The end of Europe? I

But it would seem that if despotism were to be established amongst the democratic nations of our days ... it would be more extensive and more mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them .... [T]his same principle of equality which facilitates despotism, tempers its rigor .... I think then that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world: our contemporaries will find no prototype of which will accurately convey ... the idea I have formed of it, but in vain; the old words "despotism" and "tyranny" are inappropriate: the thing itself is new; and since I cannot name it, I must attempt to define it ....

.... Above this race of men [would stand] an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications, and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent, if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances - what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living? Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things: it has predisposed men to endure them, and oftentimes to look on them as benefits. ... [T]he supreme power then ... covers the surface of society with a net-work of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting: such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.

I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind ... might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom; and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people. Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions; they want to be led, and they wish to remain free: ... they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians. Every man allows himself to be put in leading-strings [harness], because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large that holds the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master, and then relapse into it again .... [T]hey think they have done enough for the protection of individual freedom when they have surrendered it to the power of the nation at large. This does not satisfy me: the nature of him I am to obey signifies less to me than the fact of extorted obedience.

- Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1838)

More than a year ago and several times since then (see here and here), Kavanna took a look at the situation in Europe and came to rather negative conclusions. But there's only so much a few blog postings can convey about this profound and many-sided topic. More comprehensive are the armful of excellent books on Europe that have appeared in the last few years: Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept (2006), Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It (2006), and Walter Laqueur's The End of Europe: Epitaph for the Old Continent (2007). Laquer's book is a shocker, a sign that the trend is serious and no mere epiphenomenon. The author of the earlier Europe in Our Time: A History (1992) - a laudatory account of Europe's post-1945 reconstruction - Laqueur's view of Europe has obviously changed in recent years.

While all these books are important, Claire Berlinski has the distinction of kicking off serious discussion in the US with a stream of articles and her book, Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis is America's Too. Berlinski writes regularly for the Washington Post, National Review, etc., and now lives in Istanbul. She's even written a couple of well-received novels. Menace in Europe was published in late 2005. Nothing has happened since to lessen its validity and much that re-validates it.

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Before starting with Berlinski's book, we need to clear away some myths that get in the way of informed discussion of contemporary Europe. There are three major misconceptions. One is that what's happening in Europe doesn't matter to America. This myth has some currency on the center and right of American politics. Two other myths are still widespread among American liberals and leftists. These are the "Europe is more sophisticated than America" myth and that stubborn urban legend, "It's all W.'s fault, and the problem will vanish when he leaves office." None of these myths is true.

What's happening in Europe does matter - Europe is the West's "other half," and if Europe fails, the United States will need a Plan B for many things. And what happens there is paralleled, in certain ways, by what happens here. Nor is it all, or even mainly, W.'s fault. European anti-Americanism has a history stretching back to the 1920s, to the immediate aftermath of part one of Europe's civilizational suicide. It surged in the 1970s and early 80s, died down afterwards, then reappeared in the late 90s, with globalization and Europe's glaring failure in Yugoslavia. While Bush's actions and political style have aggravated the problem, anti-Americanism has also dissipated somewhat compared to a few years ago - but it will not disappear when he leaves office. Fresh events and new personalities will keep the kettle boiling. As for European sophistication, read on and judge for yourself.

Part of the problem is that older Americans have a distorted picture of Europe picked up in the immediate postwar period, when much of Europe's traditional culture was still alive; and that all Americans have misleading experiences as tourists spending time admiring an older European civilization that isn't where and how most Europeans live today.

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The most painful chapter of Menace in Europe is the one on Britain. It is, in part, an excursus on Britain's Muslims, largely of south Asian origin, and the heritage of British imperialism. But it also, by comparison, makes telling observations on Britain's non-Muslim former imperial subjects and why, upon immigration to Britain, they have so few of the problems that Muslims do.

The causes are partly socioeconomic: many, although not all, of Britain's Muslims come from villages; the other immigrant groups are overwhelmingly educated, urban, and middle class. The causes are also partly connected to the history of the Indian subcontinent, spanning the whole of British-ruled India before 1947 (encompassing modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). Britain's empire in India was at first strictly economic-exploitative, run by the private East India Company, the same whose tea was dumped in Boston Harbor in a well-known incident. Later it became a political entity - an empire within an empire - created at the expense of India's minority Muslim rulers, the Mughals. The British Raj, first unwittingly, later wittingly, became a powerful force on behalf of India's Hindu majority, its non-Muslim minorities, and (after 1920 or so) its women.

