WHEN WILL "A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA" BE PUBLISHED?

 WHEN WILL “A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA” BE PUBLISHED?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 20, 2012

REFERENCE:

Readers have read the exchange between Billy and Mary with me after completing the manuscript, and have inundated me with when can I get a copy of the book.  This is representative of that reaction:

A READER WRITES:

Jim,

OK, you have me hooked.

When will I be able to purchase a copy of A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA?

Wayne (:>))

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Wayne,

Thank you for your comment.  The book is only in manuscript form. 

You are one of many who found this exchange interesting.  The process of book writing-to-publication, at least in my experience, is a time consuming and lengthy one. 

You, like many others, have been kind enough to write, and will be alerted when and if this manuscript reaches publication.  My sense is that it will not be this year.  Sorry. 

A book tells a story, but the process of scribbling framed in some form finally reaching closure tells a more interesting story.  The operational word is "process" and it has its own denouement. 

I have been trained in both the hard and soft sciences to maintain a focus on process not results, on the means not the ends, as the correct process, and not the reverse of this dictate the results and ends. 

As I write these words, I am still working on process seeing if the story I wish to tell in A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA is the story I am telling.

Once this idea of process and framing the problem (i.e., defining it) was not a radical idea, but somehow we have lost sight of this fact. 

I don't know if you have watched the insanity of the Republican Debates, which reached the bizarre last night, but that comedy speaks to my point and is indicative of societal drift. 

Book publishing, as with everything else, is symptomatic of this frenzied state of affairs, that is, of getting the story out before the story is ready, telling the wrong story completely, the old saw of the cart ahead of the horse, or indeed, appealing to the lowest common denominator in our collective psyche.  Take the debate last night. 

The focus of the debate veered off process immediately, away from “How do we get the economy back on course and more people back to work,” to run off the road and into the ditch with the CNN moderator asking a soap opera question of infidelity to Newt Gingrich, and then compounding this error by asking an equally inappropriate question of Mitt Romney: “When was he going to release his income tax returns?”

Such questions are titillating if the objective is gossip on a reality show, but irrelevant to process when the problem is assessing competence to be president. The media have lost their moral compass and their way, and it is embarrassing for the viewer to see. 

When the focus is on the person and not on the problem, the future is left up for grabs whoever is elected.  This is not very heartening.

Returning to writing, mentioned in that exchange with Billy and Mary was Aldous Huxley's book, "Point Counterpoint" (1928).  I read it 55 years ago when I was a sailor on the USS Salem (CA-139) in the Med, and still have my annotated copy. 

The book made an impression on me showing how much conversation (i.e., process) is the music of life, and dictates outcomes (i.e., results) when it has a palpable focus.  Artists often appear to be going nowhere in conversation, and this book is no exception, but it stuck with me -- they were involved in process and clarification. 

If I have a skill as a writer to that of many other scribblers, I believe it is in dialogue, as I remember the rhythm and yes, point counterpoint to conversations that I have heard over my long life.  Aldous Huxley had a recorder in his head, as did author John O'Hara.  I think I do as well.

Be always well,

Jim. 

 

A PAINFUL STING, CRUEL AFFRONT, A MARGINALIZER, NOT AN INSPIRER

A PAINFUL STING, CRUEL AFFRONT, A MARGINALIZER, NOT AN INSPIRER

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 19, 2012

The first television debate in South Carolina of Republican hopefuls to win the party’s nomination for President personified moral fatigue.  Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich stepped into the void to offer odious overkill.

Fox Television News panel baited the Speaker with softball questions about food stamps and unemployment compensation for out-of-work Americans.  Gingrich has a talent for going for the jugular expressing the pent up angst of his party, which for me represented a painful sting and cruel affront to the marginalized, the people powerless to protest, and I am a registered Republican.  

Raucous applause greeted his reference to 99 weeks of unemployment compensation being the time required to earn an Associate of Arts college degree.   

One of the panelists suggested that the Speaker’s criticism was directed at African Americans, a charge the Speaker dodged with agility pointing out that unemployment benefits should be tied to some kind of work or training program for everyone.  Who could argue with that?

The Speaker waved his pudgy arms magnanimously and said he was sure his colleagues on the dais agreed.  They were silent.  He then said Republicans believed “work is good,” implying Democrats do not. 

Words are incendiary, words such as “work” or “food stamps” or “unemployment compensation.”  Incendiary words have been the arsenal of demagogues throughout history, words that suggest leadership but appeal to the rabble, not the reasonable. 

Food stamps and unemployment compensation are indicators of the failure of governance, an embarrassment to takers as well as givers.  The Speaker added ceremoniously, “I’ll help you if you’re willing to help yourself.”  Pretty words empty of meaning.  People drowning in debt and in psychological and economic depression have little to say in the matter but to accept their marginalized status.

THE PUNISHING WASTE OF CORPORATE SPEAK

The human mind is a fragile instrument, and puppet masters dance on that mind as if they own it, believing they have reached their own elevated status as if by osmosis.  Heredity, environment, culture and programming are imperious masters of the individual’s fate.  So it has been throughout history. 

The soul of a race is docile or competitive, reactive or engaged, servile or challenging.  Each race carries the heavy chains and the lasting links of its ancestors.  Gustave le Bon, more than one hundred years ago, put it this way: “We are the children at once of our parents and our race.  Our country is our second mother for physiological and heredity as well as sentimental reasons.”  He went on to say, “A people are guided far more by its dead than by its living members.  It is by its dead, and by its dead alone, that a race is founded.”  Our ancestors fashion our ideas, our approach to our problems, and the motives of our conduct.  We bear the burden of their mistakes and reap the rewards of their virtues. 

A people of many races, as is our own constituency, develop common sentiments, common interests, and common beliefs.  Within these sentiments a character develops with a mental constitution, which is not rigid.  It may waver between a capacity for prudence or a tendency to rely on impulse, a demonstration of will power or an inclination to follow the crowd, the stoicism of perseverance or the passivity of giving up at crunch time, the energy to do what is necessary or the need to be carried, a respect for rules or an obsession with avoiding them.  In the end, the level of morality determines if a race is to survive and prosper.

We have many examples in history to show us the truth of this.  Rome fell after 500 years, overrun by barbarians, when its morality and character unraveled. 

We also have bifurcated evidence of race bending but not breaking.  The Anglo-Saxon of northern Europe had the character and constitution to challenge the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.  This led to the Protestant Reformation. 

This did not happen in southern Germany or the southern tier of Europe, or indeed, in any of the Latin countries of Europe.  Five hundred years after Martin Luther, southern Germany remains essentially Roman Catholic, but not northern Germany, northern Europe or England.  The birthplace of the present pope, Benedict XVI, incidentally, is from Bavaria in southern Germany.  

