The following interesting comments in “Reason” from Neal Stephenson, author of the recently completed “Baroque Cycle:”

“The success of the U.S. has not come from one consistent cause, as far as I can make out. Instead the U.S. will find a way to succeed for a few decades based on one thing, then, when that peters out, move on to another. Sometimes there is trouble during the transitions. So, in the early-to-mid-19th century, it was all about expansion westward and a colossal growth in population. After the Civil War, it was about exploitation of the world’s richest resource base: iron, steel, coal, the railways, and later oil. For much of the 20th century it was about science and technology. The heyday was the Second World War … The war led into the nuclear arms race and the space race, which led in turn to the revolution in electronics, computers, the Internet, etc. If the emblematic figures of earlier eras were the pioneer with his Kentucky rifle, or the Gilded Age plutocrat, then for the era from, say, 1940 to 2000 it was the engineer, the geek, the scientist. …

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we’re coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it’s going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be “worse” … but as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we’ll get lucky again.”

Stephenson may be too pessimistic. The reason that the U.S. has usually found a “new way” is because its people are generally adaptable and adventurous. We have bought into an economy that changes and evolves — sometimes in fits and starts, and often with ugly social costs — but often in the right direction. Those of us old enough to remember the early 1980’s can attest to the general gloom as we contemplated life under our new Japanese masters. But then — we changed. We learned how to compete better where that made sense, and moved out of areas where it did not. Engineers now code C++ instead of design blast furnaces. The result: higher real incomes and standards of living, and fewer people in poverty.

And with the evidence of ongoing scientific and technical advance all around us, it’s hard to buy that we’re entering a new dark age.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 1st, 2005 at 10:30 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Brilliant, but uncategorizable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.