The Failure of Multiculturalism: Ancient Warnings for Modern Europe

Introduction: A Crisis of Cultural Unity

Modern Europe finds itself in a profound identity crisis. As nations embrace multiculturalism – the idea that diverse cultures can coexist without any overriding normative culture – cracks have appeared in the foundation of European cultural unity. Many sense a fragmentation, as if the common spirit that once animated Europe has splintered into a mosaic of separate identities. This essay argues that the roots of this fragmentation run deeper than recent policies. They extend back to the Enlightenment, whose ideals of individualism, secular humanism, rationalism, and egalitarianism, while liberating in many respects, also eroded the traditional metaphysical and moral structures that bound European civilization together. To illuminate these claims, we draw a historical parallel with ancient Rome, a civilization that suffered a similar fate: excessive pluralism and the dilution of ancestral customs contributed to the collapse of the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire. In the warnings of classical philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Seneca, we find striking foreshadowings of the challenges facing Europe today. Their teachings on virtue, cultural unity, and the moral purpose of the state offer timeless wisdom – cautioning against moral relativism and societal laxity. Likewise, the traditionalist philosopher Julius Evola, especially in Revolt Against the Modern World, diagnoses the modern West’s ills in terms that echo those ancient warnings. Evola’s scathing critique of modernity, liberalism, and Enlightenment thought – and his call to restore a sacred, hierarchical order grounded in transcendent values – provides a framework to understand why both Enlightenment and multiculturalism have precipitated a crisis of identity in Europe.

The Enlightenment and the Unraveling of Tradition

The Enlightenment of the 17th–18th centuries fundamentally transformed Europe’s intellectual and moral landscape. It championed reason and the rights of the individual, casting off the authority of throne and altar. This intellectual revolution brought many blessings – scientific advancement, human rights, religious tolerance – yet it also initiated an unraveling of Europe’s traditional order. Pre-Enlightenment Europe was held together by a shared metaphysical vision: a synthesis of Classical and Christian heritage in which society was seen as an organic hierarchy under God, and in which individuals found identity and purpose through their roles in family, church, and kingdom. Enlightenment thinkers boldly challenged this old order, undermining the shared worldview that had provided cultural cohesion.

Enlightenment values that weakened Europe’s traditional foundations included:

Individualism – elevating personal autonomy and rights above communal duties. This prized the self over the collective and weakened the bonds of communal identity and obligation.
Secular Humanism – centering morality and purpose on human reason and worldly happiness rather than divine authority. By marginalizing religion and transcendent truths, secularism eroded the religious unity that had anchored European cultures for centuries.
Rationalism – insisting that reason alone is the path to truth, casting doubt on inherited traditions, mysteries, and myths. This bred skepticism toward old beliefs and customs, prioritizing material reality and empirical validation over traditional metaphysical knowledge.
Egalitarianism – rejecting the idea of a divinely ordained social hierarchy in favor of equality. While advancing justice in many areas, it also delegitimized the vertical principle of order that traditional Europe had lived by.

Together, these Enlightenment ideals dismantled “traditional structures” and obliterated the sacred in society. By enthroning human reason as the sole arbiter of truth and human flourishing as the highest aim, the Enlightenment desacralized the public sphere. Man, not God or Tradition, became the measure of all things. In Evola’s analysis, the West thereby “lost touch with the spiritual dimension,” trading a civilization of being for one of materialism. The result was that Europe entered the modern age without a shared sacred canopy. Each person became, in a sense, a world unto themselves – free to choose their own beliefs, but also free to drift away from any common center.

It is in this context of an already weakened cultural core that multiculturalism emerged in the late 20th century. Multiculturalism holds that a society need not have any singular cultural identity – it can be a neutral framework within which multiple cultures coexist, each with its own values. But if the Enlightenment had already hollowed out Europe’s unified moral framework, multiculturalism would hammer the point home by declaring that even in principle no particular culture or value system should hold pride of place. As a policy and an ethos, multiculturalism often encourages relativism – the notion that all cultures are equally valid, and that the state exists merely to ensure peaceful cohabitation, not to promote any particular vision of the good life. Here we see a stark contrast with classical philosophy: what is the purpose of the state? To the classical mind, a state is a community with a clear, shared end – the cultivation of virtue and the pursuit of the highest good.

Evola would argue that multiculturalism is but a late symptom of the disease unleashed by the Enlightenment. After the French Revolution – which Evola describes as unleashing “anarchy and chaotic forces that not only dismantle authority but also erode personal identity” – Europe gradually replaced its old common culture with a liberal, materialistic consumer society. In such a society, religion became a private matter, traditional ethnic identities were downplayed in favor of abstract cosmopolitan ideals, and the state embraced technocratic purposes rather than a spiritual or moral mission. By the late 20th century, many European nations had become largely secular states devoted to managing diversity rather than cultivating unity. The arrival of large immigrant communities from very different civilizations only exacerbated the crisis of identity. A vacuum had formed: Europe was severed from its past by its own Enlightenment choices, yet hesitant to demand assimilation in the present due to the multicultural ethos. The result, critics argue, is a Europe unmoored – a “shapeless and hybrid” society lacking any higher principle to unify its many peoples.

