Everyone seems to be at war with everyone these days. Certainly this is true in the United States, where conservatives have divided into a million factions and battle daily. Our president seldom seems happier than when taking a piece out of an old ally. He is much like Mao Zedong, author of On Contradictions, in that regard.
America and its old allies in NATO also keep up a feud, or a number of feuds, even as they partly support Ukraine against Russia. (And North Korea!)
Charles Cooke, a British immigrant to the United States and an American citizen, just attacked his home continent with great zest in a National Review article entitled "Europe is Delusional." To be fair, he didn't start this argument. But he tried to finish it with a beautiful burst of bombast:
"As a former Brit who enjoys spending time in both France and Italy, I take no particular pleasure in unloading in this manner, but honesty compels it: In its current incarnation, Europe is a poor, corrupt, sclerotic, vampiric open-air museum, and its leadership class is full of priggish, dishonest, supercilious, rent-seeking parasites, whose boundless sense of superiority ought by rights to have vanished in 1901. Europe, in the year 2025, is what a continent would look like if it were run by NPR. It is a librarian in a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, snobbishly shushing the workers outside. It is a faculty meeting, a Sierra Club protest, a forum for those who believe that words create reality. There is no reason that we in the United States should consent to be lectured by the apologists for such a silly place."
Bravo! That's the way to roast a continent.
Much of Cooke's rebuttal to this alleged European attitude has to do with relative wealth:
"Criticize a European from America and you will immediately be hit with a wall of undeservedly self-righteous disdain . . . At Least We’re Not American — . . . What about the massive gap in GDP that has opened up between the U.S. and Europe since 2008? At least we’re not American. What about the anemic performance of European companies relative to those in the United States? At least we’re not American. What about the gulf between GDP per capita in Europe and GDP per capita in the United States, or about the U.S.’s great advantages in biotech and energy and advanced semiconductors, or the fact that, if most European countries were to join the U.S., they’d have a lower standard of living than people do in Mississippi, or that the average European is six times more likely to die from a lack of heating or air conditioning than an American is from a gun, or that most European countries are unable to usefully project military power? At least we’re not American."
Let me emphasize the distinction here between rhetoric and reasoning, between Aristotle's Logos and his Pathos, which I often bring up with my students.
Cookes' essay sizzles. It burns the grill and everything on it -- from Iberia to the Baltic. It is smoking hot. His rant is even better than Richard Dawkins' famous attack on God: "misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, megalomaniacal, maliciously malevolent bully."
Bully, indeed. Two cheers for Charles, one and a half for Richard. (I explained why Dawkins' arguments deserve no more in The Truth Behind the New Atheism.)
Charles gets the extra half star for even better rhetoric, and arguably more truth.
But don't let those stars dazzle your eyes.
He says "I take no pleasure in saying this." Hogwash, Charlie. No one could write with such zest and not enjoy it, as we enjoy reading it.
But it is not rationally convincing:
"If most European countries were to join the U.S., they’d have a lower standard of living than people do in Mississippi, or that the average European is six times more likely to die from a lack of heating or air conditioning than an American is from a gun . . . "
And yet Italians, whom he mentions, live 14 years longer than the residents of Mississippi. Despite all that lack of heating or air conditioning.
Isn't a lifespan that includes fourteen extra years worth mentioning?
Comparisons, they say, are odious. Comparisons that cherry-pick vital facts and ignore those that tell against one's argument -- a common flaw at National Review, and in modern rhetoric in general -- should not be called rationally persuasive. Cooke hits a home run on rhetoric, but weakly grounds to second with logic and cherry-picked factoids.
Life expectancy? Advantage, western Europe, by a mile.
Domestic peace? Low murder rates? Advantage, western Europe, by two miles.
Long vacations? Advantage, again, Europe.
Healthy food? Beautiful architecture? Yes, the latter must be credited to earlier generations, except for a few buildings in Barcelona.
Fighting off the Russian army? Advantage, Ukraine, which last I checked, was a country in Europe.
Who has the less awful politicians? That's a hard one. But see who is in charge in Italy and Poland before you give his Orangeness the nod.
Yes, you can work the data around to the opposite conclusion. Yes, I am also irritated by the common European assumption that America is a racist, half-barbaric nation. And by American liberal sycophants who make the same assumption, backed up with even weaker facts and worse logic.
The sweetest revenge, though, is to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God.
Cooke's rhetoric is sweet. But on logic and evidence, I can't give his essay very high marks.
And I bet, when he goes to bed tonight, he'll admit that to himself.
Ours is an age of sentimental rhetoric. The art of reasoning seems almost to have been lost. This may be why ours is becoming an increasingly fractious age as well.
