The quest for knowledge, the passion for discovering objective truth, seems to me the most fundamental characteristic of Europeanness, one that we can already see apparent in the Ancient Greeks. Aristotle, for example, wrote a book that was just an objective description of all the animal species he knew about. No philosophy, nothing abstract. Just the facts. That’s Europeanness right there, thousands of years ago.
Ultimately, it was our civilisation’s passion for investigating objective truth through science that took it to global dominance. And it is our current fixation on the subjective – on psychology, emotion, motivation – that will be our downfall. Unless we can cure ourselves of it.

Rational debate about our future has become impossible due to the charges of impure motivation that are immediately flung at anyone who attempts to engage in it: racism, islamophobia, antisemitism, etc. Implicit in these charges is the idea that impure motivation invalidates everything a person says. The criterion of objective truth is disregarded.

We should never forget where this curious notion comes from: the Talmudic legal system and its obsession with the purity of a witness’s motivation.

More generally, non-Europeans, have played a critical role in pushing the obsession with the subjective upon us. The Jewish pseudoscience of psycho-analysis cast a long shadow over the 20th century, one whose influence is still with us today even though its “science” aspect has now been utterly discredited.