JOSH HAMMER: Louvre Heist Encapsulates a Western Culture That Will Not Defend Itself.

All across the continent, fertility rates have plummeted, and the Christianity that defined the civilization for two millennia is viewed as a quaint relic of a bygone era. The combination of modern European Union political and economic integration on the one hand, combined with imposed mass immigration from foreign (namely, Islamic) cultures on the other hand, has led to a place where sense of home and hearth is diminished — and along with it, community, meaning, and purpose.

In Britain, two Jews were killed following a synagogue attack by a Syrian immigrant on the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. In Germany — yes, Germany — Jews have already been advised for years against wearing a kippah head covering in public. More generally, Europeans’ personal happiness levels have seemingly gravitated away from church and children, the traditional sources of meaning, and toward a discomfiting positive correlation with the size of a nation’s welfare state.

The stunning Louvre museum heist earlier this week in Paris offers an uncanny encapsulation of the broader society-wide phenomenon. On Sunday, thieves disguised as construction workers stole, during broad daylight, eight pieces of the French crown jewels estimated to be worth roughly $100 million. And perhaps the most astonishing aspect of this real-life caper is this: As of this writing, the thieves have not been caught.*

The utterly humiliating inability of French authorities to either prevent the theft of the literal crown jewels or promptly arrest the perpetrators after the fact is the most poetic possible way to demonstrate a point that has come up in so many of my conversations this week: At best, European political and cultural elites have no interest in protecting and preserving their culture; and at worst, they have an interest in seeing that culture replaced root and branch.

Hammer asks, “Will there even be a Europe, in any cognizable sense of the term, a century from now?” As Mark Steyn warned twenty years ago, “There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands–probably–just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.”

* To give the gendarmes their due, initial arrests were reported yesterday: Suspects Arrested Over the Theft of Crown Jewels from Paris’ Louvre Museum.