The latest news these bygone, dreary afternoons serves yet another unappetising slice of the longue durée: a man in Austria, a supposed Islamic State sympathiser, has been sentenced to 15 years for plotting an attack on a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna. Let us pause, reader, and take a step back. Not to minimise the gravity of the plot, but to ask a rather more uncomfortable question. Why Taylor Swift? And why now?
Dismiss the knee-jerk outrage. Look instead at the intellectual wallpaper of our age. The target was not a seat of government, not a military installation, not a religious site. It was a concert by a pop star whose songs sing of broken relationships, of becoming, of a certain American feminine anxiety. This is the modern equivalent of the Vandals sacking the Library of Alexandria: not for the books, but because books symbolise the order they despised. Here, the attack is on the very concept of Western escapism, of a world where girls can scream in unison about love and heartbreak without worrying about the caliphate.
But let us also point the finger at ourselves. The Swift phenomenon is not mere music; it is a mass therapy session for a generation that has no religion, no stable national identity, no sense of history beyond the next iPhone release. A Swift concert is a cathedral of emotion, but built on loose sand. It is the modern equivalent of the Roman spectacles: bread and circuses for a public that has forgotten the arts of war and politics. When you have sacralised pop stars, you have, in a sense, already lost the cultural war. The would-be terrorist only recognises what we refuse to see: that our culture is vapid, shallow, and ripe for attack.
Ten years ago, the threat was Charlie Hebdo. Cartoons of the Prophet. That was about blasphemy and free speech. Now it is Taylor Swift. This is about the soft, pulpy heart of a civilisation that has become obsessed with personal authenticity, with the private self, at the expense of the public good. The 15-year sentence is a balm, but it does not heal the deeper wound. That wound is our refusal to admit that barbarism lurks not only in the caves of Afghanistan but in the shiny stadiums of Europe, and that the barbarians have a point, however twisted: they see our nakedness.
We must also note the irony of Austria. Austria, the cradle of the Habsburgs, of Mozart, of a certain high European culture. Now it makes headlines for a foiled attack on a cultural event that would once have been the definition of vulgarity to the enlightened bourgeoisie. Yet this vulgarity is now our shield, our identity. We have become, in the words of the historian Niall Ferguson, more decadent than the Romans, more fragmented than the Greeks. The plot may have been foiled, but the rot inside the Republic is not.
Let us not coo about the resilience of pop culture. Let us instead ask a question: if our only response to nihilism is a pop song about breakups, what exactly is it that we are defending? The 15-year sentence is justice, yes. But the deeper sentence is on our civilisation: it is condemned to an endless loop of entertainment and terror, with no civilising mission beyond the next hashtag.
I offer no solutions. I am not a politician, only a columnist. But I can name the disease: it is the quiet, comfortable death of intellectual seriousness. In the Victorian era, the Empire built railroads and schools. We build celebrity worship. The barbarians know this. They smell it on us. And they are only too happy to call it decadence.
So yes, relief at the foiled plot. But also, a shudder. Not about what could have been, but about what already is.
