Silver Linings - Martin Walker - The American Interest Magazine

Silver Linings - Martin Walker - The American Interest Magazine: "Detroit as we have known it is doomed; how we re-engineer the place for a sustainable future, rather than how we rescue its failed business model, symbolizes the way the economic crisis can be used rather than simply endured. Sometime over the next ten to thirty years, we will shift from a carbon-heavy to a carbon-lite economy and very dramatically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. We will have to re-engineer our current energy, transport and probably our industrial systems.

Some of the implications of this may well be useful, if we are wise enough not simply to refurnish old infrastructure but leap over it to a new technological generation."

This is going to change more than our economic and industrial systems. The way American capital, manufacturing systems, managerial personnel and tastes spread around the world in the 20th century (as those of the British had done in the 19th century) is likely to be followed by their Chinese, Indian and Brazilian and Arab heirs in the future. Confucian values, Bollywood films, Islamic finance and haram rules of hygiene will simply be the most visible of the deep and subtle subversions that will challenge the Enlightenment universalism that Westerners, and particularly Americans, had assumed to be graven forever into the human DNA.

Maybe there is a fourth change on the way, a psychological shift that ought to be familiar to most of us from our parents and grandparents. The value system of the “Greatest Generation”, those who grew up in the 1930s, was distinctive. They believed in thrift, in collective action, in the ability and duty of government to do the right thing, and in the need for solidarity and self-sacrifice. And those values, expressed in the language and metaphors of the Bible—which was perhaps rivaled only by the Constitution as their common cultural heritage—comprised the message that Franklin Roosevelt delivered in his 1933 Inaugural Address:

The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit. Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and the moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits.