"EUROPEAN" TOO IS JUST A MONIKER (via Mike Daley):

French Musings (Wilfred M. McClay, The American Enterprise)

Once Americans get past their initial pleasure in seeing French pain and embarrassment broadcast to the world—in just a few weeks, the German term Schadenfreude has become a household expression among Americans—they are likely to grasp the seriousness of the situation, and see that, whatever the follies that may have led to the current state of affairs, the American stake in Europe is as great as it ever was.

Yet what set of values can energize the French and other Europeans to reclaim their culture? It is said that you can’t fight something with nothing, and now that it is under fire, secular hedonism seems, in effect, to be fairly close to nothing. In this connection, a small but indicative detail emerging from this conference has remained in my mind. One of the presenters, a British sociologist who has done extensive polling on religion and religious identity across Europe, discovered that a significant number of the French (somewhere around 10 percent, as I recall) insist upon identifying themselves both as atheists and as Catholics. How to explain this? I doubt they are “Santayana Catholics,” who embrace the rituals and symbolism as a form of poetry, while rejecting the faith itself. The speaker himself said that he believes these Frenchmen were using “Catholic” as a passive cultural (or, in more Huntingtonian terms, civilizational) identity marker. In other words, it was a convenient (and not entirely socially unacceptable) way of saying “I am European, white, and not a Muslim.”

To say “Christian” apparently would imply positive belief in a way that they aren't willing to do. Thus, “Catholic,” to them, is not so demanding as a moniker. But somehow I think this is likely to be just a way station for them, and I greatly fear it's more on the way to being “white” than anything else.

Mr. McClay refutes himself--what interest can we have in defending European nihilists with whom we share no culture?

MORE:
French lessons for us all: The riots reveal the political exhaustion of Europe. (Frank Furedi , 11/08/05, Spiked)

Although the spread of unrest from Parisian suburbs to other parts of France can be seen as a result of spontaneous emulation, its main driver has been the response of the authorities themselves. The French elite lacks purpose and is politically exhausted. As I argue in greater detail in my new book Politics of Fear, for the first time in the modern era the European political elites lack a project. They no longer have a mission to perform, and do not possess a distinct outlook that can inform their policies and day-to-day actions.

In recent decades, these elites have embraced the EU and sought to cobble together a European identity that might render public life with some meaning. However, this elitist managerial project lacks the capacity to inspire the public. The rejection of the EU Constitution in France and Holland earlier this year clearly demonstrated this technocratic institution's lack of legitimacy (see The reawakening of European democracy, by Frank Furedi).

The current state of political exhaustion shows that public life lacks a sense of purpose, perspective and meaning. Most government policies try to get around this problem by avoiding it. The celebration of diversity is probably the clearest example of such an evasive strategy. Celebrating the many is a meaningless act that simply recognises the reality that we are not all the same. It is as vacuous as the worship of one or a few. Diversity is a statement of fact - and to turn a fact into an ideal is to avoid having real ideals altogether. More specifically, it spares the authorities from spelling out what defines their society. That is why the French policy of assimilation and the British pursuit of multiculturalism have such similar outcomes: these policies are about avoiding the hard task of saying what it means to be British or French, and therefore implicitly raise the question of meaning in an acute form.

What the events in France demonstrate is that power means very little without purpose. Power and authority gain definition through a sense of direction. Without meaning, even the power of the military and the police loses much of its force. And the more this powerlessness becomes exposed, the more it encourages those who are estranged from society to have a go. This is not simply a case of official incompetence, but rather points to an elite that no longer believes in the legitimacy of its own authority and way of life. The way in which this crisis of belief has been intensely amplified through the French media has been one of the main drivers of the recent unrest. But don't blame the media: their cynical criticism of French authority is quietly shared by those who wield power. By letting the cat out of the bag, the French media simply transmit the message that politics lacks meaning.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 8, 2005 11:50 PM