which, with three times the population, churns out fewer graduates each year than Taiwan, especially in disciplines related to new technologies. The cultural deficit is the first sinister sign of defeat.
Todd, as an anthropologist, then identifies the collapse of American Protestantism as the third factor of decline. Following in the footsteps of Max Weber’s, albeit questionable, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, who was convinced that the engine of the West’s economic rise was the Protestant states (USA, England, Germany unified by Lutheran Prussia), Todd notes the high level of education in that world. The Protestant mentality demanded that every believer read the Scriptures for himself, fostering mass literacy. The indirect result was the formation of educated and hard-working generations, a large middle class that is all but dispersed today. The fear of damnation, the need to feel elected by God induced the work ethic along with a strong individual and collective morality. The dark side was various racisms (anti-Indian and anti-black in the US, anti-Jewish in Germany) overshadowing the equal human dignity proclaimed by Catholicism.
The spread of education and the work ethic produced long-term economic, civic and industrial benefits. The implosion in America, step by step, of the WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] culture has led, since the 1960s, to an empire without a center and a project, “an essentially military organism run by a group without a culture”. This sounds like the definition of the neocons lump that inspired the industrial and military apparatus against which an outgoing president, Dwight Eisenhower, who had also been a victorious general, warned in 1961.
Todd also has it in for the spirit of Sixty-Eight, deluded that “the individual would be greater if liberated from the collective”. This led to the end of the communal and collaborative spirit, to incapacitating selfishness, which cannot imagine common enterprises for which to commit and eventually sacrifice. “Now that we are free of metaphysical, foundational and derivative beliefs, whether communist, socialist or nationalist, we experience emptiness”. As a result, we have become “a multitude of imitating dwarfs, who dare not think for themselves, capable of intolerance like the believers of ancient times”.
Another element of the dissolving crisis is the culture of erasure, the woke cult that left New York to reach Europe, “the banner of the nihilism that characterizes the West, this drive to destroy not only things and human beings, but reality”. The words are hard as stones: “Trans ideology says that a man can become a woman and a woman can become a man. This is a false claim, close to the theoretical heart of Western nihilism”.
A civilization founded on falsehood cannot function. Even less so if it despises life and is incapable of reproducing itself: the demographic crisis, in this sense, is both cause and effect of defeat. No civilization survives without new members and these cannot come into being if a common principle, a tension towards the future, is missing. Rome fell apart when there was a demographic crisis at the end of the 2nd century. It had to extend citizenship to everyone in the empire (Caracalla) and the newcomers, who had become the ruling class, were alienated from the reasons and values of the dying regime.
Today, in a sad analogy, the collapse of Protestantism has triggered the American intellectual decline, the disappearance of the ethic of sacrifice, replaced by the mass greed of immediate success, the portrait of neo-liberalism. The financial economy produces nothing and collapses when someone, as in poker (an American game) says the fateful “I see”.
Todd is neither religious nor moralistic: he merely analyses the facts, including the demographic decline of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant component that, for better or worse, has been the backbone of the American spirit. Another factor in the Western defeat is the ever-increasing rejection aroused in the world by hegemony, the will to power and the values – especially the nihilistic ones – it propagates. This is glaringly evident in the Ukrainian war scenario and in the sympathy for Russia in much of the world. An embryo of conservative (anti-LGBT) Russian soft power also formed as soon as it became clear that the Moscow bear could withstand the economic shock of sanctions.
Western modernity, Todd explains, appears insane to the outside world: the observation of an anthropologist, not a retro moralist. Clearly: our variable-geometry morality is not credible in the eyes of the rest of the world, the overwhelming majority of states, cultures, populations; we preach equality and inclusion, but we live off the underpaid labour of Third World men, women and children.
The issue of war – from 7 October 2023, the beginning of the Gaza tragedy, of wars – is diriment. A part of European public opinion has begun to realize that the aversion to the USSR was not ideological, linked to the communist regime, but to the old geopolitics of the Anglosphere. Russia – mercilessly dismembered, bought at bargain prices in the 1990s with the complicity of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs – is the center of the heartland, the heart of the world according to Halford Mackinder and British imperial geopolitics. An operational matrix adopted and adapted by the US, which has not generated alternative thinking and has been encapsulated in the self-referential solipsism of globalization and the anti-humanism of the World Economic Forum, the creation of David Rockefeller and his secular arm, Henry Kissinger.
According to this imperialist theory, Russia must be isolated, surrounded (the unfortunate Ukraine, especially after the 2014 coup, fulfils this function), possibly conquered. The operation was aborted by Putin in 2022 and the battlefield is proving him right. At the same time, we are witnessing the gradual de-dollarization of the world economy after a domination of almost eighty years, the rise of the BRICS, the shift of the axis of the world to the east.
