Why Europe Is Boring America to Death
BROOKS, DAVID
Why Europe Is Boring America to Death By David Brooks As I was listening to Margaret Thatcher speak at a conference in Prague last month, I began reminiscing about the four years, starting in...
...Men looked, when all feudal straps and bandages were snapped asunder, that nature, too long the mother of dwarfs, should reimburse itself by a brood of Titans...
...Any tour through 19th-century American literature reveals how Europe transfixed polite society, setting the pace for fashion, learning, and civilization...
...Soon a much more ambivalent attitude toward Europe prevailed...
...No one feels that Europe is the future, that what Europeans are going through now we'll go through later...
...The Palace in San Francisco had 6-foot marble mantels in every room...
...If you are dutiful, you can read up on the progress of monetary union and other EU controversies...
...John F. Kennedy's favorite book was said to be David Cecil's biography of William Lamb, the second viscount Melbourne, who was Queen Victoria's first prime minister...
...The Europeans have opted for domestic tranquility instead of creative confrontation...
...And we're the poorer for it...
...Poor American kids from farms and tenements were admitted to universities built on German models to study history and philosophy according to European theories, and the mixture of Yankee meritocracy and European tradition was golden...
...The country would have to grow up some more...
...Contrast that to Bill Clinton's talk of underwear, Lamar Alexander's shirts, or Bob Dole's new taste for shorts and open-collar shirts...
...Now the European curriculum is not so central to American curricula...
...This country has not fulfilled what seemed to be the reasonable expectation of mankind," Ralph Waldo Emerson told a Dartmouth audience in 1838...
...Nicholas in New York had Flemish tapestries...
...The subsequent American books basically took the European emphasis on delicacy, display, and ornateness and simplified it, bringing in a tinge of Puritan modesty and a tinge of Benjamin Franklin practicality...
...It would be a shame to think that this balance were coming to an end...
...Soon every city had such magnificent hotels...
...But it is hard to see a time soon when the Western European nations will influence American life the way they did from the founding until a few years ago...
...and to get Europeans more involved in America in order to remind Americans that theirs is, primarily, a European civilization...
...I also found I could hook a certain number of readers if I told a few anecdotes about how Eurocrats were issuing regulations on cucumber lengths, the curvature of bananas, condom elasticity, and phallic objects generally...
...The moving force behind the gathering was the hyperkinetic editor of National Review, John O'Sullivan...
...When you live in Europe, America is always with you, in the form of popular culture, political controversies, global might, and the outrageous scandals and personalities that titillate the planet...
...European paintings and sculpture were put on display by people like P. T. Barnum, who charged admission for the masses...
...As the historian Joseph Ellis documents in his book After the Revolution, Americans were filled with optimism that they were on the verge of a golden age...
...The conference was called the New Atlantic Initiative and was sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, European foundations such as the Brussels-based Centre for the New Europe, and public-spirited American companies such as Pfizer...
...By the 1950s, American universities were the finest in the world...
...As a result, nobody feels that History, in the great big Hegelian sense, is being played out there...
...Maybe there will someday be a historical revival, and the Greeks and the Florentines will once again influence American life...
...There's just too much good stuff there for it to be long out of fashion...
...Here guests could get the service that previously had been reserved for a lord at his manor...
...but one of condescension (Let us place this work, which is probably oppressive on a number of levels, in its social context by pinning it to the display table like a bug...
...Similarly, American etiquette is drawn from the manners of the European aristocracy, but democratized...
...After two centuries in which we rebelled against Europe, emulated Europe, competed with Europe, and, from World War I through the end of the Cold War, saved Europe, Americans are now indifferent to Europe...
...There has to be something interesting to pay attention to...
...For 2,000 years Westerners have been inspired and entertained by the evolving tapestry of Western civilization...
...Europe is boring but Lady T is interesting...
...Melbourne was a true aristocrat, and it is easy to see how his aristocratic bearing influenced Kennedy's...
...Why Europe Is Boring America to Death By David Brooks As I was listening to Margaret Thatcher speak at a conference in Prague last month, I began reminiscing about the four years, starting in 1990, I spent writing from Europe for the Wall Street Journal...
...In fact, the most interesting thing about Western Europe is how boring it has become to Americans...
...The conference was called, the organizers declared, because Europe and the United States are drifting apart...
...corporate types look to East Asia for that...
...A typical American innovation was the luxury hotel, which was essentially a European palace transmogrified into a profit-making institution...
...It quickly became clear, however, that while American liberty produced a country that was politically healthy and economically prosperous, liberty by itself didn't produce cultural or artistic greatness...
...They Americanized it...
...But will such a set of economic and political relationships have a heart...
