Walter Russell Mead: The Next American Upgrade
[Walter Russell Mead is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. He blogs at The-American-Interest.com.]
Social reform, asserted Confucius, begins with the rectification of names.
I can think of one case where he’s unquestionably right: the use of the word ‘developed’ as applied to certain wealthy and industrialized countries mostly found in western Europe and North America, but sprinkled elsewhere throughout the world. The widespread and unchallenged use of that word testifies to deep errors about the kind of world we live in — and the shocking poverty of social and historical imagination that has narrowed the vision of our chattering classes.
The word ‘developed’ contains an important assumption: that a historical process known as development (closely related to modernization — another problematic word) not only exists throughout the world, it culminates in a known end which has already been reached. This word implies that countries like France, Canada and our own happy United States of America have reached the end of history, the summit of human achievement, stable and enduring arrangements in political economy that are unlikely to change much going forward.
Nothing could be stupider or less historically defensible than this belief, yet few assumptions are more widespread among the world’s intelligentsia, planners and, especially, bureaucrats. Technological change has never been moving faster or with greater force than it is today as the implications of one revolution in IT after another work themselves out; the foundations of the global economic and political order are being shaken by the dramatic rise of new powers. Yet somehow many of us believe that the western world is an end state: the comfy couch at the end of history rather than the launching pad for another great, disruptive leap into the unknown....
Read entire article at The American Interest
Social reform, asserted Confucius, begins with the rectification of names.
I can think of one case where he’s unquestionably right: the use of the word ‘developed’ as applied to certain wealthy and industrialized countries mostly found in western Europe and North America, but sprinkled elsewhere throughout the world. The widespread and unchallenged use of that word testifies to deep errors about the kind of world we live in — and the shocking poverty of social and historical imagination that has narrowed the vision of our chattering classes.
The word ‘developed’ contains an important assumption: that a historical process known as development (closely related to modernization — another problematic word) not only exists throughout the world, it culminates in a known end which has already been reached. This word implies that countries like France, Canada and our own happy United States of America have reached the end of history, the summit of human achievement, stable and enduring arrangements in political economy that are unlikely to change much going forward.
Nothing could be stupider or less historically defensible than this belief, yet few assumptions are more widespread among the world’s intelligentsia, planners and, especially, bureaucrats. Technological change has never been moving faster or with greater force than it is today as the implications of one revolution in IT after another work themselves out; the foundations of the global economic and political order are being shaken by the dramatic rise of new powers. Yet somehow many of us believe that the western world is an end state: the comfy couch at the end of history rather than the launching pad for another great, disruptive leap into the unknown....