There is nothing wrong with admiring the bravery of Ukraine’s stand against Russia. In fact, I don’t think I’d felt that much ebullient pride, seeing the Ukrainians turn back the Russians from Kyiv, since the time I saw the once iconic but now forgotten ink-stained fingertips of Iraqi voters defying terrorist threats to go out and vote in 2005. In both cases, the West seemed to stand for the universal aspirations of all. In an age that oscillates between radical nihilism and a natural yearning for certainty and purpose, it was such a joy—and a relief—to see that Western values stood for something: something others wanted; something others would die for, when many of us can’t even muster the courage to speak up at the office watercooler to the woke ideologues who police pronouns and see ‘phobias’ more often than your average hypochondriac feels the onset of an illness.
Ukraine and the Ukranians, to some extent like the Iraqis of the millennial aughts, have unfortunately become the West’s—particularly America’s—panacea for our own civilizational fecklessness. Whether you call them ‘globalists’ or ‘neoliberals,’ or as in America the ‘uniparty’ of Democrats and Republicans, the West’s promoters of endless, contingency-free, lethal aid to Ukraine suffer a proximity infatuation of purposiveness—of trying to find one’s own meaning through somebody else’s existential struggle. At the same time, Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression serves what is arguably a much more delusional, if not dangerous, illusion for a certain kind of American and pro-Atlanticist conservative in Europe: the illusion that Ukraine’s patriots can fill the West’s spiritual and cultural void.
A prime example of this illusion is a moving recent piece for First Things written by the prominent Catholic intellectual George Weigel, titled simply “What Ukraine Means.” “Western civilization is suffering from a wasting disease of self-absorption,” writes Weigel accurately,
based on defective ideas about the human person, human community, and human happiness. The dominant cultural forces in the West insist that we are mere bundles of desires, all of which are morally commensurable or equal; that the gratification of those desires is, in the name of human rights, the primary responsibility of the state. Meanwhile, woke culture, spreading from our institutions of higher learning like a plague, and infecting the bureaucracies of the administrative state, is creating a society in which racemania, ‘gender identity,’ and ‘isms’ of all sorts are somehow supposed to foster living in solidarity, although they are fostering precisely the opposite.
This much is all true, even painfully so. Where Weigel errs is in his theory of reverse-osmosis or reverse-engineering: that by aiding Ukraine the West can—or already has—somehow been distilled, purified, or transformed into a better version of itself—into the patriotic, traditional, and Christian faith-filled polities that existed prior to the consensus-shattering revolutions of the 1960s. “By looking death in the eye,” Weigel writes,
Ukrainians … have reminded the West that we are more than our subjectivity—that we can know, embrace, and live truths greater than ‘me’ … faith in a larger reality than ourselves; faith in a destiny beyond this life and its great but ultimately transient satisfactions.
Even more boldly, Weigel claims that the Ukrianians have evinced Catholic social teaching to the atheistic or agnostic West:
Since the Maidan Revolution of Dignity, Ukraine, without realizing it and often imperfectly, has nonetheless lifted up before a self-absorbed and often decadent West the … foundational principles of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church.
His words are undeniably eloquent, but are they accurate? Are there any signs that the sacrifices of Ukranians even stand a chance of correcting the “dominant cultural forces of the West” that are “based on defective ideas about the human person”? Why should we believe that the tail can wag the dog when, if anything, the obverse seems far more likely: that a Ukraine increasingly integrated into the West as it currently exists will in fact become ever more beholden to the forces of wokeness, of ‘isms,’ of ‘gender identity’ and ‘racemania.’
The EU’s railroading of Poland and Hungary over ‘LGBT rights’ and immigration policies do not bode well for a Central-Eastern European-led revival of Christian civilization, of the kind Weigel suggests, particularly given the Biden’s administration’s propensity to export the American Left’s postmodern anthropology of the human person. As R.R. Reno argues, such policies go beyond posturing and virtue signaling, illustrating the ‘imperialism’ of the ideology that emanates from Washington, demanding conformity both from allies and enemies alike.
In “The War and Russian Social Democracy,” Lenin famously argued that World War I was a calculated “distracting of the attention of the working masses from the internal political crisis” suffered within France, Germany, Russia, etc., reiterating throughout that the “working classes” and “toiling masses” had been hoodwinked. A rebooting of Lenin’s critique of the Great War for the 21st century dissident Right would be to posit not that America, France, or Germany’s working classes have been deceived, but rather its elites have been. What inflation-ravaged assembly-line worker in Germany or America would wax poetic about the Ukraine War restoring their faith in the meaning of life or the tenets of Christian social teaching?
In this era, it seems, the hoodwinked are the remnants of the globalist and neoconservative intelligentsia, of both the Left and Right, who insist on seeing the West’s own salvation somehow emerging from the crucible of the Ukraine conflict. They increasingly seem like necromancers, attempting to reanimate a corpse when what is needed is new life, not a Frankenstein-esque pastiche of globalist interventionism bandaged across the face with Christian pieties. The hardening orthodoxy on the dissident Right is not a Leninist one, but that of a far less romantic realism—that before the West can even consider saving the world, it must first save itself.
