The European Dream (2 page)

One could point to many reasons why Europeans seem to be leading the way into the new era. But among all the possible explanations, one stands out. It is the cherished American Dream itself, once the ideal and envy of the world, that has led America to its current impasse. That dream emphasizes the unbridled opportunity of each individual to pursue success, which, in the American vernacular, has generally meant financial success. The American Dream is far too centered on personal material advancement and too little concerned with the broader human welfare to be relevant in a world of increasing risk, diversity, and interdependence. It is an old dream, immersed in a frontier mentality, that has long since become passé. While the American Spirit is tiring and languishing in the past, a new European Dream is being born. It is a dream far better suited to the next stage in the human journey—one that promises to bring humanity to a global consciousness befitting an increasingly interconnected and globalizing society.

The European Dream emphasizes community relationships over individual autonomy, cultural diversity over assimilation, quality of life over the accumulation of wealth, sustainable development over unlimited material growth, deep play over unrelenting toil, universal human rights and the rights of nature over property rights, and global cooperation over the unilateral exercise of power.

The European Dream exists at the crossroads between post-modernity and the emerging global age and provides the suspension to bridge the divide between the two eras. Post-modernity was never meant to be a new age but, rather, was more of a twilight period of modernity—a time to sit in judgment about the many shortfalls of the modern era. If the sixties generation of protests and experimentation was aimed at both knocking down old boundaries that constrained the human spirit and testing new realities, it came with an intellectual companion in the form of postmodern thought.

The post-modernists asked how the world came to be locked into a death chant. What were the reasons that led to the dropping of the atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the establishment of Nazi death camps in Europe, detention camps in the Gulag, and Maoist re-education camps in the Chinese countryside? How did we end up in a world more divided than ever between rich and poor? Why were women, people of color, and ethnic minorities around the world discriminated against or, worse yet, held in conditions of bondage? Why were we destroying the environment and poisoning our biosphere? Why were some nations continually bullying other nations and seeking hegemony through war, conquest, and subjugation? How did the human race come to lose its innate sense of deep play and become machinelike drones, even to the point of making ceaseless work the very definition of a person’s existence? When and why did materialism become a substitute for idealism and consumption metamorphose from a negative to a positive term?

The post-modernists looked to modernity itself as the culprit. They placed the blame for much of the world’s ills on what they regarded as the rigid assumptions underlying modern thought. The European Enlightenment, with its vision of unlimited material progress, came in for particular rebuke, as did market capitalism, state socialism, and nation-state ideology. Modernity, argued the post-modernist thinkers, was at its core deeply flawed. The very ideas of a knowable objective reality, irreversible linear progress, and human perfectibility were too rigidly conceived and historically biased, and failed to take into consideration other perspectives and points of view of the human condition and the ends of history.

The new generation of scholars was leery of overarching grand narratives and single-minded utopian visions that attempted to create a unified vision of human behavior. By locking humanity into the “one right way” of thinking about the world, post-modernists contend, modern thought became dismissive of any other points of view and ultimately intolerant of opposing ideas of any kind. Those in power—be they capitalists or socialists, conservatives or liberals—continue to use these meta-narratives to keep people contained and controlled, argue the post-modernists. Modern thought, according to the critics, has been used to justify colonial ventures around the world and keep people divided from one another and in conditions of subservience to the powers that be.

It was the stifling nature of these all-encompassing grand visions and single-minded utopian ideas about how people were expected to behave and act in the world that the sixties generation rebelled against. The post-modernists provided the rationalization for the revolt, arguing that there is no one single perspective but, rather, as many perspectives of the world as there are individual stories to tell. Post-modern sociology emphasizes pluralism and tolerance of the different points of view that make up the totality of the human experience. For the post-modernists, there is no one ideal regime to which to aspire but, rather, a potpourri of cultural experiments, each of value.

The post-modernists engaged in an all-out assault on the ideological foundations of modernity, even denying the idea of history as a redemptive saga. What we end up with at the end of the post-modern deconstruction process are modernity reduced to intellectual rubble and an anarchic world where everyone’s story is equally compelling and valid and worthy of recognition.

If the post-modernists razed the ideological walls of modernity and freed the prisoners, they left them with no particular place to go. We became existential nomads, wandering through a boundaryless world full of inchoate longings in a desperate search for something to be attached to and believe in. While the human spirit was freed up from old categories of thought, we are each forced to find our own paths in a chaotic and fragmented world that is even more dangerous than the all-encompassing one we left behind.

Post-modern thought didn’t make significant inroads into what we call middle America. It has always been more influential in Europe. Over half of all Americans are devoutly religious—more so than any other industrialized people—and they just don’t buy the idea of a relativist world. Religious Americans still believe in a grand scheme of things and live their beliefs intimately each day. More secular Americans, while not wedded to an overarching religious frame of reference, are generally committed to another all-encompassing social vision—the Enlightenment idea of history as the steady and irreversible advance of material progress. There is, however, a third, smaller grouping in America, which is made up largely of the activist and counterculture generation of the 1960s, and their now grown children, who are far more comfortable with post-modernity. They tend to view the world less in terms of absolute values and ironclad truths and more in terms of relative values and changing preferences and are generally more tolerant of other points of view and multicultural perspectives.

