Coffee With Expatriates

Two Americans living abroad meet in a Budapest kávéház, compare notes

Budapest has such great coffee houses. In the 19th and 20th centuries, these were central to the city’s cultural life. Above is a shot of the Cafe Central interior; watch this short clip featuring Central and two other iconic Budapest coffee houses.

You never know who you’re going to meet over coffee in an international city like this one. Normally I take my morning coffee at home, but today I went to a shop about ten minutes away from my apartment. There having coffee sat an American businesswoman in town for work from her home in a western European city. By the looks of things, she’s a Millennial; we started talking, bonding over talking about our kids. She and her husband, also an American, have been living as expats for the past decade.

When I told her I work for a conservative magazine, the conversation got interesting. “I never have considered myself to be a conservative,” she said, “but not long ago, I said to my husband, ‘I’m not a conservative,’ and he laughed, and said, ‘Oh lord, yes you are!’”

She said she is on the left on issues like taxation, health care, and labor unions. But she’s on the right on cultural and social matters — especially once she started having kids. Living in Europe, where nearly everybody agrees that the social welfare state in some form is worth having, has made it easier to identify with the Right, she explained, than it is back home in the US. She’s basically a conservative Democrat … but we don’t have many of those any more. I told her about my book Crunchy Cons, and we agreed that the best society is one that makes it easier for family life to flourish, even if that chaps the backsides of doctrinaire libs and doctrinaire cons.

She went on to talk about how very different the corporate culture is in Europe than in the US. For example, she said, in her office, there are two out gay people — a man and a woman, both natives of the country where she lives (one of the more liberal ones, for the record). Last year, during Pride Month, they were asked by the firm if they would be willing to record a video for corporate communications telling their Coming Out stories. Both refused, saying they didn’t see what business it was of the company to ask for something so personal.

In her new country, said the American expat, gay people are … just gay. They don’t parade it, or make a big thing of it. She said her gay co-workers wanted to live in a society where homosexuality was no big deal, and if they wanted to have a same-sex partner, that would be fine, and nobody would much care. They have that now. They’re satisfied.

We got to talking about how weird America looks from afar, with American cultural obsessions. She said — and I’ve heard a version of this from several Americans I’ve met in the two years I’ve lived in Budapest off and on — that being away from the US since around the beginning of the Great Awokening has been a startling experience. Though her opinions on most cultural matters were conventionally center-left when she left America, she now finds herself moved to the Right — though she hasn’t really moved at all. She’s just anti-woke — she’s a free speech liberal, and a color-blind liberal, etc. — and tells me that she feels weirdly displaced when she goes back home.

We ended by talking about how strange it is to live abroad and to recognize what a cultural behemoth the United States is, in ways that we could not have appreciated until we had this experience. I told her that I had always thought of the United States as generally a force for good in the world, and that it was not only shocking, but kind of painful to discover that it ain’t necessarily so.

“You’ll find if you live in Central Europe that the US government, and American corporations, are bullies towards these people, who are not on board with the latest iteration of cultural progressivism,” I told her.

She agreed, telling me a story about either herself or a friend, can’t remember which, living in a post-communist country that had been part of the Soviet empire, and being amazed at all these useless left-wing NGOs, many of them with government funding, who are there to turn the people of that country into good Western progressives. She said, “The people there needed things like better housing, fresh water, things like that, but the NGOs were all about the kinds of things that interest American liberals.”

Left unsaid was that American liberals used to be about bringing better housing, fresh water, and things like that to poor people around the world … until they started caring more about race, sex, and gender.

I told her that as a conservative of a certain age, I’m not used to thinking about my country in this way, but from the point of view of moral and religious conservatives in Central Europe, America really has become a source of corruption — and given our unparalleled power, both economically and culturally, it is very hard to resist. I try to tell folks over here that moral and religious conservatives back in the US agree with them, and feel equally powerless in the face of the forces that dominate American culture. But it can be difficult to challenge the idea that America is a monolith. The only contact most of them have with America is through popular culture, or in their companies, if they work for European branches of American ones. We Americans come across as sanctimonious bullies to a lot of them.

