I met a charming and intelligent young Austrian man in a social setting this afternoon. I’d say he’s in his early thirties. He runs a small business, and lives in a very nice apartment here in Vienna with his wife and two small children. His wife’s American parents are here visiting, and we were invited over to meet them. It was a delightful gathering of three generations.
At one point the conversation turned to the fantastic quality of life in Vienna. The city consistently tops polls for the world’s best city to live in, and when you spend some time here it’s easy to see why. The social services are lavish, and expensive for the taxpayers, but everything just works.
This young father (I will call him Albert) mentioned that he wasn’t sure how much longer it would all hang together this well. He pointed out, for example, that he had found it necessary to buy private health insurance for his young family, because more and more of the good doctors in Vienna nowadays were only “in-network” with these private insurers.
I mentioned that I thought that the sort of social arrangement so common in northern and western Europe, with high taxes and abundant public amenities, could make for a very nice way of life, but that it required certain conditions to be met.
First, I said, there had to be general agreement among the people that they were willing to pay a lot in taxes — Albert said he pays about 65% of his income to the government — in return for generous social services. Albert agreed, of course.
Also, I said, there had to be a large enough fraction of the people paying into the system to carry the load: that you couldn’t just have a few people pulling the wagon, with most of the people in the wagon. Albert nodded in agreement.
Next — getting closer to the heart of the matter — I suggested that there had to be a real sense of community in order for people to be willing to pay someone else’s expenses today, with the reasonable expectation that others might pay their own expenses tomorrow. People just don’t put such trust in others with whom they feel they have nothing in common. In other words: for European-style democratic socialism to work requires strong social cohesion.
Albert agreed to this as well. (As I said above, he’s an intelligent man!) But then he added that this necessary social cohesion was now threatened by the rise of “right-wing” parties, skeptical of mass immigration, that were creating divisions, and so working against unity and comity.
I felt the need to tread carefully here, as I was a guest at a cheery holiday gathering in a foreign country, and I was also, I am quite sure, the only heretic in the room. The obvious response to Albert’s remarkable interpretation — which has things exactly backward — would have been to suggest that surging political parties do not so often create public sentiment as give an an outlet to what is already there; that in order for them to rise, they require something to lift them. I had just begun to say that such parties seem to be ascending, quite spontaneously, everywhere in Europe, even though their message was the same as it’s always been, and what ought we to make of that? — when the little children burst into the room laughing and shouting, and the moment had passed. To have brought it up again would have been rude.
This exchange, though, left me pondering a question of existential importance. Is a smart and civilized person such as Albert — who has all of the premises of the reactionary syllogism neatly in place, but just skids off the rails when it comes to arriving at the conclusion — walking on the road to Damascus, only a little way down the path from the moment of enlightenment? Will something — some item in the news, or some revelatory personal experience — suddenly knock the scales from his eyes, allowing him to see that those awful “right-wingers” are simply trying to preserve, for his children and theirs, all of the conditions that he already understands are necessary for the existence of the happy society he loves? Or is the dominance of our modern Universalist religion strong enough to resist, and to snuff out, such heresies?
We shall see. On the answer depends the survival of Europe.
13 Comments
A communist is a fredomist that hasn’t been mugged yet. 2019 may be the year “Albert” learns the truth.
I think it would come down to if Albert is in his soul a ‘conservative’ or a ‘liberal’. It seems that Albert is a small-c conservative. Someone who values education, hard work, contributing to society. Being an overall good citizen. However, being conservative means that you value order, as apposed to making a fetish of freedom. So, Albert, correctly so, perseveres these far right parties as being a threat to order that he is a part of. Which, in a way they are. If he is also a business owner, this would make him particularly invested in the existing order, and particularity sensitive to something that would disrupt that order. So, it is not that he is a bad person, or that he is an idiot. He may perceive trouble on the horizon. But, for someone in his position, it may be possible to profit from the existing order up to the very end. And if the end of the existing order is inevitable, why would he not?