Ancient Rome: A Parallel of Pluralism and Decline

History offers a sobering precedent for a society losing its unifying traditions: the fate of ancient Rome. In its republican and early imperial days, Rome had a strong core identity – the mos maiorum, or way of the ancestors. Romans shared a civil religion, celebrated the same heroes, and upheld a stern code of virtue (gravitas, disciplina, virtus, etc.). The Republic was held together not merely by laws, but by a cultural consensus. As Cicero defined it, a true commonwealth is an assemblage of people united by justice and a shared common good. By Cicero’s time in the 1st century BC, however, that consensus was fraying. The late Republic was marked by moral crisis and civil strife. Cicero’s famous cry, “O tempora, o mores!” – “Oh, what times! Oh, what morals!” – encapsulated his shock at the degeneration of Roman ethics. His lament conveyed that Rome had lost the old moral fiber that once made her great.

Several factors in Rome’s decline mirror what some see in modern Europe:

Dilution of Ancestral Customs: As Rome expanded, it absorbed peoples from Greece, the Near East, and beyond. The influx of new ideas, religions, and lifestyles challenged the supremacy of Roman traditions. The very cosmopolitanism that contributed to Rome’s economic success also meant that a Roman from Gaul might worship Isis and speak Celtic, while a Roman from Syria might hold radically different moral norms. The common reference points of old – Jupiter and Mars, the toga and Latin language, the stories of heroic figures – gradually lost their hold on a populace that was increasingly diverse in thought and habit. Late Imperial Romans no longer uniformly revered the mos maiorum, much as modern Europeans struggle to find a common cultural narrative in the age of multiculturalism.
Excessive Pluralism and Loss of Unity: The Roman Empire became a tapestry of countless cultures – a “many-coloured cloak” with innumerable threads. By the 3rd century AD, the Empire was a patchwork where little held it together beyond administrative necessity and military might. Emperor Caracalla’s edict in 212 AD, granting citizenship to virtually all free inhabitants of the Empire, is symbolic: it made legal Romans of diverse peoples from Britain to Egypt, yet in doing so, it arguably diluted the meaning of Roman identity. Citizenship became a status, not a marker of a shared way of life. Similarly, in modern Europe, citizenship is often a legal construct rather than a unifying cultural force. As with late Rome, the absence of a dominant cultural core invites fragmentation.
Moral Decay and Relativism: Classical observers linked Rome’s decline with moral decay. The Roman moralists – from Cato to Juvenal – bemoaned the corruption, greed, and loss of virtue that had come to define their society. Luxury and avarice displaced the old simplicity and integrity, and when “all that is holy is profaned,” society loses its inner cohesion. Stoic philosophers like Seneca noted that moral relativism – the idea that virtue is determined by popular consensus rather than eternal standards – led to a society where vice could become normalized. When a culture no longer defends a higher standard of truth, its very existence is compromised. Late Roman citizens, much like modern Europeans under multicultural relativism, found themselves adrift without a clear moral compass.

Thus, Rome offers a cautionary tale. A world-empire that once prided itself on a clear identity became a kaleidoscope of tribes, cults, and self-indulgent individuals. The outer form of the state persisted for a time, but its inner life splintered. Eventually, the Roman Empire collapsed under the weight of its own internal disunity—a disunity precipitated by the very forces of pluralism that, untempered by a unifying tradition, led to its downfall.

Classical Wisdom: The State, Virtue, and Cultural Cohesion

The apprehensions voiced about multicultural, post-Enlightenment Europe would come as no surprise to the great philosophers of antiquity. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca all stressed that a polity must be held together by shared values and oriented toward a higher good. They warned that when a society treats all values as equal and all ways of life as interchangeable, it loses the qualities that enable a true civilization to thrive.

Aristotle offered a vision of the state diametrically opposed to modern neutral pluralism. In his Politics, he declares that the purpose of a polis is not merely to enable survival, but to enable its citizens to live well. “A state exists for the sake of the good life, and not for the sake of life only,” he writes. It is not merely a mechanism for mutual defense or commerce – rather, it is a community of families and groups sharing a life of virtue aimed at the highest good. For Aristotle, a society fragmented into isolated groups with no common ethos hardly constitutes a true polis.

Plato echoes this sentiment in his Republic. Through the character of Socrates, Plato examines what holds a city together and what ultimately tears it apart. He famously warns that unchecked freedom and the elevation of every individual’s preference to an equal good lead not to a harmonious diversity but to chaos. In extreme cases, this chaos culminates in the rise of tyranny, as the collapse of order leaves a void quickly filled by despotic power. Plato’s critique is not against diversity per se, but against the lack of a shared, transcendent vision that unifies society.