I’m sure that was the case in many countries back when I was a younger conservative (though not the ones suffering under Communism), but I didn’t see it, because I thought we stood pretty much for the Good. Now, in my view, we don’t, but the woke think we do, and are unconflicted about their self-appointed mission to civilize the unwoke barbarians. It has been humbling to live abroad and to see firsthand how we Americans use our power. I can’t say that I’ve run into any outright anti-Americanism, but that is probably because I’m living in a former Communist country, where there is a LOT of residual positivity about America, for what we used to stand for. But that also makes the sense of disillusionment so many of the Central Europeans have about America so poignant. They wonder where the America they used to love and respect went. I tell them that a lot of us Americans wonder the same thing.

Another interesting thing we talked about: how crazy American culture is about not being able to tolerate silence. She said she had to go a couple of years back to the US embassy in her country to have her passport renewed. When she went into the waiting room, there were flat screens mounted on the walls, blaring American cable news. “It really did feel like being back in America,” she said, in an uncomplimentary way.

I told her that this is one of the nicer things I’ve found about living in Europe: that people generally still believe that public spaces don’t have to be filled with canned music or television broadcasts. I told her how crazy-making it is to go to the doctor’s office in the US, and to have TVs mounted on the wall, being loud. And how people are now starting to take their phones out in public places like waiting rooms, and to watch videos and TV shows without headphones, as if nobody else in the world existed but them.

Reflecting on the noise going on in people’s heads all the time, my interlocutor said, “No wonder Americans are losing our minds. We can’t think.”

About the kids, we laughed discovering that we had something in common with our parents (her kids are still young, mine aren’t, so this was in the past for us): grandparents showering the grandkids with gifts, even if the parents ask them not to be so generous. We were talking about how cramped it can be living in a small big city apartment with kids. I told her about how my wife and me had to plead with both sets of grandparents, back when we lived in New York City, and were new parents, to stop sending so many gifts. For one, we didn’t want to spoil our child, and for another, we simply didn’t have room for any of it. Both sets of grandparents were really offended by the request, and took it personally, no matter how much we pleaded with them. My mom even protested that it was her “right” to give her grandson as much as she wanted to.

The businesswoman nodded vigorously, saying she and her husband had the same struggle with their parents back in the US. It only stopped when they made clear that they were having to pay customs duty on all the stuff the American grands sent over.

We got to talking about why grandparents these days do that. It turns out that we both know other parents of our generations who have had the same problem. It’s definitely a First World Problem — but it’s still a problem if you’re trying to raise your children to be more restrained in a world of material abundance.

I told her that when my kids were younger, my mom and dad, as well as my sister, though my wife and I were super-weird because we were strict about not letting our kids eat too much junk food, and about the TV they watched. It wasn’t like we were super-Puritans or anything. It’s just that we thought there should be sensible limits on consumption of food and consumption of television — especially given that TV programming these days, particularly children’s TV, is so contrary to our moral beliefs. Julie and I tried to be very, very sensitive about saying this to my family when we would visit in years past, but they thought we were snobs.

Yep, said the businesswoman, I get that too from my sister. She has the full panoply of cable TV channels, and lets the thing run constantly. Her kids can watch whatever they want — and she looks down on my husband and me for putting restrictions on our kids.

We could have talked all morning, but I had to go. I find myself wondering this afternoon about that last point: about why so many Americans, even conservative ones, get really angry at others who don’t share their permissiveness towards letting kids use electronic devices, or eat junk food. I could certainly understand if the more ascetic moms and dads were being snippy and judgey about it, trying to tell others what to do. But this is a kind of reverse snobbery. Where does it come from? I’ve heard about it from too many people to think it’s rare. I guess I’m used to the concept of social pressure coming down from parents and grandparents to be stricter — but not to be more permissive. Is this an American thing, or do people in other countries experience this too? What are the roots of the phenomenon?

