Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, “Soumission”, tells the story of a French university professor, Francois, a secularized, single man who indulges in sexual pleasures and finds comfort in Islam. It is the symbol of a decaying Europe. In 1979, another great French writer, Emil Cioran, wrote that European civilization was going to be defeated and that its decline was due to a refined inactivity, a sublime lifestyle. Cioran saw the day the church of Notre Dame de Paris would become a mosque. What is more despicable is in fact the old continent’s moral inertia. Only the naive, or the lying, can...