Once upon a time, Europeans looked up to their writers and musicians as potential saints who could share through their “great works” their deeper perception of human destiny. To this day, we call that collection of literary masterpieces the “Western canon.” For most of the 19th and 20th centuries in the West, not only serious students of literature but most people who deemed themselves responsible citizens were expected to be at least superficially familiar with the list of writers, their works and even some of their dominant ideas.

The authors of works acknowledged as belonging to the canon were thus metaphorically canonized. No one expected these fundamentally secular writers and thinkers to exhibit any form of manifest saintly behavior in their personal lives. Nevertheless, their commitment to reasoning and an analysis of the “European soul,” their quest for some form of moral understanding of human relations and analysis of the rules and customs of civilized society gave them a legitimacy most other public figures could only envy. Their status as “spiritual” contributors to the construction of the general population’s worldview positioned them only a notch or two below Scripture itself. Most people believed that such authors lived and reasoned on a higher plane than they could ever attempt to do themselves.

The late 20th century marked a turning point in the West’s perception of its own status as a civilization and the moral value of its writers. Modernism in literature and painting in the first half of the century, accompanying and reflecting the trauma of two incomprehensible world wars initiated by nations that had acquired the most prestigious literary and artistic credentials, set the stage for the marginalization of the canon and everything associated with it. The modernist movement broke down the accepted patterns and models, distorting inherited perspectives (literally, in the case of painting). It called into question almost all the background assumptions that reassured educated Westerners that the assumptions about human behavior regulating their society were fundamentally virtuous.

In the second half of the 20th century, postmodernism ever more radically and analytically “deconstructed” even the traces of those assumptions. Other forces were at work, notably industrial and commercial ones, as the post-World War II West morphed into a civilization of consumption.

Despite the growing challenge to traditional literary and “civilizational” values, in the second half of the 20th century, figures like F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom treated the canon as relatively settled: Homer, Plato, Plutarch, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and so on. To be educated meant knowing these works. The canon served as cultural currency among elites and shaped what “literary” meant.

In 2026, not many people refer to or think about “the canon.” Literature itself has become superseded by and largely assimilated into the general area of “entertainment.” Since the advent of modernism, European literature in the 20th and 21st centuries toned down its ambition compared to the 19th century and the centuries that preceded it. Whether we’re considering writers deemed literary giants such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, their production has left few lasting effects on the general culture. It has not seriously impacted society’s worldview.

Understanding Europe’s current existential crisis

In Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum this week, Europeans have been putting on display the confusion and angst provoked by a history of slow cultural decomposition that has suddenly been brought explosively to the fore by what they increasingly see as the betrayal of their spiritual (but especially economic) heir, the United States newly incarnated for a second time by President Donald Trump. Europe is living its “E tu Brute” moment.

Europe spent centuries building competing empires. Then, with their economies in shambles at the end of World War II, they had no choice but to bequeath the aggregate of their global overseas possessions to the young transatlantic republic that had escaped the war not just unscathed but strengthened by its dominant industrial power. Soon after, the age of European colonies gave way to a new neocolonial world order, in which it wasn’t so much the American nation as the American dollar that gave the orders and called the shots.

A decade before the end of the millennium, history was shaken anew by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 21st century saw the somewhat surprising but historically logical beginning of a self-induced decline of the now uncontested leader, the US. Its economy and worldview, built on the precarious foundation of military-industrial complex, depended on the perception of existential threat: communist during the Cold War, Islamic terrorist under George W. Bush and inchoately multipolar from 2014 onwards. The US was losing its bearings. Europe tried uncomfortably to adapt and  began dislocating. 2016 saw the ambiguous triumph of Brexit in June and Trump in November, signaling changes and legitimizing a populist worldview neither the established leadership nor the legacy media was capable of making sense of.

Where are today’s literary and philosophical saints, writers capable of reviving and complementing the canon and leaving indelible traces in Western culture? The greats of the 20th century listed above (Proust, Joyce, Eliot, etc.) left no lasting heritage of ideas, concepts and memes. They decomposed ideas and associations instead of composing them. The ultimate irony is that if we look for metaphors to help us understand our own contemporary social and political drama, we must return to writers popular in or around the 19th century.

Four of those writers come to mind: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mary Shelley, Hans Christian Andersen and Alfred Jarry. Let’s remind ourselves of their contribution to understanding our Western civilization of the 21st century and look at the insight they provide.

From Goethe to Jarry and on to Davos 2026

Goethe published his poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” three years before the beginning of the 19th century and his monumental Faust, Part Two in 1832. The simple narrative of the early poem prefigures the history of the West’s culture of technological development over the past two centuries. The apprentice learns a spell that gives him the power to get inanimate objects to carry out tasks he is expected to do, but lacking the counterspell, he cannot stop the process he has initiated.

This is a moral tale everyone can relate to that leaves us to meditate on what it means to pursue convenience based on partial knowledge and motivated by impatience. Applied to an example such as nuclear energy, which we impatiently developed not to better understand what it was and how it might be harnessed, but for the purpose of human destruction justified by the “noble” objective of ending a war. It did end the war in Japan, at considerable moral cost, but it also produced the arms race, which poisoned our politics and distorted our economy during the Cold War is reaccelerating even today.

The hero of Goethe’s Faust, inspired by an earlier work of the canon — Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century drama, “Doctor Faustus” — is motivated by his desire to understand “what holds the world together in its inmost folds.” To make that leap in human intelligence he sells his soul to the devil.        Faust’s tragedy begins when he mistakes power over the world for reconciliation with it. He embarks on a process whose success in growth and ambition is commensurate with the amorality found at its core. The parallels should be obvious with the ensuing history of the technological revolution now coming to a head today with the AI revolution.

Goethe was a true visionary and a committed “modern” thinker. He understood the morality of the work of the devil, but instead of condemning it, he sought to make it profitable, drawing his own moral conclusion that by optimistically continuing to seek understanding, we might achieve clarity. “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen.” (“Whoever strives with constant effort, him we can redeem.”) If he were to look at the world today, he would recognize the very processes he described, but I suspect he would see some of today’s striving to be suspect, to the devil’s advantage.

Mary Shelley was far less indulgent with the notion of striving than Goethe in her Gothic 1818 novel, Frankenstein. Like Faust, Victor Frankenstein seeks total access to meaning and rejects mediation, patience and finitude. What he produces artificially imitates nature while failing to recognize what it reveals about nature. What Frankenstein proudly creates escapes any control, but the doctor takes no responsibility for what ensues. Many might see that as a description of where we are today with AI.

The final meme in our list appeared in 1896: Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, a madcap remake of Shakespeare’s Macbeth complemented by elements of pastiche of Hamlet, Richard III and even The Winter’s Tale and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In other words, Jarry knew the canon and played with it. The play’s plot featuring a sanguinary, bombastic, narcissistic king was so far out and over the top, so dissonant in terms of contemporary aesthetic standards, that some view it as the opening volley of 20th-century modernism. In its way, it was announcing the impending end of the 19th century’s era of peace and rational industrialization less than two decades before the start of World War I.

Why should we return to Ubu Roi today? No one imagined that such a parody of misuse of political power could ever be found in nature, especially in the context of Western democracies. South African author Jane Taylor describes the eponymous hero of the play in these terms: “The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world. Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification.” We don’t have to seek very far to see the astonishing parallel in today’s news.

We’re just left wondering how many deals Trump has done with his version of Mephistopheles.

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition Fair Observer began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.