In Casablanca, Major Heinrich Strasser invites Rick to sit down and join him for a drink at the Café Americain.
“What is your nationality?” the Nazi commander asks.
“I’m a drunkard.”
“That makes Rick a citizen of the world,” the French captain Renault jokes.
The witty, sardonic lines fit the scene: a war-riven city in 1941 and a mass of desperate refugees figuring out how to fake their way to freedom. Rick was, of course, an American, but he was either too tipsy or too shrewd to cough up an honest answer to the Nazi. Who could blame him? But what about us today, who live in relative peacetime and prosperity? Do we feel a great emotional tug for our country? Many Americans seem to feel a greater emotional attachment to other things. If asked, “What are you?” their hearts might answer, “I’m an iPhone guy.” Or “I’m a fantasy football fanatic.” Or “I’m gluten free. And proud.” If an airplane skidded on the runway and passengers had to evacuate quickly, how many would first save their iPhone, their football picks, or their tasty gluten-free muffin instead of an American flag? After a burst of flag-waving following 9/11, polls show that patriotism has drifted steadily lower, especially among young people. While 64 percent of senior citizens say they are extremely proud to be an American, only 43 percent of young adults agree, and nearly half of Millennials say the “American dream” is dead.1 Other wealthy countries face the same trends.
Rick Blaine was a “citizen of the world” because he was a drunkard. But in a globalized economy, even sober types are citizens of the world. Bono of U2, who claims great pride in his Irish heritage and still speaks with a brogue, skipped out of Dublin so that his band could reincorporate in the Netherlands and pay lower taxes on their music royalties. Roger Moore—007 himself—has mostly lived in a Swiss chalet or in tony Monaco. And the guy who funded Facebook, Eduardo Saverin, hopscotched from Brazil to Harvard to Silicon Valley to Singapore after renouncing his US citizenship in 2012. Not only drunkards and superstar musicians and actors, but just about anyone who works in international sales or computer software development might naturally feel more anchored to ephemeral cyberspace than to some cobblestoned Main Street with flags flying from the lamp poles and local merchants scrambling to compete against Amazon.com.
This book is not a long lament about patriotism and its enemies. Nor is it an attack on the modern economy. In fact, it turns on their head many traditional notions about patriotism and the stability of countries. It is a diagnosis, a history, and a manifesto aimed at prosperous countries. Do not despair, for I will end on a note of optimism, with a road map that could help us avoid the shattering of nations. In the Conclusion I will introduce a new term, patriotist, which I define as someone who affirmatively believes that it is a good thing to be patriotic about one’s country. Theodore Roosevelt said, “We want to make our children feel . . . that the mere fact of being American citizens makes them better off. . . . This is not to blind us to our shortcomings; we ought steadily to try to correct them.”2 How many people agree only with Roosevelt’s statement about shortcomings? Contrast Roosevelt’s view with the University of North Carolina professor who teaches a course on “The Literature of 9/11” and calls the United States not just a superpower but a “necropower,” adding the Greek prefix that means “death or corpse.”3 The professor does not mean that the United States is dying; he means that it delivers death to others through torture and other military means.
Virtually every advanced country from Japan to Italy faces similar economic and cultural land mines. This book is not solely aimed at Americans. As I write this, millions of refugees from Iraq and Syria stream across European borders, sneaking onto and even on top of trains and buses. Will they become Germans? Or Brits? Or Frenchmen? Or eternal refugees, the shrouded “Invisible Men” of the twenty-first century? Or worse? In 2014 the British Ministry of Defence reported that twice as many British Muslims traveled to Syria and Iraq to wage jihad than had joined the British military over the past three years.”4 Among British Muslim students, 40 percent support introducing sharia law. We might think of France as a fairly unified state, but early in its history France struggled to stop Normans, Bretons, Alsatians, Gascons, Savoyards, etc., from setting up their own countries. More recently, Charles de Gaulle wondered, “How can anyone govern a nation with 246 different kinds of cheese?” Like the France that de Gaulle bellyached about, the United States no longer coheres. We have a thousand television channels, 1 billion websites, and 330 million citizens with no reason to listen to each other. Talking heads on MSNBC and Fox News shout as if they are attending UFC wrestling matches. It is hard to get a country to “rally around the flag” when everyone stomps off in his or her own direction. Though President Obama won a clear reelection victory in 2012, he gathered votes from fewer than 28 percent of the adults in the country. Our official “national tree” is the oak, but perhaps our national symbol should instead be a splinter. The splintering is even more profound in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and other “advanced” nations.
