[BRIEF NOTE] Why I Hate George Weigel

[rfmcdonald]

This post was made in reaction to George Weigel's commentary "The Spiritual Malaise That Haunts Europe," in case anyone's wondering.

• He manages to reduce a debate over transatlantic policy differences to Good America versus Bad Europe. I'm so tired of this argument and its reverse, have I mentioned?


• He displays the fetishistic concern of American neoconservatives with European fertility rates, which are so low as to signal Europe's decadence. Yes, that's what they mean.


• He doesn't notice that laic France has the highest fertility rate in Europe, closely followed by the agnostic United Kingdom. Will the Europe of 2100 be majority French? Wait and see.


• He introduces a new and ill-defined term of "spiritual boredom" (only a couple of hundred hits on Google) without bothering to define it for his readership. He doesn't explain why it would discourage people from being politically active, and says nothing at all about why these supposedly apolitical European countries have (for instance) rather higher voter-participation rates than the United States.


• He displays the fetishistic concern of American neoconservatives with Muslim fertility rates, which are so high as to signal Islam's decadence. Neoconservatives, you might notice by now, are quite concerned with the number of children born to people of other cultural backgrounds--shades of Ceaucescu?


• He assumes that Muslims and Islam are more resistant to the lures of Western popular culture and secular hedonism than Christians and Christianity. He's still saying this about Poland, which (he hopes) will reevangelize the European continent the same way that Québec was supposed to energize Catholicism in North America a half-century ago. His child-like faith is amusing.