Reflections on the "Big Thinks" on "Europe and America"

Those who would say something about the contrast between "Europe" and "America" tend to fall back on certain clichés, either badly outdated or baseless to begin with. One of the worst is the comparison of "democratic" America and its popular culture with "aristocratic" Europe and its "high" culture, personified in the caricatured culture clash between the "crude" American and the "sophisticated" European.

This conception ignores how from the start America has had its aristocrats (however much their pretensions may have been taken less than seriously, or downplayed, by many in and beyond their country), while in Europe the aristocrats were, by definition, few. (After all, aristocrats can cultivate the graces of life because they live off of the toil of others rather than their own toil, while even among the aristocrats few get the whole "package," possessing titles and certain privileges going with them but wondering where their next meal will come from.)

There is what this also means, that America has long had its high culture, which has come a long way since the days when the Henry Jameses could snivel about America's lacking monuments and museums, while one should never forget the limits to the possession and enjoyment of high culture in Europe. In the case of the aristocrat it was apt to be a matter of superficial attainments for the purposes of showing off in that way to which the leisure class is addicted that Jane Austen satirized in her discussion of the "accomplished young lady," while contact with such culture falls off sharply just a little way down the socioeconomic ladder (Hans Fallada's portrayal of Berlin carpenter Otto Quangel showing disbelief at what a symphony conductor does sums it up), while Europe has its low culture as well, as trashy and stupid as anything that came out of America. (One would need only look at what Silvio Berlusconi put on the air in a country where, as one critic put it, "one struggles to take a step without encountering evidence of millennia of high culture.")

Bad enough in the day when Nabokov wrote Lolita, why do these stupidities persist so much later, when they seem so much less forgivable?

It would seem relevant here that we live in a deeply reactionary era which stresses cultural difference over similarity--strains for difference where it scarcely exists, plays up whatever it can; that so many have made so much of trans-Atlantic differences, and done so on the basis of the most outworn clichés, like the decadence of Old Europe contrasted with the vigor and innocence of "Young" America, for political and other purposes ("Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus"); that so many are so impressed with shallow aristocratic pretensions (utterly taken in and awed by and ready to glorify the "accomplishment" of the general public's supposed betters), and so utterly credulous toward the courtiers of the elite, both in the news media and the arts.

As if all that were not lousy reason enough, the centrist has also been a convenient marketing tool. Americans of conventional mind are prone to assume their country to be superior to the rest of the world in many things, like the development and exploitation of information technology. Yet they are ever ready to believe that others do some things better than them--with one of these fashion, cosmetics and those things generally serving the ends of "style" and beauty, where Europeanness counts for something with Americans, precisely because that is what one would expect of a more aristocratic, aesthetically refined culture. An example that springs readily to mind is the more than decade-long bombardment of the American public by commercials for Cindy Crawford's Meaningful Beauty skin care line. That the product was derived from melons grown in southern France by a French doctor who in his manner of speaking English and other ways can seem like an Anglosphere caricature of a Frenchman can seem part of the sales pitch. "It's European!" the commercial all but shouts. As European as a European men's carryall.