This must be related: back in the 2000s, when my wife, kids and I lived away, and we would go visit my folks a couple of times a year, I would eventually have to ask them to turn off the TV so we could talk. The TV would be going, but nobody would be watching it, because we were all trying to have a discussion. My wife and I found it very hard to follow the discussion, because we weren’t used to the TV being on while people were trying to talk. We had a TV, but we only turned it on when we chose to watch a movie or a program. Consequently, we had gotten out of the habit of being able to filter conversation out from background noise. When it got to the point when I was getting a headache from having to concentrate, I would sheepishly and politely ask if we could turn the TV off while we were talking, hyperaware that I did not want to give offense. They always did, but with a hard look, as if I had offended them by the request.

Where does that come from? What do you think? It was as if we were guilty of sinning against the Ethic Of Consumption, or something. I honestly don’t understand it. I’d love to know what you think. Let’s talk about it in the comments boxes.

Caryll Houselander & The Homing Toad

My late friend Tom Sullivan was a faithful Catholic who had a terrific sense of gift-giving. He once gave me a copy of Divine Eccentric, a book about the English Catholic convert Caryll Houselander — the only gift book of Tom’s that I never read, because I left it behind by accident in one of my many moves that decade. Houselander lived and wrote in the first half of the twentieth century. This essay by Josh Hochschild in Commonweal, about Houselander, makes me want to check out what dear Tom saw in her. I love this passage about her final book, which was not well received, it seems, but which sounds really interesting to me:

The central idea of Guilt is one that Houselander had explored in almost all her previous writing: the spiritual significance of psychological suffering, especially that suffering made acute in modern life. Here the focus is on a particular “disease of the soul” she calls “ego-neurosis,” and the risk she took is that Christian spirituality can address problems that scientific psychology has helped to identify: “The whole object of this book is to show that it is man’s destiny to be ‘a Christ.’”

The theme of guilt was not new. In This War Is the Passion she had written, “The only complexity about guilt is the fact that it is not the guilty but the innocent who are most humiliated by the sense of it. God knows, there is tragedy enough through the wrong sense of guilt, but there is surely a vocation also to feel guilty, to feel guilty for all those who are guilty and don’t feel it.” In that book too she had written about how gloomy, bitter people can reduce others’ happiness: “The way one suffers must make the world either sadder or happier, one or the other it must do. By suffering badly I add to the common burden, by suffering well I lighten it, and that only on the natural plane.”

The central argument of Guilt is to distinguish the ego-neurotic from the saint. Both experience suffering, but the one resists and fears it, while the other submits willingly. Willingness to suffer is “the key to natural happiness,” and a gateway to holiness: “Not the explanation of sanctity, but...the explanation of the sanity of the saints.” The ego-neurotic, by contrast, is confused about suffering and sanctity. Rather than integrating personality, opening to experience, and strengthening love, suffering gives the ego-neurotic an unbalanced personality, impoverished experience, and a weakened capacity to love. The tragic result of misreading suffering’s signal is to be “haunted by a deep inward humiliation...a profound doubt of [one’s] own potency as a human being.”

Clearly Houselander had met, and helped to heal, some profoundly wounded people, and she herself had experienced some of the crippling effects of “ego-neurosis.” As a spiritual poet, she even struck on a disarming but powerful image for the suffering soul: “At the heart of every fallen man there dwells a homing toad.” The homing toad is “a most moving animal, as beautiful as he is grotesque, and...a symbol of mankind.” No matter how far he is taken from home, he will struggle his way back, as the soul is always looking to be reunited with God.

Now man, however evil he becomes, however twisted and grotesque—however far away guilt takes him from God, from his home, the environment in which he can regain the true shape of his manhood—always reveals the struggle, innate in him, to get back. He really wants to be in the Light of God, in his proper home, and even in the twists and contortions that he goes through in his abnormalities, even in his insanities, it is obvious that he is striving, without his knowledge, even without his will, to get back.

With the image of the homing toad, Houselander seeks to tune the signal of suffering, invoking both admiration and pity, noble reverence and merciful compassion.

That’s me: a homing toad, who only realized after much migration and much suffering, that the only true home for any of us is in God.

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