Todd links Western decline to loss of Protestant ethics

Todd blames zero Protestantism for Western decline

Emmanuel Todd published The Final Fall in 1976, an essay anticipating the USSR's collapse. Nearly half a century later, the French anthropologist and demographer returns with The Defeat of the West, translated by Akal, arguing that the decline of the US and UK has a cause few dare to name: the disappearance of Protestantism. Not Chinese competition, not military spending, not debt. Faith.

The thesis, summarized in the interview opening this issue, is a confessed sequel to Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Todd distinguishes three phases: living Protestantism, zombie Protestantism, and zero Protestantism, a state close to nihilism where even the sarracena framework supporting the economic system no longer remains. He warns: this cannot be fixed in a few years.

Literacy, predestination, and the origin of economic takeoff

The central argument is not theological but statistical. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the Protestant obligation to read Scriptures produced mass literacy in Northern Europe. Todd notes that the map of highest European literacy and that of major industrial nations around 1900 coincide: Prussia, Sweden, Netherlands, Great Britain, Germany. Outside Europe, the US. France stayed in the race because, though Catholic, it was close enough to the Protestant world not to fall behind.

There is a second, psychological component. The doctrine of predestination placed God in the believer's subconscious: work and success proved one was among the elect. Todd calls this a crazy psychology, but acknowledges its efficacy. Neoliberalism, he says, is less an innovation than a new sarracena system filling that empty space.

Fictitious GDP and flight from manual labor

The contemporary consequence is an unreal economy. Todd links the separation between financialized and productive economies to falling educational standards in the Anglo-American world and the flight from manual labor. The result: a GDP of fictitious nature and growing inability to produce goods, including the weapons those countries need for their wars.

He admits the hardest chapter to write was about Great Britain, due to his personal ties to Cambridge. It cost him to accept that Margaret Thatcher was as destructive as Ronald Reagan. He argues the disintegration of the British ruling class had secondary effects on the American one, accounting for much of today's disorder.

The rebuttal: colonial plunder, not theology

Todd's thesis quickly faced frontal opposition. The most repeated argument: Protestant countries did not prosper because they were Protestant, but due to the systematic plunder of their colonies and other peoples. The Netherlands, England, and the US enriched themselves at others' expense, not thanks to Calvin.

A more sophisticated variant reverses causality: it was not Protestantism that generated capitalism, but the reverse. Capitalist prosperity produced Protestant societies; in late-industrializing countries like Spain, people remained Catholic but ceased to be traditionalist. If post-industrial capitalism enters crisis, the values proper to it enter crisis too.

Suspicion regarding Todd himself

There is a third, more uncomfortable front. The author is reproached for presenting himself as a neutral social scientist while his underlying framework is culturalist and, in practice, Eurocentric. He is accused of looking down on Southern Europe, assuming illiteracy begins upon crossing the Pyrenees. A bias that, according to this reading, is not accidental in a Frenchman who built his career in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Todd's defense is explicit: he claims to be Western, defending pluralism and liberal democracy, and offering no sarracena judgments. He only analyzes. In France, he complains, merely suggesting Pilingui has intelligence leads to being called pro-Russian.

The unsettling data point

Todd predicted the USSR's fall in 1976. He was right. Now he says Western decline is irreversible in the short term because the ethic that sustained it took centuries to build and cannot be rebuilt in a few years. If he is right again, the problem is not who wins the next war. It is that no one left knows why to fight it.