African Americans have resided in southern Florida for more than three hundred years.  In the wake of the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s, Cubans fled to the United States, and became naturalized citizens of this country.  They have produced a Florida governor and two United States Senators, Congressmen and Congresswomen.  The southern peninsula of Florida has been turned into little Cuba, culturally, economically, intellectually and commercially.  It has the character and soul of Cuba.  Meanwhile, African Americans still struggle in the region for a toehold.  

Cubans brought their individual culture with them, the visible expression of their invisible soul.    Moreover, they assimilated the American culture and made it work for them.  They possessed at once a personal life and a collective life, the latter being of their race.  The mindset has not been modified, but merely the objects that have brought it into play have changed.  So, it has been with many other cultures that make up America.  Why not the African American?

This brings me to why I take umbrage at the Speaker’s comments. 

Not only are his remarks to raucous applause patronizing and snide, they illustrate the problem.  Modern society clashes with the prospects of the marginalized realizing the American dreams of social justice and equality of opportunity. 

“I am willing to work with you” the speaker proclaims, implying those dependent on food stamps and unemployment compensation are the problem. 

These recipients are casualties of the problem.  The system is broke.  The Speaker corroborates this by speaking one language while practicing another, a breach of trust. For instance, did his $1.6 million earned consulting for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac help or hurt these people?   

The Speaker is not alone.  Educators and politicians speak of a dumbing down of American society.  Heads nod in agreement. 

Yet, if you get inside this situation, you see that modern industrial society, and now the information age endeavor to program people to increasingly specialized labor at the expense of developing their intelligence and character to engage an ever changing world. 

When people are honed like machines, they respond like machines, which is a dumbing down process. 

When these machines are considered anachronistic and discarded, the people manning them are as well, putting them out in the cold, jobless, clueless, and powerless.  A speaker standing behind a dais pontificating steps of amelioration cannot correct the problem because it is in the people's DNA. 

Everything for at least the last century has been turned inside out and upside down by developments in the last twenty years, and now we are paying the price for that development.  People have been programmed to feed the whimsical needs of society's machine rather than society being dedicated to feed the needs of the people. 

This is palpably evident in education, which is boring and out of date for students from pre-K to graduate school, in job classifications, which favor the credentialed rather than the competent, where the emphasis is on nourishment of the brain as if it doesn’t have a body, and it explains why leaders who cannot lead and followers who can, never take the reins.  

The compelling story of the Republican Presidential Debates has been the power of transparency.  But transparency is not enough.  Democracy demands more. 

Democracy demands a rallying message that embraces us all.  FDR often wrote his own speeches.  He labored over what he would say to Congress the day after the Empire of Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  He first wrote, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in history – the United States was deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan….”  When he proofread his speech, he crossed out “history” and scribbled in “infamy.”  The word was electrifying, and immediately rallied the nation behind his leadership.  We are desperate for such a word and voice now.

*     *     *

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA -- COMMENTS OF TWO READERS

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA – COMMENTS OF TWO READERS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 19, 2012

READERS WRITE:

Jim,

I have finished your book and have had some trouble forming my thoughts. 

I definitely enjoyed the inter play with your household staff, the exchange with the lady at the train station, and your sales retreat sections.  It gave me a better understanding of what and with whom you were dealing. 

As I have said before, I think the book needs to be shortened and my suggestion would be in the area of the detailed and explicit sexual encounters. 

I do understand where you are coming from but a casual reader might not necessarily have the same insight.  Reading the January 16 issue of Time Magazine and finding the article “How the ANC Lost its Way,” I concluded that not much has changed since you left South Africa. 

You are truly an outstanding individual who is able to reveal, express, and share your most inner self, a respected friend for 70 years.   

Bill

*     *     *

Jim,

I, too, have finished the manuscript and found the book enlightening about the area, the times, the conflicts within the country and within the main characters. 

It is a good story.  There are so many issues that have stayed with me and made me want to learn more. 

I plan to reread it again as I mentioned before.  This time stopping and reflecting on the references knowing it will lead to another level of understanding. 

We both, Bill and I, appreciate and admire your skill and ability and thank you for giving us the opportunity to read and comment on your project. 

We wish you well knowing it is truly a labor of love.

Our best to you and BB.   

Mary       

*     *     *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Billy and Mary,

Thank you.  You are the only ones who have completed the manuscript, and for that I owe you a debt of gratitude.

For my readers, I should mention you are husband and wife.  I have known Billy almost all my life.  Mary I have known only a few years.

Billy and I grew up only doors from each other, went to high school together, took the same classes which included four years of mathematics, four years of English, two years of history, along with a year of physics and chemistry, psychology and social science, two years of Latin, and four years playing football and running track together

We were first students and second athletes.  The course of study we took had no special name such as “college prep” or “advanced placement.”  We gravitated to such studies because of interest, and represented about 10 percent of our class.  Most of us, quite remarkably, graduated from college and pursued successful careers. 

We came out of the middle of the United States, growing up in the middle of the twentieth century, living in the middle of a community along the Mississippi River on the crescent of the State of Iowa, a state then and still with a rate of literacy of 99 percent, a state never caught up in the economic bubble of 2008 with an unemployment rate of around 5 percent today against a national average of 8.5 percent or more. 

The world we were born into was in the middle of the Great Depression.  We were in our adolescent years during World War Two when we went from deprivation of circumstances (Great Depression), to national rationing (WWII), to taking our places in life knowing the reality of scarcity, believing in the equality of opportunity, and the wisdom of frugality.  This was the character of our collective soul.  We were also white. 

As a writer, I admit to being more comfortable as an essayist and cultural critic than a novelist.  That said I took the character of Dirk Devlin, the protagonist of the story, into an alien culture as a young man because his knowledge and expertise had relevance. 

It was 1968, a year I believe marked the end of the twentieth century a little early.  It also marked the year America’s hegemony was starting to assert itself a score of years after World War Two.  Devlin was right in the middle of this surge.

This young naïve engineer was stepping into the collapsing decadence of British colonialism, and into the defiant and misguided policy of apartheid of the Afrikaner government.  Paradoxically, the Afrikaner culture was similar to his Iowa experience.  If this was not challenging enough, he was stepping into a caldron of nature where the artificial rules and taboos of his conditioning had no purchase with its laws.

This “point counterpoint” rhapsody plays on his conscience, and not too far a field from that great novel by Aldous Huxley of the same name. 

A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA references this musical technique of counterpoint as the story is constructed after the fashion of a work of music.

Instead of an obvious single plot, there are a number of interlinked storylines and recurring themes to display the characters, and to illustrate such things as corporate hegemony, Bantu multiculturalism, colonialism, Afrikaner isolationism, the soul of race, (Afrikaner and Bantu), the contretemps of clueless hedonism (the British), the disconnect between religion (Catholicism) and morality, the naked turmoil of loveless marriages, the divine rights of executive husbands and the feudalistic dependence of their spouses.

Yes, it is earthy, and earthy without apologies because it is the earthiness in the novel that is real while everything else are shards of shifting and collapsing artifacts of synthetic construction; translated: modernity on display. 

The protagonists are meant to carry the weight of this novel in point counterpoint.  This is revealed as Dirk’s subconscious periodically surfaces with insights and small epiphanies producing music and sometimes only white noise.

My concern is if Seamus “Dirk” Devlin at “point” and Nina van Polanen Petal at “counterpoint” succeed in carrying the story, or does the deluge within the frame of the story overwhelm them and the reader? 

Mary, I would be interested in learning this from you upon your rereading the manuscript.

Your comment that the story can be read on several levels is encouraging, as that is my intention. 

As for you, Billy, I am often told that my writing could use serious editing, and that may include the earthy parts.  But I must confess, were I to have an editor, which I do not have, I doubt seriously if I could be persuaded to excise any of these parts.  You must remember I come from the same tree as James Joyce, the author of ULYSSES. 

Thank you again, and always be well,

Jim

FLATLINING INTO THE FUTURE -- COMMENTS & RESPONSE

FLATLINING INTO THE FUTURE – COMMENTS &  RESPONSE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 12, 2012

A WRITER WRITES:

Jim,

Well said and the last four paragraphs are the best writing I have seen from you in awhile.

I haven't read Hoffer, but must as I have noted that, for me at least, some of your clearest writings over time have been those associated with references to him.

My view of the problem for leaders, or would be leaders, that exists today as a result of all the intrusiveness you spoke of is this: in order to have heroes (the leader is always your potential hero) you must see the person in gross relief only.  For example, if you know of the one shining hour he spent in some rabbit warren of huts in some misery hole on the other side of the world where he earned the right to wear the Medal of Honor a soldier is a hero, but if you know also of his womanizing, boozing, and anger management issues both before and after that hour it is hard to retain an heroic view of him; especially when that bit of heroics occurred in a conflict to which you were morally opposed.

The process our would be leaders must go through to get the job today, largely because of the intrusiveness technology makes possible, so dirties or blemishes them with the details of their imperfections that they lose the ability to be our hoped for untarnished heroes.  Hence we are routinely reduced to choosing for our leaders those we find least obnoxious and that makes it hard to see them as real leaders. To put perspective on it, how many folks do you suppose voted for FDR all four times and still did not know that he used a wheelchair?  How many who voted for him would not have had his invalid status been used as fodder 24/7 to question his ability to lead?

Take care,

Ted

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ted,

For readers of my missives, I would inform them that you are a retired Colonel in the United States Army, and know a thing or two about command and leadership.

That said author Charles D. Hayes of Alaska has, on occasion, compared my writing to Eric Hoffer, and so I take the mantle of working class philosopher with a degree of humility. 

Some respondents were puzzled with my closing comment of this piece: We behave like puppets on a string with the puppet master a puppet as well.  To clarify this declarative statement, I have added to this missive on my blog: Nobody is in charge.  Events control the day.

We have the benefit of biographies today on such heroes of our times as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his First Lady, the eminent Eleanor Roosevelt in which it is reported that the president had an affair with the First Lady’s secretary, and she had a lesbian affair herself.  Imagine how that would be exploited today.

Moreover, Democratic presidential candidate Wendell Willkie campaigned across the United States in 1940 with his mistress.  Not a word of that fact was mentioned in the newspapers of the time, although the campaign was not otherwise unblemished with dirty politics. 

There was apparently a code among journalists of the day that has been lost over time.  Yellow journalism, so called, seemingly has gone to bed with the scandal magazines at the checkout counters of supermarkets with no apparent palpable disgust.

Human beings, heroes included as you point out, are interesting because, not in the absence of their human foibles. 

We have a straightjacket president that is seemingly above reproach, who lacks the common touch, and who will most likely be opposed by a Republican straightjacket candidate, who also lacks that common touch, or two Harvard wonks that have little in common with any of us, and yet are expected to lead us to the promise land, which are jobs. 

We made a terrible mistake after World War Two when we sacrificed individualism for collective self-esteem, when the best students in lower grades were all treated as equally gifted, when that was never the case, then or now, when we abandoned the idea of  elitism to a dumbing down process with the focus on flaws in those that excelled as a way to cut them down to size, rather than using these models as inspiration to climb the steep curve to excellence. 

We have had more than a half-century of this programming, and now are saddled with the product, which is, in my view, “leaderless leaders” in virtually all walks of life, all disciplines from education to commerce, from religion to industry, from music to literature, from science to philosophy.

We have descended to a celebrity culture, which, hopefully, is dying the death of satiety.  This is not a new harangue on my part.  On January 1, 1976, this caption was on the front page of the St. Petersburg Evening Independent, “America is dead! Long live America!” with my essay featured on the editorial page in a more extended form:

America is dead!  Long live America! . . . On the eve of our 200^th birthday, we have been shocked awake from our illusory dream.  We have discovered belatedly that success is in the mind and not the body politic; that being Numero Uno is reaching after a child’s fantasy; that progress carries the seeds of its own destruction. . . America remains like a child.  And like a child, the focus of America’s existence has always been on becoming, rather than on being; on the competitive drive rather than on cooperation; on the illusion of progress rather than on reality . . .  But alas!  Thanks to a decade of corrupt and incompetent leadership, the wasting of our natural resources, the impatience of youth, and discriminated minorities, the dream has died . . . And in doing so . . . we have embraced despair . . . we will not grow up.  Thus, on the eve of our 200^th birthday, we are in a mourning period for our cherished illusions and protected fantasies . . . In the end, time runs out on a nation’s adolescence.  The youth must die to give birth to the man.  That is why I proclaim, America is dead!  Long live America!

This piece appeared in this abbreviated form in “Work Without Managers” (1990) and again in “Six Silent Killers” (1998).  It was repeated in these two works as I am still waiting for us to turn that corner.

Be always well, and Ted, may you and Mary have a wonderful New Year,

Jim

*     *     *

FLATLINING INTO THE FUTURE -- GOING FORWARD WITHOUT LEADERS IN THE SPIRIT OF THE CROWD

 FLATLINING INTO THE FUTURE – GOING FORWARD WITHOUT LEADERS IN THE SPIRIT OF THE CROWD

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 12, 2012

Some sixty years ago a longshoreman turned author, a man with little formal education but a passionate taste for the word, wrote “The True Believer” (1951).  The book was about mass movements and the fanatical spirit of the person compelled to join a cause, any cause, to quiet the collapsing boredom that imprisoned him in the mundane. 

Hoffer became something of a guru of the 1950s when Eric Sevareid on CBS TV interviewed him during prime time in 1963.  Hoffer wrote a series of books and became something of a celebrity, but nothing topped his first book, “The True Believer.”

What is a true believer? 

According to Hoffer, a true believer is a guilt-ridden hitchhiker who thumbs a ride on every cause from Christianity to Communism.  He is a fanatic not comfortable in his own skin, needing a Stalin or a Christ or a Hitler to worship and die for.  The true believer is a mortal enemy of things as they are, and thinks nothing of sacrificing himself for a dream or a hope or a cause that is impossible to define and more incomprehensible to attain.  He sees the true believer everywhere on the march from early Christianity to his era of the 1950s.  Self-educated as a philosopher, he clarifies in this work the motives and hatreds of the crowd, which has seething contempt for the individual who is uninspired by their holy cause.

Hoffer was the darling of the liberal movement of the time until he commenced to criticize African Americans for their indolent ways, and to defend President Lyndon Johnson and his policies during the Viet Nam War. 

*     *     *

Society moves forward in mysterious ways, and sometimes that movement resembles a flat line when the oscillating rhythms of life creep forward with neither a blip up or down, positive or negative, resembling a static curve on the oscilloscope.  We are in such a moribund period now.

Hoffer’s focus was on true believers, but he used the motives and hatreds of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, and the love of the Christ to illustrate the latticework to which true believers clung to in their fanaticism.

Were the longshoreman to have been able to think outside the box, which Edward de Bono would not introduce as "lateral thinking" for another quarter century, he would have seen that society was breaking down at its core because there were no longer leaders, only managers, and the crowd was a symptom of this development.  Leaders guide people; managers manipulate people as things to be managed.

Leaders were no longer bigger than life villains like Hitler nor saviors like the Christ, only insensitive tyrants like Caligula in chief executive roles that managed companies and countries as if they were selling an inanimate product.  In this climate, profit was more important than people, as people were only a vehicle to the bottom line, and a necessary but cumbersome consideration to that focus; translated: expendable.

We read daily in the headlines of our newspapers, on our blogs and on television news of the current intransigence on Wall Street, in Congress, in Brussels in the European Economic Community, as the fabric of economic, political, social and cultural life of an increasingly global society is seen to be unraveling.  Yet, no leaders rise out of the trenches to right the situation, as polarity has become the name of the game, and puerile bickering the state of governance.

We see in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street the visible effects of the invisible changes of human thought. 

Two things are at work in this transformation.  Traditional religious, political, economic and social institutions are crumbling no longer able to support themselves much less those that look for them for guidance. 

The pyramid of hierarchical authority has collapsed and everyone including those who have the title of “leader” is scampering about with no clue as to what has happened much less where they are, as the chain-of-command is now only a chain around the neck of society slowing everyone’s progress. 

Indicative of this scurrying are the Republican Party debates for the Presidency of the United States.  They resemble Keystone Cop skits as they vie for the most powerful position in the world with no idea how to lead.  They personify the problem and the scope of its intrusive character on contemporary life, but they are not the problem.  Too much too many too soon has been the mantra of the day as we are on the cusp of an entirely new condition of existence and thought as the result of information technology and this exploding scientific age.

Our beliefs and values are tottering and disappearing, the pillars of society are giving way one by one, and into this vacuum has inevitably come the power of the crowd, the only force that nothing menaces and which has a momentum of its own.  It is mindless because a crowd is leaderless.  It coalesces around impressions in a tectonic shift of strangers who willingly sacrifice their identity and personality to a collective mind that can be as easily criminal as heroic.

Where this is going is difficult to say.  What is certain is that we are in the grip of the crowd where there is no room for the individual, and leadership is only possible from individual not collective consciousness. 

We fail to see this erosion in individualism because we fail to see 24/7 news coverage as an invasion of our privacy, neither do we see the constant polling of our collective mind by pundits and politicians, marketers and advertisers, political and social scientists, and other pollsters as such invasions, nor do we protest vociferously at 24/7 surveillance at seemingly every stop light, shopping mall, school, church or even our homes as a manifestation of this intrusive removal of our individualism.  We behave like puppets on a string with the puppet master a puppet as well.  Nobody is in charge.  Events control the day.

*     *     *

FOREIGN AFFAIRS -- CLASH OF IDEAS -- A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD -- Snippets from the 90th Anniversary Edition

 FOREIGN AFFAIRS – CLASH OF IDEAS – A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© January 9, 2012

PREAMBLE:

A quarter century ago, I became a regular subscriber to “Foreign Affairs.”  Not a political scientist, diplomat, academic, politician, think tank aficionado, nor a pundit or journalist, I am simply a reader.  It is my hope that sharing these snippets with you will find you interested in becoming a reader, too. 

The thoughtful ruminations reminds me of what philosopher Gustave Le Bon called in his day, some hundred years ago, the contemplation of society's "chimera of dilemmas," which invariably result in revolutions. 

While revolutions claim to be founded on rational thought fueled by deliberate reason, in Le Bon's view, this is never the case.  The cognitive biases of political scientist and economists cannot be faulted for trying to steer a measured course through the chaos and conflict of their times.  Words are no substitute for action, but words trigger action, and on occasion prove prophetic. 

The January/February 2012 issue of Foreign Affairs features, "The Clash of Ideas."  It provides snippets of earlier essays, and in some cases the ideological battles in those periods up to the present, ideas that have made the modern world, and are shaping the future. 

In 1888, novelist Edward Bellamy published “Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887.”  His little book was an attempt to find a solution to most of the ills of his time caused by the Long (business) Depression from 1873 until 1893, the longest economic contraction in history.  Bellamy, a socialist and follower of Marx envisioned the United States in the year 2000 being a totally socialistic state. 

In this world, there is no money, the state provides jobs and work cards that contain the same amount of credit for a year’s expenses, be you a domestic, doctor or bricklayer. 

There is no opportunity for anyone to spend this stipend foolishly and starve as the government steps in and supervises the spending when necessary.

Everyone is educated to the age twenty-one with a broad cultural course so that inte4lectual snobbery is not only discouraged, but impossible. 

Everyone engages in an apprentice program such as waiting on tables or similar tasks for three years, then competitive examinations are given to determine qualification for such professions as medicine, engineering, teaching, etc. To advance to these professional schools the individual must show the germane aptitude and attitude required, or be otherwise slotted in some other activity. 

This utopian novel may seem farfetched but it was a resounding success in its day, and has been read up to the present as are other utopian novels such as Plato’s “Republic” Thomas More’s “Utopia,” and William Morris’s “News from Nowhere.” 

At the end of this "Foreign Affairs" abridgment, the reader is introduced to Jeremy Rifkin’s new book, “The Third Revolution."  It reads like a utopian novel, as twenty-first century society is on the brink of a world Bellamy envisioned, as competing ideologies are moving toward complementary partnerships.  Utopia is moving increasingly from "Nowhere Land" to the social and economic order of tomorrow. 

"Foreign Affairs" has been dealing with social and economic order and disorder for the past ninety years, making its own contribution to the course of human history, as these snippets indicate.

MAKING MODERNITY WORK

Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs, 2012

He sees the true narrative of the times more a matter of policies than principles, as the ideological wars have given ground to stability.  The clamor of the times is on the symptoms, not the problem, on the fact the US is trapped in political deadlock and dysfunction, Europe is broke and breaking, authoritarian China is on the rise, Occupy Wall Street protesters are on the streets, while movers and shakers search for “new models” to shape the future.  The issue shares contributions of writers who have attempted to deal with modernity to reconcile capitalism and mass democracy, increasing economic inequality and declining social mobility.  The question he poses is not what to do but how to do it. 

The ideas and words that follow are all those of the authors indicated, and not my own.

HOW WE GOT HERE: THE RISE OF THE MODERN ORDER

Lenin and Mussolini

Harold T. Laski, September 1923

(Professor in London School of Economics)

A revolution in Russia was doubtless implied in the logic of events.  No government, which is vicious in principle and corrupt in practice, can hope to retain the allegiance of those who do not share in the benefits of its dishonesty.  But the Russian Revolution differs from all its predecessors in that it came in the name of a consistent system of doctrine; and it was largely made by men to whom that system contained the quintessence of social truth . . .

The state is in fact a method of protecting the owners of property; and the true division of men into those who own and those who do not own possessions other than their power to labor.  The life of the state is an eternal struggle between them.

Just as the social order of the past has secreted within its womb the germ of its successor, as, for example, feudalism produced capitalism, so does the latter contain within itself the germ of its communist successor.  Capitalism, as Marx said, produces its own gravedigger….

Leninism has been the dictatorship of a party, Fascism (Mussolini) is the dictatorship of a man . . .For liberty, indeed, Mussolini professors no affection.  He has called it a nineteenth century concept which has exhausted its utility.  Liberty, for him, is the parent of anarchy…

LENIN

Victor Chernov, March 1924

(Russian Social-Revolutionary writer)

Lenin was a great man … Lenin’s intellect was energetic, but cold.  It was above all an ironic, sarcastic and cynical intellect … Politics to him meant strategy, pure and simple.  Victory was the only commandment to observe; the will to rule and to carry through a political program without compromise … Lenin always felt his audience ... . .. Yes, Lenin was good-natured.  But good natured does not mean good hearted … He devoted his whole life to the working class…

STALIN’S POWER

Paul Scheffer, July 1930

(Foreign correspondent)

Stalin is not a man who appeals to the sympathies of crowds or stirs their imagination.  He is not an electric person.  Let us be more blunt: he is frankly unattractive, and all the more since he knows he is, and shows by his demeanor he does not care!  Even his voice, a voice as hard and brittle as glass, lacks the undertones, the rhythm, that work so powerfully upon the music-loving populace of Russia … You feel at once that he is “dangerous”….Stalin is the dictator of dictators…

Making the Collective Man in Soviet Russia

William Henry Chamberlin, January 1932

(Correspondent, Christian Science Monitor)

The individual personality is fighting a losing battle against heavy odds in Russia today…What is perhaps not generally realized is that man himself is the firs and most important objective of Soviet planning and that the tendency to replace man, the individual, by collective man, is the product of social groups and forces, is one of the most important and interesting currents in Soviet life…Young pioneers (children about eight on) are not only taught to disbelieve religion; they are encouraged at Christmas time to go around and convert those “backward” children who may still want to have Christmas trees and celebrate the holidays in the traditional manner …So the individual personality is attacked from every side by forces which are all controlled from a common center and which are working in accordance with a prearranged plan to make the traditional human individualist into a collective man, a citizen of the future communist society …

The Philosophic Basis of Fascism

Giovanni Gentile, January 1928

(Italian philosopher)

In the definition of Fascism …concerns itself not only with political organization and political tendency, but with the whole will and thought and feeling of the nation .. Fascism is not a philosophy .. Much less a religion.  It is not even a political theory… It is eminently anti-intellectual .. if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action, of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice.  Fascism is hostile to all Utopian systems which are destined never to face the test of reality.  It is hostile to all science and all philosophy which remain matters of mere fancy or intelligence … It is hostile not so much to culture as to bad culture, the culture which does not educate, which does not make men but rather creates pedants and aesthete, egotists in a word, men morally and politically indifferent … For Fascism … the State is a wholly spiritual creation…

Radical Forces in Germany

Erich Koch-Weser, April 1931

(Former Minister of Justice of the German Republic)

The world is not ruled by reason, but by passion, and when a man is driven to despair he is ready to smash everything in the vague hope that a better world may arise out of the ruins….Intelligent and orderly as the German people are, patiently as they have borne the sufferings of war and of inflation, they are in danger today of falling into this reckless state of mind…. The watch-word is not the Christian one, “What is mine shall be thine,” but rather one of envy, “What is thine shall be mine.”  The blind submission shown by the leaders of the party towards edicts issued by Soviet Russia increases its danger to Germany.. Greater danger is threatened at the present time from the National Socialists, popularly called the Nazis….

Hitler: Phenomenon and Portent

Paul Scheffer, April 1932

(Foreign correspondent)

Hitler is the most successful orator that Germany has ever possessed .. It is an interesting and a stirring experience to listen to Hitler, his bitterest enemies have often fallen under his spell … The hall where he is to speak often closes its doors and hour before the meeting is scheduled to begin because it is already filled to overflowing.  One always sees a clean, neatly dressed crowd with faces that betray intellectual pursuits of one kind or another: clerks, professors, engineers, schoolteachers, students, civil service employees.  These audiences are preoccupied, chary of words, quiet.  Their faces are tense, often drawn.  The only bustle in the room will come from the “hall guards,” a typical product of these times, rough young fellows, the Sturm Abteilungen, or “shock troops.”

Hitler’s Reich: The First Phase

Hamilton Fish Armstrong, July 1933

(The editor of Foreign Affairs)

A people has disappeared.  Almost every German whose name the world knew as a master of government in the Republic of the past fourteen years is gone…There are exceptions; but the waves are swiftly cutting the sand from beneath them, and day by day, one by one, these last specimens of another age, another folk, topple over into the Nazi sea…Not merely is he (the German) wiped out, but the memory of him is wiped out.  It is pretended that he never was…. This does not merely apply to Jews and Communists, fled or imprisoned or detained “for their own protection” in barbed-wire concentration camps.  It applies to men like Otto Braun, leader of the great Social Democratic Party, perennial Premier of Prussia . ...... Federal Germany is gone….But the final determining condition which caused the Republic’s death was that it had no nourishment from below.  As an eminent German said to the writer two or three years ago: “We made a republic; but there were no republicans…

Political Ideas in the Twentieth Century

Isaiah Berlin, April 1950

(Fellow of New College, Oxford)

The practice of Communist states and, more logically of Fascist states is not at all the training of the critical, or solution finding powers of their citizens, not yet the development in them of any capacity for special insights or intuitions regarded as likely to reveal the truth.  It consists in something which any nineteenth century thinker with respect for science would have regarded with genuine horror, the training of individuals incapable of being troubled with questions which, when raised and discussed, endanger the stability of the system; the building and elaboration of a strong framework of institutions, “myths,” habits of life and thought intended to preserve it from sudden shocks or slow decay.  This is the intellectual outlook which attends the rise of totalitarian ideologies, the substance of the hair raising satires of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, the state of mind in which troublesome questions appear as a form of mental perturbations, noxious to the mental health of individuals, when too widely discussed, to the heath of societies…This is truly a for reaching conception, and something far more powerful than the pessimism or cynicism of thinkers like Plato or Machiavelli, Swift or Carlyle, who looked on the majority of mankind as unalterably stupid or incurably vicious…

Of Libety

Benedetto Croce, October 1932

(Italian senator)

Communism, it is the fashion to claim, has passed from theory to practice and is being applied in Russia.  But it is a practice not as communism but in keeping with its inner contradiction as a form of autocracy as its critics had always predicted would be the case…The Russian Communists have not solved, nor will their violent and repressive methods ever enable them to solve, the fundamental problem of human society, the problem of freedom.  For in freedom only can human society flourish and bear fruit.  Freedom alone gives meaning to life … stirs in the souls .. And on the day that this problem is faced, the materialistic foundations of Soviet structure will crumble and new and very different supports will have to be found for it….For liberty is the only ideal which unites the stability that Catholicism once possessed with the flexibility which it could never attain, the only ideal which faces the future without proposing to mould it to some particular form, the only ideal that can survive criticism and give human society a fixed point by which from time to time to reestablish its balance…..

The Position and Prospects of Communism

Harold T. Laski, October 1932

(Professor in London School of Economics)

For a brief period, the sudden prosperity of America concealed from many the realities of the situation.  It was argued that the condition of Russia was a special one; that elsewhere the problem was rather one of dealing with the excrescences of the capitalistic system than with capitalism itself.  As late as 1928 President Hoover felt able to announce to an awestruck world that America had (under God) solved the problem of poverty…A hundred years ago the votaries of capitalism had a religious faith in its prospects…But those triumphs could not conceal the fact that the idol had feet of clay.  The price to be paid for their accomplishment was a heavy one.  The distribution of the rewards was incapable of justification in terms of moral principle…Its danger was foreseen by Tocqueville nearly a century ago.  “The manufacturer,” he wrote, “asks nothing of the workman but his labor; the workman expects nothing from him but his wages.  The one contracts no obligation to protect, nor the other to defend; and they are not permanently connected either by habit or by duty… The manufacturing aristocracy of our age first impoverishes and debases the men who serve it, and then abandons them to be supported by the charity of the public … Between the workman and the master there are frequent relations but no real partnership”..They realize that the essence of a capitalistic society is its division into a small number of rich men and a great mass of poor men … there should be no proportion between effort and reward…

Nationalism and Economic Life

Leon Trotsky, April 1934

(Leader of the October Russian Revolution in 1917)

The nineteenth century was marked by the fusion of the nation’s fate with the fate of its economic life; but the basic tendency of our century is the growing contradiction between the nation and economic life.  In Europe this contradiction has become intolerably acute ..The League of Nations attempted to translate from the language of militarism into the language of diplomatic pacts the task which the war left unsolved.  After Ludendorff (German military leader) had failed to “organize Europe” by the sword, Briand attempted to create “the United States of Europe” by means of sugary diplomatic eloquence.  But the interminable series of political, economic, financial, tariff, and monetary conferences only unfolded the panorama of the bankruptcy of the ruling classes in face of the unpostponable and burning task of our epoch…How many unified Europe be included within a coordinated world economy?  The solution to the question can be reached not by deifying the nation, but on the contrary by completely liberating productive forces from the fetters imposed upon them by the nation state …decadent fascist nationalism, preparing volcanic explosions and grandiose clashes in the world arena, bears nothing except ruin…

The Reconstruction of Liberalism

C. H. McIlwain, October 1937

(Professor of the Science of Government, Harvard University)

The preservation of the status quo is a solution that can satisfy none but the contented; and just now most men are not contented…Liberalism means a common welfare with a constitutional guarantee…So-called liberals have ignored the first part of the definition and have fouled the nest by invoking the guarantee for privileges of their own, conducive only to the destruction of any true common weal.  None have ever prated more of guarantees than these so-called liberal; but they have forgotten, if they ever believed, that these guarantees must secure the rights of all, not the selfish interests of a few.  They are traitors within the gates who have probably done more than all others to betray liberalism to its enemies and put it to its defense …De minimis non curat lex; there is little or no safe guard for the weak against the strong; protection of the public against an adulterated product would be unthinkable, Caveat emptor…

The Economic Tasks of the Postwar World

Alvin H. Hansen and C. p. Kindleberger, April 1942

(Hansen, Littauer Professor, Harvard, Kindleberger, Economist, Federal Reserve)

There are still a good many people concerned with problems of international security who think exclusively in terms of political arrangements and economic mechanisms such as tariffs and currencies.  We would call that the passive approach…Many questions at once arise.  What will be the role of government in postwar economic life?…It can merely be said that in time of war governments must and do assume more direction of economic life; after this war they will probably be given increased responsibility for trying to get rid of unemployment in their respective nations and to establish higher minimum standards for the low income group; and that while the degree of control exercised in the postwar period will be less than that exercised during the war, it nevertheless will be greater than it used to be before the war…

Freedom and Control

Geoffrey Crowther, January 1944

(Editor, The Economist)

It is the thesis of E. C. Carr’s influential book, “Conditions of Peace,” that the dominant ideas of the nineteenth century are dead, or at least that they no longer have sufficient validity to serve as our guiding lights…if not dead, are so battered that they will not serve us any longer as our main props.  We are, indeed, living in a vacuum of faith.  But the trouble about a vacuum is that it gets filled, and if there are no angels available to fill it, fools, or worse, rush in…The trend away from liberal democracy has been a trend towards totalitarian dictatorship.  The trend away from individualist capitalism has been a trend toward rigid state control .. The trend away from the sovereignty of the nation-state has been a trend towards the concentration of aggressive strength in the hands of a few Great Powers…The central dilemma of the present age is that we can no longer rely on the old principles alone, but that we abominate the alternatives that time and tide, if it is left to them, will produce.  This dilemma can be solved in only one way, by the birth of a new faith, adjusted in its instrumentalities to the needs of the new century, but preserving the ultimate objectives of the old.  The only way to avoid the murder of nineteenth century liberalism by twentieth century Fascism is through the birth of a twentieth century faith by the new out of the old…What we need is not a compromise between the old ideas and the new, but a fusion, not a mixture but an amalgam…

The Split Between Asian and Western Socialism

David T. Saposs, July 1954

(Statistician, European Labor Division)

Western Socialism has ceased to be class conscious and become reformist.  It seeks the welfare state, but not revolution.  The growing Christian (predominantly Catholic) labor movement in Western Europe has also arrived at maturity, and its social philosophy is likewise oriented toward the welfare state…The former sacred tenet that the workers are the class chosen to fulfill the holy mission of bringing about the inevitable capitulation of capitalism has fallen into limbo.  The central theme of the new official pronouncements revolves about problems of social justice, economic planning, full employment, democracy and human rights.  Emphasis is placed on the need to avoid deflation with its consequent depression and unemployment, and of course, on the role of the trade union movement in promoting social justice.

The Myth of Post-Cold War Chaos

G. John Ikenberry, May/June 1996

(Professor of Political Science University of Pennsylvania)

The world order created in the 1940s is still with us, and in many ways stronger than ever.  The challenge for American foreign policy is not to imagine and build a new world order but to reclaim and renew an old one … The end of the Cold War was a historical watershed.  The collapse of communism brought the collapse of the order that took shape after World War II.  While foreign policy theorists and officials scramble to design new grand strategies, the United States is rudderless on uncharted seas.  The common wisdom is wrong.  What ended with the Cold War was bipolarity; the nuclear stalemate; and decades of containment of the Soviet Union….But the world order created in the middle to late 1940s endures, more extensive and in some respects more robust than during the Cold War years … Its basic principle …are alive and well… commitment to an open world economy and its multilateral management, and the stabilization of socioeconomic welfare…World War II produced two postwar settlements .. The containment order, which was based on the balance of power, nuclear deterrence, and political and ideological competition.  The other, a reaction to the economic rivalry and political turmoil of the 1930s and the resulting world war, which can be called the liberal democratic order…The problems the liberal democratic order confronts are most problems of success, foremost among them the need to integrate the newly developing and post-communist countries…Today economic globalization is producing much greater inequality between winners and losers, the wealthy and the poor …this will affect the stability of the liberal world order more than regional conflict…

The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers

Azar Gat, July/August 2007

(Professor of National Security, Tel Aviv University)

Today’s global liberal democratic order faces two challenges.  The first is radical Islam …The second, and more significantly, challenge emanates from the rise of non-democratic great powers: the West’s old Cold War rivals China and Russia. Now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist regimes…Capitalism has expanded relentlessly since early modernity, its lower priced goods and superior economic power eroding and transforming all socioeconomic regimes, a process most memorably described by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto.  Contrary to Marx’s expectations, capitalism had the same effect on communism, eventually “burying” it without the proverbial shot being fired. The triumph of the market, precipitating and reinforced by the industrial-technological revolution, led to the rise of the middle class, intensive urbanization, the spread of education, the emergence of mass society, and ever greater affluence.  In the post-Cold War era (just as in the nineteenth century and the 1950s and 1960s), it is widely believed that liberal democracy naturally emerged from these developments, a view famously espoused by Francis Fukuyama.  Today, more than half of the world’s states have elected governments, and close to half have sufficiently entrenched liberal rights to be considered fully free…By shifting from communism to capitalism, China has switched to a far more efficient brand of authoritarianism….the possibility looms that it will become a true authoritarian superpower….

How Development Leads to Democracy

Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, March/April 2009

(Inglehart, Professor Political Science, Michigan, Welzel, Professor Political Science Jacobs University Bremen in Germany)

A democratic boom has given way to a democratic recession.  Between 1985 and 1995, scores of countries made the transition to democracy, bringing widespread euphoria about democracy’s future.  But more recently, democracy has retreated … These developments, along with the growing power of China and Russia, have led many observers to argue that democracy has reached its high water mark … That conclusion is mistaken.  The underlying conditions of societies around the world point to a more complicated reality.  The bad new is that it is unrealistic to assume that democratic institutions can be set up easily … The good news, however, is that the conditions conducive to democracy can and do emerge, and the process of “modernization,” advances them . . In retrospect, it is obvious that .. early versions of modernization theory were wrong on several points.  Today, virtually nobody expects a revolution of the proletariat that will abolish private property .. Nor does anyone expect that industrialization will automatically lead to democratic institutions; communism and fascism also emerged with industrialization.  Nonetheless, a massive body of evidence suggests that modernization theory’s central premise was correct: economic development does tend to bring about important ..changes in society, culture, and politics…First, modernization is not linear.  It does not move indefinitely in the same direction … Second, social and cultural change is path dependent: history matters… a society’s heritage, whether shaped by Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Confucianism, or communism, leave a lasting imprint on its worldview…Fifty years ago, the sociologist Seymour Lipset pointed out that rich countries are more likely to be democracies …it has held up against repeated tests …But growing mass pressures for liberalization are beginning to appear, and repressing them will bring growing costs in terms of economic efficiency and low public morale…

The Post-Washington Consensus

Nancy Birdsall and Francis Fukuyama, March/April 2011

(Birdsall, President of Center for Global Development, Fukuyama. Stamford)

The Great Depression set the stage for a shift away from strict monetarism and laissez-faire polices toward Keynesian demand management…paving the way for the rise of radical and antiliberal movements across the world..  This time around, there has been no violent rejection of capitalism, even in the developing world.  In early 2009, at the height of the global financial panic, China and Russia …made it clear to their domestic and foreign investors that they had no intention of abandoning the capitalist model....Why has the reaction in developing countries been so much less extreme after this crisis than it was after the Great Depression?  For one, they blame the United States…Thus, The American version of capitalism is, if not in full disrepute, then at least no longer dominant … What the crisis did …was to underscore the instability inherent in capitalist systems, even ones developed and sophisticated as the United States …Capitalism is a dynamic process that regularly produces faultless victims …This is a lesson that politicians in developing country democracies are not likely to forget….

The Future of History

Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class?

Francis Fukuyama, January/February 2012

(Author and Professor at Stanford University)

Something strange is going on in the world today.  The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and the ongoing crisis of the euro are both products of the model of lightly regulated financial capitalism … Yet despite widespread anger at Wall Street bailouts, there has been no great upsurge of left-wing American populism in response.  It is conceivable that the Occupy Wall Street movement will gain traction. But…the left is anemic and right-wing populist parties are on the move…serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding…Social forces and conditions do not simply “determine” ideologies, as Karl Marx once maintained, but ideas do not become powerful unless they speak to the concerns of large numbers of ordinary people.  Liberal democracy is the default ideology around much of the world today in part because it responds to and is facilitated by certain socioeconomic structures…Almost all the powerful ideas that shaped human societies up until the past 300 years were religious in nature…The first major secular ideology to have a lasting worldwide effect was liberalism, a doctrine associated with the rise of first a commercial and than an industrial middle class …mature capitalism generated middle class societies, not working class ones.. Median incomes in the United States have been stagnating…most U.S. households have shifted to two income earners…Americans are reluctant to engage in straightforward redistribution, the United States has instead attempted a highly dangerous and inefficient form of redistribution…by subsidizing mortgages for low-income households…There was a lot of happy talk about the wonders of the knowledge economy, and how dirty, dangerous manufacturing jobs would inevitably be replaced by highly educated workers doing creative and interesting things.  This was a gauzy veil placed over the hard facts of deindustrialization…What would that (new) ideology look like?  It would have at least two components, political and economic… .redesign the public sector … more redistribution … the ideology could not begin with a denunciation of capitalism … It is more the variety of capitalism that is at stake and the degree to which governments should help societies adjust to change … The product would be a synthesis of ideas from both the left and the right, detached from the agenda of the marginalized groups that constitute the existing progressive movement….That mobilization will happen, however, as long s the middle classes of the developed world remain enthralled by the narrative of the pass generations … The alternative narrative is out there waiting to be born.

The Democratic Malaise

Globalization and the Threat to the West

Charles A. Kupchan, January/February 2012

(Professor of International Affairs, Georgetown University)

A crisis of governability has engulfed the world’s most advanced democracies…Voters in industrialized democracies are looking to their government to respond to the decline in living standards and the growing inequality resulting from unprecedented global flows of goods, services, and capita … But Western governments are not up to the task…. The international system is in the midst of tectonic change due to the diffusion of wealth and power to new quarters… the shift of economic stability from the developed to the developing world … Globalization has expended aggregate wealth and enabled developing countries to achieve unprecedented prosperity … the main source of the West’s current crisis of governability: Deindustrialization and outsourcing, global trade and fiscal imbalances, excess capital and credit and asset bubbles, these consequences of globalization are imposing hardships and insecurity not experienced for generations … for the better part of two decades, middle class wages in the world’s leading democracies have been stagnant and economic inequality has been rising sharply … “The Way Forward,” a consequence of the integration of billions of low wage workers into the global economy and increases in productivity stemming from the application of information technology to the manufacturing sector.  These developments have pushed global capacity far higher than demand, exacting a heavy toll on workers in the high-wage economies of the industrialized West… the industrialized West have entered a period of pronounced ineffectiveness.  First, globalization has made many of the traditional policy tools used by liberal democracies much blunter instruments…Second, many of the problems ..require a level of international cooperation that is unattainable … Third, democracies … are clumsy and sluggish when their citizens are downcast and divided … Since 2008, many Americans have lost their houses, jobs and retirement savings. And these setbacks come on the heels of back-to-back decades of stagnation in middle class wages .. making the United States the most unequal country in the industrialized world .. In addition, many of the most competitive companies in the digital economy do not have long coattails.  Facebook’s estimated value is around $70 billion, and it employs roughly 2,000 workers; compare this with General Motors which is valued at $35 billion and has 77,000 employees in the United States and 208,000 worldwide.  The wealth of the United States cutting-edge companies is not trickling down to the middle class… What is needed is nothing less than a compelling twenty-first century answer to the fundamental tensions among democracy, capitalism, and globalization …

FINAL THOUGHTS

Segments of these essays appearing here are meant to interest the reader in perusing this issue, as there is much more to ponder.  Jeremy Rifkin’s new book, “The Third Revolution: How Lateral Power is Transforming Energy, the Economy and the World” (2012) is a fitting complement as revolution implied or stated was the issue’s focus. 

Rifkin views economic revolutions as having two components: the convergence of technology and energy.  Revolutions come, he claims, when we create new energy regimes, and then we create new communication revolutions to manage the new energy regime.

In the nineteenth century, steam and coal were the energy regime leading to cheap print technology, and mass transit through railroads with steam power and a communication revolution in public school education to create a literate workforce to organize and manage society around these two components.

In the twentieth century, electrical power provided the energy for the communication revolution of telephone, radio and television, with oil the energy for fuel to run our automobiles, power our airplanes, which led to mass consumption, a ubiquitous interstate highway system connecting suburbs to shopping malls and cities coast-to-coast  

Fossil fuel is now on life support.  When crude oil rises to nearly $150 a barrel the price of everything goes up, incomes go down, jobs are lost, and ultimately, as in 2008, this leads to economic collapse, and social disruption.

Rifkin sees us on the cusp of a new power shift in the twenty-first century with the Internet communication revolution seeding a social, political, cultural and economic shift from the hierarchical organization where the few dictate to the many to a lateral distributive collaborative paradigm where everyone is a leader. 

Private enterprise here is not a building or factory or consortium but the providence of two billion souls on the planet literate in computer technology with Silicon Valley imaginations. 

Utopian?  I don’t think so.  Rifkin’s focus is on an economic model involving green energy complemented by the Internet revolution.  Only the last “Foreign Affairs” essay in this 90^th Anniversary issue compares Facebook with General Motors to underscore the energy-communication revolution now at full throttle.

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