DAVID BODANIS, a writer and consultant, is the author of Passionate Minds: The Great Enlightenment Love Affair.
I wonder sometimes whether the hyper-Islamicist critique of the West as a decadent force already on a downhill course might be true. At first it seems impossible: No country is richer than the United States, and no one has as powerful an army. Western Europe has vast wealth and university skills as well.
But what got me reflecting was the fact that in just four years after Pearl Harbor the United States had defeated two of the greatest military forces the world had ever seen: the German Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy. In that World War II period, everyone realized that there had to be restrictions on gasoline sales in order to preserve limited sources of gasoline and rubber. Profiteers were hated. But in the first four years after 9/11, Detroit automakers find it easy to continue paying off congressmen to ensure that gasoline-wasting SUVs aren’t restricted in any way. American military forces have barely changed.
There are deep trends behind this. Technology is supposed to be speeding up, but if you think about it, airplanes have a similar feel and speed to those of thirty years ago; cars and oil rigs and credit cards and the operations of the New York Stock Exchange might be a bit more efficient than a few decades ago but also don’t seem fundamentally different. Aside from the telephones, almost all the objects and daily habits in Steven Spielberg’s twenty-five-year-old film E.T. are about the same as they are today.
What has been transformed is the possibility of quick change; it’s a lot harder than it was before. Patents for vague general ideas are much easier to get than they used to be, which slows down the introduction of new technology. Academics in biotech and other fields are wary about sharing their latest research with potential competitors, and that slows down the creation of new technology as well.
Moreover, there’s a fear of falling from the increasingly fragile higher tiers of society, which means that social barriers are higher. I went to adequate but not extraordinary public schools in Chicago, but my children go to private schools. I suspect that many of my colleagues (unless they live in academic towns, where public schools are generally strong) are in a similar position. This is fine for our own children but not for those of the same potential who lack parents who can afford it.
Sheer inertia can mask such flaws for quite a while. The National Academy of Sciences has shown that, once again, the percentage of American-born university students studying the hard physical sciences has gone down. At one time that didn’t matter, for life in the United States—and at the top U.S. universities—was an overwhelming lure for ambitious youngsters from Seoul and Bangalore. They would come to America and make up the gap. But already there are signs of that slipping, and who knows if enough of those energetic foreign students will still be coming to America or Western Europe in another decade or two?
Another sort of inertia is coming to an end as well. The first generation of migrants from farm to city brought with them the attitudes of their farm world; the first generation of migrants from blue-collar city neighborhoods to upper-middle-class professional life bring similar attitudes of responsibility as well. They often vote against their short-term economic interests because it’s “the right thing to do”; they engage in philanthropy toward individuals from backgrounds very different from their own. But why? In many parts of America and Europe, the circumstances creating those attitudes no longer exist. When they finally melt away, will what replaces them be strong enough for us to survive?