Not since Richard Nixon has the West has the West had a national political leader who thinks about geostrategy as profoundly as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Love him or hate him, the man is profound. His long speech at July’s Tusványos meeting in Romania marks Orbán out as a true visionary, one whose reach transcends the limits of the moment, and ranges far beyond the borders of his small Central European nation. It is, in fact, a very Orbánist point that what makes him such a compelling civilizational thinker is that he is so deeply rooted in Hungarian soil, and the lessons it teaches about human nature.
Naturally, the Western media covering the event only saw yet another instance of the annoying Magyar griping about the European Union. The U.S. Ambassador to Hungary groused that Orbán peddled “Kremlin conspiracy theories.” But if you read the English transcript of the speech, you see that the media and others missed its philosophical heart. It is plain that the Hungarian leader, to use a phrase popular on the American Right, “knows what time it is” both globally and locally, in Europe.
“A change is coming that has not been seen for 500 years,” Orbán said. “What we are facing is in fact a world order change” as Asia becomes the “dominant center” of the world.
In the wide-ranging talk, Orbán discussed the nature of this tectonic shift, and how both Europe and Hungary should respond to its challenges. The prism through which the prime minister sees the global future is the Russia-Ukraine war.
The biggest problem the world faces today, he said, is the weakness and disintegration of the West. The nations of the West, in Orbán’s view, have turned their backs on the ideas and practices that made them a great civilization. And though there are signs that ordinary people are awakening to the crisis, and want change, the elites who rule Western countries see their peoples as bigots and extremists. If neither the ruling class nor the ruled trusts the other, what future does representative democracy have?
Since the 1960s, Western elites have committed themselves to what you might call “John Lennonism”: an imaginary utopia in which there is no religion, no countries, nothing to kill or die for, and no history: it’s a globalist paradise in which all the people live only for the pleasures of today—especially sexual ones.
According to Orbán, this vision weakens and even surrenders all the things that make nationhood possible. Six decades on, the Lennonist dreamers—especially in Europe—have created a civilization in which God is dead or dying, migrants move in huge numbers across borders no one cares enough to defend, and young generations only care about their people’s history for the sake of despising it.
It’s a civilization where families are disintegrating, hardcore porn is ubiquitous, sexual perversity is celebrated as the new normal, and children are propagandized to hate and desire to mutilate their bodies.
It’s a civilization where solidarity is increasingly hard to imagine, as political, educational, business, and cultural elites have taught the masses to care only about their own desires, and to embrace crude racial tribalism (as long as you aren’t of European descent).
It’s a civilization in which there is nothing to kill or die for because nobody has much to live for. With regard to the fertility crisis, if it’s true that the future belongs to those who show up for it, then on organ’s view, the West doesn’t have one.
The prime minister spoke of the previous night’s revolting Paris Olympics opening ceremony, in which one of the world’s great nations chose to present itself, in a global broadcast from one of the world’s most beautiful capital cities, as leaders of a historical quest for ‘freedom’ that required the gruesome decapitation of royals, and concluded with homosexuals, transgenders, and drag queens starring in a grotesque parody of the Last Supper.
“They have not become great, but have become small,” mused Orbán, speaking not only about France, but about modern Western man.
In a provocative philosophical aside, Orbán continued:
Here we must talk about the secret of greatness. What is the secret of greatness? The secret of greatness is to be able to serve something greater than yourself. To do this, you first have to acknowledge that in the world there is something or some things that are greater than you, and then you must dedicate yourself to serving those greater things.
There are not many of these. You have your God, your country and your family. But if you do not do that, but instead you focus on your own greatness, thinking that you are smarter, more beautiful, more talented than most people, if you expend your energy on that, on communicating all that to others, then what you get is not greatness, but grandiosity.
And this is why today, whenever we are in talks with Western Europeans, in every gesture we feel grandiosity instead of greatness. I have to say that a situation has developed that we can call emptiness, and the feeling of superfluity that goes with it gives rise to aggression. Hence the emergence of the “aggressive dwarf” as a new type of person.
If anyone in Europe still reads Dante, they will recognize the dynamic of which the Hungarian prime minister speaks. In Canto 15 of Inferno, the pilgrim Dante and his companion Virgil visit the Circle of the Sodomites, where Dante meets his old mentor, Brunetto Latini. Brunetto tells Dante how proud he is of his pupil’s worldly success, and encourages him to keep writing poetry for his own personal glory.
As becomes clear in the poem’s wider context, the Circle of the Sodomites symbolizes the damning cultural infertility that comes from caring only about yourself, and fulfilling your own immediate desires. In Purgatorio, the pilgrim Dante discovers the truth that Viktor Orbán articulated at Tusványos: that only when you dedicate yourself to serving higher goals can you achieve true greatness.
