Reality and Hope
By Dr. David Mason, Professor, Political Science
The dolphin pavilion is turning out to be a special place for me
this year. My daughters Melanie and Dana made my 60 th birthday
gift last November an opportunity to swim with the dolphins here,
during which time I befriended Nova, who was flirting with me
through the glass just a few minutes ago. And now I am delivering
what really is my last lecture for Butler University, in
this enchanted place. To tell you the truth, though, I already gave
a "Last Chance Lecture" at BU almost 25 years ago, in a series
organized by students. It is not often any of us are offered
two last chances in this life!
When Michael first asked me to deliver this Lecture, I thought I
could get off easy by simply presenting a lecture I had given to
another audience a few weeks before-a powerpoint presentation
outlining my new book on The End of the American Century. At that
point, I was still not sure I was going to retire this year.
Indeed, I think Michael's invitation was a subtle effort, perhaps,
to get me to make up my feeble mind! It may have worked, because
over the last few weeks, as I have worked on this lecture, I have
increasingly come to see it as the last lecture, at least for me,
rather than a last lecture, and if it really is the last one, I
need to retire, right? So the preparation for the lecture itself
has helped me move toward that very difficult decision. That, plus
Craig Auchter's musing after finding out how long I had been
teaching at Butler: "33 years is enough."
Thinking of this as my very last lecture, though, as also caused
me to change somewhat my approach to my remarks. As you will see,
my thoughts about "The End of the American Century" are pretty
downbeat. I thought, first of all, that I didn't want to send you
all home, from this celebratory evening, in a blue funk over the
state of the world.. I also felt that a downbeat message at the end
of my career did not really, truly reflect who I am, what I
believe, or how I teach. And I am, first and foremost, a teacher.
It is that aspect of my job that I will most miss, and the reason I
procrastinated so long in deciding to retire.
For me my teaching is inseparable from both my research and
writing, on the one hand, and from my passion for politics, peace
and justice on the other. In all of these endeavors, what I have
tried to do, through my entire adult life, is to help people to
understand their own country, the world, and the relationship
between those two. This is not easy, given the prevalence of "cant"
in the political world. This word "cant" is a highly useful and
germane one to explain what I mean; though it is hardly ever used,
and I suspect many of you maybe even a little fuzzy on its meaning.
My first real encounter with it was with a graduate course in
international politics taught by Ed Buehrig, who believed that even
today, the only textbook you would ever need for that topic was
Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, written 2500 years ago. (Buehrig
really was a devotee of the liberal arts!) The dictionary
definitions of cant include hypocrisy, false piety, insincerity,
and whining speech. You see why it is so useful for understanding
politics? My task as a teacher of politics, then, is to circumvent
or counteract political "cant." I did this when I taught about the
communist world; when I teach about Islam in Change and Tradition,
and most recently, when I have been teaching the subject of my book
on The End of the American Century. One of the major themes of that
book is that hypocrisy, false piety and hubris prevent Americans
from seeing their country as it really is-how it has changed
(mostly for the worse) in recent years; how it compares (mostly
unfavorably) to other developed countries; and how it is perceived
(mostly negatively) by people in other parts of the world.
Here though is a dilemma and a paradox for my role as a teacher.
I want to teach my students things about their own country that are
not at all flattering, and which fly in the face of their own
pride, patriotism, and optimism. But I don't want them to become
cynical, pessimistic and fatalistic (as I often am!). If you get
too bombarded with bad news, there is a tendency to throw up your
hands, ask "why bother?" and retreat into your own personal
affairs.
But one of our jobs as teachers is to empower students, and to
inspire a sense of hope and possibility in them. This, then, is the
theme of my talk this evening: Reality and Hope. How does one teach
the truth, yet keep alive hope? I don't have the answers, of
course, but I can share with you some of my thoughts.
To illustrate this dilemma, I first want to depress you! Well, I
don't mean to depress you, but I want to highlight some of the
themes of my book, which will be published by Rowman and
Littlefield this fall. This is what I have been teaching my
students, so you will get a chance to see what I am wrestling
with.
The United States was the dominant power in the world, in almost
every sense, for the six decades after the end of World War II. For
this reason, the 20th Century has aptly been characterized "The
American Century," a phrase used as the title of an influential
essay written in 1941 for Life Magazine by the magazine's
publisher, Henry Luce. In the years since then, the U.S. economy
propelled world trade and economic growth. Its science and
technology provided the leading edge of innovation and discovery.
America's democratic institutions and educational system served as
beacons for peoples all over the world. Its popular culture, film
industry and sports were envied and mimicked everywhere. American
military prowess was admired and feared by governments and
revolutionary movements alike.
Yet in the last decade, and particularly since September 11,
every aspect of this American predominance has begun to wane. The
U.S. economy is riddled with debt and unsustainable obligations-by
both governments and households-presaging at least long-term
economic decline, if not general collapse. The U.S. has higher
rates of poverty, inequality and violence and the worst record on
health care of any other industrialized democracy. The educational
system, once considered the world's best, now ranks near the bottom
among developed countries, and about one third of U.S. citizens are
now functionally illiterate. U.S. corporations, once models of
dynamism, innovation and efficiency, are hampered by bureaucracy,
corruption, and bloated executive payrolls. Few American
corporations are generating either innovation or growth. Even
science is marginalized and beleaguered under the gun of politics
and religion. And while American consumer goods and popular culture
remain fashionable in much of the world, there is at the same time
increasing resistance in many countries to the erosion of national
culture and traditions in the face of U.S.-led globalization. The
U. S. invasion of Iraq, in blatant disregard of both international
law and the United Nations, extended that perception to America's
military as well and intensified anti-Americanism all around the
globe. Furthermore, the war has been a fiasco in every conceivable
way, for both Iraqis and Americans. Global public opinion polls
show that almost everywhere, including in most European countries,
it is the United States that is now seen as the major threat to
peace in the world.
America's decline is multifaceted: it is economic, social and
political; domestic and international; both real and perceived;
evident in both its hard power and soft power influence overseas;
and manifested both in long term trends, and in comparison with
other countries. All these elements of decline are also symbiotic:
economic decline affects the political and social world; domestic
decay fuels international decline; and the real decline feeds the
perceptual.
So this is a complex and complicated story, but I think there
are two key elements of America's decline upon which hinge most of
the other problems: the first is the growing level of debt in the
US, in its multiple dimensions. And the second is inequality-the
rapidly growing chasm between the rich and the poor. So let's look
briefly at these two issues.
First: debt. The U.S. is experiencing record high levels of all
of the following: the federal debt, the annual federal deficits,
the trade deficit, personal debt, consumer debt, and mortgage debt.
Two decades ago, the Yale university historian Paul Kennedy
published a book called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers in
which he traced historical empires, including Rome, Spain and
Britain, and found that in each case, as they grew and became more
ambitious and overconfident, they fell victim to "imperial
overstretch" where they bankrupted the country by trying to extend
themselves too broadly. Kennedy also trained his eye on the Soviet
Union and the U.S, both of which he thought were vulnerable to
these phenomena. At that time, in 1985, the U.S. federal debt was
44% of our GDP, which Kennedy said was unprecedented in world
history for a major power. Twenty years later, that debt has
ballooned to 68% of GDP, and is still growing. What is perhaps even
more alarming is the ownership of that debt.. IN 1970, only 4% of
US debt was held by foreigners. Now, almost 50% is. Furthermore,
these debts do not even account for the unfathomably huge amounts
of "unfunded liabilities" especially for Social Security and
Medicare, which economists estimate to total some 27 trillion
dollars. Some of us, on the verge of retirement, are particularly
interested in this right now!
