Each country has its talents; Italy has a talent for beauty. This attribute is not easily measurable: no online graphic can illustrate it. Still, it is palpable, and an architect's cultural work in an ancient Afghan town seemed to me part of a particular Italian disposition.

The modern world does not like such particularities. The rapid movement across borders of capital, goods, labor, technologies and ideas — the thing we call globalization — is a process of accelerated convergence. It brings many welcome things, among them opportunity and cheap goods; it also stirs unease because its stamp is sameness and its pre-eminent criterion efficiency.

This unease has been evident in Europe of late. French youth, invoking revolution in the cause of stability, spent weeks in the street to protest and ultimately overturn a law that would have given them jobs at the price of losing existing guarantees against the abrupt termination of employment.

The proposal smacked too much of "precariousness" for the French. That is to say, it smacked too much of the market, of capitalism, of globalization, for it is in the nature of all these things to be changeable, dynamic and ultimately precarious. They opted, in short, for security over risk, a choice many Americans find puzzling.