Momentum, Not Moment

Edmund Burke wrote in 1790, having watched the Queen of France harried by the mob, that the age of chivalry is gone. The sentence has been rewritten in every generation since, each time with a different loss: the faith, the estates, the empire, education, lately cash. Spengler gave the lament its title in 1918. Soberly considered, a historian has to admit that the perception of decline has accompanied the West for a surprisingly long time, and that the loss of culture after the fall of Rome was regrettable rather than total; a reform of the late Roman Empire would have been the greater catastrophe. I have added to the genre myself. Europe lies in intensive care, an old lady on tubes, her ailments increasingly iatrogenic, caused by the doctors themselves. So I may ask two questions: whether the patient who has been dying for two hundred years exists at all, and what the people who declare themselves his rescuers actually want to save.

The Museum

The first answer leads into the museum. It wants back a condition that demonstrably existed: the Catholic unity of the Middle Ages, chivalry, the Germanness of the Kaiserreich, or some other national inwardness, depending on the nostalgic's year of birth and confession. The longing is understandable. Instinctively man yearns for the clan, for the small and closed community we are adapted to by evolution, and almost every community that lasts has a sacred core; from a distance the Middle Ages look like such a community writ large. None of it can be brought back, because the conditions the nostalgic has in mind rested on preconditions he no longer shares: a Church that regulated marriage and inheritance, a nobility living from land and war, a literacy reserved for the few. What remains is the costume, and I have described elsewhere what becomes of the costume once it is taken seriously. The LARP is the cargo cult, the state of living inside the certainty of salvation, behaving as though redemption had been delivered and only the bookkeeping remained. The Reichsbürger, Germany's self-declared citizens of the Reich, play at being a state: they issue identity papers, found councils, award decorations and submit proclamations. That is the caricature. The better-groomed form gives lectures on the West, and whoever comments on them soberly has, it seems, thrown dirt at one of the last heroes of the Occident. Public membership of a more moral group, whether rescuers of the climate or of the West, unfortunately correlates negatively with character, because our interests take public moralism all too readily as an alibi for private immorality.

The more educated form of this current promises to rebuild Europe from its old inheritance, antiquity and Christianity, and to gain from it an identity that withstands decay. It has some success, and still it is too backward-looking for me. It reads the West with Spengler as an organism with ages of life, whose winter is to be endured with dignity. I am less interested in how one survives the winter than in where the summers came from.

Which Moment?

Nostalgia has a second problem, and it weighs more than the costume: it cannot find the moment it wants to return to. The decline of the West did not arrive as an event. It came in waves, and every flowering a conservative invokes today already stood inside one of them. The French Revolution was a mistake; the French centralism that followed it and the Prussian centralism that copied it were mistakes too. The state theory of money merely changed garments, from ermine to committee. And yet the centralisation was followed by the greatest growth the continent has ever seen, and on this paradox nostalgia founders. Larger spaces give capital room: one law instead of three hundred, one market instead of thirty customs lines. What unfolded in that space, however, was the harvest of a freedom that had grown beforehand. The apparatus that brought the harvest in was young, and most of it was stolen. Banks, credit, bills of exchange, bookkeeping, exchanges: the tools the king now handled had arisen in the towns, among merchants who owed each other accounts, and everywhere the central state absorbed these innovative cores and made them fit for war. In my new book Win-Win I called this the capture of the catallaxy; the spark goes on glowing in royal hands, brightly for a while. The fruits of freedom are harvested in times of growing unfreedom. For a century now la grande nation has consumed capital it did not build, and centralism is the mechanism: where there is one centre, no error stays local and nothing fails early enough to teach anyone, and the pseudo-elites it breeds are too big to fail at a scale no Sun King could have financed. In post-war Europe, above all in the supposedly robust states Austria and Germany, the next generation and the one after it were systematically plundered. Whoever sees only the correlation takes centralism for the cause of prosperity, and so the legend of the strong state that made the country great is born; almost always the causality runs the other way round from how the nominalist illusion reads it. The German economic miracle lets one inspect it. Credit is held to be the ground of the explosion in productivity, when only the visible capital structure had been destroyed and the invisible one remained intact: skills, mentality, relationships, the mycelium under the burnt forest floor, from which the mushrooms shoot the moment they are allowed to. Capital and context explain more than policy. That is why there is no moment to return to. The Kaiserreich some miss harvested what the towns had sown; the Middle Ages others miss were themselves the harvest of a freedom that grew after Roman central power collapsed. Every moment one would bring back is a harvest, and harvests cannot be repeated. Sowing can.