The ongoing federal budget deficits, and the accumulating
federal debt, is one half of the "twin deficits" that also include
the US trade deficit, which has now reached record levels in both
absolute terms ($700 billion) and as a percent of GDP (6%). The
U.S. imports almost everything that consumers buy, and we produce
very little that anybody else wants. The trade imbalance is
particularly large with China, which is home to almost 80% of the
suppliers of products purchased by Wal-Mart.
While the federal government has been living on borrowed money,
increasingly, so have most American citizens. The household savings
rate in the U.S. which has always been low compared to other
wealthy countries, has now dipped below zero for the first time
ever. Credit card debt, mortgage debt, foreclosures and
bankruptcies are all at or near record levels. Most baby boomers
have retirement savings of only about $50,000-probably less than a
tenth of what they would need to maintain their standard of
living.
Average real wages in the United States have not grown since the
mid-1970s. (And you thought it was just at Butler!) Wealth and
income inequality have risen steadily and sharply since then. The
U.S. has higher rates of poverty, and much higher inequality, than
any other industrialized democracy. The inequality is particularly
galling at the very top. In the 1950s, average CEO pay in the U.S.
was about 50 times the salary of average workers, and even then,
this ration-50 to 1-was much higher than in any other developed
country. Now, that ratio is over 500 to 1.
High rates of poverty and inequality have translated into a
whole host of other problems that lead us to compare poorly to
other wealthy countries. Our educational system is failing, mostly
because of poor public schools in the cities, and American students
invariably score near the bottom of international competitions in
math, science, history and geography. Our health care system, which
leaves 40 million people without health insurance, is more
expensive than any other wealthy country, but has the worst record
among them in terms of infant mortality, maternal mortality, and
many other measures. Americans are much more likely to kill each
other than people in other developed countries. And we have more
people in prison than any other country in the world, both in
absolute numbers and as a percentage of the population.
As I mentioned earlier, in the international arena, the U.S. is
increasingly viewed in other countries as a major threat to world
peace, even among our allies. Well before September 11 or the
invasion of Iraq, the U.S. had begun moving out of step with the
rest of the world, and alienating much of it, by its cavalier
dismissal of international conventions and treaties. The US is one
of the few countries that has not ratified the Kyoto Treaty on
climate change, and the treaty creating an International Criminal
Court to bring to justice those who have committed war crimes or
genocide. We have not signed the international treaty on rights of
women, and we are one of only two countries not to ratify the
international convention on the rights of children. The only other
country not to sign is Somalia, which has no government. Since
September 11, the trampling of international conventions on torture
and the treatment of prisoners of war has further tarnished our
image, as have the sickening images of Abu Ghraib.
It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that the U.S. is no
longer considered a model for other countries. It is not that
foreigners "hate our freedom" as President Bush has said, but that
they don't see our accomplishments as that much to crow about, or
to mimic. It used to be that people in other countries may have
disliked the American government or its policies, but still liked
Americans, and their culture. But even this has begun to change,
with international public opinion polls showing foreigners
increasingly blaming American citizens for the problems the U.S. is
causing, and increasingly wary of the spread of U.S. customs and
ideas.
What's more-the world itself has changed in ways that makes US
unilateralism and hard power increasingly ineffectual. Global
warming, climate change, air and water pollution, energy and
resource shortages, global poverty and hunger, epidemic diseases,
nuclear proliferation, terrorism-none of these originate in any one
country, and none of them can be solved by even the most wealthy
and powerful nation-states. They require international,
cooperative, and multilateral solutions. The U.S. has not been
particularly inclined to pursue such strategies, but even if it
were, other countries are less willing to accept U.S. leadership.
Other countries and regions have matured or emerged, in the
European Union, China, India, and elsewhere, and most of them are
more amenable to cooperative and multilateral approaches to
international relations. They are in a better position than the
United States to assume regional or global leadership, and to take
up the slack of the 20th Century superpowers.
