Article: Reflections on Ian Morris' Book About the West and China

However, as long as Chinese graduate students continue to come to the United States to study for advanced degrees, the United States government will hold the power to refuse them visas to come here to study. This is an enormous power to hold over the Chinese and other non-Western people. I have no idea if economists have tried to figure out a monetary value for evaluating the worth of graduate and professional education in the United States today. Perhaps it would be better not to try to monetize their worth because American universities are arguably invaluable, as are other universities in the West and in China and elsewhere in the world today.

CONCLUSION

Let's review. Millions of Chinese today know English, and many Chinese graduate students come to the West to study for advanced degrees. But Ian Morris urges the West to watch out for China. Conservative Americans might heed his wake-up call to update their favorite apocalyptic thought-world. But how might liberals respond to his wake-up call, or will they just shrug him off? Are the best days of the West drawing to a close, or are the best days yet to come? If the best days of the West are drawing to a close, then perhaps liberals should just shrug and say, "What's wrong with that?" However, if the best days of the West are yet to come, then how might liberals today help the future emerge, with China rising on the horizon? I believe that the best parts of American history are yet to come in the future, so I hope that we Americans can recover from the regressive tendencies that have dominated American life and politics since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. As China rises on the horizon, Americans will need pluck and luck, not more apocalyptic hysteria from radical conservatives.

As is well known, Richard M. Nixon did his fair share to advance anti-communist apocalyptic hysteria. But then when he was president of the United States, he visited China. But his visit outraged radical conservatives. Unfortunately, radical conservatives are still with us today, and they still seem to glory in constructing an apocalyptic thought-world. Fortunately, Ian Morris stops well short of embracing the apocalyptic thought-world of radical conservatives in his discussion of the West and China. As I have suggested, he asks us to consider the West to be like Troy writ large and China to be something like Achilles writ large. As unthinkable as it may sound to us today, he asks us to consider the possibility that China one day might somehow defeat the United States, just as Achilles and his fellow Greek warriors eventually defeated the Trojans.

We Americans today should stop well short of celebrating our American heritage with the kind of triumphalism that Pericles uses in his celebration of the Athenian heritage in his famous "Funeral Oration" (as reconstructed by Thucydides in his HISTORY OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR). No doubt such triumphalism can be rousing. But such triumphalism can lead to over-reaching, as the Athenians themselves over-reached after the death of Pericles in the Peloponnesian War. To avoid the tendency to over-reach, we Americans today should embrace a more carefully calibrated exposition of the qualities in our American heritage that we consider to be admirable.

In extemporaneous remarks in Strasbourg, France, on April 4, 2009, President Obama responded at length to a question that he had been asked regarding American exceptionalism. Among other things, he said "We have a core set of values that are enshrined in our Constitution, in our body of law, in our democratic practices, in our belief in free speech and equality, that, though imperfect, are exceptional." (I have borrowed the quote of President Obama from John Dickerson's article "How He Ticks: Five of the Most Revealing Moments of the Obama Presidency" that was published online at SLATE MAGAZINE on December 10, 2010.)

I like the part about "though imperfect." That's why we have political debate. That's the part that saves his statement from the triumphalism of Pericles' "Funeral Oration." My own assessment of American democracy can be summed up in the well-known quip that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest. Our American experiment in representative democracy is an ongoing experiment.

As for an antidote against radical conservatives, liberal Democratic politicians and other liberals in the public arena are going to have to learn how to stir up political anger against radical conservatives. For understandable reasons, President Obama as the first African-American president is probably not in a good position to lead by example in stirring up political anger against radical conservatives. If he were to stir up political anger political anger against radical conservatives, he would probably just be playing into their hands. Radical conservatives would probably be able to manipulate such an effort on his part, so that he would probably come to regret his own actions. When it comes to handling radical conservatives, President Obama should probably follow a policy of containment much like the American foreign policy of containment of the former Soviet Union. For those of us who lived through the Cuban missile crisis, the prospect of all-out war with the former Soviet Union was not attractive, to put it mildly. In a similar way, for President Obama himself to lead an all-out war with the radical conservatives would probably not be a promising course for him to follow.

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