Risk & Other Four-Letter Words
Wriston, Walter B.
1986
Not Every Battle Is Armageddon
Each of the various cultures of the world has something to teach us; one can, for instance, borrow from part of the philosophy of Buddha and project it against our contemporary environment. Buddha said, in effect: "Don't just do something, stand there." This reversal of the usual American advice has a certain relevancy for today. | |
All of us are flooded daily with messages on radio, television, and in the newspapers, which, if taken at face value, would leave the human race no alternative but to prepare for mass self-destruction. The communicators of the world pound home the message day after day that every problem has become critical: Every battle is Armageddon. | |
Without in any way downgrading the problems of our time, I suggest that the people who tell you the world is about to stop, and repeat it constantly, are guilty of a kind of intellectual overkill. They have either never read any history, or, if they have, failed to understand it. | |
A columnist, writing in the , once made a dire prognostication about our country when the Senate passed a minor piece of legislation that in the end came to nothing and by now has been forgotten: "Poor old Union! Its | |
p.4 | great and generous dreams falling one by one to dusty death." He was a modern reincarnation of the British scholar Lord Bryce, who studied our Constitution at the time of its birth and solemnly averred that it was all sail and no anchor and that the ship of state would founder. |
His verdict was not proclaimed electronically around the world. In fact, it passed almost unnoticed. There was no clamor for a new Constitutional Convention to remedy our disastrous mistake, so clearly identified by an "expert." | |
Today, however, we all live in Marshall McLuhan's "global village" and Chicken Little runs through our living rooms on every hourly newscast. The process gives a new dimension to the word "synergy." | |
Barbara Tuchman, one of our distinguished historians, has observed that "the fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five-to-ten fold." | |
A study of how people learned of the shooting of President John Kennedy in 1963 showed that 44 percent of the people knew it within fifteen minutes, 62 percent within forty-five minutes, and 90 percent within an hour. About half of the people heard about the event from radio and television and they notified the rest either in person or by telephone. It was the first time in history that the population of an entire continent learned about a single event in an hour's time. And that was twenty years ago! | |
Today, cameras zoom in on the face of the man struck by the rock or the policeman's club. Armies that clashed by night now appear in our living rooms. I do not in any way argue that this is bad; far from it. But I have to observe that for the first time in the history of Man, our society, with all the flaws inherent in human nature, all the breakdowns in technology, and all of our social foibles, is communicated instantly to the world. Things will inevitably go wrong, because men still are not gods. But because all the failures, the mistakes, and the accidents intrude upon our consciousness in an almost unbroken stream, our fear of the future increases exponentially. | |
The fact that the world has had the technology to destroy this planet for more than thirty years, but has not done so, is noteworthy but not newsworthy. Nevertheless, it is critical to all else. It represents what Barbara Tuchman calls "the persistence of the normal." And it is this persistence that gets us past the crisis. | |
If we kept a running inventory of trouble in today's world, reasonable people might conclude that the world was about ready to collapse. All the elements of disaster are present. And yet somehow the world still functions-despite a full-scale war between Iran and Iraq which has consumed several hundred thousand lives, a Soviet invasion and war of attrition in Afghanistan, a complex and dangerous factional war in Lebanon, the military adventures of Libya in Africa, the presence of Cuban troops in Angola, the wars in Central America, the fight for the Falkland Islands, the war in Cambodia, and struggles in other parts of the arc of Asia. | |
This is not to say that there are not always present real dangers of great magnitude which require our best efforts to manage-there are. Indeed, one seems to succeed another with great rapidity. What is underestimated is the ability of mankind-using that term in its broadest sense-to act and react and to survive. | |
Those who say that Armageddon is here and that the world will stop tomorrow completely miss the main message of life. The real news in American society is not that our problems are complex and have multiplied, but rather that our sensitivity to these problems is greater now than at any time in the long history of man. This is enormous progress in your lifetime and mine, for every problem-solver knows that quantifying the problem, and recognizing it for what it is, is often half the battle. One grows weary of strident voices whose owners' ignorance of the past is matched only by the extravagance of their language. Our generation, like each one before it, has made mistakes, but at least we are facing the major problems of our time with candor and energy. Our record is not that bad. I agree with the late historian at the University of Montana | |