Re: “Will something – some item in the news, or some revelatory personal experience – suddenly knock the scales from his eyes, allowing him to see that those awful “right-wingers” are simply trying to preserve, for his children and theirs, all of the conditions that he already understands are necessary for the existence of the happy society he loves? Or is the dominance of our modern Universalist religion strong enough to resist, and to snuff out, such heresies?”
Europeans like Albert have been subjected to the brainwashing of political-correctness for a longer time than their counterparts in the United States, and at a greater level of intensity. Moreover, in many European nations, the penalties for “bad- think” and “bad-speak” are quite harsh and very real.
Speaking your mind at the wrong time and/or in the wrong place can cause not just social ostracism, but loss of one’s career and livelihood. Steep fines and imprisonment are also possibilities.
On a cost-benefit basis, it still makes sense for most Europeans not to color outside the lines of their carefully-prescribed worldview. The individual penalties for doing so are simply too severe in return for the possible gain.
Once that cost-benefit ratio deteriorates, and the average European begins to really feel some pain, that moral calculus may change. But probably not until then, particularly if he/she remains an isolated individual instead of joining some sort of protest movement.
Now, if the man in question is unfortunate-enough to suffer personal loss from the status quo, such as the death of a loved one, his feelings may change rapidly, because the problem is now real as opposed to abstract.
Socialism, collectivist beliefs, always leads to genocide. Being a devoted family man and hard worker who believes in the social order matters not a whit when the african wave descends upon his world.
The reactionary syllogism is correct. Obviously! But there’s something very wrong in the situation. Suppose that (impossibly) Austrians could replace most of their population with aliens while somehow maintaining whatever conditions are necessary for their nice functional health care system and all the rest of it. Wouldn’t that still be a horrible prospect for any normal Austrian person? Something is wrong in the fact that Albert would have to be convinced (if he could be convinced) by this kind of indirect argument. Instead a normal person should regard the prospect of his own people becoming a minority in their homeland as a terrible thing in itself, quite apart from how it might affect the infrastructure or housing prices or anything like that. It _should_ be enough to simply say “Do you realize that in 60 years your Austrian children will be minorities in Austria?” Realizing that should make a normal person immediately vote for whatever “far right” party is willing to stop the population replacement. And if it isn’t enough all by itself, I don’t think anything else can be.
Isn’t that what really motivates people like us? We do care, of course, about things like housing and crime rates and the health care system. But all of that is policy wonk stuff in comparison with the existential horror of the European peoples being replaced in their homelands. Going extinct. Or being reduced to powerless minorities subject to the rule of aliens.
I hope that most people have some deep instinctual wish for their own ethnocultural group to survive and flourish. Maybe it’s there but the decades of brainwashing and threats have pushed it down into the subconscious. If it’s not even there anymore… That would be really bad!
Hi Jacques,
Yes, the point you raise is an important one. I didn’t approach it from that angle in my conversation with Albert, because to have done so would immediately have triggered a moral reflex that would have shut down the thought process I was trying to arouse. (It would also have marked me at once as a bigot, racist, xenophobe, white supremacist, etc.)
The idea that any normal human would quite naturally care about becoming an ethnic minority in his own homeland, even without regard to economic and political practicalities, and that one might actually have a duty to one’s children to care about this, is the greatest imaginable heresy, especially in postwar Germany and Austria. I really think that there is a kind of deeply trained “crimestop” in the minds of young people of my daughter’s generation that makes it almost impossible not to recoil in fear and horror from even a whiff of such ideas. Even the majority of educated people of my own generation generally react this way. What makes this so powerful is that it has been drilled in so deeply that it is not only an unchallengeable axiom, but an unchallengeable moral axiom. To question it at all, even as a nonbinding exercise in abstract inquiry, is itself a sin, and is tainted with grave moral peril.
Given all this, the only crack in the wall where there is any chance at all of inserting the tip of the crowbar is with these practical matters.
But once a few bricks come loose, who knows what’s possible? Nature has a way of reasserting herself.
