Freedom and understanding
The Economist offers some insight into Unhappy America.
"There are certainly areas where change is needed. The credit crunch is in part the consequence of a flawed regulatory system. Lax monetary policy allowed Americans to build up debts and fuelled a housing bubble that had to burst eventually. Lessons need to be learnt from both of those mistakes; as they do from widespread concerns about the state of education and health care. Over-unionised and unaccountable, America’s school system needs the same sort of competition that makes its universities the envy of the world. American health care, which manages to be the most expensive on the planet even though it fails properly to care for the tens of millions of people, badly needs reform.
There have been plenty of mistakes abroad, too. Waging a war on terror was always going to be like pinning jelly to a wall. As for Guantánamo Bay, it is the most profoundly un-American place on the planet: rejoice when it is shut.
In such areas America is already showing its genius for reinvention. Both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates promise to close Guantánamo. As his second term ticks down, even Mr Bush has begun to see the limits of unilateralism. Instead of just denouncing and threatening the “axis of evil” he is working more closely with allies (and non-allies) in Asia to calm down North Korea. For the first time he has just let American officials join in the negotiations with Iran about its fishy nuclear programme (see article).
That America is beginning to correct its mistakes is good; and there’s plenty more of that to be done. But one source of angst demands a change in attitude rather than a drive to restore the status quo: America’s relative decline, especially compared with Asia in general and China in particular.
The economic gap between America and a rising Asia has certainly narrowed; but worrying about it is wrong for two reasons. First, even at its present growth rate, China’s GDP will take a quarter of a century to catch up with America’s; and the internal tensions that China’s rapidly changing economy has caused may well lead it to stumble before then. Second, even if Asia’s rise continues unabated, it is wrong—and profoundly unAmerican—to regard this as a problem. Economic growth, like trade, is not a zero-sum game. The faster China and India grow, the more American goods they buy. And they are booming largely because they have adopted America’s ideas. America should regard their success as a tribute, not a threat, and celebrate in it.
Many Americans, unfortunately, are unwilling to do so. Politicians seeking a scapegoat for America’s self-made problems too often point the finger at the growing power of once-poor countries, accusing them of stealing American jobs and objecting when they try to buy American companies. But if America reacts by turning in on itself—raising trade barriers and rejecting foreign investors—it risks exacerbating the economic troubles that lie behind its current funk.
Everybody goes through bad times. Some learn from the problems they have caused themselves, and come back stronger. Some blame others, lash out and damage themselves further. America has had the wisdom to take the first course many times before. Let’s hope it does so again."
The one most serious unspoken mistakes that America and the rest of the world has been making in the last 8 years or so is this profoundly undeserved suspicion and reversal of freedom as some kind of solution that it has, without much doubt in my mind, not proven itself to be, in the least. Americans, like everyone else, romanticize power and force to solve problems it cannot possibly solve. We do so largely out of frustration and fear. But neither compensate for understanding. And that is what freedom offers better. A stronger opportunity for understanding.
If America and the world could learn to trust freedom and understanding to do what cynicism does not understand and cannot achieve for us, the world would be in much better shape. It is our fears and what we do with those fears that perpetually causes so much death and destruction in the world. It is fear that is at the bottom of terrorism, repressive government, repressive religious, cultural, and ideological traditions, and most of the places in the world where we do damage to ourselves and one another in the name of self-centered self-preservation.
It is fear that drives our most needlessly destructive impulses. And the only andidote to that fact of human nature is more freedom and more understanding. With freedom and understanding comes the kind of self-awareness and self-determination that make the repression of others and our fears of them unnecessary and unthinkable. Or rather, we can think about them all we want. But it becomes clearer the more we reflect on our fears and their destructiveness and self-destructiveness that, perhaps, we are better off learning from the freedom than trying to control what we cannot control.
It's either that or live with the mess we've created for ourselves.
I'll take the freedom and the understanding.
Everything else just seems like an enormous waste.
