Europe loses its mind.

Almost all of my adult life I have been a Europhile. I lived in Europe for the better part of 11 years, and considered myself lucky, because the thing I cherish most--good, informed intellectual conversation with people who know a lot about history and enjoy talking politics and philosophy--was better there. Intellectuals were more appreciated in Europe. Even though we lived in miserable apartments in Italy for several years, without heat or hot water in a fifth-floor walkup that was hell to reach if you had a baby carriage in one hand, the groceries in the other, and the baby strapped to your back, I enjoyed high social status because I was a "professor."

All this flowed automatically from well-established European convictions. Culture was important. The best ideas came from cultured people. Therefore the things that cultured people did, like writing books or composing music or designing buildings, were treated with appreciation and respect.

In contrast, American intellectual life seemed less interesting during the 1960s and '70s. Certainly conversation was much less challenging. Most Americans didn't know beans about history, even their own. Virtually no one in the United States knew anything serious about the stuff I was working on--Italian fascism and other nasty mass movements. Europe was my real home, the place I went for cultural nourishment, for intellectual stimulation, and for imaginative political thinking.

Today, all that has changed. Now, conversation is much better in America. Intellectual creativity is incomparably greater. Both the number and the variety of truly stimulating magazines--the favorite medium of intellectuals--are far greater here than in Europe.

But even without the comparison to the United States, with all its current dynamism in the life of the mind, the European intellectual scene has become almost unbelievably boring. Talks with European intellectuals often bring nothing but whining and self-justification. Though Americans are now concerned about anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and other unhappy aspects of European culture, these are not new developments. What is new and troubling is that Europeans have gone brain dead. There is no energy there, no spark of imagination, none of the intellectual playfulness I found when I first set foot on the continent in the mid 1960s.

Out of the last 50 Nobel winners in physics and chemistry, only 12 were Europeans. European novelists defined contemporary literature for decades, but no more. European movies used to put Hollywood to shame. Now European flicks are rarely worth watching; even Iranian movies are better. Most of the European press has lost any semblance of independence, having long since surrendered to the enforcers of political correctness and sold its soul for invitations to the best dinner parties and unmerited awards from one another.

The resurgence of European chauvinism and other ugliness is closely related to the collapse of Old-World intellectualism. It's as if the only way Europeans can assert themselves is by embracing the excesses of previous generations. There is a growing sense of inferiority among Europeans--an accurate recognition that Europe counts for much less than it used to.