This mixed Anglo-Indian heritage is visible today in India, but especially in Britain, where the south Asian Hindus, Christians, Parsees, and Sikhs do well, but the Muslims often do not. The baleful heritage of the Deobandi school of Islam, south Asia's verion of Wahhabi or Salafi Islam, sticks out clearly in this generation of anti-assimilated south Asian British Muslims and their attraction to Islamic militancy.

Berlinksi's most fun chapter is that on the French port city of Marseille. Although it might surprise some of her readers (it shouldn't), her evaluation of France, the French, and France's secular republican ideal is very positive, even as she acknowledges that that ideal has probably outlived itself and met an insuperable barrier in the form of Islam.

Affectionate yet disapproving is her other chapter on France, an extended and satirical take on antiglobalization activist José Bové, exposing the layers of Europe's mystical and apocalyptic movements that stretch back 1500 years, to the origins of modern Europe. Here we are treated to the successive reincarnations of the charismatic romantic mystic, with his striking eccentricities and strong sex appeal. Until the 18th century, they were religious revolutionaries, proclaiming the coming of heaven on earth, the abolition of wealth, rank, and distinction, and (before the Reformation) demonizing the Jews as the people of Satan. The first modern (secular) revolutionary of this type was Rousseau, the founder of leftism and creator of the "noble savage" myth - the origin of all politics of adolescent rage against modern civilization. Modern Europe's angry, mystical political movements are secularized re-creations of these older religious movements, with virtually the same themes.* The chapter is a mixed-mood piece because Berlinski herself feels disturbed by the anonymous nature of globalization and questionable nature of modern factory farming and food production, harmful to animals and sometimes to humans. The spectacular British case of "mad cow disease" just underscores the point.**

The mosht dishtuurbing chapter is that covering Germany and its famous heavy metal band, Rammstein. (They're all over the Web - see here.) Berlinski uses Rammstein as a foil to explore the return of nihilistic late Romanticism - Expressionism - as a feature of German kultur. This is a crucial theme in modern German history, Germans as the people of nihilism and the people of Faust. Important German thinkers (Goethe, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann) were themselves acutely aware of this aspect of "national personality." You can't imagine Rammstein's songs sung by anyone, say, French or Italian. British and American heavy metal bands are about personal rebellion and angst. But in Germany, where music exposes the national soul, juvenile angst is automatically political, with an unmistakable esthetic familiar from the 1930s and 40s.

While French, British, and American Romantic tendencies have usually taken the form of personal rebellion, and its political form consists of delusional searching for the noble savage somewhere else - among workers, brown and black people, or among animals - in Germany, Romanticism was xenophobic from the start: the German Romantics decided that they didn't need to look elsewhere for noble savages. Rather, they felt that the Germans themselves were the noble savages, possessing deep Germanic "culture" in opposition to the superficial and materialistic Anglo-Franco-American "civilization" or the "mere barbarism" of the Slavs. This view, increasingly important in the 19th century, became, after 1918, the sickness of much of German-speaking Europe. In exploring this history, Berlinski's personal venom is evident here, understandable given her family's history in Germany. This disapproving chapter is not at all affectionate.

Germany sadly remains a crime scene still cordoned off after all these years, with people continuing to stand around and wondering what the hell happened. Germany's civilized and semi-civilized neighbors have all peered into the gloom of the dark Teutonic forest. They squint and scratch their heads.

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Berlinski's final chapter, "To Hell with Europe," seems flippant at first sight. But she doesn't mean, to hell with France, or Britain, or Germany, etc. Her point is the "persistence of national personality." When she writes "to hell with Europe," she means just that: to hell with the false unity of the EU, the pretense that Europe's real nations have been made to go away, and that Frenchmen, Britons, Germans, etc., are now all just Europeans.