Dante Alighieri was a well-known poet of his day, but he did not become truly great until he suffered his fall from power and grace, and endured the exile that turned his eyes toward God, and produced the Commedia. Nobody remembers the grandiose Brunetto Latini, but as T.S. Eliot once said, “Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.”
Orbán offered various policy proposals for what Europe should do to avoid becoming “an open-air museum” in the dynamic new world order. Yet he seemed unconvinced that Western European nations—as distinct from the nations of Central Europe—are capable at this point of reversing their decline. The last part of his speech focused on Hungary taking a kind of “Benedict Option”: that is, developing a plan to survive and thrive as a nation in a world of radical change and broad European decline.
The cultural dimension of Orbán’s plan is the most daunting, though it is one that any European nation that wishes to make it through the crisis upon us all must adopt. You can sum it up in one phrase: “God, country, family.”
If a people wants to come through this civilizational catastrophe intact, it must reject the Great Replacement. It must start having children, and fast. Immigration is no solution. “The Western experience is that if there are more guests than hosts, then home is no longer home,” said Orbán. “This is a risk that must not be taken.”
A decade ago, a political scientist who studies family policy told me he had just completed a study on behalf of the European Union, which wanted to know if it was possible to increase the birth rate without religion. The scholar studied the problem, and concluded no, it’s not possible. He said that Brussels didn’t like the conclusion, but he had to be honest.
At some level, Orbán surely understands this, given that he told the Tusványos crowd that if Hungary abandons God and becomes a country of “zero religion,” it will have surrendered the cultural basis of its nationhood. Said Orbán:
Zero religion is a state in which faith has long disappeared, but there has also been the loss of the capacity for Christian tradition to provide us with cultural and moral rules of behavior that govern our relationship to work, money, family, sexual relations, and the order of priorities in how we relate to one another. This is what Westerners have lost.
Controversially, Orbán linked the coming of “zero religion” to the recognition of same-sex marriage. He didn’t elaborate, but he is correct—to a point.
In the 1930s, the Oxford social anthropologist J.D. Unwin published Sex And Culture, a scholarly historical study of eighty cultures and six civilizations. Unwin concluded that sexual restraint is the most important factor in a culture or civilization’s success. With wealth comes sexual liberalization, which hastens social entropy. Sexual liberalization is associated with the decline of religion too, Unwin found. Once a culture or civilization abandons sexual restraint, within three generations its social energy dissipates, and its people lose interest in life outside of the everyday.
“Any human society is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom; the evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation,” wrote Unwin.
So, when Orbán blamed gay marriage for the death of God, he was only partly right. Same-sex marriage would never have happened if the Sexual Revolution had not first taken place in the 1960s and 1970s. The acerbic midcentury English poet Philip Larkin saw through that revolution’s empty promises, to its essential nihilism. In his 1967 poem “High Windows,” Larkin described the Lennonist idea of sexual liberty thus: “Bonds and gestures pushed to one side/Like an outdated combine harvester/And everyone young going down the long slide/To happiness, endlessly.”
It is true that the enshrining of same-sex marriage in law and custom as the equivalent of heterosexual marriage is a cultural and civilizational Rubicon. That is the point at which the badly abused and bent Christian tradition finally breaks. It is doubtful that any nation that accepts the equivalence can recover what it has thrown away. Hungary has not yet drunk that particular poison.
That said, there is little indication that the Hungarian people are much more than nominally religious. Communism may be relegated to the graveyard of history, but the Sexual Revolution retains all its power in contemporary Hungary. An observant Catholic Budapester in her early thirties complained to me once that her generation “only wants Hungary to be a Magyar Sweden”—meaning secular, sexually free, and living for consumer pleasures.
While most other Western presidents and prime ministers are the blind leading the blind, Viktor Orbán focuses on the future with clarity unmatched by his peers. Can he convince Hungarians to see what he sees? Can a politician alone re-Christianize his country, and save it from the dark night of decline falling across its continent and civilization?
Surely it is expecting too much of a king to also be a philosopher, a priest, and a father to the nation. Actually, in ages long past, a king might just have been able to do that. Not now, not in our democratic era. Orbán needs allies.
Where are the priests and pastors? Where are the artists and cultural leaders who refuse the modish nihilism and despair on display at the Paris Olympics? Where are the fathers and mothers raising strong families who love God, country, and family? Where are the young people, their faces so plastered to their devices that they can’t see the cliff’s edge approaching, who are willing to stop stumbling toward oblivion? These questions are not only for Hungary, but for every nation of the weak and disintegrating West.
Viktor Orbán won’t live forever. Politically, he is always only one election away from retirement. If Hungary ignores his counsel, and chooses to walk the primrose path of Lennonist liberalism with Brussels and Washington, the immediate tragedy will be Orbán’s. But if that should happen, in time what’s left of the Hungarian nation will see, only too late, that the tragedy really belongs to them.
