How Putin gave meaning to the West

Since Putin sent his armies into Ukraine, something strange has happened in the West. We have seen unprecedented levels of drive, unity, and purpose across government, society, and businesses. This has caught Putin, as well as ourselves, off-guard, but it shouldn’t have.

People need meaning. We spend all our lives worrying over whether we are doing the right thing, a worry made more intense by virtue of not knowing what we are supposed to be striving for. Some find meaning in their relationships with others, others find meaning in training a skill. Many find meaning in the bottom of a bottle, or at the sharp end of a needle.

This is OK. People should be free to live their own lives, make their own choices, and do what they want to do. That is what our culture tells us. It is what I believe; it may even be what you believe.

The question is how this translates to our society. Historically in western Europe, the quest for societal meaning followed one of two paths: religious/spiritual enrichment or aggrandisement through conquest. Then God died. This left aggrandisement through conquest, but this, too, ended in World War 1. We turned to ideologies. This led to World War 2 and the Cold War. After the Cold War all we had left were the values and ideologies what we had used to win it, but what value is a gun with no target?

In The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray spoke about the difficulties in transposing our individual quest for meaning into a societal need for meaning:

“The search for meaning is not new. What is new is that almost nothing in modern European culture applies itself to an answer…Instead, a voice at best says, ‘Find your meaning where you will.’ At worse the nihilist’s creed can be heard: ‘Yours is a meaningless existence in a meaningless universe.’ Any person who believes such a creed is liable to achieve literally nothing. Societies in which that is the case are likewise liable to achieve nothing. While nihilism may be understandable in some individuals, as a societal creed it is fatal.”

I do not believe that at a societal level we view existence as meaningless; society is closer to Murray’s more optimistic appraisal of nihilism. He is, however, right to highlight the problem with the relationship between the personal quest for meaning and the societal need for meaning in the Western context.

The success of the Western cultural ideal on a societal level is paradoxical. When everyone pulls in their own direction, you cannot move the boulder of progress. For the West to prosper, everyone must pull in the same direction of their own volition. Everyone must find the same meaning independent of one another.

With Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, this has finally happened. For the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been cause for everyone in the West to pull together. The years that followed the collapse of Communism were spent in a societal daze. The West was triumphant and bathed in that triumph.

For a moment, the war on terror seemed like it could be the new meaning. Yet it never really came to force for two reasons. First, it was not big enough – Islamic extremists have killed fewer people in the last 20 years across the whole of Europe (~600) than Northern Ireland related terrorism killed in the UK in the 80s alone (~841). Secondly, and most crucially, the idea was contrary to the Western Ideal. Islam must be integrated, not ostracised. Indeed, if anything, it caused fractures: how exactly do you integrate Muslims who hold more extreme and intolerant beliefs into a tolerant system, while preserving what we hold dear?

The financial crisis sowed further doubts into the ideals of capitalism and globalisation. These seeds of doubt flowered into nationalist movements. Some were small, such as Catalonia and Scotland, others large, such as Brexit and Trump. These movements were driven by meaning. On both sides of these debates, people looked to politics to provide them with meaning. The effects were predictably disastrous: we all know victims of Brexit Derangement Syndrome on both sides of the divide.

The next crisis, Covid, never threatened to bring us together either. How could something that demanded we spend time alone create common cause? Now it ceases to be a contestable issue, becoming a mere fact of life. Zero-Covid is a non-starter, everyone who wants a vaccine has taken it, and it is now less deadly than the season flu.

Of course, there is the climate crisis. It is telling that once Brexit was “dealt with”, Boris Johnson decided the green agenda was to be a defining mission of his government. International in scale, cataclysmic in effect, it would be a unifying cause, but, alas, it is painfully slow and embarrassingly unsexy. It may excite dreary hippies, but, for most people, battling climate change is a secondary concern to the daily battles of life.

So desperate for meaning, so desperate to do something, we crave an existential threat that we can truly grasp.

And then along came Putin’s full invasion of Ukraine. Cast to perfection: in one corner, the old ideological enemy led by a ruthless dictator, forged in the KGB in the dying days of the USSR, who believes that we have become docile, decadent, and spineless; in the other, the plucky underdog, led by a democratically elected leader who promotes closer ties to the West, vowed to tackle corruption, and voiced Paddington.

Having fought half a dozen muddied wars unchallenged, Putin has concluded he can get away with anything. He invaded Ukraine with barely half a desiccated fig-leaf of an excuse, believing he was laying down a challenge that we would shy away from. Only, he didn’t realise how much his challenge was needed by the West.
In invading Ukraine, Putin has reminded us of our cause and given us meaning for the first time in over a generation. He has reminded us of the value of liberty, of choosing our own destiny. Like hell are we going to let that chance go.

When did we last act so decisively and with such force? The sanctions flew in so fast, with such fury, we fell over ourselves in a frenzy, like a junkie discovering a new high. Countries, corporations, NGOs, all wanted to get in on the action. Kick them off SWIFT, stop selling them cars, ban them from the Paralympics, anything goes, just take part in this life-affirming crusade. Higher gas prices? We’ll pay them. Russian ballet? Get rid. Ukrainian refugees? We’ll take the lot.

Putin has reignited the cold war and we are here to bathe in the warmth of those flames. Those days of ideological conflict gave us meaning, gave us drive. Everything was at stake, and nuclear annihilation loomed over the whole affair - by God, how we’ve missed it!

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal, unwarranted, and barbaric. It will go down in history as the heartless action of a despotic dictator unable to comprehend the suffering he is inflicting upon so many. Applying sanctions and supplying arms to Ukraine is categorically the right thing to do: we have a moral duty to aid the Ukrainian people in their struggle as much as we can. We must lay down the law as forcefully as possible to discourage Putin as well as any other powers who seek signs of Western weakness.

That it has taken a tragedy of this scale to bring the West together and remind us of our ideals is a sad inevitability. We would only react to a tragedy. It is only when life is threatened that we consider what makes it important. Putin did not have a chance of knowing how far we would go, because we did not know ourselves - not consciously at any rate.

It is cruel to talk about the tragedy that is unfurling itself upon the Ukrainian people in this way. Millions will be displaced, tens of thousands of lives will be lost, and countless lives will be ruined. A nation suffers and its people bleed, while we talk about ourselves. We do this over Yemen. We do this over Syria. We do this over every nation far away that suffers. In our gilded lives, we do not suffer; we merely observe, mourn for a while, then move on.
We must not beat ourselves up over this, for this is not simply a flaw of Western man, but rather a flaw of man. We can only weep so much for the suffering of men, women, and children in lands far from ours. Yet for once, we find our lives and our futures entangled with theirs. For once, we cannot move on.

This unity and sense of purpose will not last forever. The high will wear off. The high of rediscovering our purpose has carried us this far, but, sooner or later, we will realise what all this will cost us and how far we are prepared to go. Already we see lucidity in the refusal to consider a no-fly zone. We may find meaning in this conflict, but we should not join in.

Soon we will have to consider how to pay for the increased military budget that we have said we must have but hope is never required. With inflation skyrocketing, borrowing is expensive, so we must make cuts elsewhere. That’s when the higher fuel prices will really bite.

Worst of all, at some point, it will emerge that the lionised Ukrainians are human too. War is a horrible, messy affair in which humans make terrible mistakes.

This will be the moment. This will be the time in which we in the West will truly find out how dearly we hold our beliefs. I can only hope, for Ukraine’s sake, we hold them true.

The above represents my personal view and should not be interpreted as representative of the views of any organisation.