...But, he wondered, "is it right that this should be for the few, the very few of us, when for many of the rest there must be but bare walls, tile floors . . . ?" The parks he subsequently designed in the United States-New York's Central Park, Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, and many others-were meant to bring the elevating spirit of the manor grounds to the masses...
...Still, Americans didn't just swallow European culture whole...
...There were speaking tubes from rooms to the front desk, and a reading room downstairs...
...Or perhaps, without European influence, we'll no longer model our train stations on grand palaces like Grand Central Station, but will instead build flat terminuses like the newer Penn Station...
...During the 18th and 19th centuries, young Americans learned manners from courtesy books, which gave table pointers such as: Don't chew meat bones while sitting at the table...
...For a rambunctious, populist, consumerist, and free-wheeling America, European cultural influence has long exercised a countervailing pressure in the direction of refinement, high culture, and civility...
...The Palmer House in Chicago had silver dollars embedded in its floor, a perfect example of European luxuriousness turned brassily American...
...Samuel Huntington's articles in Foreign Affairs set European pundits to their pens...
...Will Americans and Europeans feel closely bound to one another by a common past, common problems, and a shared destiny...
...sense...
...According to writer Jeffrey Gedmin, fewer than 10 percent of the articles in the journal Foreign Affairs over the past five years have been on European topics...
...The St...
...There is grave danger that the links among us might be broken again, or gradually erode . . ." There were a few immediate policy ideas, the most important of which was a call for NATO expansion to central Europe...
...When European classics are studied at all, it is done not in a spirit of reverence (What can we learn from our betters...
...It's impossible to imagine that the American indifference to Europe will continue forever...
...American multiculturalists have struck blows against Eurocentrism, but the real culprit is Europe itself...
...Between the end of the French and Indian Wars until about the 1820s, Americans were convinced that Europe was a desiccated graveyard of a continent...
...Its present is so boring that it has made its past seem less important...
...But how to revive the image of Europe as a living thing in the minds of Americans, not just as some Canada, a place to go on vacation but not to take very seriously...
...Soon, many thought, there would be American Shakespeares, Dantes, and Ciceros...
...Parks were another institution of European aristocracy turned democratic by Americans...
...And its withdrawal means that homegrown populism, commercialism, and radical egalitarianism can surge unchecked...
...America took European refinement and democratized it, multi-culturalized it, and made it a consumer item, so that anybody who could afford to could enjoy it...
...Our young lovers will no longer romance along the patterns set down by chivalric tales...
...At the Prague conference the Americans defended Eurocentrism far more aggressively than the Europeans did...
...The aspects of European civilization that Americans found so useful-the grandeur, the social hierarchy, the aristocratic virtues-have practically no defenders on continental Europe, except among some obnoxious fringe parties...
...In the hottest academic disciplines, the European tradition no longer serves even as a model...
...These are worthy goals...
...I'd state it this way: to get Americans more involved in Europe in order to work with the Central Europeans to loosen the dirigiste tendencies of the Brussels-dominated European Union...
...But on a day-to-day-basis, there will be almost nothing in your American life to remind you of the contemporary European issues and personalities that formerly concerned you...
...But when you leave Europe, as I did two years ago, you leave it utterly...
...Frederick Law Olmsted was set to become a farmer until an 1850 trip to England, when he marvelled at the gardens of the aristocracy...
...We can expand NATO...
...The conference Margaret Thatcher addressed last month in Prague was designed specifically to remedy the widening transatlantic rift...
...If you go to continental Europe hoping to encounter a stirring defense of Eurocentrism, you won't find it...
...Or perhaps our leaders will lose the royal bearing that was developed by generations of European aristocrats...
...After centuries of unsteady dependence, we Americans are now estranged from the mother continent...
...Our young men and women will no longer dream of Napoleonic feats of derring-do...
...George Washington copied his famous 110 rules of good conduct from a courtesy book called Youth's Behavior, or Decency in Conversation, which was based on a French etiquette book published in 1595, which in turn was based on a 1558 Italian book by Giovanni della Casa, the archbishop of Benevento...
...If you skim through the biographies of great Americans-Washington, Lee, Teddy Roosevelt-you notice how closely they studied and imitated European heroes...
...Moreover, few Europeans actually believe in Europe anymore...
...No one feels that Europe is the center of the world's energy...
...American universities modeled themselves on English or German counterparts but let in students from tenements as much as estates...
...Francis Fukuyama is debated across Europe, Oliver Stone stirs pan-European controversy...
...For example, I found I could sucker Americans into reading about Europe if I stuck the name Margaret Thatcher in the first sentence...
...And we should do these things...
...It's big because of what it says about the state of American culture...