A reduced role for the US in the world is not necessarily a bad
thing. For one thing, a smaller economy and reduced consumption
will make the US less of a burden on global resources, and on
global warming. Even so, the standard of living for Americans is
almost certain to decline, at least in the short run. Accepting
this and adjusting to it will not be easy for either citizens or
leaders. Hope
So, you see what a doomsayer I am! And this brings me back to
the issue of how to convey this bad news without leading everyone
to the Kool-Aid bin! How I interact with students in addressing
these downbeat issues both raises a paradox and allows me to see
some hope in all of this. Our role as teachers is to educate and
enlighten our students, but also to activate and empower them. The
themes of my book, however, can lead people to a sense of despair.
One of the publisher's outside readers for my manuscript, wrote
that "this is a manuscript that makes you want to jump off a
cliff." (And this was one of the positive reviews!) And almost
every week in the class I teach on this topic, students despair
over the conclusions we reach. But I don't want them to feel this
way, even though I often do! So how does one reconcile teaching
about reality, and providing hope? Part of the answer, I think,
depends on how we define hope and hopefulness.
The Nigerian writer Chris Abani, who writes dark and depressing
fiction about life in both his native country and his adopted one,
spoke to this when he was on campus a few weeks ago. He said that
in America, happiness is achieved through the erasure of trauma and
the history of trauma; whereas for most of the rest of the world,
happiness comes from living with the damaged self, but a self that
is not inflicting damage on others. Hope, therefore, does not
spring from the denial of trauma and suffering, but in the
willingness to recognize problems and address them. Hope, he said,
is the "resistance of erasure." Cataloging problems, which he does
in his fiction, and I do in my book, is the beginning of hope. So,
we can give our students hope without allowing them, like most
other Americans to continue in their self-delusions. Hope resides,
in part, in education, and in our efforts to teach students about
the rest of the world and about other ways of seeing, being, and
knowing. Michael would like me to point out, I'm sure, that this is
what the Liberal Arts are about!
There are other ways in which we can take hope in the face of
this despairing reality. The trappist monk Thomas Merton suggests
that we should "not depend on the hope of results." He was writing
this to a young political activist, but I think us old ones can
also take counsel in his wisdom: "you may have to face the fact, "
he wrote, "that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve
no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you
expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to
concentrate not on the results but on the value, the truth of the
work itself." Let me repeat: "As you get used to this idea, you
start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the
value, the truth of the work itself." Gradually, he continued, "you
struggle less and less for an idea, and more and more for specific
people. . . .In the end, it is the reality of personal
relationships that saves everything."
This sort of advice is obviously easier to give, and accept, if
you are a person of religious faith. I know that it is one of the
things that keeps my wife Sharon going. As a deeply religious Roman
Catholic and a hospital chaplain, she confronts trauma and tragedy
every day at work. Yet her faith sustains her; she betters the
world one person and family at a time; and she always remains
cheerful and hopeful. It is a little trickier for me. As a
self-professed "Christian atheist," I am not sure where I fit in on
the faith side of things, but I do find inspiration, and an
example, in her.
After confessing my weakness of faith, I should probably not be
quoting yet another theologian. But for some reason, holy men and
women always seem to have the best quotes! Several times in my
book, I quote the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who I read
in college but did not finally understand until this year! He wrote
that "nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore
we are saved by hope." This sentiment is similar to that of Thomas
Merton, but adds the notion of time and legacy. All the problems I
assemble in my book will probably still be with us by the time I
shuffle off this mortal coil. But there are our students, and our
children and grandchildren who will still have a chance to fix
them. We have to introduce them to the reality, and supply them
with some tools, but there is much to be hopeful in them.
At the very end of my book, I quote a passage from the writer
Alice Walker, which captures in more elegant fashion what I am
trying to say here.
