This summer, the transatlatic culture war has fixated on an unlikely flash point : air-conditioning.
Last weekend, I arrived in Paris at the beginning of the canicule, the heat wave that has stifled the country and much of Europe. Temperatures soared to record-breaking highs, reaching nearly 112 degress Fahrenheit in certain parts of the country.
The toll has been sobering. Several young children died in parked vehicles, and dozens of people drowned in waterways while seeking relief from the heat.
The World Health Organization estimates that more than 175,000 people die from heat-related causes each year across Europe.
Some American commentators seized the moment to lecture Europeans, and perhaps even to indulge in a little schadenfreude. "Just install the AC and save your grandma's life, Euro friends, " the economics writer Noah Smith posted online.
Plenty of Americans seem scandalized that more Western Europeans don't embrace the technological miracle of AC. But the disagreement ultimately has less to do with objective criteria than with subjective questions about what constitutes an acceptable level of physical suffering.
As someone who splits his time between the United States and France, I've seen firsthand how Americans tend to interpret discomfort as a failure of infrastructure, whereas Europeans seem much more willing to regard it as part of life.
For many Parisians who are not physiologically vulnerable, the past week hasn't been nearly as apocalyptic as media accounts have suggested. Parisians have rolled with the heat; it certainly hasn't kept them from carrying on with their lives.
Cares and ice-cream parlors are packed. The roving outdoor Fete de la Musique drew half a million revelers, and men's fashion-week parties have spilled onto the streets.
Traditional French residences were designed to breathe in the summer months. Even if the architiects of my building didn't anticipate global warming, their handiwork, with some minor accommodations, has made the past week bearable.
Like my neighbors, I keep my windows closed behind metal shutters to block out the midday sunlight and open them when there is a breeze in the evening. Living on the ground level, I haven't even felt the need to buy a fan yet.
I wouldn't have noticed there was such a monumental problem had I not been plugged into socila media. Underneath the debate raging online is a fundamental divide about how America and Europe address discomfort.
Americans have grown accustomed to treating physical distress as a challenge of be fixed rather than a state to be endured. This is in keeping with out flattering self-conception as optimizers and pragmatists.
The U.S. has spent decades engineering interior environments, offices, cars, shops, and homes, in which refrigerator-like conditions are standard.
For many Europeans, the ubiquity and frigidity of American air-conditioning play into the perception of Americans as profligate and pampered. The big-box stores that prop their doorways oepn on hot days and blast polar air on passersby are a symbol of perverse excess.
Europeans, by contrast, pride themselves on small but telling displays of thrift: conserving water while washing dishes, wearing extra layers rather than turning up the heat, scraping plates clean at dinner. These are people who still carry memories of war, occupation, and stretches of extreme privation.
Neither side, strictly speaking, is responding to the weather. They seem instead to be drawing on highly different sets of values around consumption, noise, pollution, and the importance of public beauty.
Paris has an aesthetic aversion to window units and rooftop systems, which helps explain why installing air-conditioning typically requires special permission, especially in protected or historic areas. This is, after all, a town where hanging laundry from your windows is illegal.
Such regulations might seem draconian, but they help perserve the city's distinctive appeal.
I find that my own thinking about temperature depends on where I am. In the U.S., i don't hesitate to switch on the AC.
But when I'm ini Paris, there is something satisfying, maybe even a little noble, about withstanding the heat without the help of climate control.
One of Nietzsche's great insights in On the Genealogy of Morals is that pain isn't objective or proportional to external conditions, but rather a matter of perspective and therefore interpretation. This truth holds for individuals and also for societies.
That's why, on one side of the Atlantic, overcooled offices necessitate wearing a fleece in August, while on the other side, too man buildings feel like saunas.
A growing divide has also emerged within Europe. In France, Marine Le Pen's National Rally has opportunistically seized on air-conditioning, portraying it as an urgent quality-of-life issue that moralzing environmentalists have ignored.
As a result, the far right has polarized what should be a nuanced debate.
A middle path is possible, but it will require both sides to stop treating comfort as a moral verdict.
올여름, 대서양을 사이에 둔 문화 전쟁이 뜻밖의 발화점에 꽂혔습니다. 바로 에어컨입니다.
지난 주말, 저는 카니쿨, 즉 프랑스와 유럽 대부분을 짓누른 폭염이 시작될 무렵 파리에 도착했습니다. 기온이 기록적으로 치솟아 일부 지역은 화씨 112도에 육박했습니다.
그 대가는 무거웠습니다. 어린아이 몇 명이 주차된 차에서 숨졌고, 수십 명이 더위를 식히려다 강에서 익사했습니다. 세계 보건기구는 매년 유럽 전역에서 17만 5천 명 이상이 더위 관련 원인으로 사망한다고 추정합니다.
일부 미국 논객들은 이 순간을 잡아 유럽인을 훈계하고, 어쩌면 약간의 샤덴프로이데마저 즐겼습니다. "그냥 에어컨 달고 할머니 생명을 구해라, 유럽 친구들"이라고 경제 칼럼니스트 노아 스미스가 온라인에 올렸죠.
많은 미국인은 서유럽인들이 에어컨이라는 기술의 기적을 받아들이지 않는 데 경악하는 듯합니다. 하지만 이 갈등은 결국 객관적 기준보다는 '무엇이 견딜 만한 신체적 고통인가'라는 주관적 질문과 더 관련이 있습니다.
미국과 프랑스를 오가며 사는 사람으로서, 저는 미국인이 불편함을 인프라의 실패로 해석하는 반면 유럽인은 그것을 삶의 일부로 받아들이려는 태도가 훨씬 강하다는 것을 직접 봐 왔습니다.
신체적으로 취약하지 않은 많은 파리 사람에게 지난 한 주는 언론 보도만큼 종말적이지 않았습니다. 파리 사람들은 더위에 유연하게 적응했고, 더위가 그들의 일상을 막지는 못했습니다.
카페와 아이스크림 가게는 가득 찼습니다. 거리를 누비는 야외 음악 축제는 50만 명의 인파를 끌어모았고, 남성 패션위크 파티는 거리로 흘러넘쳤습니다.