Cicero, a statesman and philosopher, synthesized Greek and Roman wisdom on these matters. He argued that a true commonwealth is not merely a collection of people under the same legal status, but a community united by a shared notion of justice and the common good. In his works, Cicero decried the moral decay he observed in Rome, lamenting the abandonment of the mos maiorum – the revered ancestral customs that once bound Romans together. His cry, “O tempora, o mores!”, was not simply nostalgic, but a grave warning that the loss of cultural unity foretold the collapse of the Republic.

Seneca added the Stoic perspective, asserting that virtue is the only true good. For Seneca, a society that abandons its higher moral standards in favor of a relativistic view of ethics is doomed to decline. He urged individuals not to follow the crowd in their vices, but to adhere to a higher moral order that transcends the fleeting fashions of the moment.

Collectively, these classical voices affirm that a state’s strength is rooted in a shared cultural and moral framework. Without it, even the most powerful empire can crumble—a lesson that remains starkly relevant to modern Europe.

Evola’s Revolt: Condemning Modernity and Liberal Decadence

Into this discussion enters Julius Evola, a 20th-century traditionalist whose works, particularly Revolt Against the Modern World, offer a radical critique of modernity and the legacy of Enlightenment thought. Evola argued that modernity is characterized by a profound decline—a loss of the sacred, a collapse of hierarchy, and the triumph of materialism over spiritual values.

Evola contended that the modern world, beginning with the Enlightenment and crystallizing in the French Revolution, rejected the eternal and transcendent truths that had once structured society. By overthrowing the divinely ordained order of God, King, and community, the West traded a spiritual hierarchy for a system of abstract individualism and egalitarianism. In this new order, all values became equivalent, and cultural relativism replaced the notion of an objective, higher good. This leveling impulse, Evola maintained, paved the way for the chaotic pluralism that characterizes modern European societies.

In Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola paints a stark contrast between Traditional civilizations and the modern “civilization of chaos.” Traditional societies were founded on an acute awareness of transcendent reality, where a spiritual elite ruled according to divine law and society was organized into a sacred hierarchy. Life was imbued with meaning through myth, ritual, and a clear order of values. In such societies, diversity existed only within the framework of a unifying, transcendent order.

Modern Europe, by contrast, has discarded that order. With the Enlightenment’s desacralization and the subsequent embrace of multiculturalism, Europe has permitted every cultural expression to flourish on its own terms—without any unifying standard. For Evola, this is not progress but a decline into mediocrity and moral dissolution. The very policies that champion cultural pluralism also serve to obliterate the sacred center, rendering the modern state a hollow assembly of fragmented identities. Evola’s remedy is not a return to pre-modern institutions by rote, but rather a radical reassertion of transcendent values—a restoration of a hierarchical, sacred worldview that can once again guide society.

Conclusion: Rekindling the Sacred Flame

Europe stands at a crossroads. One path leads to the continued fragmentation of identity—a future in which nations become mere geographical entities populated by isolated cultural enclaves with little in common beyond the veneer of legal citizenship. In such a scenario, the deep sense of European identity and unity, forged over millennia, would be irretrievably lost. The other path demands a difficult but essential renewal: a rediscovery of a common cultural and spiritual core that transcends the relativism of modernity.

This essay has argued that the current failure of multiculturalism is not an isolated policy misstep but is intrinsically linked to the Enlightenment’s dismantling of Tradition. By rejecting the old order of divine authority, hereditary hierarchy, and a shared metaphysical vision, the Enlightenment paved the way for modern liberalism—a system that ultimately devalues the sacred and the transcendent. Multiculturalism, emerging in this context, has only exacerbated the crisis, creating a society in which no single cultural identity can assert itself as a unifying force.

The classical wisdom of Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, and Seneca reminds us that a state is more than a collection of individuals; it is a moral community bound by shared values and a pursuit of the highest good. Julius Evola’s critique further warns that a civilization that abandons its transcendent principles is doomed to decline. If modern Europe is to avoid the fate of ancient Rome—a civilization that collapsed under the weight of its internal disunity—it must rekindle the sacred flame of Tradition.

This is not a call to reject diversity outright, but a plea for integration through a unifying, hierarchical cultural order. A true revival would involve a renewed commitment to those eternal values that have long sustained great civilizations. Only by restoring a sense of purpose, rooted in a transcendent moral order, can Europe hope to forge a future that is both culturally rich and cohesively unified.

The challenge is monumental. Europe must confront the legacy of the Enlightenment—a legacy that has, in its pursuit of reason and individualism, hollowed out the spiritual center of society. But if it can once again embrace a higher order of values, it may yet transform the crisis of multiculturalism into a renaissance of cultural unity and sacred tradition. The time has come to ask: can Europe restore its soul, or will it continue to drift into the chaos of relativism and disintegration?

Only a revival of the transcendent, the sacred, and the hierarchical can offer a path forward—a path where diversity is harmonized within a common, unyielding cultural framework. In the words of those ancient and traditional voices, a civilization that knows its soul is a civilization that endures. Europe must now choose between continued decline and the arduous task of cultural renewal.