The Slackening

As to what caused the last wave, a legend reigns on the right that yields nothing to the left in convenience: the decline is the work of a conspiracy, the march through the institutions, re-education, a plan. Conspiracies exist, of course; it would be the dumbest of all conspiracy theories to deny it. A suspicion becomes a conspiracy narrative only when someone fails to understand a dynamic and therefore needs a hand on the levers, and it takes no conspiracy to exhaust a culture. The West went slack after an overstrain that was too great and neurotic. Centrally inflated national pride was wounded by national catastrophes and in Germany finally sublimated into pure statism; two world wars, fought with all the technology and all the pathos the nations had stored up, left peoples who wanted to know nothing more of themselves, and elites who wanted it least. The betrayal of the elites preceded the slackening and accompanied it. Those who should have led administered; those who should have taught lectured; those who should have held wealth across generations consumed it, together with the trust in institutions, which was shamelessly spent on virtue signalling, prestige, lecturing and self-enrichment, until a growing part of the population rightly withdrew it. Into the vacuum stepped the secular substitute religion of statism, redemption through the state and salvation in the collective we, and in fallen nations it strangles whatever rises above the dreary grey of Kafkaesque functionaries. The we has never built anything; cathedrals carry names. The we only ever eats.

The greater share of the blame, paradoxical as it sounds, lies with the supposed conservatives and the right. The left never concealed its statism. The right supplied it with the better legitimation, fatherland, order, tradition, security, and so gave the slackening a good conscience. Sombart reproached the bourgeois with having gone slack because he gave himself over to a seigneurial way of life; that is exactly what happened, except that the seigneurs were now functionaries. Where heirs turn away from business and flee into learned inclinations and municipal offices, a firm loses its mercantile core, and a civilisation does the same. An apparatus fed parasitically on the institutions and slowly consumed their cultural capital, and the conservatives called it preserving. Affluent neglect shows itself in the search for pseudo-problems out of existential boredom, in living off what was neither earned nor understood, in high expectations with little pressure to perform, in immanentised substitute religions, in virtue signalling, and above all in a cushion that separates one from reality. The LARP is one form of it, the comfort of tradition a second, status consumption the third: entitlement leads to status greed, and the inferiority complexes typical of the unproductively wealthy seek recognition through virtue signalling to justify a status they half know to be parasitic. Subsidised mass migration into the welfare state, conducted under the refugee lie and today the tinder of every debate, belongs here, and it belongs here as the last symptom: cultural destruction is not linear, it stays invisible for a long time and then shows all at once, and this mass migration is the culmination of a naivety remote from reality, of blind formalism and of the consumption of status and income in the therapeutic state. Whoever sees the cause in it mistakes the bout of fever for the disease. That is why nostalgia belongs among the forms of the decline it laments.

The Status Quo

The second answer is quieter and more widespread. It defends what is: the institutions, procedures and vested interests as they stand, the university, the constitution, social insurance, the currency. This calls itself conservative, and it is the stance of almost every party that governs today. The world changes; to declare a system the end of history serves the interests of the status quo. Worse than a romanticised past, however, is a romanticised present, because this kind of blindness is a far more immediate calamity than any false nostalgia could be. The forms the defender of vested interests protects have often long since handed their purpose to others. The university bears the name of the corporation of Bologna and is a government office; trust in academic authorities has been boiled down into the alphabet soup of countless technocratic agencies, institutes and NGOs. What remains are state factories for officials and private factories for titles, a cargo cult of education that has kept the form and lost the ethos; where the market no longer selects, the certificate has to feign it. The central bank passes for the guardian of money and does what the Bank of Amsterdam did in secret, whose bank money Adam Smith in 1776 still believed to be fully covered by coin: it lends its depositors' money to the state and its companies. Where money is produced by privilege, by central and commercial banks, the problem of trust cannot be solved by technique; it can only be papered over with PR bluffs. An institution can keep its name and lose its inner independence, and whoever then preserves it unchanged preserves the husk and calls it loyalty.

The New World

In Europe only the past still makes people proud. In the United States, despite state failure on the same scale, there are still living poles of dynamism, and there too is a third answer, which does not come from conservatives. Where the West today looks most like what its defenders describe, it wears neither crown nor cross: it sits in Silicon Valley and in Manhattan. Two centres of power survived in the United States, both unfortunately closely interwoven with the state, yet with enough strength left for new autonomy: the entrepreneurial centre on the West Coast and the financial centre on the East Coast. Both found their first soil in the war economy; in the end entrepreneurial creativity produced mostly civilian usefulness. Compare Silicon Valley with Stuttgart, or Manhattan with Frankfurt, and the American success can hardly be relativised. While work-life balance takes hold in Germany, the bored leisure-seeking of good-for-nothing heirs, the productive minority of Americans shows even in youth a shirtsleeved diligence that in Europe looks unlikely to survive the demographic bottleneck.

Why, then, do I still not reconnect there? Because both elites lack what makes success durable in the first place: principles and cultural depth. Worst of all is the state-favoured organised crime on Wall Street, where lawyers, regulators and large financial firms take part in cartels and pocket a large share of the gains from financing. The tech elite of the other coast shows the type in its purest form: entrepreneurs of astonishing executive power and reach whose personalities have become brands, and who hold every position, on money, on free speech and on the state, exactly as long as it serves the next venture. This calls itself pragmatic. It has little to do with ideology and much to do with the pragmatism of power; pragmatic entrepreneurs shy away from theory and rightly look for shortcuts, in times of geopolitical upheaval that can become dangerous, and the strongest force in the room, in Washington as in New York, is the military-industrial financial complex, the compound of armaments, public debt and central bank money. So the most mobile men in the world end up propping the same status quo as the most inert officials of Europe. Culturally this elite is shallow. It does not know the history of the forms it uses and takes the joint-stock company, the exchange and the venture fund for inventions of its own generation. In the United States too, the inventiveness of the pioneers is broken by mind viruses and bullshit jobs that keep many on the hamster wheel of unproductive occupations, and an artificial acceleration is always delicate, because it begets ideological reactions.