Many commentators blame an obvious villain for polarizing civil society: new technologies, especially the Internet, which offers infinite choices and distractions. The Internet raises two separate threats: it can radicalize loners and it can also fracture communities. An NYPD white paper proclaims that the “Internet is a driver and enabler for the process of radicalization” by luring weak-minded and strong-minded people into fringe groups. Former Obama official and Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein warns that when “like-minded people get together, they tend to end up thinking a more extreme version of what they thought before they started to talk.”5 At the same time, new technologies enable a splintering of society. Picture an old black-and-white photo from the 1930s, with grandparents, parents, and children gathered around one RCA family radio in the living room listening to the revered voice of President Franklin Roosevelt. Even RCA’s mascot, a terrier named Nipper, perked up his ears to listen. Now look around a home today, with each individual tuned to a personal smartphone or iPad. We have all seen families gather together at restaurants, ostensibly to share a meal and conversation, but each holds in hand an electronic device that literally packs more computing power than Apollo 11. At the same time community institutions have broken down, including thousands of city and village newspapers that have folded, at a rate of about 150 per year.
Clearly, technology can play a role in unraveling communities. But to blame technology is too simple, convenient, and recent an explanation. In the chapters ahead I will show that throughout history prosperous nations have suffered from a powerful tendency to fissure, splinter, and lose their unifying missions—even without the help of electrons zipping through wireless devices. This entropy explains why nations have collapsed, even when their economies looked relatively strong. In fact, this book will show that nations are just as likely to unravel after periods of prosperity as during periods of depression. I will uncover five key forces that tend to undermine nations after they have achieved economic success. Together these forces impose the price of prosperity. While Paul Kennedy’s classic The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers hit bestseller lists with tales of countries overextending their military, I make the case that the rot begins internally, not from armies storming across borders trying to conquer others. Recent bestsellers like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century target inequality, while Why Nations Fail by James A. Robinson and Daron Acemoglu focuses on poor countries struggling to achieve prosperity. But we must also worry about “successful” countries that can no longer move forward or even stay in place.
I will also argue that a splintering among the population matters: it induces people to cheat, swindle, and focus more on the short term than on their long-term responsibilities, which ultimately undermines the economy and a cohesive civil society. The evidence jumps out from the headlines. A front-page story in the New York Times in 2008 reported that virtually every career employee of the Long Island Railroad applied for and received disability payments upon retirement. As a national spirit recedes, opportunism creeps in and shows up in everything from the housing market to school admissions to how congressmen handle national budgets. In the bubble years before the Great Recession of 2008 home buyers and brokers conspired to get subprime mortgages without putting any money down and without even showing tax returns to the bank. Bankers signed off anyway, since they were delighted to collect their hefty fees and pass the risk on to some faceless investor or taxpayer. Nobody had any skin in the game.
It is a common and dangerous mistake to think that societies are less vulnerable when they are relatively prosperous. Most readers and even some social scientists assume, for example, that economic downturns spark crime. But faltering spirits and a lack of faith in the future kindle kidnapping, burglary, and murder more than do falling incomes. During the 1930s, as families gathered around to listen to President Roosevelt’s reassuring voice, they felt a greater sense of cohesion and mutual support. In contrast, crime rates exploded in the 1960s, even as paychecks got fatter and jobs got easier to come by. To explain how even relatively prosperous societies have a tendency to come apart, we will scroll back the pages of history and look at the story of the splintering of such powers as the Ming dynasty in the 1600s, Venice in the 1700s, the Habsburg monarchs and Tokugawa shoguns in the 1800s, and the Ottomans on the eve of World War I. In these examples, we will see how disintegrating national goals led to opportunistic behavior, an increase in cheating and theft, and a decrease in saving and investment. We will see how the five forces of entropy threaten nations, putting a price tag on prosperity. These empires were powerful and reached extraordinary heights of economic wealth, yet they all collapsed from within. In this book I have chosen examples that span cultural norms—from Confucian to Islamic to Catholic; geographic characteristics—from seafaring lowlands to mountainous highlands; and, of course, hundreds of years of history. The stories in this book will allow us to make inferences that are not anchored to one specific time, place, region, or religion.
BUBBLE WRAP AND BUBBLES
A more complex international economy disintegrates traditions and a community ethos. Globalization has ignited the forces of entropy. What is entropy? Of course, it’s a word plucked from the hard sciences as a measure of disorder and randomness. So let’s illustrate with a simple science class illustration:
Imagine a sheet of bubble wrap. Let’s say there are 193 bubbles (the number of UN member states), each self-contained and filled with a different colored and flavored syrup, for instance, Canadian maple, Mexican agave, Peruvian yacon, and Chinese oyster sauce. The molecules in each bubble maintain an equilibrium state of density, color hue, and taste. Now let’s grab some sharp darts and hurl them at the bubbles so that the syrups begin to travel and blend with others. Of course, this may sometimes be a very good thing. New combinations may suddenly seem appealing to the eye and even tasty to the tongue! But this is certain: our ability to predict behavior has collapsed. Once we’ve punctured the bubbles, the syrups have fewer boundaries, more freedom, and less certainty.
What if, instead of syrup, we imagined packing into those bubbles the characteristics of peoples and nations? For example, divergent beliefs in religion, magic, the rights of women, the use of violence, and obligations to parents. Here, too, leakages and mixing incite a more volatile, combustible situation. No wonder our globalized world has witnessed more terrorism, religious furor, broken states, and anarchy in the last twenty years than in the period from World War II to 1990. Even if we put aside global politics and limit our vision solely to economic and financial explosions, we can tick off a staggering list of crises and bubbles that have punctured lives and wiped out families over the past twenty years: Mexico bankruptcy and bailout (1995); East Asia crash (1997); Russia bankruptcy (1998); dot.com stock crash (2000); Argentina crash (2002); housing bubble and crash (2004–9); commodity bubble (2007–8); world stock market crash/collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers (2008); Iceland bankruptcy (2009); Portugal, Ireland, Iceland, Greece, and Spain crash (2009); Cyprus bankruptcy (2013); energy crash (2014–2015); China stock market crash (2015). All these bubbles and crashes were fomented by the entropic forces addressed in the chapters ahead.
At the same time that nations feel themselves in an exhausting free-for-all struggle to understand globalization, many also struggle with internal immigration debates. How can a country feel stable and sustainable when so many diverse newcomers are unpacking their bags?
In part I of this book, I will set out the five potent forces that can shatter even a rich nation: (1) falling birthrates, (2) globalized trade, (3) rising debt loads, (4) eroding work ethics, and (5) the challenge of patriotism in a multicultural country. In part II, I will dive into fascinating historical case studies of individuals and countries that faced almost insurmountable odds in weaving together a frayed nation. In the conclusion, I will, among other things, do the unfashionable thing and praise corniness. Even the word corny sounds, well, corny, and recalls your great-granny’s handmade quilt smelling of mothballs. So be it.
THE WELCOME MAT ROLLS UP
The global economy saps patriotism. Reckless financial markets encourage people to gamble with other people’s money. A coddling culture in schools removes the stigma of a slacker’s attitude. In the United States, community traditions like American Legion cookouts and patriotic parades are tossed aside as corny or jingoistic. In 2010 the Welcome Wagon company rolled up its welcome mat and sent its two thousand “hostesses” packing. The hostesses (later called representatives) used to knock on the doors of newlyweds and newly moved-in neighbors to offer neighborly advice, gift baskets, and coupons from local merchants. Now the remaining Welcome Wagon employees dump advertising circulars into mailboxes and the post office delivers them with other colorful junk mail. An explosion of media splinters national cultures. More media is not all bad, of course. YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, Snapchat, Google, and Instagram have ignited a supernova of creativity and freedom of expression. Within a split second you can learn of the history, current weather, and traffic jams in Split, Croatia. But there has been a price for creating millions of media websites. Back in the days of yore, when families could tune into just ten stations, television delivered a greater feeling of unity. When President Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, or Reagan appeared, even if you changed the channel, you couldn’t get away from his image. The State of the Union address appeared on nearly every channel. In 1970 an NBC Bob Hope Christmas Special attracted nearly two-thirds of viewers and his jokes were stale even by 1970 standards. In 1983, 77 percent of televisions were turned to watch a single show—the last episode of M*A*S*H. Television was once a unifying, community-building institution. But in the last twenty years, only Super Bowls have cracked the all-time top-twenty list of most-watched programs. We thirst for new unifying institutions or seek to rebuild old ones.
Here’s the challenge: How do you keep community in a world that seems so different from the one faced by the so-called Greatest Generation and its children, the boomers? “To each his own” has morphed into the “Age of Whatever.”6
Amid our examples from history and from pop culture, I will occasionally draw on literature, music, and art to illustrate key points. When we think about a modern country and its people, we can conjure up all sorts of metaphors: melting pot, salad bowl, mosaic, etc. I want you to think about standing too close to a painting, let’s say Georges Seurat’s pointillistic A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. You simply see dots of color. They may be pretty, but they make no sense. Now back up slowly. Eventually the cheerful scene by the River Seine envelops you and you can make out figures. Wait, that’s a dog! There’s a sailboat! A very large bustle! Now you realize that each point of paint had a larger point, after all. But what if you backed up and all you saw were those same dots and they never formed a portrait or scene that made any sense to you? I am afraid that in the shattering of nations, the atomistic scattering of people, jobs, and hobbies no longer amounts to much else. Here’s another way to look at it: In the past our political system and our culture might have alternated between waves of classicism and romanticism, times when we prize order and a legalistic structure and other times when we may feel more idealistic and sense a natural, romantic attachment to our homeland. You might consider the late 1800s a classical, Victorian period, when schoolmarms in buns smacked unruly kids with a hickory stick. In the 1920s flappers and romantics broke free and smashed rules of fashion and dating. Cole Porter wrote and Ethel Merman blared that in olden days a “glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking,” but now anything goes. But how can a country survive if it starts to reflect, not classicism or romanticism, but a more modern chaotic trend, for example, expressionist art? Or a Jackson Pollock painting, where the drips do not clearly cohere? I once attended a lecture by the great actor Vincent Price, who loved art even more than movies. A woman in the audience complained that she had just visited a Picasso exhibit and could not understand the distorted figures, where heads were misaligned with bodies and legs twisted and detached from hips. She told Price, “Those Cubans were terrible!” Price laughed. She meant Cubists, of course, but what would it mean to have a country whose socioeconomics and politics reflected Cubism? We literally cannot make head nor tail of each other. Maybe that’s what our county has evolved into. We’ve gone from admiring the classical structure of Washington Crossing the Delaware to worrying that we’re just moments away from another Guernica.
REPAIRING AND REBUILDING
A hundred years ago life expectancy was just fifty years of age. There were virtually no antibiotics and only crude dentistry and yet young people felt more confident that they could get a job and support a family, in a local mill, a factory, a farm, or a mine.7 If they stumbled into trouble, their neighbors or their church would step in to lift them up, offering a bed to sleep in or a chair at the breakfast table. Traditional “old economy” jobs have faded away and so has the community spirit that encouraged people to take risks and dream big dreams. Entropy, exacerbated by globalization, threatens to unravel communities, as it did the powerful dynasties of the Tokugawa shoguns, the Venetians, the Habsburgs, and the Ottomans. Is it inevitable? Can a community spirit be restored in the United States and in Europe today? In the pages ahead I will share the lessons of history to show that it can. We cannot retrieve the old mill and mine jobs of our grandparents, but we can embrace uniquely American traditions while building new foundations for new prosperity. Using the latest research in neuroscience and economics, we can identify policies that will make kids smarter and grittier, better able to carve out a good paycheck and a happier life in a confusing, apersonal, high-tech world.
From the footsteps of Alexander the Great across Egypt to the Turk who toppled a sultan to the former terrorist who turned Costa Rica into a durable democracy to the video-crazed kid in Cleveland who ranks as a commander in his avatar world but struggles to figure out how to get off his mother’s couch in the basement—we will cover thousands of miles of bumpy, rough, and sometimes smooth terrain. It’s a race to renew a nation.