In a recent Atlantic article, James Fallows attempts to answer an age-old and essentially American question, that is, “Can America Rise Again?” With deft insight gained from years of experience writing on technology and foreign policy in places like China, Japan and Europe, Mr. Fallows reacquaints us with the tradition of doom and gloom predictions of American decline, in both our popular expression and our politics – to edifying effect, to be sure.
The article points out a lot about what’s wrong with this country and usefully points the way toward fixing our many troubling troubles. The long and short of Fallows’ argument is, in my view, that American exceptionalism is alive and well, for a number of compelling reasons. Whatever else is wrong, we still live in the kind of cultural environment that is the envy of the world, our universities turn out techies and thinkers who can innovate at a higher more flexible level than any in the world and our private economy can still create opportunities so that a middle-class standard of living is reasonably attainable. The big whatever else that’s wrong is that our politics are antiquated – cases in point, the two-party system and the Electoral College – and structurally the Constitution is difficult to amend, leaving us plenty of time to dicker over grain subsidies, useless weapons systems, bridges to nowhere, don’t ask/don’t tell and school prayer while, according the American Society of Civil Engineers, one out of every four bridges is, “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” And that’s just the start of it.
If there is any reason to look forward with hope, it may lie in the underlying optimism of Mr. Fallows’ prescription for the polity and society, but we may very well be undermined by our exceptionally American way of finding more effective ways to solve problems that don’t need to be solved – in other words, the over-reliance on better tactics rather than sound strategic thinking.
One point the article brings up is that back in the “Contract On America” days, Newt Gingrich and his gang abolished the Office of Technology Assessment (established during the Nixon Administration; sometimes you just have to hand it to Nixon). The OTA was something like the Congressional Budget Office and helped to steer technical advancements into the marketplace as American creations before they got gobbled up by some other world power. Without that key agency, even if we have the capability to say, set up a network of electric car refilling stations across the country, we have no central office charged with figuring out how to implement the solution. We’d rather let the invisible hand that doesn’t exist direct the market, straight into second place in technical development.
From the way we fight our wars to the way we power our homes, perhaps the only way for the U.S. to remain a viable, vibrant hope for the world is for each and every one of us to find a fundamentally new way of thinking about our lives. We cannot continue to live only in the moment and cope with issues as they arise ad hoc, willy-nilly, and most significantly only for ourselves. All the little fixes we’ve come up with for managing our devices and data, scheduling our time, robbing Peter and skimming off Paul’s payment, all these stalls and hedges against making the tough choices we know we must make together are a symptom of focusing mainly on alleviating our immediate pains, rather than strategically mapping out a plan for the continued health of America as a society, a beacon to the world, and a really good idea (however flawed in its current execution).
To sum up, the way forward through history is marked by periods of crisis in which truly great societies somehow collectively force themselves to commit to great works of imagination and inspiration (rebuilding Europe after WWII or going to the Moon) whose fruits will be mostly realized by some future generation and not so much in our lifetimes. Our lifetimes are so very short, even with an average of 75 years allotted to most nowadays, we choose at our own peril to spend all our energies on today’s comfort over our posterity’s. So much so that poetic justice might just prevail and give us nothing but dystopia as a reward for having so diligently feathered our nests and building so many houses of cards on so many foundations of quicksand.
End. Rev1 7.01 pm, 06 February 2010, Brooklyn© David Mark Speer
Saturday, February 6, 2010
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