Irony, tragedy and progress

I had the very good fortune of going up to Boston to hear Andrew Bacevich talk about his book, The Limits of Power, about a week or so ago. Though I disagreed with him on a number of points, I felt that his arguments had merit (in the interests of not repeating myself, I will simply link to my previous post in which I outline some of his arguments). To be succinct, I agree with him that the current trajectory of American foreign policy, defence spending and conspicuous consumerism is unsustainable. Where we disagree is in whether anything can be done about it and what. Bacevich takes the view that the most we can hope to achieve at this point is to cut our losses and put the nation back on a humbler, more realistic path foreign-policy wise, but that ultimately the arc of our history is a tragic one – he quotes Niebuhr to the effect that ‘[t]o the end of history, social orders will probably destroy themselves in the effort to prove that they are indestructible’, and he views the American project as no exception.

I take a view which interprets the history differently. The American project as it stands now may be doomed to self-destruction as we take on increasingly astronomical debts and continue to abuse our military might to act as world policeman in the name of ‘security’, but the American project also has an interesting gift for reinvention as it is tried against the limits of various economic and political paradigms. An economy that was built upon an unsustainable ideological contradiction (that of slavery) was consumed in the blazes of civil war, and America under Lincoln began its long climb upward from its tragic legacy of institutionalised racial injustice. We are coming up against the limits of a number of ideological contradictions, on the question of national security, on the question of the consumer/debtor-state and on the question of environmental protection, and it is growing increasingly likely that we will be harrowed by history in a similar way. But I am optimistic that the American project will find a way to reinvent itself, to progress – perhaps in a way which conceives its place in history with greater compassion, modesty and frugality.

Which is why I found myself laughing aloud while reading David Brooks’ Tuesday column. Brooks laments what he views as a ‘crisis of faith’ in America’s ability to be an innovative leader, which has manifested itself as a loss of optimism in the wake of the economic crisis. He goes on to compare our current social psychology with that of China, noting that the Chinese are more optimistic than we are about their own nation’s ability to be a technological and entrepreneurial leader, and pines for a leader who can ‘induce the country to salivate for the future again’ by creating a coherent economic strategy to keep us competitive with rivals like China.

The humour I derived from reading Brooks’ column is that his professed goal of seeing an optimistic, future-oriented nation (a goal with which I heartily sympathise) is riddled with irony and contradiction from the beginning. He begins by describing a decidedly retrograde colonial psychology based on an assumption of unlimited resources, and proceeds by describing strategies which sound inescapably quaint in a world where we are becoming increasingly aware of the scarcity of resources and the limits of the world ecology’s tolerance for our industrial activities. And the optimism he finds lacking in the nation is thwarted by the pessimism he betrays in describing the American social psychology as lacking discipline and fixated on the promise of material gratification. It may be possible that we need to bring back Thomas Malthus as our economic tutor. This may seem pessimistic to some, but it strikes me as the pinnacle of pessimism that we cannot bring the same manic energy that we once invested in altering our environment to bear upon ourselves, or that it would be misguided to invest more heavily in a communitarian, environmentalist, scale-free and scarcity-conscious economic programme. Such a project of reinvention might damage our competitiveness in the short term, but which will allow our economy to better endure the coming trials of history and withstand the tragedies our present-day Jeremiahs have prophesied.