The modern West has its origins in the Dark Ages that immediately followed the collapse of the western Roman empire, which was replaced with a variety of what historians once called "petty kingdoms, dukedoms, and principalities." Europe in some ways has never left that state. The barbarian peoples - the Celts, the Germans, and later, the Slavs and others - rebuilt civilization from what was left in the Roman wreckage, including the Church. Modern Europe has rejected these sources of its civilization, leaving an immense spiritual, cultural, and political void. Into the void step what Berlinski calls "black-market religion" (Bové) and "black-market nationalist hate/nihilism" (Rammstein). No pan-European unification project since the end of the Roman Empire has succeeded - not the Catholic Church, the Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburgs, the Bourbons, Napoleon, Hitler, or the Communists - in spite of the attractive appeal of new religions and utopias. In reminding her readers of these facts, Berlinski is passing on an essential perception of modern Europe's history, its arc from origins to finish.

Berlinski recommends some sensible changes as a necessary start to saving Europe - none of them is original, as she acknowledges: reforming its deadly economic mix of overregulation and unsustainable entitlements; dealing with Islamic extremists - both as individuals and institutions - in a more consistent and punitive way; applying Western legal and social standards equally to Muslim men and women without apology. (This is one of a number of her points of admiration for the French, whose policy towards Islamic radicalism is one of zero tolerance.) Major changes will happen soon: Europe's social democratic systems will either be reformed or collapse; its demography will change dramatically in the next generation; the political unification project will fail. Some of these changes are already starting. Other possibilities are more speculative.

Menace in Europe has a fragmentary form, which might at first make it seem like a jumble. But its thematic and stylistic unity is powerful; Berlinski grabs her readers and shakes them, saying "See?" and "See?" She has a Web site of her own, and you can listen to a podcast interview with her here.
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* I mean identical in some cases. For example, the program of the anonymous German Revolutionary of the Upper Rhine, circulating in manuscript just before the Reformation, called for the expulsion or extermination of the Rhine Valley Jews, the end of Germany's economic relations with the outside world, the independence of a unified Germany from the Papacy, and the creation of a new religion mixing Christianity and a restored pantheon of old German gods. Reading it, you get confused: is it from 1500 - or 1933?

Then there's Joachim from the Italian town of Flora: his speculative tripartite theory of history, published in manuscript around 1300, postulated a three-stage historical evolution leading to an Age of Pure Spirit, where everyone would be living equally in a barracks or a monastery. The tripartite stuff sounds a little like Hegel and a lot like Marx; the equality of the barracks and the monastery, like the pre-Marxian socialists whom Marx himself ridiculed as "utopian."

In laying bare the religious and utopian origins of the modern West's extremist political movements, Berlinski and the rest of us are profoundly indebted to the works of Norman Cohn, especially his classic In Pursuit of the Millenium (1957). Cohn's work explodes the claim that these modern movements made about themselves, that they were "scientific," "progressive," or "enlightened." There's nothing scientific or enlightened about Marxism or race theories; these movements repackaged tribal, mystical, and apocalyptic ideas in a superficially modern garb of pseudoscience. Environmentalism bears strong traces of the same.

** Consider too America's industrialized food production, with its heavy use of subsidized corn, bestowing upon us the dubious blessings of corn syrup, corn feed, and ethanol.

Arrivederci Sicilia!

Binah, your faithful traveling correspondent, recently took a big trip to the Mediterranean. His first stop was Sicily, the Mediterranean's largest island. It sits just west and south of the Italian "boot."

I stayed my week there at the small mountain town in Sicily's northwest called Erice, overlooking the western sea. A group of us attending a scientific conference were whisked from the airport at Palermo (on Sicily's north coast) on an hour-plus drive to the west, the final part being a steep climb into the coastal mountains. The scientific center at Erice, home to conferences, workshops, and summer schools, is named after a young Sicilian science prodigy, Ettore Majorana, who mysteriously disappeared in 1938. (He made a small number of highly important contributions to the then-burgeoning science of elementary particles and forces.)

This southwest-facing coast is not as famous as the Greek-influenced southeast corner and lacks its own Mount Etna. But you've heard of some of this part of Sicily, although perhaps not with that association. It's a part of the island first colonized by the Carthaginians around 800 BCE, itself a North African colony founded in 814 BCE by the Phoenician city of Tyre back in what is today Lebanon. Sicily is three-cornered, with coasts facing north, southwest, and southeast. The northern coast was originally the least developed part, the home of a mysterious people the Romans called the Siculi, for whom the island was named. Over the millennia, Sicily has been ruled by Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Greeks again, Arabs from North Africa, the Normans, the Spanish, and finally by the modern Italian republic.

August in Sicily is hot, tending toward the humid, with strong sea breezes. But Sicily is also subject to the powerful north African scirocco wind, headed northward from the Sahara in the late summer and loaded with atmospheric dust, and we had three or four days of it later in the week. Erice boasts a mountain cable car both exciting and useful. It runs up and down the mountain all day and well into the evening, acting as Erice's main public transportation to the port city of Trapani - unless the scirocco shuts it down. It did for part of my stay.

In spite of the heat, I walked all around our mountain town of Erice every day, enjoying the amazing Sicilian food, and took a part of day to hike down to Trapani. Next to Trapani is the better-known city of Marsala, home of the famous wine, salt, and chicken. Salt has been harvested there from the sea for almost three millenia, starting with the Phoenicians. Marsala wine (fortified and aged like port) was invented by English wine merchants in the late 18th century. A later wine merchant, Joseph Whitaker, bought the island of Mozia in Marsala harbor. He started excavations there just before World War One. While the island was donated by the Whitaker family to Sicily about 30 years ago, the excavations continue, and what's been dug up is now preserved in a museum at the site.

For Americans, Sicily brings up a cluster of outdated stereotypes of organ-grinders, heavy tomato-based cooking, and the Mafia. (Most Italian-Americans are of southern Italian extraction - Sicilian and Calabrese - because the south was and is the poorest part of Italy.) The Mafia is a leftover of the days when Sicily was ruled by foreigners. Most of its power has been broken in a campaign that has gone on in fits and starts since the days of Mussolini. I didn't see any organ-grinders, but the cocina Siciliana (like the architecture) shows an interesting mix of Greek, Arab, mainland Italian, and French influences. Couscous with local fish is a regional signature. Tomatoes are still ubiquitous. Erice is famous for its ultrasweet marzipan and mustazzuoli.

Much of the island's infrastructure is new. Sometimes I thought I was in California. The regional and Italian governments, plus the EU, have clearly been at work. Modern industries like wine and food export and tourism have also made a large mark. Sicily is still poor compared to northern Italy, but the gap is much smaller than in centuries past.

Year-end round-up and a merry ...

Random thoughts on the year's best books and movies ....

* Lawrence Wright's The Looming Towers: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is the best narrative history of the 9/11 attacks so far. It's tightly focused on the primary actors and shows you through personal vignettes how the attackers succeeded and how the defenders failed. For more background, see this posting. C-SPAN's BookTV interviewed Wright recently.

* The year's best political book is Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It. We're living through an era of rapid geopolitical change, and unfortunately, our political elites mostly spent the post-Cold War period asleep, misunderstanding, or lost in absurd partisan follies. Steyn's book will get you thinking, get you infuriated, get you to agree or disagree - but most of all, it will get you to wake up, open your eyes, and pay attention. As a bonus, it features Steyn's trademark zany humor and wordplay. He's shamelessly promoting it over on his Web site (greedy bastards, these conservatives :).

In connection with the theme, consider Niall Ferguson's much larger tome, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West and this related posting.

* Another Big Book is Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation, released in paper this year, and the best one-volume history in a long time. It focuses mainly on the religious and social aspects of the Reformation, but also lays into the relief the unintended consequences: the simultaneous growth of religious freedom and oppression, the separation of religious authority and civil government, the divergent histories of western and central-eastern Europe, the rise of skepticism and the Enlightenment, and the rise of the nation-state. Useful for understanding the modern Western political system and to compare with the many-centuries decline of the Muslim world. (Don't let all that oil $$ fool you!) A tale both interesting in its own right and highly relevant to our current mess.

* For popular science, I've beaten the subject of string theory and its failure to death, but remember Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong and Lee Smolin's The Trouble with Physics.

On a more positive note, don't forget Nina Planck's Real Food, reviewed here. Related is The Omnivore's Dilemma, which I haven't read, but have heard good things about.

* It has nothing to do with 2006, but I rediscovered it this year, William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, a quintessentially American book about a quintessentially American thing, the road trip - in this case, around the US in 1978 in a van called Ghost Dancing. A good companion is another, rather different classic also based on a road trip, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the first book I read in college and never forgot.

Both books are sometimes compared to Kerouac, but either one is far better.