p.6 | Mr. K. Ross Toole, who said that he was "tired of the tyranny of spoiled brats." He wrote: |
My generation has made America the most affluent country on earth. It has tackled, head-on, a racial problem, which no nation on earth in the history of mankind had dared to do. It has publicly declared war on poverty and it has gone to the moon; it has desegregated schools and abolished polio; it has presided over the beginning of what is probably the greatest social and economic revolution in man's history. It has begun these things, not finished them. It has declared itself, and committed itself, and taxed itself, and damn near run itself into the ground in the cause of social justice and reform. | |
That is not a message of despair, but of hope and achievement. It is a record of sensitivity to our environment of a magnitude never before achieved. | |
The Bible, for example, tells us that "the poor are always with us." The fact that our generation does not accept this as a God-given state of affairs, but rather is putting its energy and its skill and its imagination to work to reverse this ancient state, is good news, not bad. That we Americans have not achieved in a few years what the world has been unable to do in two thousand years is not a valid cause for despair. To the contrary, it is a cause for optimism. | |
We are similarly sensitive to our environment, and the need for us all to do something to improve its quality, not only because we are anchored in our communities and will continue to be, but also because we now have a deeper interest in the condition of our environment. This state of affairs is both a circumstance and a subject that would not even have been thought of twenty years ago. The fact that we have all become acutely aware of our mistreatment of our environment is, again, not a cause for despair, but rather, in any kind of perspective, a source of encouragement. We have now | |
p.7 | defined the problem, which went largely undetected for a long time. We overlooked it because it was growing at such a rate that only yesterday no crisis was foreseen. Half of the people in our nation have been born since the end of World War II. It is perfectly plain that twice the number of people living on the same land mass would cause a pollution problem even if we had been much more skillful than we had been. |
After all, what did Adam and Eve do with the apple core? Pollution is caused by people and it starts with the throwing of a beer can out the window of a student's car while he is on the way to an environmental demonstration. | |
Before the poor old Union goes down to dusty death, it would be useful to remember that the Greek civilization, which many admire so much, was in fact built upon human slavery. It might be instructive also to recall that George Washington was a slave owner, and that in those days most people of his time, who suffered a long and costly war for liberty, did not make a distinction between owning slaves and supporting the Declaration of Independence. That great document was silent on this subject. | |
In this day of concern about voter registration, literacy tests, and raising the legal drinking age, we overlooked the fact that the principal drafter of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, believed that only a man who held real property should be entitled to the vote. Far from going down to dusty death, the American dream steadily has sharpened its focus; but the clamor for instant solutions to ancient problems obscures the enormous progress that we have made. | |
Consequently, anyone in our society whose eyesight and hearing are not totally impaired is likely to believe that we are on a collision course with doomsday. Considering the amount of time and space devoted to predictions of impending disaster, it would appear that we have sought to validate a variation on Gresham's law: Bad news drives out good. | |
Our compulsion to turn every scrap of bad news into a full-blown crisis distorts our perspective. It neglects to remind us that troubles may be news, but they are by no means new. | |
p.8 | This negative emphasis ignores the decisive role of human ingenuity in a free society, which invariably produces a coping mechanism. |
Alarmists' curves frequently are based upon downward trends. As early as the sixth chapter of Genesis, some believed the world was headed downhill. The doomsayers were already looking back upon better times: "There were giants in the earth in those days." | |
Prophets of doom fail to appreciate man's inherent ability to adjust and innovate. The British economist Thomas Malthus predicted in 1798 that the imbalance between population growth and food production would cause the world to starve to death. The doomsayers called it Malthus's Iron Law. As time has proved, it was neither iron nor law. Like many of our current crop of transient experts, Malthus fell into the oldest trap of all in the prognostication game. He underestimated everyone's intelligence but his own; he was incapable of imagining that out of the Industrial Revolution would come reapers, threshers, combines, and tractors. He did not foresee that quantum jump in productivity. Nor did he envision agricultural improvements creating such abundance that foolish governments would pay farmers not to cultivate the soil. | |
