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RECOVERY OF AMERICAN ‘KNOW-HOW’

What is the fastest or most certain route to recovery of our cultural self-confidence? How can we recover the supreme technical competence that came with it- what our forebears called “American Know-How”?

The first step must be soberly assessing where we are now, and how we got here.

Getting Off Track

To begin with, “Know-How” itself was always on a wobbly foundation. During the fifties, when it was one of the great buzzwords of the age, its acolytes assumed the permanence of  impermanent things. They took our freedom and our questing, inventive spirit for granted, forgetting that they could thrive only in certain cultural environments. Our technical mastery could grow only in certain philosophical and religious soil.

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We can see something of the “Know-How” idea in the early work of Syd Mead. He was a popular commercial artist in the early sixties. His work featured sports cars, private planes, sleek attractive women, and colonization of other planets.

Mead’s vision assumed the permanence of certain beliefs and practices that have since waned. Marriage and the nuclear family will continue to be society’s social glue. Our economic life will revolve around free markets. Our governments will prioritize their core functions, defense and law enforcement, so we’ll be safe. The Judeo-Christian ethic will be our dominant social value. We’ll continue exploring, so energy will be cheap and abundant. The sciences will be solidly founded on experimentation, and will not be corrupted by politics. Our children will be well-schooled, and well able to think and reason.

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By the late sixties, the notion of American Know-How was hopelessly outdated. Demons that had long lurked in the recesses of the American psyche came out into the open. Student radicals taking over our streets insisted that America was hopelessly despotic and corrupt, and the system should fall. New theories of jurisprudence led to skyrocketing crime rates. We lost the war in Vietnam. The Apollo Space Program fizzled out. We suffered repeated energy crises. The seventies saw ‘stagflation’- monetary inflation with low or negative economic growth- which we’d been told couldn’t happen.

Finding Our Way Back

The Reagan Era brought partial recovery, but it was slow and incomplete. The Trump Presidency offers a robust reassertion of America’s cultural self-confidence. His personal failings, though, threaten to derail his most promising projects.

At any rate, there is only so much we can achieve through politics. Full recovery of “Know-How” requires attention to matters of spirit. It requires attention to our ancient ethical system. It requires reconsidering how we educate children. It requires reform of news and entertainment media.

Above all else, recovery requires reaffirmation of ancient creeds. We have to study again the ideas, hundreds or thousands of years old, that made the American Republic possible.

If we address only the obvious symptoms of our current cultural crisis, we will soon backslide into our previous funk. Recovery will be stalled. Dysfunction will once again become our national norm.

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Next- and Last in the Series: Driving in Neutral

 

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AMERICAN KNOW-HOW, PART III: 

DECLINE IS NOT AN OPTION

Can we restore American cultural self-confidence, and the supreme technical competence that came with it? If we can’t, could decline at least be gradual and comfortable?

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The middle-aged ex-athlete, flabby and weak, eases into his lounge chair. Watching a college football game, he remembers his own glory as the captain of his football team, when his body was agile and strong. He rues his physical decline.  The aging beauty queen, wrinkled and sagging, looks at an old photo of her triumphant moments as head cheerleader and homecoming queen, when her skin was flawless and her body was taut, and nearly every boy in her high school was in love with her. She puts the photo away and weeps over what can no longer be.

Is Decline Inevitable?

Our leading cultural critics are likewise haunted by nostalgia. They consider America’s former greatness, when she was by far the world’s dominant power. They remember when ‘American know-how’ was in vogue, and was taken seriously. They ask if it’s possible for us to recover the cultural self-confidence that led to putting a man on the moon, winning the Cold War, and unprecedented levels of prosperity. Noting the sad state of our universities and the seemingly intractable incompetence of our governments, they ask if our recent decline can be reversed.

Some say that decline is inevitable, but need not trouble us much. They cite the British Empire. In the middle of the twentieth century, the British people were tired of imperial responsibilities. They abandoned their empire, and seem not to be much worse off for it. They’ve maintained a modern economy, most of their freedom, and a reasonable level of social peace. Decline seems not to have harmed them.

Could we do the same? If America declines, could its senescence be comfortable? Could we sit on the sidelines of world affairs, watching other nations wrestle with the questions that used to vex us? Could we get used to being a bit player on the world stage?