The Russians are aware of their immediate industrial and military superiority, but they are also aware of their future demographic weakness. Putin wants to achieve his war aims by sparing men and taking his time. He wants to preserve what he has acquired in Russian society, starting with the demographic revival, which takes a long time. He does not want to militarize Russia; rather, he cares about consolidating its economic development. Military recruitment will be more difficult in the coming years: it must defeat Ukraine and NATO now, without allowing any pause. At the moment, a quarter of Ukraine’s pre-war territory is back under Russian control.
All this is geopolitics, but Todd, in order to demonstrate the reasons for the decline, indeed the defeat of the West, insists heavily on demographic, cultural, anthropological factors. He deduced the Soviet crisis from the steady increase in infant mortality and the decline in life expectancy in the 1970s, noting that the relevant statistics were no longer made public. Those same indicators reveal that the problem has moved to the United States.
Nothing strange, after all. Drugs are mowing down generations, the healthcare system is excellent for the rich, exclusionary for the poor and the declining middle class. Education has also declined due to adherence to the woke panic about the racialization of culture. The cultural elites – predominantly white – are mocked and dwindling in number, replaced only in part by “brains” of Eastern origin. Even the army is in a quandary, forced to enlist physically unfit, morally unreliable subjects, interested only in pay and citizenship.
I wonder what Todd would say about the long-term implications – economic, civil, functioning of society – of the reverse Flynn effect (the steady decline in the IQ of young Westerners) and the addiction to devices such as smartphones, which are changing the brains of the latest generations. What will be the impact of the spread of the culture of erasure, what anthropological crises, as well as demographic ones, will the LGBT ideology trigger?
A society in which ignorance and addictions advance cannot survive, nor can a civilization based on the affirmation of lies as the foundation of the civilized edifice. The responsibilities of the French Theory of the 1970s, which came to America and returned to Europe like a boomerang, are enormous. The late Michel Foucault wrote. “Truth? A fiction! Man? A mirage! Social norms? A straitjacket!” After which he concluded “the ultimate norm? The norm of the absence of norms, the norm of the abnormal”. For the first time, abnormality founds normality. The abnormal, the deviant become the cornerstone of the (Western) world. It can only end in dissolution, a prodrome of defeat.
Individualism has mutated into narcissism, Todd explains. Anglo-American Protestantism “has reached the zero stage of religion, beyond the zombie stage, and produces this black hole. In the United States, at the beginning of the third millennium, fear of the void is transformed into deification of nothingness, into nihilism. “Religion has reached a zero state (a new concept) in the West “at the beginning of the third millennium, which I capture through three statistical indicators. In the zombie state, people no longer go to mass but still baptize their children; today the disappearance of baptism is evident, state zero reached. In the zombie state, people still bury the dead; today, the massive spread of cremation becomes the norm, practical and economical: state zero achieved. Finally, civil marriage in the zombie period had all the characteristics of ancient religious marriage: one man, one woman, children to bring up. With same-sex marriage, which makes no sense for religion, we emerge from the zombie state, and can date the new zero state of religion”.
Similar concepts – with less statistical detail and without any claim to scientificity – have been expressed by scholars and observers not aligned with the dominant thought. “The fixation on this ultra-minority issue raises a sociological and historical question. To establish as a social horizon the idea that a man can actually become a woman and a woman a man is to affirm something biologically impossible, it is to deny the reality of the world, it is to affirm the false. Trans ideology is one of the flags of the nihilism that defines the West, a drive for destruction, not only of things and men, but of reality. This ideology exists and I must integrate it into a historical model. In the age of the metaverse, I cannot say whether my attachment to reality makes me a reactionary.”
On another level – but everything holds – the reflection on the “assisted suicide” of Europe is a sad truth. The hegemonic Franco-German axis has been in trouble since 2008, with the financial crisis imported from the US. The situation has precipitated since February 2022: the EU has renounced cheap Russian energy, bogged down in sanctions (or self-sanctions), and abandoned trade with its natural neighbor. Germany, crippled by the end of the mercantilism that brought massive trade surpluses, has suffered without a word the terrorist destruction of its most essential infrastructure, the gas pipeline (largely paid for by the Germans themselves) that supplied its manufacturing with Russian gas.
There is hope, however, in Emmanuel Todd’s analysis. Europe, particularly Germany, will eventually recover its relationship with its large Slavic neighbor and a new chapter of history will open. The question is: at what price? Will we have to go through a war, as too many indications, including the bellicose language of the press and governments, make us fear? Certainly, the defeat of the West is in the facts and the serial lie we are subjected to will not hold for long.
The big American funds ( Black Rock, Vanguard, State Street ) did not buy Ukraine at bargain prices, Putin is losing, NATO does not make wars, but international police operations to restore peace and democracy, the West is a garden, the EU is the trench of the interests of the European peoples, there is a hunt for terrorists in Gaza, artificial food is good for you, the New World Order is beautiful, the currency must belong to the bankers, you will have nothing and you will be happy.
That’s the Western narrative, the world in reverse. Those who do not believe it will be prosecuted – democratically – for hate speech. The West will triumph and if fate decides otherwise (or history, or logic) a war and a prefabricated pandemic will revive the wounded beast…
Translation by Costantino Ceoldo