June 2, 2003
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Europe: Remorse and Exhaustion (Pascal Bruckner, Dissent Magazine, Spring 2003)Americans ... express a pride in themselves and their country that is too often lacking on the other side of the Atlantic. Europe's worst enemy is Europe itself ...
How can we command respect if we do not respect ourselves, if we constantly depict ourselves, in literature and the media, in the darkest colors? The truth is that Europeans do not like themselves or at least not enough to overcome their disgust ...
[C]ontemporary Europe did not come into existence as the United States did, with an enthusiastic vision of a new birth of history. It arose out of weariness with slaughter. It took the total disaster of the twentieth century to bring Europe to virtue. Without the world wars and their procession of horrors, there would never have arisen today's longing for peace, which is now confused with the longing for rest.
We may have become wise, but the wisdom is that of a sated brute, weary with slaughter, resigned to modest projects. European democracy resembles a rest cure that its once turbulent peoples have taken after losing their taste for battle.
We no longer love history; it is a minefield from which we struggled to escape after 1945 and again in 1989. But history continues to be made without us.... When a crisis erupts, we do our utmost to delay. We temper our indignation with cynicism and treat the aggressor and his victim as equals, as though, in light of our own disenchantments, nothing made any difference.... America mobilizes and acts. Europe snickers and stands by-a fearful colossus suffering from its great size, losing strength as it expands territory, Europe has become the Pontius Pilate of nations....
We delight in casting all our sins onto this ideal scapegoat, because everything that goes wrong in the world can be laid at Washington's door. In the imagination of many intellectuals and political leaders, America plays the role the Jews once did in National Socialist demonology. Yet we do nothing to free ourselves from American domination. Quite the contrary. We persist in our refusal to grow up and assume our responsibilities. We would rather complain than act, cursing Uncle Sam while throwing ourselves into his arms at the slightest trouble....
Europe and America are linked to one another. They embody two divergent conceptions of the Enlightenment, two outcomes of emancipation inaugurated in the eighteenth century. There is skepticism and the art of living on one side, and optimism and religiosity on the other. The first leads to failure to act, the second to adventurism....
Reason demands that we convert European-American rivalry into emulation ... They both have much to learn from one another about audacity and wisdom: how to temper American hubris with European moderation and European moderation with American dynamism....
We Europeans ... can easily denounce the ambiguities of the melting pot and the ravages of communitarianism, and we can reject a world made in the image of American society. But then we have to offer in its place something more than mockery and reproof.... We are far from doing so. We lag far behind the Americans, out of breath. We still imitate their mistakes after they have devised remedies. Some Europeans place their hope in a theory of reverse genesis. America, the offspring of the Old World that has surpassed its progenitor, would witness the birth of a new Europe that would then put the United States in its place. For now, since geopolitics is the contemporary form of fortune telling, this is nothing but wishful thinking. The bitter truth is that Europe lags behind our transatlantic cousin in almost every area. But our possibilities are enormous if we enact a genuine intellectual revolution.... Europe holds its own cards. Either it will build a counterforce endowed with credible political and military tools or it will be vassalized, willingly. In the latter case, an aging and declining Old World will reduce itself to being a luxurious vacation resort, coveted by predators, and always prepared to abdicate its freedom for a little more calm and a little more comfort.
Europeans seem to be tired of life itself. They do not value life enough to bring children into the world, or to be outraged when the explosion of another Palestinian suicide-murderer sends nails into the flesh of children.
As a conservative, I think America has already found a pretty good mean between sluggishness and audacity, and would not want to dilute it with European "moderation." But this is a fine essay, the first sign I have seen of humility and truth-seeking from the European left. It is very heartening. Still, it is a letdown when, in the final paragraph, he places his faith in that fever-dream of the intellectuals, an "intellectual revolution." What Europe needs is a spiritual revolution, a revolution in desire, a revolution of the heart. European wisdom will begin, if it ever does, with fear of the Lord.