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In an interesting analytical essay in Newsweek based on the ideas in his book Civilization: The West and the Rest, historian Niall Ferguson argues that any worries about a potential decline of the United States should be based noton a hypothesis of gradual decay but instead on a concern over a quick collapse.
Ferguson’s thesis is that the West rose to world dominance through several “killer apps”:
COMPETITION
Western societies divided into competing factions, leading to progressive improvements.THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
Breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology.THE RULE OF LAW
Representative government based on private-property rights and democratic elections.MODERN MEDICINE
19th- and 20th-century advances in germ theory, antibiotics, and anesthesia.THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
Leaps in productivity combined with widespread demand for more, better, and cheaper goods.THE WORK ETHIC
Combination of intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation
In recent decades, however, the United States (like Europe) has undermined these killer apps, replacing the ideas and concepts on which the nation was founded—notions such as self-reliance, political and religious liberty, the value of competition, and rule of law—with an enervating and indeed destructive managerial state. The solution, Ferguson says, continuing the metaphor, is a cleanup of the hard drive, followed by a reboot of the nation’s founding values:
Social scientist Charles Murray calls for a “civic great awakening”—a return to the original values of the American republic. He’s got a point. Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly.
What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic.
This certainly accords with the principles continually promulgated here at The American Culture. This nation requires serious reforms in countless areas, and those cannot be accomplished until there is widespread public acceptance of the values and principles from which such reform ideas emanate. I believe that such a general consensus is possible. Ferguson’s article is well worth reading in its entirety.