A growing number of Americans are beginning to wonder why Europe has leaped ahead of the U.S. to become the most environmentally advanced political space in the world today. To understand why Europe has left America behind in the race to create a sustainable society, we need to look at the very different dreams that characterize the American and European frame of mind.
Ask Americans what they most admire about the U.S.A. and they will likely cite the individual opportunity to get ahead-at least until recently. The American Dream is based on a simple but compelling covenant: Anyone, regardless of the station to which they are born, can leverage a good public education, determination and hard work to become a success in life. We can go from "rags to riches."
Ask a European what they most admire about Europe and they will invariably say "the quality of life." Eight out of 10 Europeans say they are happy with their lives and when asked what they believe to be the most important legacy of the 20th century, 58 percent of Europeans picked their quality of life, putting it second only to freedom in a list of 11 legacies.
While the American Dream emphasizes individual success, the European Dream emphasizes collective well-being. The reason for this lies in the divergent histories of the two continents. America's founders came over from Europe 200 years ago in the waning days of the Protestant Reformation and the early days of the European Enlightenment. They took these two streams of European thought, froze them in time, and kept them alive in their purest form until today. Americans are the most devoutly Christian and Protestant people in the industrial world and the fiercest champions of the capitalist marketplace and the nation-state.
Both the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment emphasized the central role of the individual in history. John Calvin exhorted the faithful that every person stands alone with their God. Adam Smith, in turn, argued that every individual pursues their own self interest in the marketplace. This individualist strain fit the American context far better than it did the European setting. In a wide-open frontier, every new immigrant did indeed stand alone and had to secure their survival with little or no social supports. Americans, even today, are taught by their parents that to be free they must learn to be self-sufficient and independent, and that they cannot depend on others.
Europeans, however, never fully bought the idea of the individual alone in the universe. Europe was already densely populated and without a frontier by the late 18th century. Walled cities and tightly packed human settlement demanded a more communal way of life. While Americans defined freedom in terms of individual autonomy and mobility, Europeans defined freedom by their communal relationships. ...
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