The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity (35 page)

What, then, are the real barriers to political change? Of course, the current vested interests will continue to fight fiercely for power and privilege. Wealth can certainly defend itself aggressively, through media power, financial largesse through lobbying and campaign financing, and more nefarious means. We had a taste of that power in 2008, when the banks not only won their bailouts but also got the White House and Congress to turn a blind eye to the continuation of outlandish bonuses even in the midst of the storm.

Alternatively, the anger of the Tea Party could presage a much more explosive environment of street unrest, but it is hard to envision the middle-aged and elderly Tea Partiers at the barricades! Or the economy could deteriorate to the point of creating a downward spiral of rising budget deficits, a deepening political crisis, and yet further deficits. That’s the path that leads to hyperinflations and defaults on government debt. Such disasters are more frequent than we in the United States tend to realize. Thank goodness, we’ve never experienced such an upheaval, at least since the Revolutionary War and Civil War. I’ve helped to clean up hyperinflation in many other countries, however. Fortunately we’re not close to that now, but another five to ten years of drift could certainly bring us closer to the fiscal cliff. One recalls the dark joke in the waning days of the Soviet collapse: “Comrades, we were at the edge of the cliff, and we’ve just taken a giant step forward!” A few more tax cuts for the rich, and we’ll be in a position to say the same.

Real change will not come easily because there is so little consensus
on the way forward. America may well continue to choose very badly, for example by cutting taxes further despite the gaping deficits or continuing to reject decisive action on climate change because of the poor economic conditions. Politics, alas, is filled with “positive feedbacks,” meaning in essence that one damn thing leads to another, with each disaster causing the next. In recent years, the outsourcing of government services to incompetent and corrupt contractors has led to repeated failures, leading to more criticism of government and then, ironically, to still more outsourcing! The collapse of government becomes, in essence, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

All this means that it’s extremely difficult to get on the right track. Yet it’s certainly possible. The actual solutions are within reach and require only moderate changes of course. And the pace of change accelerates these days because the spread of ideas is so much faster than in the past. What seems outlandish and impossible one moment becomes mainstream and inevitable the next.

Eyes on the Prize

When short-term navigating is so difficult, the key is to keep one’s eyes on the long-term prize. We spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about the latest wiggle in consumer confidence, industrial production, or new orders. Great fortunes are made and lost depending on who can guess better, even when little can really be done about the economy’s short-term meanderings. A far better use of our time would be to maintain long-term focus on the issues that will have mattered decisively when we look back after a quarter century. I believe that four issues will prove to be decisive for America and its place in the world: education, environment, geopolitics, and diversity.

The first decisive issue will be education. The path to national prosperity, life satisfaction, and sustainability in the twenty-first century will depend heavily on education, and especially on a large
proportion of today’s young Americans being able to complete higher education, albeit a higher education that has been fashioned to fit the needs of our times. The labor-market data tell the brutal truth: low-skilled workers are either scraping by in near poverty or failing to find work altogether. There is almost no chance today of securing a well-remunerated career without a college degree or its equivalent in vocational training. Low-skilled jobs are being filled by recent immigrants prepared to accept wages a cut above those of their home countries, replaced by outsourcing, or eliminated by reengineering the jobs away entirely using advanced information technology. Young people know these facts and are prepared to go deeply into debt to achieve a higher degree. Yet steeply rising tuition and onerous borrowing terms have led to epidemics of dropouts or limited enrollment in the first place.

One of the bright spots in education is the potential, still in its early days, for information technology to transform the educational process, making it more effective and accessible to all. More and more curricula can be found online; more and more distance learning can link disparate parts of the world together. Each Tuesday morning at Columbia University I have the joy of participating in a “global classroom” with twenty campuses around the world linked via Internet-based videoconferencing into a global discussion of sustainable development. As the discussion bounces from Beijing to Ibadan, Nigeria, to Antananarivo, Madagascar, to New York City, the thrill of global problem solving comes to life for hundreds of young people around the world. If anyone is equipped to carry this technological potential forward, it is today’s Millennials and their younger brothers and sisters!

The second decisive issue will be environment. Today the issues of climate change, water scarcity, resource depletion, and biodiversity seem like special problems that can be relegated to the Sunday talk shows and newspaper science sections. Within a generation, and probably much sooner, these will loom as the largest challenges facing the planet. The world is headed over the cliff, exceeding or
soon to exceed the safe global boundaries on countless ecological fronts: greenhouse gas emissions, pollution from nitrogen-based and phosphorus-based fertilizers, water scarcity, habitat destruction, and much more.
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The United States will experience water stress in the Midwest, drought in the Southwest, extreme weather events in many parts of the country but most seriously the hurricane-impacted Gulf Coast, hypoxic zones in the estuaries, and profound coastal erosion and threats from rising sea levels. The vulnerability of the poorer countries is likely to be far worse, with at least some experiencing violent conflict as a result of encroaching droughts, floods, and other climate-induced calamities.
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Once again, social networking and the promise of new IT technologies will make a profound difference. Mobile telephony and wireless broadband are already making possible new breakthroughs in environmental surveillance (soil mapping, drought monitoring, discovery of deforestation and illegal fishing, crop estimation, tracking of population movements and disease transmission, and much more) and disaster response. The IT revolution created the new globalization; it can lead to the “new sustainability” as well. Once again, Millennials will take the lead in these breakthrough prospects.

