There is a respectable school of thought among historians of Ancient Rome that Rome failed, not because of the introduction of Christianity or the invasion of the barbarians, but by the restrictions of Roman education which stifled the intellectual flexibility of the leaders of the Roman Empire and prevented it from adjusting to new realities. The crisis and collapse occurred because the rigidities of its educational system carried over into the thinking of its educated elites.
We are facing such a crisis today. It is more than the mere economic crisis or the country’s loss of credibility in world affairs. It is a crisis without easy answers and certainly one that will not be alleviated merely by a change of personnel in the upper echelons of government. If we fail to address the crisis properly, it could prove to be fatal to everything we believe in as a country.
The crisis is one of the mind, a rigidity in thinking, a confusion of self interest with national interest with human interest and it all leads to the fatal instinct of arrogance, intolerance and a lack of empathy for competing views. It results from an inability to “think outside the box,” to reexamine old prejudices and chart a new future.
It is not a lack of brain power, it is a failure to question what you think, or want to know, is true and allow for the possibility that you might be mistaken. It is the unwillingness to examine years of learning and go back to square one to recheck your data. Even more destructive, it is to be so sure of yourself that anyone with an alternate theory is not just a heretic, but someone beneath contempt and beneath any serious efforts on your part to refute. One might call this the Krugman Effect.
At the moment, the most obvious manifestation of this phenomenon is found in the realm of economics. Take two of the country’s best economists, Ben Bernanke and Christina Romer. Both of them are students of the Great Depression. Dr. Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is, broadly speaking, a monetarist and Dr. Romer, former Chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, is more or less a Keynesian. Both of them have produced papers which have advanced their respective schools of thought
Anyone who has read (or in my case, tried to read) Dr. Bernanke’s book on the Depression knows that he has thought long and hard about the Great Depression and helped develop the once controversial thesis that the Federal Reserve is largely to blame for the Slump. He has been nicknamed “Helicopter Ben” for his most famous quip that one can deal with a recession by dumping baskets of dollar bills over populated places.
Dr. Romer has focused on how the Great Depression ended and one of her great insights was that Adolf Hitler was indirectly responsible for much of the economic growth between 1933 through 1937. Hitler took office two months before Franklin Roosevelt did and was such a sinister figure that massive amounts of capital almost immediately began to flee Europe in search of a safer place to invest: the United States.
But that was then and this is now. What happens when a country ceases to manufacture everyday items? All those dollars you drop from a helicopter are used primarily to buy foreign goods, doing very little to jumpstart the domestic economy but doing a good job of exporting capital overseas.
Handing out money willy nilly neglects a more holistic approach. As long as U.S. manufacturing is hamstrung by overregulation and what has become a cultural bias against manufacturing goods, any recovery will merely be the baseline for the next popped bubble. Consider the following:
• It has been many years since the route to the top of General Motors was through production. Now the CEO comes up through the ranks of Finance or Marketing. It even had a CEO who was a lawyer, whose first twenty years of his career was spent in the Midwest defending product liability suits.
• Engineering schools keep their doors open primarily by recruiting foreign students who get their education here and return home to ply their trade.
• The cream of the yearly MBA crop head for Wall Street or the consultancy business, instead of manufacturing or, better yet, entrepreneurship.
Now there’s nothing wrong with the brains of Dr. Bernanke or Dr. Romer, but their insights stay frozen in the world of theory. Once their boots hit the ground in Washington, those terrific minds lose their flexibility and when their theories crash into reality, they try to force reality to fit into their theory. Remember the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Well that comes dangerously close to the recommendations of our policy makers.
And although the Tea Partiers are too smart to fall into the same trap and understand that something is wrong with the theories that run the economy, their solutions are also inadequate. They don’t seem to grasp that tax and regulatory reductions are at best a partial answer. Although I am generally of the right, as an admirer of the U.S. military, the U.S. Post Office and what public schools used to be 50 years ago, I find myself uncomfortable with the anti-government rhetoric of some of them. Tax cuts are sort of beside the point anyway when we’re facing a debt mountain which will flatten us anyway.
On top of that, we have such an enormous number of people whose well-paying jobs are dependent on government – lawyers, Wall Street, government workers – that we need to change the terms of the debate without disrupting whatever is left of our economy. Clearly thinking outside of the box is necessary and it isn’t coming from anyone.
This is hardly limited to the political sphere. Everyone seems satisfied with their wretched little orthodoxies and like a bunch of crazy rural fundamentalists, they cling to them with a blindness which is frightening.
Remember Climategate, which occupied the media for about fifteen minutes, even if it only amounted to The New York Times tut-tutting that gentlemen (other than they themselves of course) don’t read other people’s mail? Prominent paleoclimatologists, faced with research from respectable scientists which contradict their favorite global warming theories, decided to ruin lives and threaten academic journals rather than to reexamine their own premises.
Time after time, in many fields of study, in the arts, in the humanities, the elites have closed their minds. The 2010’s are like the 1850’s and the 1920’s on steroids, with a reach beyond the complaisant bigotries and ignorance of politics and economics and extending into many fields of endeavor. We pushed through this intellectual barrier 80 years ago and 150 years ago, but if we don’t do it again, we will share the fate of the Roman Empire.
And a lot more quickly, too.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
