Europe and its malaise

I continue to muse on the condemnations of Europe I keep hearing from the other side of the Atlantic. Europe suffers from a deep malaise, and an underlying problem with antisemitism. That is true, and there is no way of getting away from it.

On the other hand, though, I hear the voice of commentators like Fallaci, who writes, near the end of her new book The Force of Reason:

And the true face of the West is not America, but Europe. While being a daughter of Europe, an heir of Europe, America does not have the cultural physiognomy of Europe. The cultural past of Europe, the cultural identity of Europe, the cultural lineaments of
Europe. While being born of the West, while being the other face of the West, America is not the West that Islam wants to subjugate. America is not the West where Suleiman the Magnificent wanted to create the Islamic Republic of Europe. In order to put out the fire, then, what is needed first of all and above all is Europe.(p. 276)

But:

How can one rely on a Europe that is now Eurabia, which receives the enemy cap in hand, looks after him, and even offers him the vote?"

A Europe that has forgotten how to use its reason...

Perhaps, though, Europe cannot be perceived in a vacuum, or in isolation from the rest of the world, many parts of which suffer from versions of the malaise that are even more severe. Europe was deeply traumatized by the First World War and by what happened in Russia - a vast and only partly European country - in 1917. Europe never recovered from those twin disasters. Of course it's possible to say that to a large extent Europe brought those disasters upon itself - but they were the culmination of processes that had been developing for centuries. Martin Buber has many shrewd things to say about this in the second part of I And Thou, where he describes the movement involved in the rise and fall of cultures:

The sickness of our age is like that of no other age. and it belongs together with them all. The history of cultures is not a course of aeons in which one runner after another has to traverse gaily and unsuspectingly the same death-track. A nameless way runs through their rise and fall: not a way of progress and development, but a spiral descent through the spiritual underworld, which can also be called an ascent to the innermost, finest, most complicated whirlpool, where there is no advance and no retreat, but only utterly new reversal - the break through. Shall we have to go this way, to the end, to the trial of the final darkness? Where there is danger, the rescuing force grows too.

I'd like to return to this theme, and these reflections of Buber's, later on.