Sort Yourself Out, America

Today I went to a very interesting meeting at my university. It was put together by a few different groups, mostly the honors college, but also a few other groups. The stated purpose was to attempt to ignite a discussion on the issues America faces. The message was: America has problems. They're not the biggest problems we ever faced—Civil War, anyone?--but they're more complicated than the past issues we've had to confront. Meanwhile, the country's political discourse is pretty ill-equipped to deal with these problems. I'm not really sure on what they're endgame is here, but I think I can appreciate the sentiment of what they're trying to do.

The main event was a speech by the president of my university and former governor/senator from Oklahoma, David Boren. Dude's a pretty cool guy, I have to say. Anyway, much of his speech revolved around the idea of the decline of America. He says that eight years ago he was interviewing Rhodes Scholars candidates, and asked them how long they thought America would remain the dominant power in the world, or even a dominant power. Most of them stammered through answers that amounted, essentially, to “forever.” Fast-forward to this semester, he asked his government class (President Boren teaches a freshman government class every semester. Like I said, cool guy.) the same question. The answers ranged from fifteen years to fifty, but the average was about twenty-five. His case is that we've gone from being complacently optimistic to paralyzingly pessimistic, which reminds me of a speech I once wrote in high school. (See, he agrees with me. COOLEST GUY EVER.)

You know, I have some skepticism of these sorts of predictions, where someone inevitably trots out statistics on China's GDP or how many thousands of engineers graduated in India last year. First of all, many of them seem to miss the point of diminishing returns. Obviously China and India are having massive growth—they're at the beginning of a logistic growth curve. The creation of a modern economic and scientific infrastructure entails growth of a magnitude that just doesn't happen in places where we're working with infrastructures already in place. The other problem I have is that, far too often, these discussions frame the growth of Asian economies as a bad thing intrinsically. The fact that a growth in China's GDP means that millions of peasants could be potentially lifted into better lives in the middle class isn't really something to mourn, in my book. (I'm aware that China, as a country, is hardly a humanist paradigm. Those specifics are not really the point.)

That said, I am an American, and I'll probably live here for most of my life. (要是我不能，我准被。）I like America, really, as my previous posts should make clear. So I do recognize the concern that the growth of other countries could post a threat to the ability of America to remain the place it is today. (The good aspects of America, that is. Obviously, the place it is today isn't perfect either.) While I'm optimistic about America's future, I do think some changes in culture are necessary to actually ensure that future:

1) American exceptionalism. This is the idea that America is intrinsically special or has a particular destiny, and it needs to die. If it's true, it's only true in a very trivial sense—America is special and unique, yes, but so is Canada, so is Mexico, so is Poland, etc. The responses of those Rhodes Scholars who stammered into “forever” were born fundamentally from the fact that the last two or three generations of Americans have grown up in a world in which America seemed exceptional by default. American prosperity didn't just happen, and it won't continue just happening without active maintenance. A sense of entitlement or predestination kills any motivation towards that maintenance.

2) Anti-intellectualism. I really do think this is among the most poisonous cultural attitude available. Like some sort of memetic Borg Collective, it has a remarkable in-built ability to inoculate itself against attack. Any serious political discourse requires argument, evidence, reasoning, and the like—but anti-intellectualism specifically denies those foundations, the result being that it represents a position impossible to attack because it is its own counterargument. More and more, we run on sound bite and unsubstantiated assertion. Emotional arguments are terrifically resilient to actual arguments. Usually, I'm a pretty pro-Internet guy, but sometimes I think that this is because I use it very different than everyone else. If you're not into blogging, forums, and other things of that nature, much of your Internet communication could fall into the stereotype of being short and laughably superficial. Twitter doesn't really represent an actual forum for political discourse, at least not on its own. Neither do Facebook statuses. Now, both of these are useful services (even if Facebook's kind of a dick about privacy) but none of them offer what we really need. Another aspect of anti-intellectualism is a devaluing of education, which is especially dangerous. We need education to be valued, not just to encourage people to become educated, but because we need people to become educators. I know lots and lots of smart people who are good with people. Few to none are planning on going into teaching. There's no money in it, after all. At the college level, we keep seeing tuition hikes due to cuts in education funding. This is...troubling, to say the least.

As I said, I'm an optimist. Deep down, I trust that the future in general will turn out alright—and if it doesn't, I feel fairly confident in my personal ability to keep my own head above water. (Optimism and narcissism are a great combination, really, I can't recommend it enough.) But I'll admit that the country faces serious issues—far too serious to be dealt with in a blog post of this size. The above issues, though, represent a starting point—the key memes that have to be rooted out and dealt with before the country can make serious progress.