Please remember that we are talking about Austria, and thus it is hard to define who the “Austrians” really are. I also live in Austria, but not in Vienna. The Turks were brought over in large numbers beginning in 1964, so there has been a large Turkish community here since before most people were born. Many of these are naturalised, but they still remain in Turkish groups. The groups from Ex-Yugolavia have been here nearly as long, and they tend to be more integrated. Much of what was Yugloslavia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the Treaty of Versailles, and they are present in larger numbers even than the Turks. Maybe it is due to the circles I move in, but most of the small businesses I know are run by people who speak a Slavic language at home. A great deal of our political correctness was forced on us at the end of the second World War as a condition for regaining independence. Our constitution was written by the US and USSR, and is designed to make very sure that we cannot own military arms and possibly overthrow a tyranical government.
Thank you for your comment, Simon. I’m away from the computer at the moment, but will respond when time permits.
Two quick questions: Where in Austria do you live? Are you yourself an immigrant to Austria?
I’m wondering Simon, in the context of what you, Malcolm, and others have written: is concern for the alt-right only a figment of political correctness, or is it also a legitimate respect for the past, of avoiding rhetoric that is reminiscent of the awful events of the first half of the twentieth century? My sense is that it’s very much both, and that it’s important not to conflate the two. Please tell me if you think I’m missing the boat on this.
Best to you Malcolm on the new year. I’m glad everything went well for your daughter and your second grandchild.
Simon, you wrote:
I would probably begin by identifying the qualities of Austrian culture that distinguished, even during the Habsburg empire, the national core from the rest of the imperium, and then suggest that those present-day Austrian citizens, native or assimilated, who identify — either by ancestral transmission or by adoption — that cultural constellation as their own heritage, are who the “Austrians” really are.
I’d say also that a sense of common duty to, and shared responsibility for the preservation of, that cultural essence would be an important criterion as well.
(None of this is specific to Austria, of course; it’s just a template for nationhood.)
Like all empires, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was, even at the best of times, not a nation; it was a cluster of diverse nations under common rule and fealty. In the worst of times, those natural fault-lines cracked wide open. I’d be very surprised if the Slavic-speaking citizens you mention would meet the criteria I gave above. Given that language is perhaps the most basic requirement for deep cultural cohesion, it hardly seems likely, and the history of Balkan relations with the Empire can hardly be far from memory.
As for the Turks, well… I suppose 1529 and 1683 were a while ago now, and the German-speaking nations of Europe have been given some rather stiff mood-altering medicine since the middle of the last century. Still though: how soon we forget! I’m sure the Turks haven’t.
Thanks Jason! Mother and son are both very well indeed.
I’m a regular reader and occasional commenter from the U.S., but have been for many years married to an Austrian wife. She recently took a DNA test and found that she is, unsurprisingly, classically Austrian for her part of the country (Graz). As you probably know, the historic population of Lower Styria is a mix of Germans and germanized Slovenians, and this has been the case for over 1,000 years. When her family speaks of Austrians, they mean members of this group. At the same time, her family is politically committed to the SPO, much as many blue-collar Americans remain committed to the Democratic Party, and their welfare statism tends to defeat their implicit nationalism. They would certainly prefer that lower Styria continue to be populated by a mix of Germans and germanized Slovinians, but they see alternatives to the SPO as parties of the upper class or parties for people with whom it is dangerous to be associated.
When I am in Austria, I have the sense of a very pleasant place that cannot remain very pleasant much longer. You may have noticed that the Austrians build amazing playgrounds, but those playgrounds are mostly empty because too few Austrians make babies. I have a small collection of photographs of these monuments to sentimental sterility. Some of my sense of a very pleasant place that cannot last no doubt comes from my experience of decline here in the U.S. I taught a class in Bavaria a few years ago, and the students were all on fire to repeat every mistake we have made.
JMS,
Very nice to see you here in the comment-thread. (I’ll remind readers of an excellent article of yours at Orthosphere that I linked to just recently.)
You write:
That is the victory of those who have reprogrammed Europe, and the rest of the West, in the postwar era: that to make a distinction between one’s own nation, people and culture and the rest of the world, and to express an interest in preserving them, now marks one off as a person with whom it is “dangerous to be associated”.
My own daughter has brought two children into the world in Vienna, but she and her husband are not Austrian, and will probably have moved on within another two or three years.