American Hubris in Action

As a historian and sometimes a psychohistorian, I wonder why a fairly sizable number of Americans thought and felt from the very inception of this country that it would not be subjected to the same power syndromes as all past great powers. The Summers and Elovitz articles provide a basis for understanding these unsustainable beliefs.

Yes, we will follow the same path as every other major power in the past, but either we don’t know it, or know it and cynically exploit it. We are not unique in that we ignore the lessons of our failures; as a matter of fact, we glorify them, like Vietnam, Iraq, and soon to be Afghanistan. The Athenians, the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt, the Han in China, the Romans, the Carolingians, the French before the Revolution, the Russians, the Third Reich of the Germans, and the Soviets, to name a few, all followed a similar path. Those who argue that the U.S. is different because we have created a democracy overlook that ours is not the first experiment with democracy. Like all other forms of government, democracy has profound weaknesses, including the long-standing exclusion or suppression of minorities, a massive underclass that does not participate in the accepted political and economic processes, the radicalization of the political discourse, extreme social and financial discrepancies, an overextension of the military, and national and state debt burdens no one seems willing to tackle seriously.

What causes great powers to fail? Paul Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987), describes how one downfall of great powers works. They divert too many of their resources into war or interventions in other areas of the world and thus overextend themselves. I would like to add several other reasons. One has to do with a traditional form of government, namely monarchy. It consistently fails because usually even the best rulers are followed by one or two bad ones, therefore creating a situation in which the state cannot continue as designed. Sometimes priests and nobles exploit this weakness at its center and then undermine it further and frequently destroy it, for their benefit, of course, and not

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that of the society. In our system, we have an elected center, that is, the electorate has a chance “to kill the king,” or change the ruler, every four years. But like in all other societies, we have nobles— corporations and wealthy people—who are weakening the center for their benefit. One other phenomenon that has plagued past societies is that the privileged avoid paying their share of the burdens of their society. What happened in Rome offers a hint about what is happening in the U.S. as the wealthiest Americans refuse to pay their share of the tax burden to maintain the benefits of our democracy. Roman imperial nobles, for example, refused to build and maintain roads and aqueducts that previously were their pride and joy.

Another reason that weakened, if not destroyed, most previous regimes is the abuse of their environment. Before the dynastic period, the Egyptians cut down all of their trees to make pottery, and likewise the Indians of the Indus Valley civilization cut down their trees to burn brick for their houses. The Romans destroyed North Africa’s capacity to produce wheat, the southwestern American Indians used up their forests for their buildings, and today, we use most of the world’s oil to drive our cars. In each case, the greatest advance of a given society was destroyed by the overuse of the resource that was needed to create this most significant product.

As we contemplate how other regimes destroyed themselves, arrogance (“hubris,” as the Greeks called it) emerges as the key reason for their collapse. We assume that we have created a different political and economic structure, a better one at that. But as Summers and Elovitz show, the U.S. is simply in an unfettered and narcissistic stupor, and I would like to add, is seemingly blind to the fate of all other great powers who went down that route.

Is there a way out? Yes, but we would need to look differently at a nation’s success and failure, its fate. Like corporations, nations undergo infancy, maturity, old age, and, sometimes, renewal. Usually a prince, king, or emperor consolidates a state, which becomes most important to his success being his dynamism and the sustainability of his dynasty. In the case of the U.S., the impetus and enthusiasm came from the objection to the “old Regime” across the ocean and the establishment of a unique approach to governing. A state’s initial success is usually followed by territorial expansion; in the case of the US, a fierce ideology assisted the conquest of a continent. Expansion reaches its limits, and a nation finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the massive terri-

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tory: internal dissention, abuse of resources, inability to hold the borders, the deterioration of infrastructure, and other factors all play a role. As with corporations that “aged” recently, nations “age” and collapse. Yes, renewal is possible. The Romans pulled it off at least four times, the Russians at least three times, the Egyptians with nearly every new dynasty; in each case they did so with a new dynamism at the center.

In our own case, the first steps to renewal lead away from the slogans that served us in the past; the time of empire building is over. Renewal needs to focus on the inside and I see three interlocking reforms. One, we must accept that we are not exceptional. The sooner we do, the sooner we can talk about the changes that would reverse the obvious downward spiral. The death of bin Laden might have been such an opportunity for conversation. Two, we need proper rewards for work, responsibility toward each other, quality of our products and high standards in general. Three, we must moderate our capitalism, reigning in corporations and their leaders, reassessing our tax structure, and including all members of society in it.

As an immigrant who chose the U.S. freely at age 17 and who has worked all his adult life to make it a better place through intense engagements in higher education, the blithe unwillingness on the part of our leadership to confront the crisis that has been brewing for some time is a slap in the face. This sense, anger if you will, is made worse by all sides posturing and being unwilling to tackle reforms that surely are known to the leadership and would be key to our survival. Sadly, as a historian and psychohistorian, I am doubtful that we will stop wallowing in our self-glorification that allows us to assume that we will prevail. Thus, we may need a collapse before we can find genuine renewal.

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