David Mills Takes on European Morality

David Mills, at First Things, takes on European morality and it’s disposition toward the OBL killing:

OK, I’m wondering what the Europeans think of this perspective. Thoughts? Observations?

We asked the bartender to turn up the sound, and heard the anchorman announce that Osama bin Laden had been killed in Pakistan by American forces. A cheer went up. My friend put his face in his hands for several minutes. He then walked out to call his parents. When he came back, we celebrated.

Which is something the concerned, worried, and doubting, at least the European chapters of that brotherhood, apparently do not understand. “While many nations suffered from al-Qaida’s terrorism and few in the world will mourn Bin Laden’s death,” wrote the Guardian columnist, “the United States is the only place where it sparked spontaneous outpourings of raucous jubilation.”

There is, I would have thought, an obvious reason for that, like two planes flying into tall buildings in New York, not London or Paris, but he thinks there’s something wrong with us. “The patriotic impulse in American society is intense and pervasive. The kind of national fervour reserved elsewhere for occasional events like royal weddings, World Cup victories or major tragedies is a dormant reflex waiting for a trigger.”

He offers this in criticism of America, but he’s said something far more damning about Europe. If he’s right, and I have no reason to doubt him even if he’s probably exaggerated the point a little, their patriotisms must not be intense and pervasive, which is to say, hardly patriotism at all. They only get excited about ephemera like royal weddings and World Cup victories or heart-tugging events like tragedies. Not, apparently, by the vanquishing of their country’s enemies and long-delayed justice being done. Not about anything that actually matters.

It was not always so for Europe, even Europe’s liberals. In the words of the concerned, worried, and doubting speaks the exhausted old man whose plumbing has packed it in, who after decades of sexual conquests now prefers the more sedate pleasures of the flesh, from rare old wines to thick socks that keep his feet warm, who now preaches the virtues of chastity and the vanity of sexual indulgence as if he himself had always been the model of continence, and purses his lips censoriously when he sees the young men chasing the young women.

Heaven knows we have our faults and sins, but we do not need lectures on morality from those who now obey their rules only because they’re too tired to break them and find their greatest pleasures in feeling superior to the young.