On wishing America is better than it actually is
For the entirety of my adult life, America has supposedly been in decline.
Before we get to this short July 4th post, some exciting news. My new book The Case for American Power is now available for pre-order from Simon & Schuster. Pre-orders make a big difference, so please consider supporting me and my work by getting yourself a copy. You can do so here.
Here is a teaser from the chapter on decline. Hope you find it of interest.
In allowing ourselves to be dragged into two decades of conflict (and counting) in the Middle East, we were in a sense inviting our decline. How did this happen? What were we thinking? These are reasonable questions. But this preoccupation with our own fall from grace can be misleading in its own way. The declinist story is, in the end, a story — and one that may not be entirely true.
Decline is, more than anything else, a feeling. If you think that the past was great, you’re more likely to believe the present is worse. These are subjective things. Declinism — the state of fear and fretting in which decline seems inevitable — has been something of a national pastime, with each generation of Americans rediscovering what it means to lose faith.
In 2004 and 2005, after the invasion of Iraq, I was living in Jordan and Egypt. I felt ashamed. I tried to avoid conversations that outed me as an American. I was tired of being asked to justify or explain decisions that I had nothing to do with. I didn’t see George W. Bush as my president, even though he was. I was in Amman, Jordan’s capital, when Bush managed to win a second term, despite a deteriorating security situation in Iraq. Made up of disbanded Iraqi soldiers, an insurrection was building with no obvious end in sight. It seemed inconceivable to me that there would be four more years of this.
Oddly enough, this sense of shame was bound up in other emotions, namely pride, disappointment, betrayal, and then ultimately something deeper and more profound. The more I lived abroad, the more I found I couldn’t escape the fact of who I was and who I had become. I was American. And there were few things more American than wishing and wanting America to be better than it actually was.
Dear Shadi, whether what you have been experiencing is a situation of cognitive dissonance or paradoxical inconsistencies, I see you smarter than getting stuck in this rut; just some more authenticity and responsibility (nothing pejorative meant or said from higher ground; for this I kick myself every time of every day). West or no West, Muslims & Arabs are in deep sheet; real solution is impossible at this stage, whether the West helps them or otherwise, even if the West become Muslim then there is still no prosperity for Muslims & Arabs, but they will 100% stop blaming the West.
You realise all this very well, as far as I can see.
the premier software engineering ability of america means it will be durable with significant world impact for a long time. we invented the teenager, cool and fun in the 50s and still have cultural capacity. software has been like a resource curse that flooded wealth and eased industrial obsolescence, sooner or later the downsteam economy must be reconstructed and modernized, nativists, technicists, state-capacitists and abundancists are clamoring if not moving in that direction. yet more contingent items are changing, the western hegemony is already over and the associated western secular free world paradigm is teetering. when BRICS output surpassed the G7 the west became an economic minority hegemony, an oxymoron. military capacity is shifting decisively in two directions: a duopoly of american and chinese near earth orbit command systems and a demographic and geopolitical preponderance of large middle income countries. in response western policy has turned more and more against development - sanctions, bans, tariffs and secessionist destabilization and wars against large countries. the capacity of that policy decreases by the day. with or without missiles good luck stabilizing a shrunken high tariff bloc against a vibrant world trade among a rising middle class of countries. sooner or later Europe and America will bite the bullet and reengineer domains to again compete in global markets, and the crutch of interventions will become unneeded as well as infeasible. there is strong impetus toward an hegemony of major powers, amalgamation of states, and wielding near orbit command responsibly to secure trade and internet. the western secular liberal paradigm exists as like minded and like employed colonies in most countries, the deflation of this paradigm is unmooring these colonies and opening possibility for broader political unity around national ecomodern development. the tradition of separation of church and state manifests now as neutrality toward ethics. the combination of ethical neutrality plus governance stratum gave us woke, which is a warning and indicator that elements of the western liberal paradigm are incapable and hazardous. a paradigm of ethical neutrality cannot confront the multiplying choices of advancing software, CRISPER and many more to come. for social institutions to catch up with galloping software the practitioners in many domains must be bolstered with a positive perspective toward the human journey to make decisions that are more and more put in their hands by software. the senior ethic systems - major religions and materialism - have evolved over millennia to encode thinking and ritual that favors the human journey. Ethic systems function as complex systems including national cultures that convey practice and emotion to raise children and bolster adults toward the human journey, and they evolve through demographic selection - the more effective ethic systems create a larger number of stable children that reproduce. to manage the hazards and make software modernization comprehensive the western secular neutral ethics must be replaced in public policy with mechanisms that favor a plurality of pro human journey paradigms. in 1994 tariq ramadan proposed ethic councils composed of religious and non religious experts in each domain to recommend controls on emerging technology with ethical implications. we can maintain freedom of expression for all in algorithms. but policy in the age of software modernization must do better than the naive secularism.