I'm sitting here at my internship and reading the latest issue of Foreign Affairs with a feature article by none other than Condoleeza Rice. And an interesting point has been introduced by her. Before September 11, 2001 American International Relations scholars were refering to the world as the "post-Cold War world," despite the fact that more than a decade had passed since the USSR was officially dissolved.
Today we are at a point where those same scholars refer to the world primarily as one of two things, either the "post-9/11 world" or (much less often) the "post-Iraq world." My question is why are we stuck in the past? American grand strategy in the wake of the Cold War was in shambles, gone was the threat of "the Evil Empire," no longer a focus of the maintenance of nuclear deterence or containment. We were utterly lost. Is that the place to which we are once again headed? Instead of reacting to what the world throws at us, why do we not be proactive? Court the transatlantic relationship, work to repair and then bolster the damaged ties that Clinton formed with Yeltsin's Russia, seek partnership with China rather than wait for an "economic Cold War" of sorts, work towards strengthening African governments instead of waiting for the next genocide to occur for us to lament but stand idly by. Maybe I have fallen into the opposite trap of past-centricism and ignored the present, but even though we seem bogged down in Iraq it is not, in my view, naive to look at the world at large while trying to flesh our way out of the quagmire. To already have a strategy in place for when our exit (or at least significant decrease in military and financial commitments) from Iraq occurs would put us in a much better position than we historically have been, twiddling our thumbs or staring, star-struck, at the sky waiting for an answer; only to have that answer come in the form of a massive metero-earth collision.
What I'm getting at here, I think was once said best by Ralph Waldo Emerson: "America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations." Somewhere, I believe, that futurism of America was lost (my intuition tells me that this focus on the past, indeed this zeal for labeling things based not on what tomorrow may hold but on what yesterday did hold, stems from the Cold War--a period that, in hindsight, was the most stable and unchanging that the world probably has ever been).
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I think Americans too readily buy into the cliché ridden theory of a cyclical pattern of history. 'To know the past means to understand the future' (<-- paraphrased), "never again," etc. Historiographers agree (mostly) that the idea of history being on a continuous cycle that, if monitored, can help one achieve 'clairvoyance' is nonsense. History, by its very nature, is fact less. Instead it is a series of interpretations by the day's historians muddled by the lenses of the era in which they personally live in. Thus, no history is 'fact,' and to use history to interpret the 'facts' of today is a miserably uninformed decision…a veritable ‘blind leading the blind.’
Hopin' that's making sense.
I can see the future. No, honestly, I can. But, only in a tiny area of experience – otherwise I would be fabulously rich off predictions of tomorrow’s stock prices.
Here’s the trick: after 27 years of working in a pretty small area (i.e. manufacturing systems implementation and post-implementation support) I’ve seen enough ‘cycles’ so that in a certain circumstance, given some initial conditions, I can predict what will happen, sometimes even 2 or 3 years out.
Whoa (or is that Woe)
No, that’s not eerie science fiction music you hear in the background . . . nor is it ESP . . . it’s just that after ‘a few times around the block’ you start to get that ‘déjà vu all over again’ feeling. . . and you can ‘see’ the future because in reality, current circumstances have placed you in a veritable slot-canyon world-line, in which really there is no choice but to continue down the slot to the end. When the canyon turns, or you have to climb over the boulder, the ‘executives’ (full of arrogance and hubris, by the way . . . yes, I’ve seen lots of this so I know the color of such elements) say, I knew it would do that, or I saw it coming – Hah!
I suspect that’s why ‘grey-beards’ like me can see the ‘repeats’ while others can’t. So study your history . . . it is often the only lamp we have to light the way ahead.
BTW, it has been noted elsewhere (was it Einstein? I can’t remember) that one of the great tragedies of human existence is that people don’t live long enough (e.g. to both gain huge stores of knowledge, and then pass it on to the next generation). If our lives were longer, I’m sure we’d see more clearly the vague ‘cycles’ of history and have even more of those ‘déjà vu all over again’ feelings . . . and probably even be better at predicting the future.
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