* The year's funniest movie is Little Miss Sunshine, a sweet, sharp barely-functional family comedy of mini-epic proportions, with an unforgettable ending.

* The year's sexiest movie: The Devil Wears Prada. It's really a chick flick, but no healthy male should pass up two hours with Anne Hathaway. Plus it has KT Tunstall's catchy theme song.

* NOT the year's funniest movie, but still worth watching for its bizarre scatology and unique "plot," is Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Sacha Baron Cohen brings Ali G. and his questionable antics to America, to impress and awe the unwashed natives. The BBC was less impressed: see please here for BBC reviewing of Borat cinema.

* And don't forget United 93, a small gem of a movie that never got the attention it deserved. Democracy in action: airliner passengers don't wait for Homeland Security; they figure it out for themselves and act.
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On Donner, on Blitzen ... on Donder, for purists ... oy ... and to all the nice goyim out there, merry Christmas and happy new year ... and to all, a gut yuntif :)

Real food for real people

Nina Planck has a great new book out, Real Food, which is all about eating real food, instead of industrial, heavily processed, and junk foods. Anyone concerned about diet, health, and weight control should read it. It's not long, and it has great, mouth-watering pictures. Food porn, you might call it :)

I shop occasionally at Whole Foods (then wait a few months for my wallet to recover). I've thought about real food for some time now, trying to sort out the whole diet thing. I was on medications for a decade that caused me a lot of weight gain. I dropped about 20 of those pounds in 2002, but struggle to take off another 10 or so.

Real foods is the right approach, including eggs, butter, and whole milk. Don't listen to the conventional advice about dietary fat -- it's wrong. A lot of the high-protein diets (especially Protein Power and South Beach) are essentially "real foods" in a different language. The problem is the heavy addition of fillers -- starches, mainly, but also unnecessary sugar and salt, etc. -- to industrial foods. It's all empty calories. The essential point is that most body fat is not produced from dietary fat. Most body fat, in fact, comes from unburned carbohydrates -- that junk food you just ate.

I had that experience today. For breakfast, I had fresh fruit with plain, whole-milk yogurt (the only kind anyone should be eating). But then at lunch, I had a peach "low fat" yogurt (meaning, stuffed with starches to compensate for the missing fat). You can taste the bland, yucky starches. In fact, when I was on the South Beach diet, it struck me just how much most cafeterias are still loaded up with starchy, sugary empty calories.

Instead of going on a diet, you just need to permanently change what you eat to something real, then stick to that. Planck's most memorable and brilliant advice is eating around the edge of the grocery store -- that is, fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, fish, juices, and fresh-frozen things. Eat dark chocolate instead of sugary milk chocolate; eat fresh or flash-frozen vegetables instead of the processed stuff; eat fruit instead of pastries; and eat moderate amounts of butter instead of margarine. And keep your kids off of the junk. Whenever friends talk about hyperactive kids, I ask about their caffeine and sugar intake.

Another life-transforming experience I had recently was my first trip to Italy. I spent a few days in Florence -- that's real food. The cuisine is brilliant -- very simple, as fresh as possible. (Then I noticed the pattern: the Florence cathedral, the Duomo, is the same as the cuisine -- Catholicism stripped to its essence, with no starchy additives. If you've been, you'll understand.)

I plan to get Planck's book. Sounds like a keeper.

POSTSCRIPT: There's a libertarian angle to this. Eric Schlosser's famous Fast Food Nation mentions it, but not until almost the end of the book, and Schlosser fails to understand its significance.

One of the main reasons American have been inundated with industrial food in the last 50 years is agricultural subsidies. (Most other countries protect their agriculture with tariffs and quotas, making their food more expensive than it needs to be. We mainly use subsidies and paying people not to grow.) The two most notorious cases are tobacco and corn. (Why do we keep subsidizing tobacco, then have to spend more tax money discouraging smoking and dealing with the consequences?) Most of Schlosser's book in fact is a report on the consequences of corn subsidies -- cheap corn feed, corn syrup, and corn oil are products of subsidized overproduction. That's where that bland meat, those questionable eggs, and all that terrible corn syrup come from. Sugar (in moderate amounts) and honey are better for you, but after all the subsidies, tariffs, and quotas, they can't compete pricewise with corn syrup.

Check out the podcast interview with Planck and Crunchy Cons author Rod Dreher at Instapundit.