I'm not so sure that the French way of life has all that much to offer. They are fast reaching their own impasse.
At 13:17 26/07/2003 -0700, you wrote:
In what I'm coyly referring to as the midsummer version of the nearly furious Winter and Spring debate over the European and American divide, TIME's Michael Elliott writes from Paris:
I like what you wrote further below, but Michael Elliot gives the impression (see below) that it's all week-end family parties over there, and intellectuals sprawling about for hours in the caf�s of Paris discussing philosophy . If I can throw a few slightly dampening facts into the proceedings, let me quote some recent Financial Times statistics. Americans work a 40-hour week, the French, 36 hours; Americans take 12 days annual vacation, the French, 25; and both countries have the same number of statutary days holiday -- 11 each. Thus, the difference is not quite as great as you might infer from Michael Elliot's piece. Very few French people are able to take 6 weeks' holiday a year, as the myth has it.
Yes, the French have a slightly more elastic view of time and holidays than the Amercans. A friend of mine is having some building work done on his French farmhouse. If the weather's nice on a statutory holiday, then the builders are quite likely to take the next day or two off as well -- without, of course, giving notice. Yes, it's joy (if you can stand the noise) to see French families having Sunday lunch in a restaurant in any provincial town -- and going on well into the late afternoon. I also have a lovely memory of a town square very late one evening where families had gathered almost till midnight, where, instead of being in bed, the children were larking about and a couple of grandfathers were playing with the very youngest children, hardly able to walk. The fathers weren't there, though. Presumably they were holed up in a drinking den.
But all is not well in France. Not by any means. I am not so sure that in America you have places where the police daren't enter unless they go in numbers inside armoured cars. Well, there are several very large suburbs of Paris where this is so. In America, unemployment is only just reaching 6%, but in France the rate has been nearer 10% for several years and is likely to grow much higher. A French friend of mine had a restaurant in Paris and was forced out of business by having to pay almost as much tax and insurance to the government for each employee as he did in wages. Fortunately, he had an English wife and he was able to get over here and he now drives a taxi in Bath. Scores of small French firms are now settling in Kent to avoid penal taxation over there, their personnel commuting back and forth across the Channel.
And then, French scholarship and culture is not as cracked up as it's supposed to be. The French complain about the heavy dose of American films on their TV channels, but where are their own films? As for books, the French still have good novelists but where are their books of scholarly value? I can't recall a single one in the last 10 or 20 years. They are still quoting Sartre and his reprehensible existentialism. Wearing my other hat as a publisher of choral music, I sell more than 50 times as much music to American choirs (on a population basis) than to French choirs. (And the notation accuracy of music published in France is notoriously bad. I'm sure they don't proof-read.) The French are supposed to be much more logical than English people or Americans, and they're very good at launching new ideas or hurling defiance at America. But their logic takes them into crevaces from which they can only emerge with difficulty, as President Chirac had to do recently after he had publicly snubbed both Blair and Bush. A brand new theory of economics called Post-Austistic something-or-other was proclaimed a few years ago and their intellectuals got very excited about it but the articles in its journal were incomprehensible to me and, as far as I could make out, mutually antagonistic.
Let's face it, scholarship and research in the best French universities, in both science and the arts, simply doesn't compare in quality or quantity with that of MIT or Harvard. On a population basis, there ought to be *something* to remark upon, but there's really nothing I can think of.
Having tried to come to the defence of America, I must confess that Americans have reached their own cul-de-sac as regards their lack of leisure time and capacity to absorb much more, whether of culture or consumer goods. Despite all the reasons that are given for the present economic slowdown of America, I am increasingly persuaded that, underneath it all, there's a profound unease about where society should be heading. The French still hang onto their myths and past glories; the Americans don't have so much of either, so their intellectuals can probably see the future a little more clearly and a little more bleakly, too. The title of Francis Fukuyama's book, The End of History, had more than one meaning in his mind, I'm sure. Consumerism has now reached the end of the line -- there's no more time or energy left for more. The Americans only work for four hours a week more than the French, but that's enough to take America to the edge of its economic philosophy. And yet, while America and the rest of us are so dependent on oil and natural gas, I can see nothing constructive at present --only more trouble ahead -- the Iraq invasion repeated and multiplied several times more in the decades to come as long as cheap fossil fuels last.
