The American Renaissance

The timing is pretty good. John McCain can't possibly be as bad as George Bush has been, and for purposes of presenting an image of a new American, Barack Obama will likely be much better. Especially in the President Obama scenario, we may now be entering into an age where the United States comes to look increasingly attractive. One reason for saying so is the general investing principle that, when things look too ugly to believe, they probably are not really that ugly. The Bush/Cheney administration has done so very much to depress the stock of America. It is realistic to expect that any next president would cast the nation in a better light. Obama certainly seems capable of doing so; and there is some chance that McCain, if elected, will prove to be much less regrettable than some of his campaign tactics and statements might suggest. Both are, in any event, talented and experienced individuals. Another reason to expect a change in America's global reputation is that the rise of China seems likely to provoke considerable anxiety around the world. It is true that much of the American effort and attention abroad has been steered by people of money and power, as distinct from people of principle. Even at their worst, however, American abusers of power and wealth have had to consider the possibility of lawsuits and investigations -- civil, criminal, and journalistic -- that, sooner or later, might expose their misdeeds and undermine or taint their legacies. This is not yet the case in China. To compare recent examples, the Bush administration faced many hurdles in its efforts to commit human rights abuses in places like the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and the pendulum is now swinging back. There will be innumerable investigations, articles, interviews, and tell-all books in response to such abuses. In China, meanwhile, the collapse of poorly constructed schools during a recent major earthquake appears to be attributable to massive corruption on the part of local officials and construction enterprises; yet China's response to this is not to learn from it, much less to air its dirty laundry in public. The school collapses join the Tienanmen Square massacre as major catastrophes that will simply fade away into the past, if the Chinese government has its way. Ideally, Americans would not commit horrible atrocities or exploit other peoples. As a dim second-best, one can at least hope and expect that there will remain a belief in justice, and a number of ways to pursue it, within the American culture and government. Whatever tales may have been told about American soldiers to Japanese soldiers and civilians during World War II, when it came to the end, the decision was clear: surrender to the Americans, not to the Russians. The brief American occupation of Japan compared quite favorably to the postwar Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. America was, and remains, the kind of occupier from which an occupied land could expect some openness and respect. Again, notwithstanding the atrocities, American ambitions in Iraq do compare favorably against Chinese ambitions in Tibet or Sudan. The United States also appears likely to retain a relative attractiveness, compared to China, in terms of its natural environment. There has been a long-term American commitment to the outdoors, one that has cost a great deal of money that could have been pocketed by people who would have liked to cash in on real estate values and mineral rights in national parks and other preserved lands. Even a bankrupt municipality rarely thinks seriously about selling off the city park. China has a nearly permanent disability in this regard. It has too many people. Those people want food, shelter, and ultimately a middle-class (or better) lifestyle. Unless environmental conditions deteriorate to such a gross extreme as to enforce other values upon those individuals, the present course suggests that the average Chinese person is going to focus on lifestyle and childbearing, rather than the environment, for the foreseeable future. Tourists will still want to see China. But it is not likely to be considered one of the world's most attractive travel destinations. The Bush/Cheney administration has given the world's people many incentives to want China to replace or counterbalance the U.S. China, as the new kid on the block, has been positioned to gain much attention and prestige from the present state of affairs. When the dust settles on the 2008 Olympics and the Bush/Cheney administration, however, some of China's novelty is going to begin to wear off, and there is apt to be a positive reappraisal of the U.S. contribution to the world's welfare. The United States is the sort of nation whose culture gives rise to a Peace Corps and to robber barons, from the 19th century to Bill Gates, who ultimately devote their fortunes to charity. It is not that every robber baron followed such a path, nor that every college student longs to join the Peace Corps. It is that such orientations do endure and are respected. We actually believe in soldiers giving candy to kids in occupied lands. Despite our leaders' macho denials of interest in "armed social work" or "nationbuilding," circa 2003, that is exactly the kind of commitment to which we have proved capable of allowing ourselves to be yoked. For all our arrogance and exploitation over the past half-century, we do not have a 2,000-year history of considering ourselves the center of the world. As China becomes stronger, people everywhere are going to become more concerned about that difference. In financial and, eventually, military terms, China will increasingly become a rival of the United States. In doing so, China will be following the path of the Ugly American who threw his money and weight around, starting especially in the 1950s. Thus, at the very time when China is making itself more of a challenger to the U.S. in those regards, it will ironically be making itself less competitive against the U.S. in terms of values and ideals. The land that could learn from (and become famous for) its Buddhist and Taoist heritage will instead become the latest incarnation of an exploitative and corrupt capitalist model -- just when the likes of Obama may be swinging America back toward its best values. At such a time, it may appear that the true deficit of a nondemocratic regime lies not in its capacity to manage, but rather in its difficulty in inspiring its subjects with a vision. A generation from now, China will have developed into a somewhat more mature capitalist society. Its people will have more of a say in things. There will be greater awareness of environmental and spiritual matters. China, too, may be approaching its own low point in the next few years. What remains unclear is whether China will recover from that sort of low point with imagination and creativity, or will instead continue to follow examples borrowed from other countries -- previously, the U.S.S.R., and more recently the U.S. At present, it seems that China will not be a leader in the competition for the best ideals of humanity. If the U.S. is in that race, its competitors will most likely be in Europe or, perhaps, India.

Why the Tibet Protests Are Important

The Chinese leaders will not back down on Tibet. The Chinese people will not let them. The people of China are convinced that Tibet belongs to them. So it seems unlikely that protests on Tibet will make things better in Tibet. They may help, but they may also hurt. The protests are important because they provide a focal point for the world to treat China as a superpower. The sooner the people of the world become sensitized to the dangers that a superpower poses, the more likely they are to unite against it. It's not that people should just band together against a superpower for the hell of it. That's not the nature of the situation. People do, or should, band together against superpowers when they abuse their power. Power tends to corrupt. It seems almost inevitable that, when a country becomes strong, it begins to throw its weight around. "Appeasement" was the word used when, in 1938, the leaders of France, Britain, and Italy caved in to Hitler's demands to annex part of Czechoslovakia, claiming that it rightfully belonged to Germany. It took another year or so for those leaders to realize that, when you feed the tiger, the tiger becomes bigger. The world does not need any more Munichs. China has entered onto the world stage. It is taking superpower-level actions; it is stirring superpower-level irritation; and it is generating superpower-level unity, not only among its opponents, but also among those who were previously undecided about it. This process is healthy. The sooner the world can unite against China, the less likely China will be to commit the kind of costly mistake that, for instance, the U.S. made in Iraq. The world is going to continue to deal with China, and China is going to continue to grow. But, with luck, it will grow not only quickly, but well. The best that could happen, for these purposes, would be that the world would become truly outraged, and the Olympics would become a tremendous embarrassment for China. That way, ten or twenty years from now, the Tibetan incident will be remembered more clearly, and will be likely to have more influence, than the Tiananmen Square massacre has had. The bigger the problem, the harder it is to sweep under the rug. Ten or twenty years from now, China will be a superpower indeed. With luck, it will have the lessons from its "Wild West" period held up for reflection within living memory -- not just weakly resurrected from history books, like in the U.S. Let China take a very large, very visible fall on its face -- not because there is any joy in embarrassing anyone, but because the world does not need any more Tiananmens either.

The Ultimate Intellectual Piracy

The United States may soon cease to be the world’s greatest threat to global peace.

That statement may come as news to those who were not aware that the U.S. ever was a great threat to global peace. And surely, by many measures, it is not. How many countries have a Peace Corps? How many provide real estate for a United Nations?

Let us not quibble about the U.S.’s standing as the world’s leading seller of weaponry. Let us not debate the invasion of Iraq, or the devastation and brutality of the Vietnam War (or, indeed, the murder rates in our own cities).

In fact, let us withdraw that statement about the United States altogether. Because soon, it may not matter anyway.

The U.S. has had its Ugly Americans abroad, as well as its piggish Yuppies cluelessly asking themselves, “Why do they hate us?” in the wake of 9/11. But at least some such Yuppies did ask, and some actually seemed to want to hear an answer. That, however, may not be the way of the future.

Surely there will always be a liberal, educated fringe of Chinese individuals who have not only visited the West but who have also come to appreciate the good things that the West’s liberal, educated fringe try to achieve. Such individuals will undoubtedly be grossly outnumbered, though, by those Chinese people who, in good middle-class American style, neither know nor care, very much, what the rest of the world may think or believe.

Most Chinese may be like most Americans – concerned, that is, with what’s on the barbecue or in the fridge, and not so concerned with what someone with a cause, somewhere else in the world, seems to be complaining about.

China has a reputation, these days, of copying what other people invent. There is no law of nature that limits such copying to the good things. Those who plunder goods from others’ homes may inadvertently haul away some dust and cockroaches as well.

In particular, China may be copying some flaws from America of the 1960s. Chinese responses to Tibet certainly make it seem that way.

On Tibet, as in Vietnam, the world speaks out, in the name of fairness and humanity. The Dalai Lama, like a latter-day Ho Chi Minh, actually talks as if he believed that the leaders of the superpower were reasonable people. But those leaders have their eyes on domestic opinion, and domestic opinion is clear enough.

It took a long, long time for Americans to make up their minds, take action, and ultimately end the Vietnam War. Even in a fairly open democracy, with many fictions exposed by a relatively free press, it took years on end for society to get sick of its own anti-communist rhetoric.

Americans of that era knew what they believed. They knew it because it was what someone had told them, and it was also what their friends seemed to believe. We cannot expect anything different from the Chinese, and we are not getting anything different. The effort to talk sense to Chinese people – even educated, westernized ones – about Tibet, these days, seems much like the effort to talk sense to Americans in 1968 (or, actually, in 2003).

Tibet is not the point. Tibet is merely the illustration. If the Chinese people are presently able to support internal or localized nationalist hype á la the Alamo or Cuba, in the future they may also be able to support nationalist hype focused abroad, á la Saigon or Baghdad.

Things are changing very quickly, these days, in the U.S.-China balance. It is easy to notice the shifts in the balances of finance, military power, and influence. But other things are shifting as well.

Sooner than we expect, people of the whole world may begin to encounter the Ugly Chinese. If such a thing happens, it will not be because Chinese individuals are interpersonally ugly. Much to the contrary, they hail from a culture that seems to foster deference and agreeableness. It will happen, not because of who the Chinese people are, but despite that.

Power tends to corrupt, and the Chinese people are gaining power. There are things they want and, as shown in Tibet, there are things they will take – not because they are right, educated, or caring, but simply because they will be increasingly able to follow their beliefs and feed their desires.

It will be too bad if China copies us so diligently in that mistake. But the writing does appear to be on the wall. Chinese public opinion is harshly set against a fair deal for the people of Tibet. Leaders in China, like leaders in the United States, do not generally tell their constituents to set their nationalism aside in favor of respect or decency to others.

Ultimately, the problem is with the accumulation of power itself. When a nation becomes as big as China or the U.S., it tends to expect its leaders to achieve outsized things at the expense of other peoples. There had never before been a superpower like the United States. And in its own, different but conceivably far worse way – as we may soon begin to see – there may also never be a superpower like China.