Soft Landing for a Superpower?

I recommend that everyone spend some time with the cover story by Parag Khanna in today's New York Times Magazine (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/magazine/27world-t.html?ref=magazine). In "Waving Goodbye to Hegemony," Khanna makes a strong argument that the international political order is no longer the unipolar system dominated by the United States that followed the Cold War.

Due to America's failure to seize the opportunity to build a new, durable world order centered on liberal democracy and free enterprise, an opportunity seems to have slipped away. Khanna argues that a new "Big 3" -- the United States, Europe and China -- now share world dominance among them. He also argues that U.S. power will continue to diminish as a resurgent Europe and booming China compete for dominance in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

It's hard to know anything about history and not acknowledge that all good (or evil) empires must come to an end. The question on my mind is whether America can engineer a soft landing. What do you think?

Perpetual Prosperity

I know I've been hammering capitalism a bit on this blog, but it seems to be occupying my mind quite a bit these days. This week was no exception. I arrived in New York on Tuesday morning at almost the same time the Fed announced its emergency 0.75 point cut in the federal funds rate. By the time I left the city, House leaders had agreed with the White House on the basic elements of an "economic stimulus" package to help right the listing ship of the U.S. economy.

It was a flurry of activity that dominated the media agenda for the week. Talk of recession, inflation and what could be done to stop the downward spiral reverberated off the skycrapers of Manhattan, the corridors of Capitol Hill and the backs of auditoriums in South Carolina. It all seemed like an odd frenzy to me, born more from perception than hard economic data. In fact, it appears that market indicators are mixed at worst, with as many reasons for optimism as despair. Yet the skittish traders on Wall Street joined the nervous pundits on cable TV to fuel a nation's fears.

Let's just accept the pervailing wisdom for a moment that a recession is in the offing. So what? Isn't it normal for economies to go through cycles of expansion and contraction? That's what I remember from the few economics courses I took as an undergrad. It seems, however, that our patience for the natural ebb and flow of things has worn thin. In our hubris, we believe we no longer need to be subject to forces of nature, be they upticks in the global temperature or downturns in the national economy. Our wealth, our comfort, our mastery over all things must continuously be on the rise.

It's ironic, though, that this perpetual prosperity seems only to benefit those who already have the most, while the poorest among us drop deeper into despair. I believe that sooner or later it must all come crashing down unless we're willing to replace greed as the driving force in our society with some other, more sustainable value. What might it be?

Quarterlife v. "real" life

This blog is part of a new initiative I launched in my own life to try to connect with social media and the whole Web 2.0 movement. I have a facebook profile, I have a flickr page (see first post), I'm doing this blog, and I even gave Second Life a spin. The initiative is born out of a commitment I have to authentic criticism. W. H. Auden argued that criticism of art (and life, by extension) requires "a vast experience of all artistic activities" (see "The Mental Kitchen" in the Readings feature of Harper's, December 2007 -- sorry, it's what I'm reading now, so you're stuck with it for the moment).

I had been offering ignorant criticism of social media as actually being pseudo-social media. What I mean is that it seemed ironic to me that everyone was turning to mediation (which the Internet is) as a new method of social interaction. If you want to have connection to more people or a broader or deeper connection with some, why would you turn to a digital interface rather than to the actual living faces, voices, embraces of those people? Does online interaction get you closer to people or act as yet another barrier between you and the "authentic" world?

Clearly, there is much to debate in the above, and much debating I have done. I have engaged on this topic mostly with younger people, acknowledging that at the ripe old age of 38 I might be so out of touch with the world of twenty-somethings and teens that I risk appearing like the grumpy old men in the SNL skit from the 80s that I'm old enough to remember.

There are two important things I learned from these debates. First, that social media do not replace direct interaction in most cases for most users. They augment it. There are exceptions -- those geeks who seem to live out their entire lives online in fantasy scenarios -- but those exceptions of antisocial reclusivity are not new to 2008 or created by new technology. Second, my criticism of social media was ignorant, as I stated above, because I had not experienced it. In my conversations on the topic, it quickly became clear that I needed to either stop judging social media or dive in and see what it's all about.

As I took the plunge, I encountered something called "Quarterlife." It's an Internet-only TV show (is it really TV if it's not on TV? -- this will be a moot point soon: Quarterlife will debut as an NBC series in February) born on MySpace.com. It has since migrated to its own Web site (check it out here: http://www.quarterlife.com/index.php) with lots of features in addition to the now 21 short episodes of the show (and counting).

It's created by the writing/producing team of Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creators of thirty something and My So-Called Life. I quite like the show and have watched every episode. The thing that fascinates me most is how the show and the Web site incorporate social media into a crazy cycle of hyperreality that French philosopher Jean Beaudrillard would have a field day unpacking.

Let's see if I can do it justice. It's a show that appears only online as part of an online community (first MySpace and now Quarterlife) about a group of twenty-something friends seen partially through the lens of character Dylan Krieger's videoblog that appears on a Web site that is part of an online community. But wait, there's more: The show's Web site also has social networking features like viewer profiles complete with blogs, videoblogs, photo galleries, "friends" networks, music, etc. Even more interesting, the characters of the show have their own profile pages where they blog and post videos, photos, etc. -- in character. Then, viewers, many of whom have their own profile pages, post comments on the characters' posts, often treating the characters as if they were real people.

OK, so you have so many layers of reality, with art imitating life imitating art and so on that I think my brain is going to explode. In the middle of all this, I think it is worth asking the question, What is real? Does it matter? Is interaction really "social" when you're interacting with a fictional character in a virtual environment? I don't have the answer, but I think I have a much better feel for the question.

Belief and Capitalism

I’m up too late doing work, listening to jazz and having a nice glass of Spanish wine. As I wait for someone to send me a file that I need to complete my project, I thought I’d take a moment to comment on an essay I read earlier in the evening.

I’m perpetually behind in my reading. That’s true on two levels at least. There’s all the great works of philosophy, literature, rhetoric, sociology, communication theory, ethics, religion, etc. that wait impatiently on my lifetime reading list constantly reminding me of what little I know. Then there’s also all the magazine and journal articles I’d like to be reading to stay "current," as they say. Yet, I’m never current with such reading. Frustration abounds.

At any rate, I cracked open the December 2007 issue of Harper’s this evening, which isn’t all that tardy for me. I generally start with the Notebook column (even though it’s not always written by Lewis Lapham these days, it’s still usually a great read) and then hit whatever seems most interesting in the rest of the magazine.

(I have the feeling that I’ll never get the hang of this blogging business unless I can learn to dispense with all the introductory detail, such as what appears in the first three paragraphs of this post. So, on with it.)

In last month’s Notebook column entitled "Hot Air Gods," Curtis White (click here for his faculty info at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, of all places: http://www.english.ilstu.edu/people/profile.aspx?ulid=ckwhite) uses the banality of belief (as a cultural phenomenon or trait) in America as the pathway to get at some important truths about capitalism. White argues that capitalism has been so effective in structuring reality that it is above criticism. "What capitalism has successfully obscured is the fact that the competition it prizes is not just between business entities internal to it but between capitalism as such and all other possible systems of value." By so doing, capitalism is above reproach as it has "succeeded in convincing the people living under it that it is not a system at all but a state of nature."

White’s essay evokes the arguments of Jules Henry in Culture Against Man, in which he describes the "technological drivenness" of our "pecuniary culture" that will eventually extract everything organic from human existence, replacing it with the cold, synthetic detritus of reflexive consumption. Instead of embracing a "culture of life," says White, capitalists see "nature and humanity ‘instrumentally,’ as things to be manipulated rationally and technically for profit" (author’s emphasis retained).

The implications of what White and Henry have to say are profound. Why am I sitting here at midnight waiting for an e-mail to meet a next-day deadline? Perhaps I see no alternative. Maybe what I need is not so much belief, but faith. More about that later.