KH
>>>> Excerpt from Time Magazine 28 July 2003
EUROPEANS JUST WANT TO HAVE A LITTLE FUN Long vacations. Lots of dancing. So why can't we loosen up?
Michael Elliot
In a famous series of essays collected in his 1976 book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Daniel Bell noted how the decline of the Protestant small-town ethic had unhinged American capitalism from its moral foundation in the intrinsic value of work. By the 1960s, Bell argued, "the cultural justification of capitalism [had] become hedonism, the idea of pleasure as a way of life." This magazine agreed. In a 1969 cover story titled "California A State of Excitement," Time Mazazine reported that, as most Americans saw it, "the good, godless, gregarious pursuit of pleasure is what California is all about ... 'I have seen the future,' says the newly returned visitor to California, 'and it plays.' "
But the American future didn't turn out as we expected. While Europeans cut the hours they spend at the office or factory in France it is illegal to work more than 35 hours a week and lengthened their vacations, Americans were concluding that you could be happy only if you work hard and play hard. So they began to stay at their jobs longer than ever and then, in jam-packed weekends at places like the Hamptons on Long Island, invented the uniquely American concept of scheduled joy, filling a day off with one appointment after another, as if it were no different from one at the office. American conservatives, meanwhile, came to believe that Europeans' desire to devote themselves to the pleasures of life and the shame of it! -- six weeks annual vacation was evidence of a lack of seriousness and would, in any event, end in economic tears.
Why do Europeans and Americans differ so much in their attitude toward work and leisure? I can think of two reasons. First, the crowded confines of Western Europe and the expansive space of North America have led to varied consumer preferences. Broadly speaking, Americans value stuff -- SUVs, 7,000-sq-ft. houses -- more than they value time, while for Europeans it's the opposite. Second, as Bell predicted, America's sense of itself as a religious nation has revived. At least in the puritanical version of Christianity that has always appealed to Americans, religion comes packaged with the stern message that hard work is good for the soul. Modern Europe has avoided so melancholy a lesson.
Whatever the explanation, the idea of a work-life balance is a staple of European discourse, studied in think tanks, mulled over by policymakers. In the US, the term, when it's used at all, is said with the sort of sneer reserved for those who eat quiche. But it might still catch on. When Bill Keller was named executive editor of the New York Times last week, he encouraged the staff to do "a little more savoring" of life, spending time with their families or viewing art.
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KWC
Most of us on Futurework List have argued or agreed that the Puritanical influences are alive and well in America today, we take ourselves much too seriously. It's led to a religious idolatry of Free Market sects, created mass markets of medicated and numb worker bees, and allowed the proliferation of a consumer culture based on plastic and home ownership, not much else. So is one solution to Pax Americana and Big Brother 2004 a big party? I am interested in American culture being less identified with product lines and profit margins and more recognized for its literary and artistic performances; indeed, we cannot sustain (note how popular this word is now and generically applied) the momentum of a superpower for much longer if we forget what we are fighting for, and that does include real culture and sense of time and place and play? We cannot even have a good time being patriotic these days, its become an exercise in intensity and loyalty.
Is it arrogance that led us down this path? Or ignorance? Or what else? We have reminders all around us, from friend and foe that empires do not last forever. Blair managed to sneak that warning in his speech to Congress, and Italy's Berlosconi added his two cents worth (also in this same issue of Time Magazine) that what Italy learned from the Roman Empire is that every prince needs allies, and the bigger the responsibility, the more allies he needs.
So should Americans be stepping back and looking at the horizon, reflecting on the small and simple things that make life worthwhile, rather than being force-fed superpower heroic vitamins? I vote yes.
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Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
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