Politics & Power Quote by Johan Huizinga

Huizinga’s line lands like a quiet provocation: it doesn’t flatter Europe’s sophistication or America’s practicality so much as accuse both of needing substitutes. Written by a historian steeped in the long afterglow of Christendom, he treats “religion” less as doctrine than as a social engine: a shared story that authorizes values, disciplines desire, and supplies rituals for meaning. When that engine weakens, modern societies don’t become neutral. They reroute the same hunger for transcendence into whatever institution can plausibly carry it.

Europe, in his framing, spiritualizes art. Museums and concert halls become secular cathedrals; the artist is granted a priestly aura; aesthetic seriousness stands in for moral seriousness. The subtext isn’t “Europe loves paintings.” It’s that Europe’s cultural elite can turn taste into a creed, complete with heresies (kitsch) and saints (geniuses), and that this can be both ennobling and claustrophobic.

America, meanwhile, sacralizes science. Not science as method, but science as promise: a forward-driving faith that the world is legible, fixable, improvable. That’s why the sentence stings; it hints at the quasi-religious role of innovation and expertise in American life, the way “the data” can become an oracle and the lab a moral alibi. Huizinga is writing in a century when mass politics, technological war, and mechanized living were remaking the West. His point is diagnostic: modernity doesn’t eliminate belief. It changes the costume, and the new vestments carry their own temptations - aesthetic snobbery on one side, technocratic certainty on the other.