G-20: Rejecting “the Pond”

“The Pond” is an expression suggesting “no distance between the U.S. and Europe.” I wish it would go away. Perhaps, it was an innocent-enough exaggeration when the two continents were coming together in the 1970s, with the introduction of Concorde New York-London flights of 3-1/2 hours. But after 27 years of never really catching on, the Concorde ceased service in 2003. The distance then grew greater, not ever shorter as we once had expected. But “the Pond” phrase lives on.

Obama has jumped “the Pond” to London for the latest G-20 meeting. The G-20, as its own website says,

brings together important industrial and emerging-market countries from all regions of the world. Together, member countries represent around 90 per cent of global gross national product, 80 per cent of world trade (including EU intra-trade) as well as two-thirds of the world's population. The G-20's economic weight and broad membership gives it a high degree of legitimacy and influence over the management of the global economy and financial system.

The G-20’s impressive statistics combine numbers from all of Europe, something the G-20 gets away with because one of the G-20 members represents the entire “European Union,” even though EU members Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy are also G-20 members. Add the U.S. and Canada, and 7 of the G-20’s members are of “the Pond.”

The term “the Pond” especially bothers me because it re-enforces the East Coast-based American elite’s obvious admiration for Europe at a time when, under Obama, we are drawing closer to European-style democratic socialism—government control of industry, high taxes, powerful unions, government-financed underclass, nanny-state regulations, national health insurance. Our elite loves Europe.

Conservative scholar Charles Murray recently laid out his case against Europe and for continued American exceptionalism. Murray said in Stockholm, Amsterdam, London, Paris, “the people don’t seem to be groaning under the yoke of an evil system. Quite the contrary. There’s a lot to like—a lot to love—about day-to-day life in Europe.” But he also suggested, “the European model can’t continue to work much longer. Europe’s catastrophically low birth rates and soaring immigration from cultures with alien values will see to that.”

Here’s the heart of Murray’s case against Europe (my summary):

“A life well-lived” has meaning. It brings “deep satisfactions”— what we look back upon when we reach old age. Such a human activity has to have been important; to have required a lot of effort (hence the cliché “nothing worth having comes easily”), and; you have to have been responsible for the consequences.

Few activities can satisfy those requirements. If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith. Nobody has to make use of all four institutions, but the stuff of life—the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one’s personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships—coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness—occurs within those four institutions.

The goal of social policy should be to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that’s what’s wrong with the European model. It doesn’t do that. It enfeebles every single one of them.

Almost anything that government does in social policy can be characterized as taking some of the trouble out of things.
The problem is that every time the government takes trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it strips those institutions of their vitality.

Families are not vital because raising children and being a good spouse are fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won’t get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it’s so much fun to respond to our neighbors’ needs, but because the community does important things that won’t get done otherwise. When the government says it will take the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it takes action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.

When the government takes the trouble out of being a spouse and parent, it doesn’t affect the sources of deep satisfaction for the CEO. Rather, it makes life difficult for the janitor. A man who is holding down a menial job and thereby supporting a wife and children is doing something authentically important with his life. He can take deep satisfaction from that, and be praised for doing so. If that same man lives under a system that says that the children of the woman he sleeps with will be taken care of whether or not he contributes, then that status goes away.

“The Europe syndrome” goes something like this: Human beings are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate. The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible. Work is not a vocation, but something that interferes with leisure. Why have a child, when children are so much trouble—and, after all, what good are they, really? Why spend time worrying about neighbors? What could possibly be the attraction of a religion that says otherwise?

Murray hopes America will have “a Great Awakening” that will take our elite away from modern day Europe and back to our roots in family, community, vocation, and faith.