A third fault accounts for the inability of the doomsayers accurately to predict what will happen. They cling to the belief that there are accepted absolutes in a world of rapidly changing value systems. As the French poet Paul Valery put it: "We often tend to be marching backward into the future." | |
Examples abound. A presidential commission appointed by Herbert Hoover in 1929 later reported to Franklin D. Roosevelt on how to plot our course through 1952. The report was in thirteen volumes, prepared by five hundred researchers. The summary alone filled sixteen hundred pages. Yet there was not a word about atomic energy, jet propulsion, antibiotics, transistors, or many other significant developments that occurred by 1952. The World's Fair of 1939, which was dedicated to the World of Tomorrow, not only failed to suggest any of these advances, but did not even | |
p.9 | entertain the idea of space travel. The late Herman Kahn's opus on the year 2000 never mentioned pollution, nor was there any real emphasis on the energy shortage. The people who have come closest to predicting the future are some of the science fiction writers, unencumbered by elaborate research or prestigious committees, but with the courage to dream. Jules Verne's wild imagination proved to be more prophetic than the calculations of Malthus. |
Our latter-day Malthusians, whose forecasts are often dignified with computer printouts-which substitute for the ancients' ox entrails in modern-day occult prediction-appear oblivious of the fact that man, given the proper incentive and freedom to act, has repeatedly found substitutes for dwindling materials. The United States was denied 90 percent of its sources of natural rubber during World War II, but technological ingenuity created synthetic rubber, which is now more widely and flexibly used than the natural product. One of the most common substances in the world is bauxite, but it was not regarded as much of an asset until the way to manufacture aluminum was perfected. Coal was not even considered a resource before the steam age, nor was uranium highly valued before the atomic age. Since the Industrial Revolution, resources have grown exponentially, step by step, with man's ability to apply fresh technology to his needs. These experiences of yesterday are relevant today. I do not assert that history repeats itself, but offer a reminder that the human story did not begin with today's crisis. | |
This propensity of Americans to overstate and overkill is not new. The only difference today is that the technical scope and reach of our communications are much wider that ever before in history. One man saying that everything is wrong can command coast-to-coast attention in living color, a power not given to an absolute monarch a century ago. | |
One of the great optimists of America was Walt Whitman, who usually sang of the joys and promises of our land. In 1870, however, he wrote: "Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness of heart than at present. Genuine belief seems to | |
p.10 | have left us .... We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. .... The depravity of the business classes of the country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America ... are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, maladministration." These views, published in a pamphlet, attracted limited attention in those days, and despite Whitman's name and fame, only a tiny fraction of the population was even aware of his momentary despair. |
Whitman, fortunately, reminded us, on another occasion, of a more important, universal truth. That is that these institutions, which are said to be in trouble, are made up of people like you and me. The American system has been built not upon the worship of institutions but upon a belief in the worth of the individual. | |
Whitman put it this way: | |
O I see flashing that this America is only you and me, | |
Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me, | |
Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections, are you and me, | |
Its Congress is you and me, the officers, capitols, armies, ships, are you and me. | |
Whitman did not say that America was a collection of groups or institutions. He said it was you and me. We do not educate groups; we educate individuals. Part of our education must be that each of us has an obligation to pass on to our children our hard-won individual liberty, which must be reasserted if our freedom is to endure. | |
One reason for the deep pessimism of our generation's communicators is that somehow they got it into their minds that prior to yesterday America was largely a happy and serene country. They brush under the rug the violent upsets of 1919 and 1920, years when wholesale violations of our civil liberties were carried out. | |
They apparently forget the Whiskey Rebellion, when Appalachian farmers protested against Alexander Hamilton's formula | |
