America's Big Fat Advantage
"Peak oil" and
our "oil addiction" were supposed to have ensured that we ran out of
either gas or the money to buy it. Now, suddenly, we have more gas and oil than
ever before. But the key question is: Why do we?
The oil and gas renaissance
was brought on by horizontal drilling and fracking that opened up vast new
reserves either previously unknown or considered unrecoverable. Both
technological breakthroughs were American discoveries, largely brought on by
entrepreneurial mavericks and engineers exploring on mostly private lands.
Couldn't the Saudi, Venezuelan or Nigerian oil industry have discovered these
new methods of resource recovery, given their nations' reliance on petroleum
exportation?
The world now wakes up to
iPhone communication, Amazon online buying, social networking on Facebook,
Google Internet searches, and writing and computing with Microsoft software.
Why weren't these innovations first developed in Japan, China or Germany -- all
wealthy industrial countries with large, well-educated and hard-working
populations? Because in such nations, young oddballs like Jeff Bezos, Bill
Gates or Steve Jobs more likely would have needed the proper parentage, age,
family connections or government-insider sanction to be given a fair shake.
Even in its third century,
America is still the most meritocratic nation in the world. Unlike the caste
system of India; the class considerations of Europe; the racial homogeneity of
China, Japan or Korea; the tribalism of Africa; or the religious orthodoxy of
the Middle East, America is still a place where one can offer a new idea,
invention or protocol that is judged on its merits, rather than on the
background, accent, race, age, gender or religion of the person who offers it.
Businesses evaluate
proposals on the basis of what makes them lots of money. Publishers want
writing that a lot of people will read. Popular culture is simply a reflection
of what the majority seems to want. In the long run, that bottom line leads to
national wealth and power.
If history is a guide, the
most savvy Chinese citizen of Japanese descent would not make it as a high
official in Beijing's Communist Party -- no more so than a brilliant Japanese
citizen of Chinese descent would run Toyota or Honda. A white Croatian of
enormous talent could not end up as president of Sudan.
Mexico has a word, Raza,
that conflates race and nationality, in the way that the German word Volk used
to suggest not just being German, but looking German as well. I doubt that
either country would ever elect a black head of state.
It would be virtually
impossible for the most talented Christian or Jew to be allowed to head
contemporary Egypt, or for a brilliant four-star Buddhist general to run the
Iranian military. For the immediate future, don't expect a female
business-school valedictorian to manage Saudi Arabia's national oil company.
Note that in all these cases, such exclusions derive from criteria other than
innate talent, character and industriousness, and can result in the lesser
qualified being considered the only qualified.
The mixture of consumer
capitalism and constitutionally protected free speech -- and all sorts of
races, religions and ethnicities -- sometimes means that America can be a wild
place with a popular culture that appears crass and uncouth to those abroad.
Our generation's $17 trillion national debt, unfunded entitlements and nearly
50 million people on food stamps might convince the Founding Fathers that they
had spawned license rather than guaranteed liberty.
Yet the upside to the wild
arena of America is that almost anyone is free to enter it. Oprah Winfrey, an
African-American woman, reinvents the genre of daytime talk shows and builds a
media empire. Warren Buffet outpaces New York's Wall Street -- from Nebraska. A
one-time five-and-dime owner from Arkansas, Sam Walton, refashions the way an
entire planet buys its stuff. A Russian emigre, Sergey Brin, co-founds Google,
perhaps the most indispensible site on the Internet.
Just when we read
obituaries about an unruly nation of excess, unlikely nobodies pop up to
pioneer fracking, the Napa wine industry or Silicon Valley. Why? No other
nation has a Constitution whose natural evolution would lead to a free,
merit-based society that did not necessarily look like the privileged -- and
brilliant -- landed white male aristocracy who invented it.
The end of American
exceptionalism will come not when we run out of gas, wheat or computers, but
when we end the freedom of the individual, and, whether for evil or supposedly
noble reasons, judge people not on their achievement but on their name, class,
race, sex or religion -- in other words, when we become like most places the
world over.
Victor
Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
University, and author, most recently, of "The End of Sparta." You
can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment