COMMENT/RESPONSE TO KIERKEGAARD -- SEVEN

COMMENT/RESPONSE TO KIERKEGAARD – SEVEN

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

© June 4, 2012

A EUROPEAN READER WRITES:

Dear Jim,

As you have lived in many countries, including Europe, I'm a little bit amazed about your judgment regarding the dominance of the U.S.

From my point of view, the U.S. had a real dominance shortly after WWII.  It lost that dominance in the cold war (East Block was as powerful at least in military terms). 

Can you give me one military engagement since WWII the U.S. actually won?  You yourself point out that the work ethic and the quality of work in the U.S. has faded dramatically.

I deplore that situation very much, because the U.S. still has the role of political leadership and stabilizing influence in the world.  I think it only can change from its weaknesses when it honestly analyzes its existing deficiencies.

Please don't be upset about my response.  It is just a spontaneous reaction from a Non-US-citizen. You know how much I respect you.

Be always well,

Manfred

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Manfred,

I cherish your thoughts and perspective.  When I wrote this --  In that short time, America has been dominant more than a century.  Few societies have risen so quietly to explode so violently and reach global significance so quickly.  It was, and is a formula that would inevitably be copied  -- my intention was to show cultural rather than military dominance. 

True, we seem to make a mess of things in our wars since WWII (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Iran).  With the exception of WWII, when the country was totally behind the military, Americans have displayed ambivalence towards war, but a natural proclivity to isolation. 

Close to ninety percent of Americans have never been abroad, most high school and college students cannot find most countries on the map or have any idea what their respective cultures are like.  Only ten percent of Americans read books outside of school and only twenty five percent read daily newspapers.   

Could our failure in war be traced to a lack of will and military genius?  I once accused my son, an excellent tennis player in his youth, as lacking the killer instinct.  There is no such thing as a country half victorious in war, or an athlete in sport.

America is not into controlling land but rather into controlling minds with ideas of democracy and capitalism.  Since Americans, as a people, have been egocentric from the beginning, they have shown little tolerance and even less understanding of people of difference.  This is paradoxical because the United States is the melting pot of nations, but that melting pot is expected to brew only Americanism. 

That said I don’t differ with your sadness at our inclination to lead with weakness.  We are creatures of history and historians have given us much to ponder.  Perhaps it is not our weakness that is the deciding construct, but the clash of peoples and cultures that has changed the calculus of everyone's existence.

PERSPECTIVE

The discovery of the Americas in 1492 led to the dominance of Europe and changed the world forever technologically, culturally, economically and politically. We have that same wind at our backs today. 

Europe was not a main player in the world over the previous 500 years.  It was an agricultural society with small guilds, and dominated by the Catholic Church. 

The Conquistadors of Spain came to the Americas in the early sixteenth century with their technology, military weapons, agricultural knowledge, and disease.  Brutal conquests and widespread disease wiped out 95 percent of native populations.  This signaled the disappearance of several ancient civilizations in the New World. 

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, and the thousand years required to climb out of the Dark Ages, the Arabs brought their math, science and technology to Spain and across to Italy.  European traders used Arabic numerals to record their trades. 

Then the twelfth and thirteen century Crusaders encountered Arab military technology, the canon.  They took this technology back to Europe and perfected the rifle to fire small canon balls called bullets.  This was the weapon of choice of the Conquistadors.      

When Columbus came to America, he used triangular sails invented by the Arabs, and a compass invented by the Chinese.  His voyage and the subsequent voyages bridged the Atlantic Ocean with three continents, Europe, Africa and the Americas.  Trade flourished and the world population increased from 400 million (1492) to 900 million (1792). 

Sugar was a product brought back from the Middle East by the Crusaders.  Europe couldn’t grow sugar in its climate, but came to crave it.  So, the Conquistadors created sugar plantations in the New World.  Since they didn’t want to work the sugar cane fields, they imported slaves from West Africa.  This marked the beginning of the slave trade in America.

Sugar is an important brain food, which results in an appetite for it that is hard to satisfy.  Since the eighteenth century, it has become a Western addiction. 

OVER THE CENTURIES

In 1700, most Europeans lived simple lives with 70 percent of the work by human muscle power and wood the primary fuel. The use of coal as fuel replaced wood once forests were depleted.  Mining coal encountered water, which had to be pumped out.  In 1712, German Thomas Newcomen invented the first coal fueled steam driven internal combustion engine to pump this water out. 

This invention started a fast retreat from human muscle power to machine power, to the factory, to the steamboat, and to train driven steam powered locomotives. This accelerated trade and commerce, but also led to other geopolitical consequences.  Europe fragmented into nation states with political and technological revolutions, which would spark the American and French Revolution. 

In 1800, the hub of political, cultural and technical power was that of Europe with Europeans and its descendants controlling 35 percent of the land of the globe. 

In 1900, Europe controlled 85 percent of all land on earth.  Today Europe controls about 10 percent.

By the end of WWI, European dominance was in rapid retreat, less a product of war than a rise in the national conscience.  The other factor was technology.  The perfection of the gasoline fueled internal combustion engine, and mass production of automobiles, changed the social conscience in norms and morals with an appetite for freedom.  It also led to more deadly weapons of war. 

In the twentieth century, three times as many people were killed as a result of war than in the previous 2,000 years.  Despite this, the population has increased from 900 million in 1792 to 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6 billion by 2000 to roughly 7 billion projected in the early twenty first century.  We appear without a controllable conscience the puppet of technology, which commenced in 1492 and seems only to be accelerating exponentially.

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My purpose in sharing these essays on Soren Kierkegaard is to suggest that we are driven by our unconscious, something that he explored quite thoroughly, which seems beyond the grasp of the common humanity of common man.  Religion and militarism are expressions of this unruly unconscious but they deal with it in absolute terms.  We are slow to learn the world is not a zero sum game of absolutes.

Be always well,

Jim

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