The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism — The American, A Magazine of IdeasThis is a FANTASTIC article by Charles Murry. I rate it a "must read", it is slightly long, but he is a solid writer and it is EXTREMELY well thought out. Best of all, it ends on a HOPEFUL NOTE!! Not very common among those that think with their brains in these times. Don't be distracted by my prattling ... skip it and just go read it yourself!
One of the main things I dislike about BO and many Democrats is that they fail to understand the very core of what makes America unique and special in the world! I've only recently discovered that is because they believe in the "unconstrained vision", and one of the many things they are unconstrained from is HISTORY! They are 100% positive that their current ideas are better than any before in the history of mankind. They tend to apologize for America, and their general attitude in looking at Europe, or even Canada is "hey, the grass looks greener over there!".
Putting aside the fact that without the exceptionalism of America, we would all be speaking German today, there is (or at least WAS, pre-BO) more to America than money!
First, the problem with the European model, namely: It drains too much of the life from life. And that statement applies as much to the lives of janitors—even more to the lives of janitors—as it does to the lives of CEOs.
I start from this premise: A human life can have transcendent meaning, with transcendence defined either by one of the world’s great religions or one of the world’s great secular philosophies. If transcendence is too big a word, let me put it another way: I suspect that almost all of you agree that the phrase “a life well-lived” has meaning. That’s the phrase I’ll use from now on.
"Drains too much of life from life" -- from the few trips that I've taken to Europe, that is a really good description. Life is "secure", but also "closely controlled and boring" -- there is no "future potential". If your historic family had some kind of a home, you may be able to keep living there, if not, you are in a price controlled very small apartment and that is where you will stay. The old joke of "you are born, life is hard, then you die" is replaced by, "you are born, life is predicable and easy, then you die". It SEEMS like that ought to be "better", but it turns out that it isn't.
To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don’t get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché “nothing worth having comes easily”). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences.
"Nothing worth having comes easily". We all know that to be true, yet the mass culture often encourages us to forget it. So how do we get worth? Largely "relationships in organizations" (including very small ones like a family).
If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith. Two clarifications: “Community” can embrace people who are scattered geographically. “Vocation” can include avocations or causes.
He talks about the whole social democrat program boiling down to "having the government take some of the trouble out of things" -- about where that is good (eg. having an FAA and having a police force), and then discusses what the problem with it is:
The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality—it drains some of the life from them. It’s inevitable.
When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He should take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised by his community for doing so. Think of all the phrases we used to have for it: “He is a man who pulls his own weight.” “He’s a good provider.” If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away.
There is the precision of "the life out of life", and a better job of capturing the reasoning that I've tried to impart about why it is that BO actually hurts those at the "bottom" of life more than those at the top. Even if he takes ALL the money from those at the top! The people at the "top" believe what they are doing is important! Many of the people at the "bottom" very much need families and the local church to make their lives worth living!
He then goes into some of things that are being found and that he imagines will be heeded, he talks about Consilience, which I blogged on previously. I would love to share his optimism on the reasonableness of the "anointed" on the left, but I fear that the their vision of "heaven on earth" is far too strong to believe that "human nature can not be changed" -- they have gone down this path before, most famously in Nazi Germany, and modern methods may well just make them more virulent -- eugenics, drugs, brain washing, taking children from families -- when the ends justify the means and there is no belief in a higher power doing any judging, there is literally no limit to the methods they might seek to employ. However, I applaud Murray on his optimism -- it is better psychological policy to believe him than me!
The second tendency of the new findings of biology will be to show that the New Man premise is nonsense. Human nature tightly constrains what is politically or culturally possible. More than that, the new findings will broadly confirm that human beings are pretty much the way that wise human observers have thought for thousands of years, and that is going to be wonderful news for those of us who are already basing our policy analyses on that assumption.
But the real effect is going to be much more profound than making my job easier. The 20th century was a very strange century, riddled from beginning to end with toxic political movements and nutty ideas. For some years a metaphor has been stuck in my mind: the 20th century was the adolescence of Homo sapiens. Nineteenth-century science, from Darwin to Freud, offered a series of body blows to ways of thinking about human beings and human lives that had prevailed since the dawn of civilization. Humans, just like adolescents, were deprived of some of the comforting simplicities of childhood and exposed to more complex knowledge about the world. And 20th-century intellectuals reacted precisely the way that adolescents react when they think they have discovered Mom and Dad are hopelessly out of date. They think that the grown-ups are wrong about everything. In the case of 20th-century intellectuals, it was as if they thought that if Darwin was right about evolution, then Aquinas is no longer worth reading; that if Freud was right about the unconscious mind, then Nicomachean Ethics had nothing to teach us.
Here it is, that which was once the unique province of Americans -- an optimism that "they will make the future better", not only in some "responsible aggregate", but for THEM -- for their own families! What is more, their children will do the same and the country will just continue to get better! And it DID! or at least it did until we decided to start throwing it away and heading down the wrong road in '06.
American exceptionalism is not just something that Americans claim for themselves. Historically, Americans have been different as a people, even peculiar, and everyone around the world has recognized it. I’m thinking of qualities such as American optimism even when there doesn’t seem to be any good reason for it. That’s quite uncommon among the peoples of the world. There is the striking lack of class envy in America—by and large, Americans celebrate others’ success instead of resenting it. That’s just about unique, certainly compared to European countries, and something that drives European intellectuals crazy. And then there is perhaps the most important symptom of all, the signature of American exceptionalism—the assumption by most Americans that they are in control of their own destinies. It is hard to think of a more inspiriting quality for a population to possess, and the American population still possesses it to an astonishing degree. No other country comes close.
Note that class warfare is at the CENTER of the BO agenda! He seeks to "blame the successful", and new dangerous levels of envy and outraged are spread to the masses every day now. I'll let Murray close here -- I agree that it is important that this happen, I shudder to think "how"?
What it comes down to is that America’s elites must once again fall in love again with what makes America different. I am not being theoretical. The possibility that irreversible damage will be done to the American project over the next few years is real. The drift toward the European model can be slowed by piecemeal victories on specific items of legislation, but only slowed. It is going to be stopped only when we are all talking again about why America is exceptional, and why it is so important that America remain exceptional. That requires once again seeing the American project for what it is: a different way for people to live together, unique among the nations of the earth, and immeasurably precious.
