My Rutgers-Newark colleague Frank Fischer sent me a couple of articles from the New York Times issue of November 14, 2011. They are about the bitterness of the current generation as common aspirations built up in the Postwar Era are dashed by crisis and also about the spread of the “Occupy” protests to college campuses.
All this reminds me of something I thought about quite a lot in the 1970s when I taught, among other things, American Politics and The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy at the University of York—reading William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, etc.
How can America adapt to the end of the frontier, ideologically, materially, politically, socially? The quasi-reality of the 17th to the 19th century, turned into myth in the 20th, was that there were empty lands (except for those pesky Indian savages), limitless natural resources, an endless supply of highly individually motivated immigrant and post-immigrant entrepreneurs and workers, and expanding markets everywhere.
This perception was compounded and spread beyond the US to Europe, Japan and elsewhere by the myth of the Post- World War II generation and the 1950s, which even Robert Reich succumbs to in his book Supercapitalism.
In a globalizing world, however, that is clearly no longer true.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
My Rutgers-Newark colleague Frank Fischer sent me a couple of articles from the New York Times issue of November 14, 2011. They are about the bitterness of the current generation as common aspirations built up in the Postwar Era are dashed by crisis and also about the spread of the “Occupy” protests to college campuses.
All this reminds me of something I thought about quite a lot in the 1970s when I taught, among other things, American Politics and The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy at the University of York—reading William Appleman Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, etc.
How can America adapt to the end of the frontier, ideologically, materially, politically, socially? The quasi-reality of the 17th to the 19th century, turned into myth in the 20th, was that there were empty lands (except for those pesky Indian savages), limitless natural resources, an endless supply of highly individually motivated immigrant and post-immigrant entrepreneurs and workers, and expanding markets everywhere.
This perception was compounded and spread beyond the US to Europe, Japan and elsewhere by the myth of the Post- World War II generation and the 1950s, which even Robert Reich succumbs to in his book Supercapitalism.
In a globalizing world, however, that is clearly no longer true.