« Scary Costumes | Main | Photomatt »

America's Future

Michael Ventura's latest column presents an interesting analysis of the State of the Union:

The great days of the United States of America are over. Nothing will bring those days back. It's too late. The damage has been done. There is no possible political, military, or economic solution. The general prosperity of the Fifties and Sixties (as opposed to the one-sided prosperity of the Nineties) is irretrievable. The capacity of the U.S. to lead the world has been drained. The only question is how America will decline – gracefully, clumsily, or tragically? Will we decline with our Constitution intact? Will our decline make us more tolerant and interesting, or meaner and more dulled? Britain declined drastically between 1914 and 1950, yet still produced great literature and a leader of the caliber of Winston Churchill. France declined just as badly, yet still had the cultural power to produce influential art and philosophy. Europe as a whole declined during the 20th century, but retained the intellectual vitality to reinvent itself for the 21st and become another kind of power. How will America decline? At this moment in history, that is the important question: How will America decline?

Here's what I said (dangerously reposted without thought or revision):

The analysis is simplistic, but he's pointing in an interesting direction. My own thought is that "decline" is inevitable, as those things that gave America its economic lead are adapted by other cultures and markets that America has dominated become global markets where many nations and cultures compete. The current Bush administration and its intellectual substructure (the New American Century people) are prepared to enforce "American" dominance in the world with our superior military force, but they've fallen into the same hole that broke the Soviet economy: enforcing dominance via military engagement has significant costs, and there are other forces in the world (such as the Al Qaeda network) that are more agile, and that *will not stop fighting.*

My opinion is that we should take a equitable place in the world and accede to the inevitable evolution of global rather than national thinking. An 'ecological footprint' analysis shows that if everyone in the world lived at my own fairly modest standard of living (modest for an American, that is), six earths worth of resources would be required - this gives you an idea how much wealth we currently have. Are we willing to lower our standard of living so that others in the world may have better lives? Jamais Cascio, my colleague at Worldchanging.com, feels that through innovative thinking we could build a world where everyone could have an high standard of living, but we would be operating from a different set of assumptions. (I'm still not sure I agree with him, but his background involves the construction of plausible futurist scenarios, so I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt).

As for politics, I think another four years of Bush will clearly be disastrous, because he will continue to choose contention over cooperation with the rest of the world, and will take no steps to adopt a global vision of the future. Ultimately our economy will fall apart, partly because he'll continue to spend billions on defense and tax cuts, partly because the rest of the world will stop buying American goods and investing in American companies, and partly because competitors will continue to emerge (think about the amount of work that's moving to India right now).

As for Ventura's argument that Americans are "immature," well... some are and some aren't, but I think that's bogus. I think the real problem is that Americans are not well-informed, and my hope is that we'll have "post-broadcast" computer-mediated tools to rectify that situation. Of course I would think so, being an Internet guy.

jon posted this at 1:19 PM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky