An exponential growth of
science and technology, the creation of a world competitive market, and the
impending displacement of hundreds of millions of workers by
non-labor-intensive processes are all combining to introduce rapid and profound
change into today's world. It is a
process that has in effect just begun and that has much further to go. The result is that almost everything we have
thought about society and human life within it will have to be re thought, no
matter what point of view we have held up to now.
The tone of this book will be that
of a personal intellectual odyssey. My
purpose will be to invite the reader into it so that the issues become the
reader's own, with us sharing them together.
We will look at what is happening in the world and will ponder the
impact of the changes on much that we have believed.
The burden will be on me to persuade
the reader that the changes have the implications I think them to have. Only to the extent we are mutually persuaded
of that impact will we travel to the end together, reflecting with each other
about what is to be done. The
persuasion will not be by special pleading or any sort of
pressure. It will be by what I hope the
reader will consider the most commonsense possible reading of events and of how
they relate to political and social principles that have been embraced by the
main competing points of view about society.
There is much to go through. It will be a long but hopefully not tedious
journey. I hope to make it as easily
understood as I can while doing justice to the serious ideas and issues at
stake.
The primary difficulty, I am sure,
will be with the desire that each reader naturally has to hold tight to the
thinking that has made up his mindscape.
No one wants to abandon ideas that have become not only dear friends but
part of the essential framework of the person's existence as he perceives
it. A challenge to those ideas can be as
serious as a challenge to life itself.
With this in mind, I will try to avoid posing the implications as a
challenge. Instead, we will want to see
why the transformation of our thinking, reflecting the changing conditions,
better serves the very things we ourselves believe in most. If we constantly keep in mind that we are
shedding some fur, in effect, in order to take on a better coat, perhaps our
innate resistance to intellectual change will give way to a common quest.
This is not to say that those who
reach a different conclusion than I do about something are per se
chargeable with resistance to change. I
respect the views of those who differ from me more than that. In the social and political debates that will
tear through society in the years to come, mutual respect will be essential to
civility; and civility will be imperative if constructive directions are to be
found. It will be a revolutionary time
shaking the foundations of everything we have known, and that portends chaos
and carnage unless the temper can be kept even.
More than anything else, we need to think things through together.
Let me introduce a term
that will be foreign to many readers. If
you are already acquainted with it, please be patient, knowing that necessarily
this book will be addressed to many different
people. Hopefully, the readers
will include those who are already highly informed in social and political
philosophy. But there will also
hopefully be a great many others, educated and intelligent but not versed in
this particular area. They will need
some instruction as we go along, not as one would teach a child but as one
would initiate a valued colleague into something outside his own area of
expertise.
What I am thinking of is the term
"classical liberal." To
understand the point from which I will start my own intellectual odyssey here,
it is necessary to know that I have all my adult life considered myself a
classical liberal. (This is the
philosophy that underlies what in popular speech most people would call
"conservatism" in the United States today; what we are talking about
is "liberalism" as it was spoken of in Europe and the United States
during the nineteenth century -- as referring to the "philosophy of
individual liberty" -- before the word took on a very different meaning
signifying a point of view that wanted the State active in society and the
economy. The word "classical"
is meant to suggest "original."
I am not making up the label; it is commonly used in political thought.) Many readers will not consider themselves
classical liberals, which means they won't be starting this "mutual
odyssey" from the same place I am.
I urge these readers to "stay the course"; they will be able
to jump aboard soon enough. And they
will be most welcome in this multiple-party monologue I hope to be
conducting.
I can best explain classical liberalism
in personal terms. I lived in
Mexico just
after infancy, and from a distance grew up revering the
United
States and all that I understood it
to symbolize. That was the philosophy of
individualism, not in any coarse "rugged individualist" version, but
in the sense of upright, stand-tall men and women who carved out a life of
individual liberty within a Constitutional system that limited, separated and
divided the power of government and who relied most essentially upon their own
energies within a market economy. Of
course, I didn't understand all that at age eleven. But as I grew older and began to inquire into
the basis for the image I had of
America, I
took on more sophistication about the philosophy's components, including
knowing its name, "classical liberalism." I especially studied it when I found the
philosophy under attack. When later most
of my professors in political science and philosophy at the
University of
Colorado were
deeply alienated against the very thing I revered, and advocated more or less
openly a socialist alternative, I found a copy of Ludwig von Mises' Human
Action in the library and read it until the cover stripped off. Mises was a leading member of the
Austrian
School of
Economics, which has been the fount of neo-classical economics and since the
mid-nineteenth century unquestionably the most stalwart center for the defense
of free market capitalism.
I served two years in the Marine
Corps after three years of pre-law, and during those two years I wrote the
first draft of my book Emergent Man, which I rewrote after finishing law
school at the
University of
Denver. The book amounts to a young man's exploration
of the principles and institutions of a classical liberal free society. From an early age, I was deeply concerned with
questions about how a society based on individual liberty works.
So I started out and have remained a
classical liberal. An important
additional fact about my intellectual orientation can be discerned, however,
from my experience when I attended the graduate school of business
administration at
New York
University before
I started law school. (I was admitted as
a "special student," since my pre-law had just been three years
rather than the four needed for graduation.)
My reason for going to NYU was that Ludwig von Mises, having fled a
Nazified Austria late in the 1930s, taught his classes and famous Thursday
night
Washington Square
seminar there. During the time I was
writing the first draft of my book, I had become concerned that a classical
liberal free society would become unsustainable if the market economy again
went through a collapse such as that of the Great Depression of the 1930s. I wanted to know whether free market thinkers
had both theoretical and practical solutions for the booms and busts of the
trade cycle. In Human Action,
Mises advocated both a gold standard and something he called "free
banking." Would those be
sufficient? And, if so, could society be
persuaded to adopt them? (I'll mention
right now, since I have led into it, that I didn't find myself persuaded by
these proposals. Instead, I came to
think that Milton Friedman's monetarism, proposing that the central bank
control the quantity of money and increase it gradually to match the growing
productivity of the economy, created the best monetary framework for the
market. With that in mind, it seemed to
me that capitalism did not have an inherent and fatal flaw. Certainly the Great Depression had not been
caused by such a flaw, but by mistaken policies that were clearly avoidable in
the future. A realization of this freed
me to go on to law school and into later explorations of classical liberal
thought.)
What I would have us notice about my
brief time in Mises' seminar is that although I was a passionate devotee of
"the free society," I was not willing to take even Mises' thought as
a disciple does. Unthinking assimilation
of ideas has never been my idea of a reasoned process. Alongside all that I found valuable, there
were things in Mises' thinking that I didn't agree with, and this led me to
submit papers to the seminar that were at odds with the otherwise unanimous
opinions of the splendid people who participated around the large conference
table. Mises was an elderly man at the
time (he was born in 1881 and it was then 1956 and early 1957), was unfailingly
gracious, gentle and dignified, and treated my heresies without the slightest
rancor. Although I was not then and am
not now a "disciple" of him or the
Austrian
School, I
think of him and those associated with him in the
Austrian
School with
great reverence and affection.
My differences with the doctrine
have led me sometimes to call myself a "neo-classical
liberal," thus complicating the semantic picture even further. It has for forty years seemed to me that free
market thinking is often learned as if by rote, and as a closed system. As such, it has an answer for everything
regardless of the facts, just as any doctrinaire system, including most
religions, do. I later wrote a monograph
called The Principles of Classical Liberalism and then a book exploring
in detail the philosophy's specific ideas, and these works entailed exploring
several weaknesses and even fallacies in the theory while at the same time I
expressed a close identification with the overwhelming thrust of what it had to
say. The "neo" comes from the
fact that I stood outside the most commonly accepted system of its thought,
feeling it needed extension and some amendment.
To my mind as I placed it in historical perspective, classical liberals,
though fundamentally correct, were forced on the defensive by the rise of the
world Left in the early nineteenth century and ceased to question their own
doctrine and to extend it into subtleties that had not been thought of by its
founders. The pure doctrine, forced by
these circumstances into a closed system, could not be taken as the final
truth; what was needed was for it to continue to be intellectually alive,
refining, extending and even correcting its thought in response to further
thinking. It could (and must) do this in
a way that is not untrue to its core values.
In fact, a failure to do these things would be the surest way to serve
it poorly.
This is important
background especially for readers who are close to me philosophically and who
see themselves variously as free market advocates, classical liberals,
conservatives or libertarians. They need
to know that I am a friend -- but also that I have long called upon all
supporters of an individualistic free society to think beyond the closed system. As this book progresses they will see that I
am neither an enemy to the values they cherish, nor a friend "who has gone
off the reservation" (suddenly or otherwise). When I urge them to join me in rethinking
much of the system of thought that has been second-nature to them and to me, it
is not to move them away from individual liberty as the central principle of
society. It is to point toward a more
sustainable philosophy of a free society under changing conditions that will
almost certainly make many of the ideas we have thus far held untenable.
Here, essentially, is what is happening. And you can see why when I reached the
mid-point in this study I expected my conclusions to shock my closest
intellectual associates. (They have not
reacted with shock, oddly enough, after reading my initial article on the
subject in late 1996.[1] Several, in fact, have indicated that they
share many of the concerns I voiced there.
The U.S. Business and Industrial Council Educational Foundation even
gave me their 1997 "American Values" award because of the
article.) Here is what the changes point
to:
That
the high-technology "information age" is fast bringing upon us
changed conditions that will undercut virtually all of the "factual and
moral predicates," so to speak, that serve as the foundation for classical
liberalism.
That,
at the same time, virtually all the underlying suppositions about people and
society that socialist thought has been preaching for two hundred
years -- suppositions that every classical liberal including especially myself
have considered dangerously off the mark during all that time--are now being
confirmed.
How can this possibly be?
Especially within such a short time after "the fall of
Communism" confirmed the free market economy as the preeminent form of
economic organization, an economy that not only provides innovation and
enormous productivity but also leads to widespread political participation and
to the limitation of governmental power?
We have had reason to think that socialism is dead, even if some of its
embers still glow in certain parts of the world. Free trade, deregulation and privatization:
these have been the rallying cries for twenty or more years.
And, too, what do these implications mean? Are they not so horrifying to an opponent of
socialism as to be beyond credence? If
they are in fact true, what hope is there for a free society in any form to
survive? The underlying premises of the
world going socialist!? To those who,
like me, have understood socialism as anathema to individual liberty, that is
unthinkable. The whole prospect is both
shocking and repulsive to those of my persuasion.
Somehow I have myself avoided a sense of doom about
it. There has been surprisingly little
trauma for me during the past year and a half (i.e., since early 1996) as I
have come to see first the changes and then their implications. Since those implications have seemed apparent
to me, I have tended to take them as givens and have accordingly been more concerned
with how a free society can be continued, perhaps even strengthened, despite or
even through them. My primary
apprehension was anticipatory: that I may be considered an apostate by so many
people whose ideas I respect and whose good opinion I value. I have no relish for "placing myself in
the other camp" from those who see themselves, in one way or another, as
anti-statist. That is why it is the
burden of this book, among other tasks, to persuade them that the changes in
society do have the implications I believe them to have and that individual
liberty will be best served by taking those implications fully into
account. In fact, I hope to impress upon
them that classical liberalism can only maintain its standing among our fellows
by doing so; otherwise, free market thinking will almost certainly go into
disrepute, and beyond that will become hated by countless millions. Those millions will not repudiate it because they are
evil. It will be because their lives
will depend upon organizing society around other principles. Classical liberalism, unless it becomes a
leader in establishing a new paradigm, will have failed theoretically and
practically.
But
I imagine many readers are by this time impatient to know what the changes
are that are occurring so rapidly and so massively in society (even though I
spoke of them briefly in the opening lines of the chapter), and why I say those
changes "falsify many of the underpinnings of classical liberalism and
affirm those of socialism." (To
avoid misunderstanding, I should take time to add that this shift does not
imply anybody's needing to embrace socialism as we have known it. If non-socialists come to see the necessity
for much redistributionism to assure everyone's participation in the society of
the future, it will be even more important to them to "chain the state
down" with every means at their disposal to prevent the abuse of
concentrated power. These means can
include a Constitutionally mandated separation of the redistributional
mechanism from the State that exercises regulatory, military and police
functions. It will also be desirable to
continue a vigorous market economy to the fullest extent feasible both as a
spur to innovation and as a freedom-enhancing option for individuals. As we will see, there will, at least in the
advanced economies, be no contradiction in having such a continuing free
market. It will be sufficient if we come
to have what I will call "a shared market economy" in which there is
a vigorous market that all people share in as part-owners. The means by which this sharing of ownership
can be accomplished will be discussed in a later chapter. For reasons that will be explained as the
book goes along, even those who have favored a "mixed economy" or
socialism per se will have reason to favor both a limitation on the
powers of the State and the continuation of a vigorous market sector. In other words, there should be common ground
for people who until now have held widely varying views.)
The early chapters of this book will recount what
hundreds of books are now reporting: that the world is experiencing an
exponential growth of science and technology, especially of
computerization. Even though we see it
all around us and perhaps think we are heavily engaged with it, the fact is
that we are just barely into it. There
is much further to go. The possibilities
for even the near-term future are staggering.
The acceleration of communications and of transport, and
the development of a worldwide financial market, are increasingly making each
country's economy a mere subset of a worldwide competitive market. Again, a nation such as the
United States is just partly into the change; only in recent years
have the percentages of imports and exports in relation to the total economy increased
rapidly; but the transformation to a world market is proceeding at an
accelerating pace. In this worldwide
market, virtually everyone is or soon will be in close competition with
everyone else. This produces a
relentless drive to reduce costs. Anyone
who does not cut costs again and again will be undersold and forced out of
business.
It is no longer silly to postulate near-utopian
possibilities from all this in terms of human well-being (though hardly in
terms of human character). Food, goods and
services of kinds we have not even thought of yet, health care, entertainment:
the prospect is imminent that all can be produced at low cost and in massive
volume. The potential is near-at-hand
for affluence, not just in the industrialized countries but everywhere, beyond
the wildest dreams of anyone but a science-fiction writer. The science and technology are here, or soon
coming. What is necessary is that they
be put fully into use, that the inertia of existing ways not serve to block
them--and that civilized order and humane values be maintained so that
societies can churn their way through times that will truly be
revolutionary. So great are the needs in
the world that a full realization of this affluence will occupy humanity, even
under the best conditions, for a very long time. The means, however, are coming into our
possession. That is why this will not be
a "Luddite" book opposing the new science and technology. They are the wings that can carry the world's
billions into a better future.
The prospects are wonderful if this is all there is to
it. But, unfortunately, there's more,
which is why I have named this Introduction "Dangerous Ascent": The
economic systems of the present, as of the past, are centered around scarcity,
the need for production and work. To
live, everyone who is not supported by relatives, friends or government must
find a place in that productive system to obtain income from it. That is, entrepreneurship or work in some
form is a necessity not just for production but for people's participation and
consumption. We judge people by their
performance in these terms; and their livelihood depends upon it. Now, however, the global economy puts workers
throughout the advanced nations into direct competition with hundreds of millions
of workers, many of them increasingly high-skilled, from among the poorly-paid
peoples of the
Third World. Profits for
firms and investors shoot up, but the inexorable process of supply and demand,
given the immense source of low-cost labor, trends the wages downward
potentially to depths unimaginable to Americans. Many authors see this as an impending crisis
for workers in the advanced economies as they come under increasing pressure
about how to make a living from and find a place in the economy. It is important to realize, however, that
this offers to be, relatively speaking, a short-term phenomenon, even though it
is no doubt very important in that short term.
Computer integrated technology (CIT)
and other scientific-technical advances promise to undercut, cost-wise, even
the poorly paid workers of the
Third
World. When something can be made dirt-cheap in the
laboratory, there is a competitive undercutting of the ability of people to
play a role as workers everywhere. The
result will be a crisis even more for the low-paid workers of the
Third World
than for people in the advanced economies.
There is even a crisis for the scientific-technical
system itself: the old "purchasing power" bugaboo that critics of a
market economy have been arguing for almost two centuries without justification
comes to life as a very real fact, and unless the billions of human beings who
make up the world's population can find some way to share in the revenues of
the economy, those revenues will begin to drop off as mass markets disappear or
fail to develop. In that case, the
utopian possibilities fade, and even
those who as investors own the technology will cease to make vast sums from it.
What we see is
that the world faces a problem not unlike the one that concerned me when I went
to attend the Mises seminar in the mid-1950s to ponder the solution to the
trade cycle. The issue is whether
capitalism--the market economy--, despite its capacity (in combination with science
and technology) to produce abundance, will continue to work for everybody. If not, two of the basic assumptions of
classical liberalism--that people in general can "make it" if they
strive with enough gumption and energy, and that accordingly a free market will
lead to a vast middle class -- are falsified.
Think how fundamental those assumptions are. Classical liberalism's legitimacy depends
upon them. If a massive problem falsifying
those fundamentals doesn't force a reorientation within classical liberalism
itself, nothing will.
Devotees of a free market will be thinking at this
juncture that "the market is always self-adjusting through its price
system. Free markets always clear
themselves of the goods and labor that are offered." If that holds true, there should be no
displacement, only adjustment. But
consider this: hundreds of millions shifted from agriculture into industry as
the industrial revolution proceeded; in recent years, millions more have
shifted from industry to the "service sector" as industry has needed
relatively fewer works to produce an ever-increasing volume of products. Where, then, do the millions or even billions
of people go, for the earnings that will allow them to be consumers, when
non-labor-intensive technology offers more and more to diminish the amount of
labor needed even for service functions?
Will people be picking up scraps and hoping from those to be consumers
at the lush table that technology can set?
A vast displacement of workers and of all economic effort
is certain to occur in the less developed economies; and classical liberalism,
if it continues to aspire to be a universal philosophy, will need to address
their needs. There is a possibility,
though, that an ultimate displacement of workers (as distinct from a series of
temporary displacements as they continually search for new jobs and niches)
will not occur within the advanced economies, and that people won't be reduced
to searching for scraps. Even in a
"best case scenario," much "churning" will occur as people
are made insecure and tossed about by constant "restructurings" as
business reacts to the relentless drive to cut costs. (The "downsizings" and
"restructurings" of the past few years aren't over; rather, they are
"just starting.") Despite this
churning, "ultimate" as distinct from "temporary"
displacement may conceivably not occur.
Why do I suggest this? Let's use
an illustration: In a town in 1849 California, it was sufficient if, say,
thirty percent of the men worked in the gold and silver mines nearby. Their income was enough to support a large
number of mercantile stores, dentists, doctors, saloon-keepers, and so on. The latter were not parasites, but regular
parts of the local economy. In the world
of the near future, if thirty percent of the public can make a good living out
of technical work, or if a significant part of the population draw income from
the economy as owners of stock such as in their retirement funds, that may be
enough to make possible a thriving economy for the others.
An economic polarization will then be the main
manifestation of the changed conditions.
Why a polarization? There will be
those who participate in the highly rewarding high-tech economy as skilled
technicians, as owners, or as people who reap vast earnings from mass
markets. And there will be the great
mass of other people, in comparatively vast supply, who compete with each
other, with foreign labor, and increasingly with non-labor-intensive technology
for the supporting roles. Science and
technology may under those circumstances raise the overall level of life, but
the differences in income and wealth will be immense.
What we need to realize is that many societies have
accepted vast inequality as normal. In
the eighteenth century, classical liberals did not accept it when they saw in
the ancien regime an hereditary inequality that had no market
justification. They knew that that
inequality was of a sort antithetical to liberty. Later, however, in the debates between
classical liberalism and socialism since the French Revolution, classical
liberals had good reason to defend a fair amount of "inequality" as
both the motive-power and by-product of a competitive market system. They have seen this market-based
"inequality" as a hallmark of freedom as against the demands for an
egalitarian leveling. But what is
essential now is for the proponents of individual liberty to see that the
inequalities of the high-tech future will not be of the same kind. Not only can major inequalities calcify into
the sort of class system that classical liberals earlier knew to be inimical to
a free society, but the inequality will find little legitimacy based on the
theory of property, earnings and contract that has been fundamental to
classical liberalism. When, for example,
Mike Tyson made $30 million dollars (before it was reduced by a fine of $3
million) for his part in the infamous ear-biting fight with Evander Holyfield,
how much of that was "due to his own efforts"? Earnings at that level were the product of a
worldwide marketing mechanism made possible by advanced communications. Did Tyson create that? Certainly not. Did anyone else in particular? No. It
was a product of the accretion of vast
scientific-technical-entrepreneurial-even governmental effort by countless
people. Because of that accretion, Tyson
was, in effect, walking into a field and "mixing his labor" with
orchards overhanging with fruit, with bushes loaded with berries, with venison
waiting patiently to be taken. To be
sure, his own labor as a prizefighter was important to the mass-marketing as
the product to be packaged, but it was just a small part. Under such circumstances in which the great
mechanism for affluence is much more than ever before an accumulation of
accomplishments from those who have gone before, if a people begin to divide
into those who are fabulously-rich and a great mass of second-class citizens,
are the classical liberals of the future going to be true to their own beliefs
if they find it sufficient simply to say "they all earned their
place"? To say that will be to
cling to what has been true in the past, while at the same time being untrue to
the essential purposes of their own philosophy.
Classical liberalism will have been transformed into what socialists
have so long argued erroneously that it has been, a special-pleading rationale
for the rich. One of the purposes of
this book will be to persuade those who cherish individual liberty that they
will be truer to their own philosophy if they see that there are limits to
polarization. This means that "the
market" and "contracts entered into within the market," cannot
under the coming circumstances be considered the sole criterion for what ought
to be.
By this time, it may
be apparent why this dialogue will interest not just pro-market thinkers but
people of all persuasions. Those who see
the market as harsh and want "a more compassionate society" will find
much of my analysis congenial. Most of
the specific points raised by present-day liberal and socialist thought will,
in fact, be satisfied by a "shared market economy."
The
question will be how much they desire to share common ground with classical
liberals such as myself in wanting to constrain the potential concentration of
governmental power that a major on-going redistributionist program will
entail.
For all those who are
serious about making the "mixed economy" or "social
democracy" humane, respectful of individuals and genuinely participative,
this will be an invitation for the ideological divisions of the past two
centuries to come to an end. Those who
have held widely differing viewpoints can come to share common ground.
There is a major stumbling-block which we need to face
honestly. During the past thirty years,
I have devoted much attention in my writing to a phenomenon called "the
alienation of the intellectual" that has been one of the principal forces
in modern civilization since Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century. Especially since the beginning of the
Romantic movement in the early nineteenth century, the predominant literary,
artistic and professorial culture (to which there have been many individual
exceptions) has been deeply disaffected with the mainstream
"bourgeois" (i.e., middle class, commercial) culture. Socialist thought came to be championed by
this alienated subculture, in fact, as its members sought out, in succession,
every unassimilated or disaffected group as allies in the ideological,
political struggle with the commercial middle class and sought to mold an
ideology that would appeal to those groups.
Much of the social-political history of the past two hundred years has
reflected this bitter division, and the major systems of thought about society
and politics have systematized the viewpoints of the respective antagonists.
There have been several reasons for this alienation. I believe they go much deeper than just the
complaints the Left has found to make against a market economy. I analyzed several causes in detail in my
book Understanding the Modern Predicament. The objections to capitalism certainly were
one of them. To the extent those
complaints have been a significant cause of the disaffection, a move into a
common outlook based around a "shared market economy" should cause
the alienation to die away. If that
happens, we will move into a new phase of history for a reason additional to
those we have already mentioned. It will
not be the end of conflict, since human beings will still retain their mixed
nature from which power and avarice will almost certainly never disappear. But the basis will exist for a reconciliation
of many of the antagonisms the world has known for several generations.
It is an open question, however, whether the alienation
will actually wither away, because other causes are at work. During the Communist years in eastern Europe,
two social analysts, Konrad and Szelenyi, wrote a book entitled Intellectuals
on the Road to Class Power. That
very name raises the question: Is there a yearning by "intellectuals"
for power that will continue even into a new, much more egalitarian, age? I would ask each of my readers who may identify with the angry artistic and literary
culture to ask himself, probing deeply into the bottom of his soul, just how he
feels about that. (Women readers are
included in this, of course. The masculine pronoun in this case is meant in the
traditional sense as a general pronoun not specifying sex.) Fundamentally, there will be conflict, not
reconciliation, between those who want an egalitarian society as a vehicle for
power and those who want it to serve individual liberty. However, since I am discussing how this book
will speak to people of varying persuasions, I should speak even to those who
see themselves as future antagonists.
They may find it a good idea to follow my ideas to their conclusion, if
for no other reason than to "know the enemy." If they are persuaded along the way, so much
the better.
Our discussions here
should also be of interest to peoples everywhere around the world. Much of the time I will be talking from the
perspective of someone in an advanced economy, but it will be apparent that our
subject is much broader than that. The
onrushing changes in the world economy offer unbelievable promise to--and at
the same time profoundly threaten--peoples everywhere.
A realistic given should be this: that it simply will not
be possible for the industrialized nations to support the burgeoning billions
in the world population even with the new technology. The world population is just too vast and
deep an ocean, so to speak, for that.
Nor would those billions' self-respect as individuals and in the context
of their respective cultures necessarily welcome that support even if it were
possible. Since "the market"
will simultaneously offer both utopia and displacement--with the latter
removing the possibility of total reliance on the market--, political action
will be essential. Such action will be
vital if the benefits of the coming technology are to be realized by entire
peoples, if vast suffering and anti-civilizational revolutionary chaos are to
be prevented, and if (for its own sake and in support of both these purposes)
there is to be assurance that everybody in a given society will share in the
means of life. And what will this action
call for? In the advanced economies
where innovation and continuing production are predictable based on what
already exists, a "shared market economy" will be a natural
solution. But in a country like
Pakistan, say, whose economy is almost entirely agricultural, the very real
question arises about how it is to have any economy at all in a world where
indoor farm-factories come to undercut outdoor farmers everywhere. In much of the world, the societies may be
forced to operate on the old socialist prescription "production for use,
not for profit." Let's express it
bluntly: If government or non-profit institutions use the technology directly
to produce and to distribute, that will be "socialism" per se. This book will be of potential value in
pointing to the dangers such socialism poses in light of Lord Acton's axiom
that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely." It will be for
erstwhile non-socialists (and hopefully socialists themselves) to ask: What
will be the means that can be used to restrain that power? How can we hope to prevent those dangers?
The peoples of the advanced economies will have a
profound self-interest in the well-being of the other peoples of the
world. Concern for those peoples will be
far removed from a naive "do-goodism." Hundreds of millions -- in fact, billions -- of
displaced people will be bitter and desperate adversaries if displacement
becomes the primary reality for them. In
an age of terrorism and of potential nuclear, chemical and biological warfare,
it will be a disaster for everybody if hatred looms so large. Or by physical migration those billions will
"swamp out" the richer nations, such as is portrayed in Jean
Raspail's haunting novel The Camp of the Saints.
These needs, both compassionate and self-interested, will
make essential a sharing of technology, as it is developed, all over the
world. The advanced economies can't
support the other peoples, but they will have a way vitally to assist those
peoples in gaining the means to support themselves.
It is conceivable that the
tendency toward a worldwide mixing of cultures and diminution of national
sovereignties will continue. The
ever-growing ease of communication, transportation and travel will push toward
that. But the necessity of political solutions
by whatever institutions are politically viable points in another
direction. In today's world those
institutions are the nation-states. A
"world government," given the present level of civilization in a
world whose evolution has taken it only so far as to the twilight between
civilization and barbarism (a theme of my book Understanding the Modern
Predicament), would portend disaster.
If the nation-state is to be the main center for
addressing the needs of peoples under the coming circumstances, and if
affluence is achievable, a by-product will be that it should become possible
for peoples to retain their respective cultures, cultivating the local texture
of life that adds so much to the richness of human experience, if that is their
desire. This should be true for peoples
everywhere. It will be especially
meaningful for the Islamic countries and for the West, but it will also be
important for any society with a culture its people value. With both Islam and the West, their future
existence is now threatened, given the trends of the past. The peoples of the West in particular have
even been losing the will to survive.
This is most apparent in the existentially-redefining extent of
immigration they have for several years been permitting.
Not only will national entities be called upon to see to
it that their peoples enjoy benefit rather than suffer calamity from the coming
age's technology, they will also be able to create the framework for modes of
life that the people may choose, even though the relentless cost-cutting of the
market would not itself allow them.
Factory farms, say, may turn out the foodstuffs needed, but millions may
choose to live a rural existence pursuing what we might consider
"hobbyist" farming. When
scarcity has ceased to be the central economic fact and there is a mechanism
for assuring everyone's participation in the output of the economy, there can
be a blossoming of freely-chosen ways of living.
No doubt there will be differences of opinion about the
desirability of survival for any given culture--and that can be a source of
conflict. (That it can be so may seem
strange, since the right of any people to retain their culture may seem a
given; it is, however, something that is very much "at issue" by the
end of the twentieth century for Europe and the United States. I have been on panel discussions with
"minority activists" who would take great offense at the barest
suggestion of perpetuating Euro-American culture.)
The erosion of European and American identity has to a
large extent come, however, from policies that have reflected the attitudes of
the alienated intellectual subculture.
That subculture presently has controlling voice in the media and major
institutions, dictates what is "politically correct," and champions
minorities of every kind as against the mainstream population. Again, if that alienation ceases to exist, or
even moderates considerably, the search for unassimilated allies may disappear
and the whole "attack on the West" may evaporate. We simply don't know what will happen. I can at least tell readers, in advance, my
own preference: as someone who cherishes the United States and sees enormous
value in the heritage the United States has received from Europe, I think it is
imperative that the opportunity be taken to reaffirm the recognizable existence
and cultural identity of the nations with a European heritage. I can only hope that most readers will join
me in this. If thought through seriously,
it should serve non-Europeans' interest as well as Europeans and those of
European extraction. It is not something
that even the peoples of other continents should have a quarrel with, if they
are able meaningfully to affirm their own cultures in their own home
countries. Then we will truly be in a
world with the richness of "multiculturalism" in its best sense.
The issues I have just mentioned illustrate that this
book will not be without its provocative elements, even in addition to those
that were originally so apparent. I am
going to make this an honest book, avoiding nothing among the major questions
as I see them. Those who read only
things with which they already agree are warned: quit now! The rest will want to join me in a dialogue
of the utmost importance and, I hope, fascination.
This introductory chapter has mostly been devoted to an overview of the main
topics that will be discussed later.
Before we conclude, let us consider a few preliminaries:
1. After my
initial article on this subject appeared in the fall of 1996, I sent copies to
about 80 friends, mostly professors, writers and think-tank scholars, around
the United States, asking for comment.
There were many excellent replies.
Some of these warned against trying to see too far ahead
and over-reacting. One of the
correspondents, W. Edward Chynoweth, a man of learning and Burkean conservative
texture, impressed on me the risks of theorizing about social changes before
they occur. Can we doubt that he was
right when he warned that "there is a thin line between wise foresight and
senseless futurism"? Another
friend. Bob Clack, wrote that "the predictions of the great minds such as
Malthus and H. G. Wells have been spectacularly wrong. Why then should we start believing them
now?"[2] It is not always possible to tell the
difference between foresight and foolishness before years go by and hindsight
provides illumination. Chynoweth was
especially concerned that groundless predictions can fuel "overzealous,
premature changes, based on mere speculation." He also raised a fundamental point about the
extent to which we are even capable of seeing ahead: "When one reflects on
history's usual litany of seminal inventions--gunpowder, the printing press,
the airplane, the moonshot, wine, etc.--doesn't it seem as if we still are
trying to assimilate all the ramifications?
Therefore, isn't it beyond our capacities to plan ahead to accommodate
the myriad aftereffects of developments still embryonic? Wouldn't it possibly even be a mistake to do
so?"[3]
I agree with each of these points. I have written similar cautions recently
about the "global warming" scare, in the name of which vast sums are
being spent but which so far has continued to be refuted by the best scientific
evidence such as the satellite temperature readings. And yet I persist with this book. Why?
Because it seems to me that the risks are similar to those someone takes
in investing in the stock market. Those
are certainly right who warn that the market may fall, or even that another
depression might strike. What is being
overlooked is that there is perhaps an even greater possibility of
inflation--just as much a risk to the value of ones wealth as a fall in the
market--, and that one cannot avoid risk by not budging. Applied to our subject in this book, there is
clearly the risk that the changes now being predicted in the world economy will
not occur, or that they will not have
the effects we foresee for them. If in
the future the market economy continues to pump out goods and services and spur
innovation, all without major dislocations and polarization, an analysis based
on dislocations will, depending on how it is perceived, amount to a humiliating
embarrassment. A future generation may
look back on the analysis and on the policies it engendered as examples of
incredible folly. On the other hand, I
am convinced that if the changes occur and have anything like the effects they
would seem to portend, a failure to begin to reorient our thinking now, and to
follow through with appropriate policies as events come to indicate their need,
will spell the doom not just of market theory, but of the entire set of ideas
that have composed the principles and values of a free society. So I would seem to disagree, at least in emphasis,
with such friends as I have just quoted.
One such friend is Angus MacDonald, who wrote that "we should
continue along the present path until facts prove us wrong."[4] Patrick Buchanan has an apt quote from Lord
Melbourne that serves as a counter-weight to their admonitions: "Nothing
that the wise men promised has happened, and everything the damned fools said
would happen has come to pass!"[5]
Fortunately, the policy implications I will suggest
(mostly to create a "shared market economy") are not radical in the
sense that they will undermine the existing market-centered world economic
system. Even if we begin to think about
them now, they will not have to be implemented until the need for them becomes
obvious.
So after a balancing of risks I prefer getting the
discussion started. The warnings from
Chynoweth, Clack and MacDonald suggest another feature, however, well worth
considering. Is it necessary to
understand our discussion as being based on dogmatic assertions that "this
or that is certain to happen"? When
I say, as I did a few paragraphs ago, that "a vast displacement...is
certain to occur in the less developed countries," what ought to be
understood by such a statement? I will
hardly be able to avoid predictions as I talk about the forces and their
implications, unless I weaken the analysis and load each statement with
qualifications about the uncertainties of life.
Let us very properly agree, right here at the beginning, that no one of
us is omniscient, that we are feeling our way, and that all predictions are
colored by uncertainty. As Richard
Lacayo said recently in Time magazine, "The first rule of
forecasting should be that the unforeseen keeps making the future
unforeseeable."[6]
So armed, we can perhaps resolve that to the best of our
ability we will wait to "take action" only with prudence and
wisdom. Action can wait until after
events have clarified its necessity. (In
making this resolution, we need to keep in mind that we may not see action as
necessary even when it comes to be needed unless we are intellectually
prepared to see the necessity. The
thought of that spurs me on. I do not
want us justifying enormities just because we are looking at them with ideological
blinders on.)
2. Even though
this Introduction has given an overview of where we are going, there is much it
has not been able to say. Our subject is
a complex whole, which we have to take a piece at a time. This demands the reader's patience, since a
reader may at least subconsciously wish that all the nuances could be made
clear simultaneously.
Repetition ought not to be a problem. The book as a whole will go into detail about
what I've already mentioned, but each part will have its fresh aspect. In this Introduction, we have barely
scratched the surface.
ENDNOTES
[1]. Dwight D. Murphey, "The ‘Warp-Speed'
Transformation of the World Economy: A Discussion of Ten (of the Many) Recent
Books," The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Fall
1996, pp. 307-342.
[2]. Letter
to the author from Bob Clack, retired Kansas State University physicist and
long-time editor of The Kansas Intelligencer, dated November 16, 1996.
[3]. Letter to me from W. Edward Chynoweth,
January 30, 1997.
[4]. Letter to the author from Angus MacDonald,
long-time publisher and editor of The St. Croix Review, dated November
16, 1996.
[5]. Quoted in Patrick J. Buchanan, "Mexico:
What Was Right?," taken from Internet,
http://www.buchanan.org/nafta01.html.
[6]. Time, Fall 1992, Vol. 140, Issue 27, p.
90.