As I get ready for a trip to London, I was listening to a nice bloke on NPR talking about the shift from the “American Dream” to the “European Dream”.
He defined the American version as he wild west, out for yourself, about the individual.
The european dream contrasts this with interdependence, being seperate but together. Mr. Covey has talked about this a long time in his 7 (now 8) Habits. In europe there is more thought of the environment, and social rights.
Now, this is all very black and white. There is a lot of room to aim for the european dream in America, and you can do vice versa.
I would love more of us here in the US to think a little differently. I am excited to hear about more and more communities that are modelled on real community, rather than having a big garage that you drive into, to hide for the night. Self-sufficient communities are very cool, and they are growing.
In many ways there is a chance to do the interdependent thing better than the europeans. For as much as they get together, they argue. They argue a lot. Remember how many years these nations were fighting each other :)
I don’t see as many fights between Wisconsin and Minnesota, compared to France and Germany :)
April 13th, 2005 at 1:09 pm
Argueing is good. Agueing is learning from each other. Programmers like to ague, *wherever they come from* :)
April 14th, 2005 at 5:53 am
Well, we (europeans) have very different cultures, languages, historical details, positions about religion, etc…
In the US it’s very much WASP having imposed their culture to the natives, imported african slaves, as well as their language (ok, one could argue that now hispanos are pretty much doing that to the US ;)).
The US is a huge mix of many nationalities, cultures, ideologies, but they don’t interoperate much: every community has to stay where it’s being put by the “real” americans (white, around 50, undecently rich).
In Europe that’s very different, at least amongst the different native european nationalities. Of course, it takes a lot more time, we have to argue and discuss a lot, get together on many many issues (with sometimes very different opinions and historical backgrounds).
Generally speaking (= blatant generalization), Europeans and US citizens have a very different opinion on how society should work. We’re not communists ((some) Europeans have been the only ones really suffering from communism, not the Americans), not at all, but to most of us, ultraliberalism is a very, very bad idea. We strive for things like social health systems, not maximizing few individuals’ profits.
I’m not going to say any opinion is better (though I do have a strong point on one of those, as you might imagine ;)) – I respect your own, but so much for explaining that there actually _is_ a big difference between the “American dream” and the “European dream” ;)
PS: I know, this is full of generalizations, assumptions,… – obviously not all Americans are like that (at least, a little under 50% isn’t ;)) – and obviously not all Europeans are like what I described either, unfortunately. And my view of the US is certainly as biased as yours on Europe.
Noone’s perfect, none of us is a better continent than the other, my point was just that building Europe is a very different thing than building the USA.
finally { peace(); takeCare(); }