I recommend, but without endorsing, this curious lecture by Niall Ferguson, celebrity historian (formerly of Oxford, then NYU, now Harvard) and apologist for empire, American and otherwise. I have not read enough of Ferguson to have a fully informed view, but my impression from what I have read is that there is something slightly off about this man, so that he should be approached with caution. (Consider, for example, his recent scolding of the United States in The New York Times for not butchering more human beings in Iraq: and to think he'd find a place at a nice liberal university like Harvard!?! Shocking.)
Quite a lot of ground is covered in this lecture, so let me just mention two bits. Ferguson says:
"If you look closely at man-hour statistics-comparing the productivity of, say, a Frenchman in a single hour with that of his American counterpart--there is in fact nothing to choose between them. As a worker, a Frenchman is just as efficient as an American. It's less true in the case of a German worker, but the difference is not huge. One of the biggest differences in economic terms between Western Europe and the United States has been an astonishing divergence in working hours. In the past decade or so, Americans have steadily worked more hours per year. In fact, according to figures from the OECD, the average American in employment works nearly 2,000 hours a year--and hours a year are a good measure of just how much work people are doing. The average German, ladies and gentlemen, works fully 22 percent less of the year.
"Between 1979 and the present, the length of the working year grew in the United States. Or, if you want to put it in more conventional terms, the vacation shrank. Precisely the opposite happened in Europe. In Europe, working hours diminished, vacations grew. Labor participation also diminished. Fewer and fewer of the population actually entered the labor market altogether. And that in many ways explains that differential in GDP growth rates as well as anything I could suggest to you. It's a little hint of what I'm going to say in a minute, that this, I think, is more than just an economic phenomenon. In some ways it is a symptom of that cultural malaise in Europe that I want to see as a critical part of the end of Europe."
"To put it very crudely, it is the work ethic itself that has declined and fallen. And it is, I think, noteworthy that the decline in working hours is most pronounced in what were once distinctly Protestant countries of northwestern Europe. Once."
I suppose if the Chairman of General Motors had written the last paragraph it would be laughed off as the self-serving nonsense of the ruling class. But since historians at elite universities pursue the truth, not the interests of a particular class, this would be an inappropriate response. (But I suppose we now know why it was the Business School at NYU that hired him away from Oxford!)
Here's another interesting bit:
"The reality is--and it is perhaps the most striking cultural phenomenon of our times--that Western and Eastern Europe are no longer in any meaningful sense Christian societies. They are quite clearly post-Christian--indeed, in many respects, post-religious--societies. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark, less than 1 in 10 of the population attends church even once a month. A clear majority do not attend church at all. There are now more Muslims in England than Anglican communicants. More Muslims attend mosque on a weekly basis than Anglicans attend church. In the recent Gallup Millennium Survey of Religious Attitudes conducted just a couple of years ago, more than half of all Scandinavians said that God did not matter to them at all. This, it seems to me, makes the claim to a fundamental Christian inheritance not only implausible but also downright bogus in Europe. The reality is that Europeans inhabit a post-Christian society that is economically, demographically, but, in my view, above all culturally a decadent society.
"They cannot, though they will try, resist forever the migration that must inevitably occur from south and from east. They will try....Increasingly, European politics is dominated by a kind of dance of death as politicians and voters try desperately and vainly to prop up the moribund welfare states of the post-Second World War era, but above all to prop up what little remains of their traditional cultures.
"I understand Samuel Huntington is worried that Mexican culture is taking a firm root in this country and shows no sign of being dissolved into the traditional American melting pot. I read an alarmist article by him in Foreign Policy this week. Well, I have good news for him. Long before the mariachis play in Harvard Yard, long before that, there will be minarets, as Gibbon foretold, in Oxford. Indeed, ladies and gentlemen, there already is one. The Center for Islamic Studies is currently building in my old university a new center for Islamic studies. I quote: 'Along the lines of a traditional Oxford college around a central cloistered quadrangle, the building will feature a prayer hall with traditional dome and minaret tower.' It will open next year. I wonder what Gibbon would have said."
If Tom DeLay, or some other figure of the extreme religious right in America, said this, one would hardly be surprised; if Goebbels said it, substituting a few appropriate religious and ethnic groups, one would hardly be surprised. But DeLay did not say it, nor did Goebbels. Rather, a member of the famously left-leaning academy (of Harvard, no less!) said it. Curious.
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