Political analysts divide America into two cultural camps, the reds and the blues, and argue that the former reflect America’s strongly held conservative religious values while the latter are far more liberal and cosmopolitan in their orientation. The red population, according to pollsters, is geographically concentrated in the Southeast, Middle-west, prairie states, Rocky Mountain states, and the southwest region of the country. The blue part of the population is clustered more in the Northeast, upper Middle-west, and the West Coast.

Although a convenient shorthand for analyzing voting trends, what the pollsters miss is that a majority of Americans, red and blue, ascribe to an American way of life that is steeped in modernist ideology. Even the blues, with their greater tolerance for other perspectives and points of view, are inclined to believe that there is an overriding purpose to the human journey and a right way to live in the world.

Europeans, in comparison, have been much more eager to critique the basic assumptions of modernity and embrace a post-modern orientation. Their willingness has much to do with the devastation wrought by two world wars and the specter of a continent lying in near ruins in 1945 as a result of blind adherence to utopian visions and ideologies.

European intellectuals, understandably, led the charge against the modernity project. They were anxious to make sure that the old dogmas would never again take them down the road to destruction. Their across-the-bow attack on meta-narratives led them to champion multiculturalism and eventually universal human rights and the rights of nature. Multiculturalism was viewed by the post-modernists as an antidote, of sorts, to modern thought, a way of countering a doctrinaire single frame of reference with multiple perspectives. The rights agenda broadened the assault on a single perspective even more. Universal human rights and the rights of nature were a way of recognizing that every person’s story is of equal worth and that the Earth itself matters. But here is where the logic of post-modernity began to run up against its own internal contradiction. The very recognition of universal human rights and the rights of nature suggests a meta-narrative. “Universal” means something everyone recognizes and accepts as fundamental and indivisible. Rather unintentionally, post-modernists dug their own grave by acknowledging that there exists at least one universal idea to which everyone can potentially agree—that is, that every human life has equal value and that nature is worthy of respect and consideration.

The European Dream takes over where post-modernity trails off. Stripped to its bare essentials, the European Dream is an effort at creating a new historical frame that can both free the individual from the old yoke of Western ideology and, at the same time, connect the human race to a new shared story, clothed in the garb of universal human rights and the intrinsic rights of nature—what we call a global consciousness. It is a dream that takes us beyond modernity and post-modernity and into a global age. The European Dream, in short, creates a new history.

It has been fashionable of late, within American conservative intellectual circles, to discuss the question of the end of history. Some, like Francis Fukuyama, argue that with the fall of Soviet Communism, liberal market-oriented democracies have triumphed and will likely not be replaced by any alternative models in the future. Although somewhat sophomoric, the debate over the end of history illustrates the bias of many contemporary historians, who assume that history is no more than the unfolding struggle between competing economic and political ideologies over how resources are to be expropriated and made productive, how capital and property are to be controlled and distributed, and how people are to be governed. For some, the American Dream, with its emphasis on unfettered individual accumulation of wealth in a democratically governed society, represents the ultimate expression of the end of history.

The new European Dream is powerful because it dares to suggest a new history, with an attention to quality of life, sustainability, and peace and harmony. In a sustainable civilization, based on quality of life rather than unlimited individual accumulation of wealth, the very material basis of modern progress would be a thing of the past. A steady-state global economy is a radical proposition, not only because it challenges the conventional way we have come to use nature’s resources but also because it does away with the very idea of history as an ever-rising curve of material advances. The objective of a sustainable global economy is to continually reproduce a high-quality present state by aligning human production and consumption with nature’s ability to recycle waste and replenish resources. A sustainable, steady-state economy is truly the end of history defined by unlimited material progress.

If the European Dream represents the end of one history, it also suggests the beginning of another. What becomes important in the new European vision of the future is personal transformation rather than individual material accumulation. The new dream is focused not on amassing wealth but, rather, on elevating the human spirit. The European Dream seeks to expand human empathy, not territory. It takes humanity out of the materialist prison in which it has been bound since the early days of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and into the light of a new future motivated by idealism.

This book is about the older American Dream and the newly emerging European Dream. In a sense, it represents a first rough cut, with all the shortcomings that accompany an effort of this kind.

While I remain viscerally attached to the American Dream, especially to its unswerving belief in the pre-eminence of the individual and personal responsibility and accountability, my hope for the future pulls me to the European Dream, with its emphasis on collective responsibility and global consciousness. I have attempted, in the pages that follow, to find some synergism between both visions, with the hope of reaching a synthesis that combines the best of each dream.

Of this much I’m relatively sure. The fledgling European Dream represents humanity’s best aspirations for a better tomorrow. A new generation of Europeans carries the world’s hopes with it. This places a very special responsibility on the European people, the kind our own founding fathers and mothers must have felt more than two hundred years ago, when the rest of the world looked to America as a beacon of hope. I hope our trust is not trifled away.