When it is all too much, when the news is so bad meditation
itself feels useless, and a single life feels too small a stone to
offer on the altar of peace, find a human sunrise. Find those
people who are committed to changing our scary reality. Human
sunrises are happening all over the earth, at every moment. [and]
they are working to bring peace, light, compassion to the
infinitely frightening downhill side of human life
I have many "human sunrises" in my life, have had many in my
classes, and they continue to brighten my days. It is one of the
reasons I have been dragging my feet on committing fully to this
retirement business. Let me mention just a few of those that have
inspired me and give me hope. Portia Parsell, a student from my
early years of teaching (in the 1970s) and the very first
International Studies Major, left Butler to work, first in Europe,
then Africa, and later in Latin America, for "L'Arche" (the Ark),
which are communities for people with disabilities. Portia married
a Frenchman who did similar work, they adopted four multiracial
children, and continue to work for the poor and marginalized.
Katie Shaughnessy was another human sunrise. She was also an
international studies major, the daughter of English professor Ed
Shaughnessy, and our daughters' favorite babysitter. Katie
nicknamed Melanie "sunshine" and Dana "moonbeam." She also cheekily
referred to me as "Comrade." Katie always argued that the best way
to improve the world was to help individual people rather than the
"collective activism" which she saw me as promoting. After Butler,
she went to work for a shelter for abused and homeless children,
where they loved her as much as Dana and Melanie did. It was a huge
loss to her family, to us, and to humanity when Katie and her
husband Mark both died in a mountain hiking accident.
Portia and Katie are just two of many many students I have had
over the years who have absorbed the lessons of reality, skirted
the cant, kept alive their hope, optimism and sense of possibility,
and worked to make the world more humane. My students, of course,
are not just mine, because much of what they learned also came from
my colleagues in political science, and from the rest of you. In
our department, Dale Hathaway, Margaret Brabant, Craig Auchter,
Terri Jett and Siobhan McEvoy-Levy, have all had to wrestle with
this dilemma of reality and hope, yet all of them have inspired
students to stay engaged with the world, and to help others. It
sometimes seems to me that this problem of reality and hope affects
political science and international relations more than other
disciplines, though I know that our colleagues in sociology face
similar issues, and Steve Perrill in Biology has told me that he
also wonders how to avoid infecting his students with fatalism and
despair when he teaches about the environment.
What it comes down to, I think, is individual human
relationships, as Merton observed. Our students, our children and
our friends are influenced by what we say, and how we live. They
see us trying to make sense of the world, and trying to be honest.
When we do our jobs as teachers in the liberal arts, they come to
understand the importance of evidence, critical thought, and
openness to other ways of being and knowing. Partly because they
are younger, they may not have so much difficulty in reconciling
the harsh truth with optimism and hope.
Almost nothing is more satisfying for a teacher than to receive
a letter, note or email from a former student, expressing thanks
(and sometimes a belated understanding) of what we taught them. I
received such an email as I was preparing this lecture, from Charli
Lehman, who had taken two semesters of C&T from me. She was
sure that I would not remember her-though I did-and reminded me
that she and I had played a duet-Heart and Soul-on the piano in
Jordan 141 just before the C&T final exam in that room. Charli
is now working for Americorps/VISTA in North Carolina. It was a
touching correspondence, but I was also struck by the tag quotation
at the end of her message. It was a quote from Pericles: "What you
leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what
is woven into the lives of others."
I have talked about keeping alive hope in students, even when we
don't feel it ourselves. If we are to keep going, though we also
need to keep hope alive on ourselves. For me, my hope has been
sustained both by the human sunrises among my students, but even
more by the moonbeam and sunshine that are my daughters, Dana and
Melanie. Dana, one of the most cheerful and optimistic people I
know, has been working in Washington (though not for the
government!) on using mediation to solve environmental problems.
Her friends are from all over the world, and she is to be married
this summer to a young man from Zimbabwe, of all places! Melanie
and her husband Ned are both finishing law school, remain firmly
convinced that law and politics can be instruments of change and
social justice, and find time to practice poverty law and campaign
for progressive political candidates. All four of them support
Barack Obama, author of The Audacity of Hope. In the midst of all
their activities, Melanie and Ned have also produced a beautiful
and happy daughter, our first grandchild, named in part after Katie
Shaughnessey. When I am with that bright, bubbly, happy, active
little Katie, even I can't help but have hope.