The third decisive issue is geopolitics. No matter what success the United States has in recovering its dynamism and vitality in the years ahead, it is almost inevitable (barring global catastrophe) that America’s relative economic position will decline. We are, I have stressed repeatedly, in the age of convergence, in which the emerging economies have the prospect of decades of economic growth that is more rapid than that of their high-income counterparts. The United States currently represents around 20 percent of gross world product (GWP), measured in purchasing-power-adjusted dollars. That is likely to decline by midcentury to perhaps 10 to 12 percent of GWP, with China and India both being larger in absolute size than the United States, though still with roughly half of its per capita GDP.
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Managing the shifting relations of leading and upcoming major powers has never been easy. The competition between the United
Kingdom and Germany in the first years of the twentieth century played a major role in Germany’s launch of World War I. Similarly, the competition among Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France in Europe, and between the United States and Japan in Asia, contributed to World War II. The potential dangers must therefore be understood and consistently averted. This will tax our diplomacy, patience, and capacity to cooperate to the maximum degree.

The fourth and greatest area of challenge, implicated in all of the first three, is managing diversity. This challenge seems to be humanity’s hardest task of all. The great religions all preach the universal brotherhood of humanity, but they also simultaneously warn against the perfidy of the nonbeliever, the “other,” the heathen. This duality—the capacity both to cooperate and to segregate—probably has its roots in the deepest recesses of our psyches. It most likely reflects, after all, the deepest evolutionary forces that have shaped our species: the urge to care for our young and our in-group and the need to defend our young and our turf from other clans.

Whatever the deeper neurochemistry, humans have a profound ability both to cooperate and nurture and to shun others and fight.
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In our advanced technological age, with the capacity of our weapons to end human life, our ability to master our baser emotions and channel them toward constructive and cooperative outcomes will provide the basis for our survival. Like all of the challenges described in this book, this, too, will require unerring mindfulness. The Buddhist teaching of compassion—the training to treat all other sentient beings as objects of our care—is smart not only for our long-term mental well-being, but also for our ability to avoid self-destruction.

The challenge of diversity will be front and center of every policy and crisis, domestic and international, in the decades ahead. We have arrived at a global society, but with the clannish instincts inherited from the tropical savanna. Or, as E. O. Wilson put it inimitably in his foreword to my book
Common Wealth
, “We exist in a
bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology. That, in a nutshell, is how we have lurched into the early twenty-first century.”
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John F. Kennedy and his counselor and speechwriter, Theodore Sorensen, were America’s greatest exemplars of an exacting mental discipline and empathy in the quest for global survival in the midst of diversity and conflict. Kennedy was president at the height of the Cold War, when tensions and tactics nearly led the world to mutual annihilation in the Cuban missile crisis. In his reasoning and his coaxing of his fellow Americans, Kennedy invariably bade us to respect our competitors, in his time the Soviet people, and to consider carefully how they might perceive, and dangerously misunderstand, any provocative actions on our part.

The core of the Kennedy-Sorensen message was consistent: that our common humanity made it possible to find common cause in the midst of competition and that peace depended on our own virtue and ethical behavior. As Kennedy put it in his famous “Peace Speech” at American University in June 1963:

“When a man’s ways please the Lord,” the Scriptures tell us, “he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.” And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights—the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation—the right to breathe air as nature provided it—the right of future generations to a healthy existence?
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Kennedy’s virtue in pursuing peace was evident to his Soviet counterparts, led by Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev. Upon hearing Kennedy’s words, Khrushchev quickly responded with his desire to pursue peace as well. A few weeks later, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed, setting the world on a far safer course. It is a great lesson in mindfulness that will inspire us for generations to come.

The Next Steps

The great role must now be played by each of us, as citizens, family members, and members of our society. For several decades now, money has trumped votes; expediency has clouded the future; and we Americans have been too distracted to defend our rights. We must now redress a society dangerously out of balance. Yet as large as these problems are, they can be overcome if we face them as a unified society, acting on shared values of freedom, justice, and regard for the future. In the Peace Speech a half century ago, Kennedy told his fellow Americans, “No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable—and we believe they can do it again.”
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Let us move forward, then, with our reason and spirit. Let each of us commit first to be good to ourselves and our long-term happiness by disconnecting from TV and the media long enough each day to regain our bearings, to read more books, to ensure that we are well-informed citizens. Let us keep abreast of science and technology—on climate change, energy systems, transportation options, and disease control—so that we can support the shared public actions needed to help secure our futures. Let us study the federal budget to know what’s real and what is gimmickry in our politics, so that the rich and powerful don’t simply walk away with the whole prize. And let us not forget the poor around us, in our neighborhoods, and in our global village even if they are halfway around the world. Our own safety and peace at heart depend on our acts of compassion and our interconnection with those in need.

As a society, let’s resolve to live up to the spirit of high accomplishment, fair play, and equality of opportunity that has defined America in its best days. America will not again dominate the world economy or geopolitics as it did in the immediate aftermath of World War II. That was a special historical moment; we can be glad that economic progress throughout the world is rapidly creating a more balanced global economy and society. Yet we need not hide
from the heightened global competition either. If we again invest in ourselves—for good health, safe environment, knowledge, and cutting-edge skills—renewed American prosperity can still be secured. A strong and prosperous America will not only compete in the global marketplace but also cooperate more effectively in global politics. Our future lies in a healthy, productive balance of competition and cooperation in an interconnected society.