A Decadent Nobel A prize for soft moralism.
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OPINION: WONDER LAND OCTOBER 14, 2009, 7:54 P.
M.
ET
By DANIEL HENNINGER
A Decadent Nobel
A prize for soft moralism.
So Donald Rumsfeld was right about Old Europe.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has taken it in the neck for awarding this year s Peace Prize to a nine-month old
American presidency.
There s been much mockery of pencil-necked Norwegian academics in faraway Oslo.
This is
unfair.
The committee said it chose Barack Obama for his "vision of .
.
.
a world without nuclear weapons" and for "meeting
the great climatic challenges the world is confronting.
" I d say that completes the argument over old and new Europe.
This is a Nobel of decadence.
Let s be clear.
This decadence isn t primarily about Roman Polanski or Silvio Berlusconi s playboy club or French
culture minister Frederic Mitterrand s adventures in Thailand.
Though these are not irrelevant.
This Nobel is about political decadence.
"Decadence," an enduring word, emerged from the Latin "de-cadere," which means "to fall down.
" Decadence stripped
bare means decay.
The unanswered question at the center of this odd Nobel is whether Barack Obama admires Old Europe for the same
reasons it admires him.
When it was a vibrant garden of ideas, Europe gave the world more good things than one can count.
Then it discovered
the pleasures of the welfare state.
Old Europe now lives in a world of unpayable public pension obligations, weak job creation for its youngest workers,
below-replacement birth rates, fat agricultural subsidies for farms dating to the Middle Ages, high taxes to pay for the
public high-life, and history s most crucial proof of decay—the inability to finance one s armies.
Only five of the 28
nations in NATO (the U.
K.
, France, Turkey, Greece and Spain) achieve the minimum defense-spending benchmark of
2% of GDP.
The effect of arriving at a state of political decadence, of no longer being able to rise in the world, is that many people
increasingly discover that soft moralism is a more congenial pastime than producing answers for the hard questions.
As when David Cameron, the Tory leader and likely next British prime minister wonders: "The insatiable consumption
and materialism of the past decade; has it made us happier or more fulfilled?"
This isn t to say that soft moralism is about nothing.
But when matters such as climate change become life s primary
concerns, it means one is going to spend more time preaching, which is easy, than doing, which is hard.
One thinks of
Nobelist Al Gore s unstoppable sermons.
Among the hardest questions Europe faced after World War II was the placement of anti-Soviet Pershing missiles on
Europe s soil in 1983.
Led by Helmut Kohl and Maggie Thatcher, Europe did something hard: It overcame its pacifists.
A decade later, with the siege of Sarajevo, old Europe came to understand that making the hardest decisions was now
beyond its reach.
Current hard questions include Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Darfur is a hard question.
Where to hold captured terrorists
is a hard question.
Henninger: A Decadent Nobel - WSJ.
com http://online.
wsj.
com/article/SB100014240527487041072045744735.
.
.
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