Køvíd & the decline of the West
A conversation with writer & journalist Modeste Schwartz
“Fear and mindless acquiescence has gripped the western world, and there’s simply no going back. Cultural, political, spiritual and economic suicide are all around the corner. Maybe even a fun little war.” — so wrote your humble correspondent while binge-drinking Corona with lime at a hookah lounge in downtown Moscow on March 23, 2020.
Approximately two years later we crossed paths with Alsatian-born French author and journalist Modeste Schwartz, who wrote an entire book about Covid and the precarious state of Western Civilization. Coincidence or fate?
Monsieur Schwartz graciously agreed to answer a few questions about Western Decay, the much-hyped Multipolar World Order, and what the heck is happening in France.
Edward: Your most recent book is called Køvíd 1204-2020—that’s quite a title. Can you explain what these dates represent? And why 2020 as the end of this mysterious epoch? And is Køvíd a fancy French way of spelling Covid? Because typically when people talk about Covid, it begins, rather than ends, in 2020....
Modeste: Indeed the title of my book is intriguing. Partly by design: publishers tend to like this kind of title. But also for more profound reasons.
I decided to conceptually severe “Covid” - as the final (pseudo-sanitary) event of the Period - from “Køvíd”, as a nickname for the Period itself.
What do I call “the Period”? - It’s what Oswald Spengler called “Western Culture” (though of course a century ago he was not able to foresee the end of it as it actually is happening now).
That's why Køvíd “starts” (conventionally) in 1204 (sack of Constantinople by one of the early crusades): because the rise of Wester Culture is intrinsically linked to the appearance of INTELLECTUALS WILLING TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD.
By that time they were still called “the (Catholic) Church”, but - though in a largely unnoticed way - during the first centuries of the second millennium after Christ, the very definition of “Church” went through an essential transformation: while during the first millennium (a state of affairs partly preserved in the Orthodox part of the Christian world) the Church had an essentially ritual and transcendent mission (guiding the souls towards Salvation - in a worldly universe considered as necessarily violent and unfair), when it started organising military campaigns (crusades), it essentially became the first draft of what would end up being the Communist party of the Soviet Union (or other totalitarian “parties of the entire People”): a de facto worldly bureaucracy led by de facto INTELLECTUALS. Saint Anselm is the prototype of Leon Trotsky.
Of course, that history was not linear. To get from the ontological proof of Scholastic philosophy to Covid-19: The Great Reset by Klaus Schwab (the subject of my previous book), you need quite a few revolutions in thought and power structure.
My claim is that those revolutions are pivotal movements between successive moments of the same cultural history, i.e. of the West (as defined by Spengler).
Basically, you first need to get rid of the God idea. I consider that the Catholic West has managed that through divinization of the State: first the state replaces the Church under the guise of an anointed, absolutist monarch, then (starting from 1789) that monarch becomes “the People”. Of course, “the People” is an abstract idea even easier to manipulate than “God” (in so far as we are talking about the God of bookish traditions, with a written revelation - a kind of Constitution to any theocracy).
The end result is the rise to power of revolutionary intellectuals (like Klaus Schwab or his mignons like Harari). If you're curious to know what such people can do once their power becomes unlimited, you just have to have a look at Covid.
Hence, in my interpretation, Covid is the final result - and epiphany - of Køvíd.
Edward: So “Western Culture” is over? What has replaced it?
Modeste: The culture of what I call nowadays “the Historical West” (one might also say: the White World) is indeed over, and I have reasons to think that even its physical existence might now be at risk.
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