When you worship the state-as-church, you don’t need to bother showing up to Mass anymore. Civic volunteerism? No. All but extinct on the Continent. Do they paint, write, compose? Not so’s you’d notice. Never mind Bach or even Offenbach, these days the French can’t produce a Sacha Distel or the Germans a Bert Kaempfert, the boffo Teuton bandleader who somewhat improbably managed to play a critical role in the careers of the three biggest Anglophone pop acts of the twentieth century—he wrote “Strangers in the Night” for Sinatra, “Wooden Heart” for Elvis, and produced the Beatles’ first recording session. If that sounds like a “Trivial Pursuit” answer, it’s not. Eutopia turned out to be the trivial pursuit; to produce a Bert Kaempfert figure right now would be a major cultural accomplishment Europe can’t quite muster the energy for. Life is a matter of passing the the new athens time—or, indeed, of holding the moment: “Linger awhile, how fair thou art,” in the words of Goethe’s Faust, which would make a fine epitaph for the European Union.
“In the long run we are all dead”: Keynes’ flippancy disguises his radical-ism. For most of human history, functioning societies honor the long run; it’s why millions of people have children, build houses, plant gardens, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and if necessary die for king and country…. It’s why extraordinary men create great works of art—or did in the Europe of old. A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe’s words, “conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream”: Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking,
“I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well…. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things.50
Europe climbed out of the stream. You don’t need to make material sacri-fices: the state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: it’s no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool. How fair thou hast been—but only for the moment, and the moment is passing. Europe’s economic crisis is a mere symptom of its existential crisis: What is life for? What gives it meaning? Post-Christian, post-nationalist, post-modern Europe has no answer to that question, and so it has 30-year-old students and 50-year-old retirees, and wonders why the small band of workers in between them can’t make the math add up.
Yet it’s not about the arithmetic, but about instilling in people for whom life is a diversion a sense of purpose larger than themselves: What’s it all about, Alfie? Cradle-to-grave nanny-state “protection”?
Europe is already dead—in the short run.
Linger awhile, how fair thou art. It’s nice to linger at the brasserie, have a second café au lait, and watch the world go by. At the Munich Security Conference, President Sarkozy demanded of his fellow Continentals, “Does Europe want peace, or do we want to be left in peace?”51 To pose the question is to answer it. But it only works for a generation or two, and then, as the gay bar owners are discovering in a fast Islamifying Amsterdam, reality reasserts itself.
We began this book with some thoughts from Bertie Wooster and Jonathan Swift regarding Belshazzar’s feast and “the writing on the wall.”
But sometimes there’s so much writing you can barely see the wall. On my last brief visit, Athens was a visibly decrepit dump: a town with a handful of splendid ancient ruins surrounded by a multitude of hideous graffiti-covered contemporary ruins. Sit at an elegant café in Florence, Barcelona, Lisbon, Brussels, almost any Continental city. If you’re an American tourist, what do you notice? Beautiful buildings, designer stores, modern bus and streetcar shelters… and all covered in graffiti from top to toe. The grander the city, the more profuse the desecration. Go to Rome, the imperial capital, the heart of Christendom: the entire city is daubed like a giant New York subway car from the Seventies. Look at your souvenir snaps: here’s me and the missus standing by the graffiti at the Trevi Fountain; there we are admiring the graffiti at the Coliseum.
