If you’ve ever used the word “Euro-weenie” or a similar derogatory appellation for a pampered Euro peacenik, but you’ve never been able to put your finger on exactly what makes America and Americans different from our European counterparts, then you must read Charles Murray’s piece at The American magazine: The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism. The frightening leftward lurch of the country that George Will wrote about so well recently will be even scarier after you read Murray. 

Sometimes, it can be hard to argue the case for American exceptionalism in light of the temptations of the secular European model. Europe seems so pleasant.  So clean. People seem so content, have government-provided health care, child care, and fantastic employment and retirement benefits.  And their cell phone and public wi-fi systems kick ass, as do many of their consumer goods. Who needs family, community, vocation or faith — the sources of “deep satisfaction,” according to Murray — when you’ve got all that?

Well, the answer is, everyone who wants a meaningful life. As Murray pointed out on Dennis Prager’s radio show (listen here), an advancing mindset among youth in Europe is that the human body is merely a conglomeration of chemicals that is activated at birth and later is “deactivated,” and the point of life is to make the intervening time as pleasant as possible.

I’ve mentioned before how my Swedish father-in-law (Swedish as in he has lived there all his life, not as in an American of Swedish descent) often chides me good-naturedly about European supremacy in this or that endeavor (see “cell phone and public wi-fi systems,” above), and even that the Swedish government is more conservative than the American one since Sweden put the center-right party in power a few years ago.  But even he has noted that the younger generation in Sweden is less and less willing to work hard because so much is given to them.

He hasn’t visited since Barack Obama was elected, so I can only imagine what he’ll have to say now! Perhaps he’ll bring up this, from Will’s piece:

TARP funds have, however, semi-purchased, among many other things, two automobile companies (and, last week, some of their parts suppliers), which must amaze Sweden. That unlikely tutor of America regarding capitalist common sense has said, through a Cabinet minister, that the ailing Saab automobile company is on its own: “The Swedish state is not prepared to own car factories.”

Or maybe he’ll cite Newsweek’s article, barely two weeks after Obama’s inauguration, that claimed “[i]n many ways our economy already resembles a European one.”

The European socialist model reminds me of the human society in the movie WALL-E. Those humans had grown fat and lazy, were provided for in every respect, and lived solely for amusement. We’re supposed to deplore that society, but I see little difference between that and the European social model.

Are there parts of the secular European model that we could adopt, perhaps just in part, without losing our American-ness? Maybe, in small bits and pieces. But it is, as Murray points out, a dangerously slippery slope once we tread onto it. It will be horrendously difficult, if not impossible, to reverse moves toward the European social model that President Obama is likely to try to implement. And it will be hard to stop them with a Republican party that has lost virtually all conservative credentials.

Murray says the answer may be in 21st century science:

This is all pretty depressing for people who do not embrace the European model, because it looks like the train has left the station. The European model provides the intellectual framework for the social policies of the triumphant Democratic Party, and it faces no credible opposition from Republican politicians.

And yet there is reason for strategic optimism, and that leads to the second point I want to make tonight: Critics of the European model are about to get a lot of new firepower. Not only is the European model inimical to human flourishing, 21st-century science is going to explain why. We who think that the Founders were right about the relationship of government to human happiness will have an opening over the course of the next few decades to make our case.

The reason is a tidal change in our scientific understanding of what makes human beings tick. It will spill over into every crevice of political and cultural life. Harvard’s Edward O. Wilson anticipated what is to come in a book entitled Consilience. As the 21st century progresses, he argued, the social sciences are increasingly going to be shaped by the findings of biology; specifically, the findings of the neuroscientists and the geneticists.

I think he’s overly optimistic. In one of their typical projections, liberals accuse conservatives of bending science to politics while doing it themselves, and I’m sure they will do the same with anything Murray envisions. For instance, I’m sure he’s wrong about the Harvard faculty of 2020:

Within a decade, no one will try to defend the equality premise. All sorts of groups will be known to differ in qualities that affect what professions they choose, how much money they make, and how they live their lives in all sorts of ways. Gender differences will be first, because the growth in knowledge about the ways that men and women are different is growing by far the most rapidly. I’m betting that the Harvard faculty of the year 2020 will look back on the Larry Summers affair in the same way that they think about the Scopes trial—the enlightened versus the benighted—and will have achieved complete amnesia about their own formerly benighted opinions.

All we can do is resist, and hope Murray is right.