The Momentum

What all three miss is a distinction: between the forms a period brought forth and the forces that brought them forth. The forms are datable and mortal. The self-governing city arose in the twelfth century in northern Italy, double-entry bookkeeping around 1300 in Italy, the exchange in Bruges and Antwerp, the joint-stock company in 1602 in Amsterdam, the university as a corporation in Bologna and Paris, the salon in Paris, Berlin and Vienna. None of these forms can be brought back, and none needs to be. The forces that brought them forth worked at different times in different fields, never all at once and nowhere completely, and yet they can be named: autonomy and decentralisation, orientation towards reason, the release of the individual from the clan, a culture of high trust beyond the circle of kin, cultural ambition, adventure and enterprise, inventiveness and high technology, individualism and sound money. Whoever seeks in them an essence of the West to be owned like a relic will be disappointed. Each of these forces existed elsewhere too, merchants in Babylon, inventors in China, scholars in Baghdad; what set Europe apart was the interplay in which, across centuries, the forces gave one another forms in which they could outlast. The cities owed their autonomy not to a gift but to a market gap in power. This interplay is a momentum, a quantity of motion, and one reconnects with a motion differently than with a moment in time.

Two of these forces are so forgotten today that they have to be explained. As Joseph Henrich has shown, the marriage and family programme of the Western Church shattered the old clan structures over the centuries: cousin marriage banned out to distant degrees, polygamy and adoption abolished, the public vow made obligatory. That is how the West became strange enough in the first place to trust strangers, with universalism in place of clannishness, lower time preference and a stronger conscience with feelings of guilt. Unfortunately the catallactic density of hostile clans is far too low ever to cross the threshold of prosperity; whoever imports clans today, or cultivates the clan logic of the parties at home, undoes this achievement again. The second force is the high-trust culture, as it developed in the Alps with a particularly low time preference. A high-trust culture lowers transaction costs and permits cooperation among strangers without an invoice for it ever becoming visible; it makes contracts with the unknown possible, the joint-stock company as much as insurance. It is at the same time the most dangerous of the forces. The block-warden mentality is the reverse side of a high-trust culture, and high-trust cultures like Germany and Japan also produced the highest degree of socially organised evil to date, because trust without reason becomes allegiance.

Apollonian and Heroic

The defenders of the West mostly remember it in its pious and preserving guise, as monastery, cathedral and order. The inheritance has two further faces, missing from this memory. One Nietzsche called the Apollonian, against his Dionysian moments: measure, form, clarity, the will to give things a shape, which produced Greek sculpture as much as the bookkeeping of the Florentines and the proofs of the scholastics. The other is the heroic, the setting-out of the individual who ventures something and stands for it. Caution is needed with heroism. The supposedly heroic changers of history are, as a rule, apocalyptic horsemen who drive still more people over abysses they refuse and refuse to acknowledge. The hero meant here is the one Sombart describes: the risk-loving overseas merchants strove to achieve in ordinary trade in goods what their fathers and brothers had attempted with gold-seeking, alchemy and robber knighthood. The farther back we travel into the darker depths of history, the closer to violence the adventurer travels; he sets his own law, with the sword if need be, and so it should not surprise that merchant, adventurer and pirate were sometimes one and the same person. The Faustian pact between violence and entrepreneurship paradoxically freed entrepreneurship from violence: the freebooters gave up their pirate ships and settled down as merchants, and the investors in the trading companies, sometimes called adventurers in recognition of their entrepreneurial contribution, shared in the success of the voyage. There is little heroic about self-employment; most of the time it was an entirely ordinary part of human life. This hero founds, discovers, invents, leads a house across generations and contradicts an authority when he knows better. He has existed everywhere, as Max Weber objected to the legend of the Occidental adventurer; what is Occidental is that certain institutions gave him permanence, dignity and freedom. Ideas are not enough; what is decisive is execution, personal risk, and liability. The truly great, enduring enterprises were often carried by sober discipline, provided they were not politically overstretched. Capital without culture loses its direction, and culture without capital loses its means; the tech billionaire shows the one, the conservative the other.

Reconnecting

Reconnecting therefore demands a labour that none of the three ways performs: to recognise the forces that were once fruitful, to examine where they work today, and to give them there a form that holds, in enterprises, places, institutions and fortunes that outlast their founders. No programme is needed for this; programmes are the shape in which a moment defends itself against time. What outlasts generations has passed the hard test of reality. It is less spectacular than a crusade and less exciting than an IPO. It is, after all, the only thing that has ever worked in the history of the West. Whoever wants to attempt it for an enterprise, a fortune, a collection or a place is met at the outset by three questions the scholarium puts at the kontor, and they are at the same time the test of momentum: what is to remain, who is to carry it, what is it to bring about?