...Families could have rooms to themselves with washing facilities, a relative novelty at a time when most inns were savage...
...But an essential problem hung over the proceedings...
...Our artists will no longer look at the Old Masters as competitors...
...Americans realized they were not on the cutting edge of history...
...The academics who rail against Eurocentrism give the impression that Americans have always been blindly following in the footsteps of the Dead White European Males...
...Without that vague sense of social hierarchy so natural to Europeans, every day will be dress-down day...
...Now, with Europe drifting from American consciousness, that countervailing pressure is gone...
...History departments that used to have ten people teaching European history now have fewer...
...It's big in more than just the geostrategic "Whither NATO...
...Europe was weighed down by history, corrupted by luxury and vice...
...The Tremont House opened in Boston in 1829, a palace built for overnight guests and decorated in the French style...
...they were still woefully behind Europe and had a lot to learn...
...It's exciting to break loose from a tradition, but after the initial liberation, the results are usually ugly...
...For much of our history, we Americans have consciously rejected European mores...
...We can even build a Transatlantic Free Trade Area...
...It doesn't do much good to exhort Americans to pay attention to Europe...
...But the mark of American merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence, seems to be a certain grace without grandeur, and itself not new but derivative...
...But that's not even close to being true, of course...
...So it shouldn't be surprising that with those Eurocentric guideposts removed, the trendiest thinkers would spin wildly off into irony, contingency, and unintentional self-parody...
...Few people feel that the huge problems over the next decades will be European in origin...
...In, say, Holland, you can find sexual radicals living next to pre-Enlightenment conservatives, but because the place is so thoroughly secular, these cultural differences don't take the form of culture wars, as ours do...
...Ideally, this balance meant that the capitalist wasn't a greedy boor, and that the heir to a great fortune wasn't a useless dilettante...
...But the (barely) hidden agenda was more profound...
...From Italy to France to Britain to Virginia, etiquette travelled westward, the manners of the late Renaissance being adapted for the prosperous New Worlder...
...O'Sullivan is just about the world's most beloved man, so he was able to attract a very impressive group: Vaclav Havel, Vaclav Klaus, Yegor Gaidar, former Dutch premier Ruud Lubbers, Paul Johnson, and 150 or so other writers, scholars, and ex-officials...
...I don't want to paint some overbearing picture of a decline into barbarism...
...This is a big thing, in many ways as important as the closing of the western frontier...
...Europe has done a splendid job of pacifying itself over the past half-century It has submerged its nationalisms, its messianic proclivities, and its economic differences within a technocratic process headquartered in Brussels, and it has thus neutered many of its passions...
...We'll no longer build inspiring libraries like the original Library of Congress, but will instead put up dull buildings like the Library's newer Madison Building...
...Or consider what has happened to the academy, the forefront of the battle against Eurocentrism...
...Until recently American universities were the crowning glories of the Euro-American balance I've been describing...
...American architects took European temples and palaces and turned them into democratic train stations, libraries, and city halls...
...American life has benefited from the balance between homegrown American populism and imported European elitism...
...A common view was that American life was not yet rich enough to produce great literature...
...There'll be no hint of deference in any social relations...
...The more mundane fear is that our manners will lose whatever polish they have absorbed from European influence...
...American etiquette books drew on the manners of European aristocrats but adapted them for a mass audience...
...This is a pretty happy set of balances for Americans...
...See, I was saying, how European social problems are relevant to American social problems...
...Then there was the warning-sign trope, in which I would declare Sweden's welfare sclerosis a warning sign for the American welfare state or Italy's pension crisis a warning sign for America's Social Security mess...
...On the contrary, Europeans know that all trends begin in the New World...
...The blunt fact is, there is precious little that reaches out and grabs attention...
...Our mission at this congress of Prague," the final declaration read, "is to reunite the family of Western civilization and so to ensure its future...
...Our moguls will no longer ape Renaissance princes (the way J. P. Morgan and so many others did), but instead their highest ambition will be to buy a football team...
...I was recalling the devices I would use to trick Americans into reading articles on European topics...
...Maybe the Central and Eastern Europeans, who are so much more confident and energetic than their Western European counterparts, will rekindle American interest in Europe...
...But my efforts were hindered by the fact that Western Europe is just not that interesting these days, unless you get tingly at the mention of monetary union...
...We bring energy, egalitarianism, and practicality and have these traits mitigated by the European emphasis on grace, grandeur, and intellect...
...The spark of genius would break free from the shackles of European custom and would land in simpler and more virtuous America...
...We can design policies to increase Euro-American cooperation...
...Our kids will no longer be inspired by rigorous German or British children's stories, but will rely exclusively on American stories about animals...
Vol. 1 • June 1996 • No. 40
