After America - Mark Steyn [61]
“In the long run we are all dead”: Keynes’ flippancy disguises his radicalism. 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 sacrifices: 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 graffiticovered 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.
A New York Times feature on Berlin graffiti reported it as an art event, a story about “an integral component of Berliner Strassenkultur.”52 But it’s actually a tale of civic death, of public space claimed in perpetuity by the vandals (like graffiti, another word Italy gave the world, as it were). At the sidewalk cafés, Europeans no longer notice it. But it is in a small, aesthetically painful way a surrender to barbarism