June 29, 2008

Friedman's Funk

By: James Poulos

It used to be said that if The Cure made a happy album something had truly gone wrong in the world. It must now be said that if Tom Friedman is depressed, we’ve run officially off the rails on a crazy train. So yikes:

My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline — not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline. Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.

In his despair, Friedman throws everything nonoptimal into a grab bag of anti-optimism: rows of unsold SUVs share sad space with $14 trillion of consumer debt. It’s enough to make you suspect that nowadays only optimists can fall into despair. Contemporary optimism requires that you make yourself believe that we can solve yesterday’s unsolvable problems tomorrow. Stuck thus between the seemingly unliftable baggage of the past and the supposed superhuman strength of the future, the present is always an anxious, uncertain time. The optimist wants to get the hell out of the present as quickly as possible — a funny posture indeed for someone who looks down on critics as cynical and destructive. The only present that works for the optimist is one (e.g., 1997-1999) in which you can step outside and watch the future unfold before your eyes.

It’s precisely that needy desire for palpable change, change you can see and hear and get your hands on, that drives the economy Friedman has decided has become so dreadful. To the extent that we want to experience progress — not for its sake but for ours — we pour our money into whatever gives us that feeling. We consume progress. No surprise indeed, then, that we run out of it so damn fast. Progress is subject to the laws of supply and demand too, an economic psychologist might imagine. When we buy up and eat almost all the experiences of progress on the market, we cast about anxiously for new fields to survey and new depths to drill. We wonder if the supply of progress is finite. We start freaking out over our ability to find “smart” experiences of progress. But do we ever wonder to what extent we should dial down our demand for the experience of progress?