The anthropology of Bruce Bawer

I finally picked up a copy of Bruce Bawer's While Europe Slept a couple of weeks ago. Of course, I had been reading his articles for a few years already, but still felt quite shameful that I had not yet read this book, which has been such a landmark publication in Europe. I finished it in a day or two.

The contents of While Europe Slept were not very shocking to me, to be honest; I was already quite aware of the extent to which the European establishment has been seeking to appease Muslim sensitivities for decades. I had written reactions to some of Bawer's writings on my Dutch blog (rather positive for the most part), and I am all too familiar with the foolish anti-Americanism that has struck Western European nations like an epidemic.

One aspect of the book, however, was surprisingly instructive, especially to a person who has been living in between American culture and his own for the past four years: Bawer's effort to compare the two left me with a feeling that, at least in my head, the puzzle pieces have finally fallen into place. The Dutch could not but nod in approval when reading Bawer's description of their cultural characteristics.

Besides the fact that Amsterdam "was the one place I'd ever been where homophobia really seemed to have disappeared," he notes that "Dutch people's sense of identity and self-worth didn't depend on jobs or salaries." Indeed, more than Americans, for whom life is all about "future payoffs, preferably bountiful ones," the Dutch, like many Western Europeans, "attend to the present moment and its small rewards." So when Bawer on one of his first visits to Amsterdam asked someone he had just met what he did for a living, the latter responded: "We don't ask that so soon. ... Not like you Americans."

Hence the Dutch noun gezelligheid, unsatisfyingly translated by the dictionaries -- and thus adopted by Bawer -- as "enjoyable," "pleasant," and "companionable." Bawer notes that these are words few Americans "would use to describe a person, place, or experience that's given enjoyment." But the word gezelligheid testifies to the Dutch people's satisfaction with the small everyday pleasures, which include visits to our typical tiny "brown cafés" with friends, having nice dinners with our families, or sitting cozily in front of the fireplace. (Now I come to think of it, the word "coziness" actually seems to be the best translation.)

In fact, I recently had the opportunity to test Bawer's hypothesis when I traveled to the United States to celebrate Christmas there. (I had visited the U.S. many times before, but never paid much attention to these differences, I guess.) And indeed, every person I talked to would almost immediately ask: "What do you do?" Even in Vermont, that bastion of radical lefties (some of whom I have described in a Dutch article). In contrast, when I spent New Year's Eve at a party in Amsterdam, I equally talked to quite a lot of people I had never met before, but I cannot recall one single occasion in which occupations were brought up. And at a party prior to my departure to the U.S., the only memorable incident had been when a relative asked me how much money I thought U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney had made off of the war in Iraq, financial rewards being the only justification for the war of which my interlocutor could conceive.

Yet the gezelligheid to which Bawer refers I run into in America just as easily as in the Netherlands. Yes, the bars generally are not as cozily decorated as their Dutch counterparts, but the experience of spending time in them with friends is just as gezellig to me in the United States as it is in the Netherlands. And, perhaps due to my experience with the former, I sometimes get more annoyed by the narrow-minded, sometimes purposeless, and often parochial, people around me at home. Being around Dutch youths, some of them quite literally dressed up like Ernesto Ché Guevara (a habit to which Bawer also devotes a few spot-on pages), can sometimes bring up a sense of instant claustrophobia. (To be sure, the fact that I find myself defending American foreign policy in the face of staunch hostility all the time, does not help much.)

Not surprisingly, Bawer himself also conceives of a downside to Dutch gezelligheid. The lack of preoccupation with what people do amounts to a similar lack of character: "what you do (or don't do) is crucial to an understanding of who you are. ... Life without [American ambition], I saw, could be a pretty pallid, hollow affair. Furthermore, I'd begun to see that in much of Western Europe, the appreciation of everyday pleasures was bound up with a stifling conformity, a discomfort with excellence, and an overt disapproval of those who strove too visibly to better their lot. Sometimes it could even seem as if Western Europe's core belief was in mediocrity."

The cultural Marxists have done a fine job educating the Dutch masses indeed: recently, right-wing parties in parliament complained (NL) about some school books used in our public school system, which described their economically liberal policy directives as "Let the people sort it out for themselves. Bad luck for those who cannot do it themselves." Left-wing parties, on the other hand, acknowledge "that not everyone can look after themselves," and therefore plead for a government "which provides everyone with as many opportunities as possible." One wonders which choice 15-year-olds will make based upon reading books such as these.

Radical indoctrination is not confined to children. Dutch daily the Volkskrant recently attributed (NL) the current subprime mortgage crisis in the United States to "deceive-the-consumer-wherever-you-can capitalism," which "is digging its own grave." (It was not even an editorial.) Better indeed to protect Dutch citizens from the sharp edges of the free market, with its evil all-for-profit corporations at the helm. We truly are the champions of mediocrity. Examples such as these abound, and Bawer sums up quite a few in While Europe Slept. Of course, they also affect what we perceive to be the trivial, if peculiar, aspects of our culture.

The final oddity Bawer notices among the Dutch that is worth sharing here is the pillarization, or verzuiling: "the division of society into religious and ethnic groups, each with its own schools, unions, political parties, newspapers, and, in recent times, TV channels." Although verzuiling is "now largely a thing of the past," "the mentality [lingers]." As a result, neither the Dutch Moroccans nor Bawer himself would ever be considered to be "Dutch".

It is funny that it takes an American living in Europe to make Europeans see the oddness of calling third-generation immigrants "Moroccans" or "Turks", but never "Dutch". In any case, it is completely true. In comparison, me telling I am from Europe to Americans in the United States often leads to surprised reactions, by people who -- despite my funny accent -- had never considered me to be a foreigner.

But perhaps they had not even asked themselves that question; from my considerable experience, I know Americans to be very warm and welcoming people anyway, and much less suspicious of strangers than Europeans are. Next to the exorbitant welfare system, and our Muslim youths' painful inability to do good in school and make something out of their lives, the Dutch tradition of verzuiling must surely be one of the foremost factors feeding the alienation of Moroccans and Turks in the Netherlands.

In my case, Bawer has largely been preaching to the choir with his book. But I did learn some important things; his anthropology of the Dutch and the Americans was both surprising and insightful. To the ordinary Dutch, of course, While Europe Slept could (and should) be and unprecedented eye opener, and a highly readable one at that. That is exactly why I, immediately upon returning to the Netherlands from the U.S., bought its Dutch translation as a Christmas gift to my father.