p.11 | for debt and tax collection. They overlook the urban riots between newly arrived immigrants and so-called native Americans, which took place in the mid-1800s. Somehow the racial and labor disturbances throughout the late 1930s have faded in their memories, if indeed they ever knew about them. |
It is interesting to speculate about what some of the noisy undertakers of American democracy would say if they took the time to read our country's history and stumbled across the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918. These two bills provided a ten-thousand-dollar fine and a twenty-year prison sentence for such felonies as interfering with the draft, encouraging disloyalty, obstructing the sale of United States Treasury Bonds or using "disloyal or abusive language" about the government, the Constitution, the flag, or the uniform. Some two thousand seven hundred people were convicted of violating it, including a man who ran for President and polled more than one million votes. Quite naturally, these statutes were tested in the courts, and their constitutionality was by the Supreme Court. | |
During the height of the so-called Red Scare in 1919, a duly constituted jury in Hammond, Indiana, took less than five minutes to acquit the assassin of an alien who yelled "to hell with the United States." Early the following year, a salesman in a clothing store in Connecticut was sentenced to six months in jail for remarking to a customer that Lenin was one of the brainiest of the world's political leaders. When the Attorney General made a public statement that the work of private counterespionage and vigilante groups was unnecessary and unwanted, the complained that the Attorney General "has perhaps been a little hasty in telling the patriotic and defensive societies that their help in guarding the Republic is neither needed nor welcomed." | |
An imperfect past does not excuse an imperfect present, but a knowledge of past realities and past mistakes is critical if we are to avoid the same mistakes twice. | |
Saul Bellow, the novelist, made this point when he wrote: "Maybe civilization is coming to an end, but it still exists, and | |
p.12 | meanwhile we have our choice: We can either rain more blows on it, or try to redeem it." |
It is my view that we Americans are trying with some success to redeem it. We have not solved all of our problems, but we have faced them squarely. We sometimes are assaulted so much by our failures that we overlook the progress that has been made. We hear too much of what John Gardner has called "the currently fashionable mixture of passion and incompetence." Against that background, we might consider the advice of an eminent American historian who, from the vantage point of eighty years, wrote: "Extravagance in the interpretation of current events destroys perspective and contributes nothing to poise and stability. It plays into the hands of the extremists at both ends of the political spectrum." | |
Therefore, the one remaining event capable of taking everyone by surprise would be a continuous period of, say, three weeks in midsummer the discovery and breathless proclamation of a single new crisis. I predict that the ripple effect of such a startling nonevent would quickly circle the globe and produce record levels of consternation. | |
Sunday rotogravure editors would rummage in old police records for unsolved ax murders, and financial commentators would be reduced to foraging in their files for old economic crises to refurbish. Program chairpersons for countless fraternal and professional organizations, having no crisis topic for luncheon speakers, would revert to photo-slide lectures on family excursions to Yellowstone National Park-exchanging one "Old Faithful" for another. Business economists would interrupt their internal dispute over whether it is an art or a science they practice, long enough to issue a reassuring joint communique stating that the absence of an immediate economic crisis is not serious-but merely a temporary aberration that will correct itself as soon as some fine tuning is done with fiscal and monetary policies. Congressional leaders would further assure us that if no better crisis occurs spontaneously within thirty days, they will manufacture one. | |
Though I can stand the absence of crisis as well as anyone, | |
p.13 | I earnestly hope there will be no interruption in the steady flow of entirely manageable crises that we have survived in recent years-though some lowering of the decibel level would be helpful. |
Perhaps then we could restore our perspective and rejoice about our sensitivity to human problems-which is, in fact, unmatched in the history of this or any other country. | |
Nothing that is good comes easily, so it is impossible to render a pat formula for solving the world's problems. But I recall an inscription on the wall of one of the congressional hearing rooms in Washington. It says: | |
Due to the shortage of experienced trumpet players, doomsday will be postponed for three weeks. | |
So really Armageddon never arrives, and people with their intellectual capital invested in the end of the world are not getting a good return. | |