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Prophets for Our Day


April 2014

Cover Story

Prophets for Our Day

by Bob Keller

Bob Keller is a retired history professor who has worked on local Greenways campaigns. He currently serves on the boards of Whatcom Land Trust and the Dudley Foundation.

In 2010, I taught a Fairhaven College class, “Conservative Voices,” addressing the history of conservative ideas in America. One older off-campus individual, noticing David Brooks among my required textbooks, decided to enroll. Berkley Watterson, age 91, was a retired UAW organizer and lobbyist. Through this class and then afterwards we became friends, with Berkley giving me a half-dozen books over the past several years, the most recent being Niall Ferguson’s “The Grand Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die” (Penguin Press, 2013). If I offered such a course again, Ferguson along with Brooks would be required reading.

Ferguson argues that the West, including the U.S., teeters on the brink of social collapse, brink in this case meaning within the next decade. His writing and thinking — traditional, not neo-conservative — resembles what one finds in The Economist magazine. He, like The Economist , is British with a free-market, capitalist editorial stance, yet delivering direct, accurate, world-wide reporting. On controversial issues, economic and otherwise, strong pro and con arguments force a reader to think and analyze. Most Economist conclusions, unlike The Nation or the National Review, are qualified, not absolute. This holds true for Ferguson as well.

After surveying conventional explanations of social decline, Ferguson attributes the looming collapse of the West to four major factors: (1) government debt as a percentage of GDP, an insupportable cost to future generations; (2) failure to rationally balance economic regulation and freedom; (3) the rule of law being replaced by the rule of lawyers; (4) decline of civic institutions.

Cause number four hits home almost immediately. Fortunately, some of us in Whatcom and Skagit can also respond positively. As Ferguson observes, no one has better stated the importance of voluntary associations than Alexis de Tocqueville did in the 1830s. This French visitor to America observed that:

“Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations … but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small … if it is a question of bringing to light a truth or developing a sentiment with the support of a great example, they associate.

But what political power would ever … suffice for the innumerable multitude of small undertakings that American citizens execute every day with the aide of an association? The morality and intelligence of a democratic people would risk [grave] dangers … if the government came to take the place of associations everywhere.

Sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another.” (A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, chap. 5)

In our time, de Tocqueville’s concern has been most forcefully expressed by Robert Putnam in his best-seller “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” (2000), reinforced by Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart” (2012). Examples of voluntary associations, many of which have suffered drastic membership declines since 1960 due to television and the internet, include the Elks Club, Lions Club, Rotary, Moose, Oddfellows, Job’s Daughters, Masons, Eastern Star, Baptist, Methodist, Quaker and other Protestant churches, PTAs, and the Sierra Club. Participating in such groups builds “social capital.” As Ferguson writes, “Like Tocqueville, I believe that spontaneous local activism by citizens is better than central state action … in terms of its effect on us as citizens. For true citizenship is not just about voting, staying on the right side of the law. It is also about participating [italics added] in the wider group beyond our families” (p. 132).

In Whatcom we have ample opportunity to reverse this trend by, for example, joining or supporting the food bank, the Lighthouse Mission, neighborhood associations, the League of Women Voters, private schools, the Tea Party, the North Cascades Institute, and so on.

Niall Ferguson’s short 150-page book can be read in several hours, a brevity that results in important omissions. Ferguson, in my opinion, devotes insufficient attention to the power of plutocracies to control their society. Nor does he address how empire-building eventually undercuts the infrastructure that led to imperial power in the first place — see Paul Kennedy’s “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” for contrast. Nowhere in Ferguson is our vast military-industrial complex mentioned, nor is the vast spread of casino gambling analyzed as a sign of cultural malaise.

How do we respond to such a challenging book? First of all: read it, and maybe twice. If we are conservative, carefully consider what that term means. If liberal, accept a challenge to some of your favorite ideas and consider changing your mind. If uninvolved, recognize the ultimate price of political/social/economic apathy.

And whether liberal or conservative (labels that I forbid my students to use in class), another highly-capable thinker has addressed the same problems as Ferguson, overlapping in places, differing in others. Jeffrey Sachs’ “The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity” (Random House, 2011) also came to me as a “must read” via Berkley Watterson. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and long-time adviser to high-ranking UN officials, does not denounce modern capitalism, but sees it as requiring drastic reform.

From 1950–1970, according to Sachs, the U.S. experienced sound and fair economic growth, but since then we have faltered or “degenerated,” to use Ferguson’s term. The gap between rich and poor, wealth and poverty, CEO and working-class incomes, has grown immensely. The U.S. political system is broken, ineffective and dysfunctional, with both major parties veering to the right — “instruments of powerful businesses and the rich,” as stated on page 114.

For Sachs, the rich absolutely must share and invest more in general social welfare and in the future, as “the price of civilization.” We need more, not less, sound government regulation to create and sustain true competition in a free market economy. This will involve reversing the four wrong turns made by Ronald Reagan: tax cuts for the wealthy, reduced federal funding on infrastructure, industrial deregulation and outsourcing of federal operations. These policies, combined with globalization, the shift of the South to the GOP, and the rise of powerful military, petroleum, Wall Street, and health care lobbies, have led to the current crisis for a hyper-consumer society fixated on TV and personal needs (Sachs firmly agrees with Ferguson here.)

What is the solution? For Jeffrey Sachs, the first step must be developing a “mindful” society in which people think, become aware and get concerned. We have much to learn from northern Europe, a model for certain reforms. He lists specific goals necessary to achieve recovery: raising taxes, avoiding “useless wars,” controlling debt (again agreeing with Ferguson), reforming the workplace and education, electoral reform, environmental protection, and reducing the military establishment.

Complicating reform is a Congress that has become a millionaire’s club with nearly half of its members having assets over $1,000,000, with California’s Carrell Issa on top with $355.4 million. Washington’s Susan DelBene ranks number fifteeen, with only $23.9 million. (The Bellingham Herald, Aug. 22, 2013, p. A4).

Who pays the price? Sachs concedes that “it’s extremely difficult to get on the right track,” yet it is possible. Again like Ferguson, he cites Robert Putnam as exposing Americans’ retreat from the public square to the house and to the screen. Unlike Ferguson, Sachs elevates the environment, or what he calls “mindfulness of nature.” This moral responsibility for long term consequences must be integral to mindfulness about our future. Problems such as climate change and loss of potable water will require a new global ethic — no easy matter, Sachs concedes.

Both Sachs and Ferguson stand out as prophets in the biblical sense: men or women who see obvious flaws and failures in their society as leading to inevitable disaster unless corrected. We may well disagree with Ferguson and Sachs on specific issues, but to completely ignore their warnings will inevitably mean facing the wrath of history.


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