Points Summer Book Club

Thanks for this, Larry. We're getting to the heart of things. Let me clarify, though: I am a believing Christian, so for me, there is no such thing as the absence of meaning. Like you (I think), I believe that war is a time of testing, perhaps the most intense in all of human experience, in which a man's character is refined, or destroyed. The choices all men make in those situations have eternal meaning, though the meaning might not be fully discernible this side of the grave.

What I was trying to get into was the headspace of someone whose hope was broken by the war. "Hope" in the sense I mentioned: of a fundamental stance toward reality, the conviction that come what may, there is transcendent meaning behind it all. As we know, the war, and its resumption in 1939, broke Europe's soul. Existentialism was an attempt to find meaning in a life in which it was no longer possible to believe in God. It too failed. I am deeply concerned about Europe's future, as anyone would worry about their father, and "All Quiet" is helping me to understand why the Great War was likely the final straw that brought the whole civilizational edifice tumbling down (this, on top of the French Revolution, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche...).

The First World War, it seems to me, marked not only when Europe quit believing in God. It also marked when Europe quit believing in man.

If we get in the headspace of the forces Rod mentions, the French Revolution, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, a pattern emerges that returns us to other possible syllogisms. Let's add Descartes to the mix as well. What is common in this list of European movements and thinkers is a foundation belief that there are no cause sui (self-caused causes). By deductive methodology, we can account for results by properties found in their causes--causes based on other knowable causes. Here independence is found through methods of scientific discovery and by extension, the implications this had for political and social life. An example might be, "I am poor not because God made me this way or this is his destiny for me but because I am a low-wage earner working the land of a wealthy person."

One step in Descartes methodology that has had lasting effect is the act of rejecting anything that is not self-evidently true. So strong is this sentiment, it is included in our Declaration of Independence.

One of the remarkable things about this book is that despite the horrific bloodbath of war, Paul still retains his humanity and his desire to live. He has experienced the brutality of the front and it has numbed him, but he still treats others kindly--his mother, his father, his comrades, even the Russian prisoners who are his enemies. Paul may have lost belief in the conventional god of his upbringing, but he has not lost empathy for his fellow human beings. What else is this but hope?

Painful things to contemplate, Rod. Like you, I'm Christian and over the years have had my faith invigorated and expanded by the classic art and artifacts coming out of Europe, from Augustine to Shakespeare and beyond. Thus it both saddens and scares me to agree with your conclusion that Europe's soul is broken, and I guess I would say that the breaking happened over a long period of time, from the rise of science with which we usually associate the Enlightenment to WWI. Remarque's novel is driving the point home.

I was just reading Theodore Dalrymple’s review of a book by Walter Laqueur, The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent. Dalrymple says that Laqueur sees Europe, “once the home of a dynamic civilization that energized the rest of the world, declining into a kind of genteel theme park—if it’s lucky. The future might be grimmer than this, of course: there might be a real struggle for power once the immigrants and their descendents become numerically strong enough to take on the increasingly geriatric native population.”

Still, though, I feel that gestures such as Paul's and his comrades' are worthy and worthwhile, even thought they seem futile by historical measures; they increase good in the world.

Several thoughts: (a) Not to take us further down the rabbit hole, but I hear in "once the home of a dynamic civilization that energized the rest of the world, declining into a kind of genteel theme park . . . the increasingly geriatric native population" what could easily become a requiem for the United States, broken by consumerism, drowned in a mindless popular culture, estranged from the concept of sacrifice for the common good (whether one's country or platoon) that drove those who fought in WWI, unable to assimilate immigrants into a common culture, and cut off from a sense of connection, of rootedness, that Rod described about his father. But enough gloom and doom; back on topic. (b)I agree with your comment, Larry, that one lesson of the book is that "human beings with power can render life meaningless for those who don't possess it." That seems to be a recurring lessen of history. Can it be said that life comes down to a struggle for power? And if your life can be made meaningless unless you have power, is that struggle not entirely justified? One can see the triumph of American democracy in terms of laying out ground rules for the struggle that avoid the necessity of violence to attain it. (c) I think there clearly is meaningless sacrifice in war: for example, the thousands who died on July 1, 1916, because men like Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who believed the machine gun a vastly overrated weapon, made decisions with little or no idea of their consequences. And the actions of the men in accord with those decisions accomplished little that would resolve a war that I can only describe as meaningless. What meaning in that? I recall the comment of a British general--Plumer?--when he finally, after months of fighting, saw what the Passchendaele battlefield--where men literally drowned in mud--looked like: could we, he asked with naive incredulousness, really have sent men to attack over that? (d) In their own way, the men who made the decisions that caused thousands to die had no more of a macro view than their victims. It is only now, with the benefit of hindsight that accurate perspective emerges. That's a truism about history in general that should give us pause: it may prove that the pessimistic view I stated above is as completely wrong as the British General Staff's faith in frontal attacks on entrenched machine guns. (e) Regarding Rod's comment, I can only agree that men's choices have eternal meaning in the sense that they can never be undone and a spiral of consequences flows from each of those choices for all time.