European Envy

Europeans love to dismiss Americans as being dumb. True, many Americans are dumb; sometimes unbelievably so (just check out the stuff on TV). But there are also many super-smart guys, both in the pure sciences as well as in the world of business and engineering. A.A.Gill did the math(s):

“America has more Nobel Prizes than Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and Russia combined.”

And then there have been companies like Ford, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook that have invented whole new worlds at varying times in history.

I guess America has the smartest and the dumbest. Europeans don’t like shades of grey; they like to stereotype entire groups of people. And not just in recent times. Gill again:

“It was Camus who sniffily said that only in America could you be a novelist without being an intellectual.”

Europeans accuse Americans of not knowing satire or irony. Gill dismisses that as Euro love for indirect techniques of communication:

“What Americans value and strive for is straight talking, plain saying. They don’t go in for ambiguity or dissembling, the etiquette of hidden meaning, the skill of the socially polite lie.”

Many Americans respond to such Euro criticism with the famous “If it weren’t for us, they’d all be speaking German” argument. Gill asks us to add Russian to that line:

“More than that, more shaming and hypocritical than that, these are people who collectively owe their nations’ and their personal freedom to American intervention and protection in wars, both hot and cold.”

And despite the contempt, Europeans do what Nassim Taleb wrote in The Black Swan:

“Yet the person making these statements is likely to be addicted to his iPod, wear blue jeans, and use Microsoft Word to jot down his "cultural" statements on his PC, with some Google searches here and there interrupting his composition. Well, it so happens that America is currently far, far more creative than these nations of museumgoers and equation solvers.”

(This was a few years back, so you could replace “iPod” with “iPhone and “PC” with “iPad”…which, by the way, are Yankee inventions!).

So is all this just European envy of a country “built out of Europe’s ideas, Europe’s understanding, aesthetic, morality, assumptions, and laws” that went on to overtake the teacher in pretty much every field?