Will Britain’s Experience Be Ours?

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We shouldn’t see British experience as a harbinger of our own future. When Britain was ready to shrug off the responsibilities of empire, it could do so without calamitous disruption of the British way of life. It could pass the baton to us. We spoke the same language and had similar largely the same traditions, a nearly identical legal system, and more or less the same geopolitical interests.

(See Mark Steyn: The Unmaking of the American World)

The same deal is not going to be available to the American people. We won’t see a gradual and comfortable decline. If we fail, we’ll be displaced by people who not only don’t speak English, they don’t even use the Roman alphabet. The Magna Carta, Lex Rex, the Protestant Reformation, and the Enlightenment will mean nothing to them. How likely are they to respect our laws or freedoms?

American failure to lead would be disastrous for us. Foreigners who don’t understand us, and many of whom are bitterly hostile to our core values, will flood our shores by the tens of millions. Jihadists will make massive headway in bringing Western societies to heel. Russia or China could be the world’s leading power, making America a vassal state. This would bring a massive loss of freedom.

America’s decline could also mean there is no real world power left. There would be no effective peacekeeper, and the globe would be in chaos. There are now pirates off the coasts of Indonesia and Somalia. We could soon see large numbers of pirates off the coasts of California and Florida. The external chaos would be accompanied by internal chaos. Tribalism would replace American identity, and the country would become spectacularly violent. The chaotic conditions would make an advanced economy impossible, and we would live under much more primitive conditions. Famine and pestilence would be frequent. Survivors would see hardship few Americans have known since the nineteenth century. Most of us wouldn’t survive to old age.

Will the Next Ten Years Be Critical?

The world offers no substitute for American leadership. Either we will recover ‘American Know-How’- the confident spirit and the accompanying technical competence- or we will face calamity. America as we’ve known it will no longer exist.

I believe the next ten years are critical. What we do during this period will determine whether we stand or fall.

Our condition is grim, but far from hopeless. We can recover- even surpass- our former vigor. It won’t be easy, but it’s within our ability.

In a future post, I’ll spell out a few steps for recovery. Watch this space.

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KNOW-HOW AND CULTURAL SELF-CONFIDENCE

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I’m looking at some old magazine ads touting “American know-how”. Do you remember “know-how”? If you do, you’re old enough to collect Social Security benefits.

“Know-how” was one of the enduring buzzwords of the fifties. It meant technical competence, of course, but much more. It was an attitude and a philosophy. Technical competence was the decisive factor in almost all aspects of life. There were hardly any problems that couldn’t be solved with the right tools, the right training, and enough elbow grease. Seemingly intractable social ailments such as war, crime, and poverty would be eradicated if the right people applied the right methods. Almost no challenge was beyond the reach of “know-how”.

Was Our Confidence Justified?

It was easy to believe in “know-how” then. America was the dominant power in the world. We were the only major industrialized nation not to have fought World War II on its own soil. Our unmatched industrial capacity had helped us defeat Tojo and Hitler. The crime rate had plunged dramatically since the thirties. Our economy was growing by leaps and bounds. We were by far the world’s largest exporter of manufactured goods. By 1955, Americans had developed vaccines to prevent polio and other crippling diseases, and we had effective antibiotics to treat other diseases. Nuclear power-“Atoms for Peace”– promised limitless cheap energy.  A middle-class American family enjoyed levels of comfort, leisure, entertainment and mobility unimaginable a few decades earlier. No other people had ever had it so good. No other nation had come close.

We also seemed supremely competent in international matters. Our advances in agriculture would end famines forever. Advances in travel and communications would tie the world together, reduce misunderstanding, and promote peace. We’d win the good will of foreigners with electricity and well projects.

Even the United Nations- an American project at first- seemed to be working. It seemed a useful tool for promoting peace and freedom. Its most important project in the fifties was defending South Korea from Communist invasion. It was much later that we came to revile the UN as a hive of scum and villainy***.

The National Mood Sours

“Know-how” fizzled in the early sixties. Afterward, to mention it was to mark oneself as hopelessly unhip and unaware. The JFK assassination had soured the country’s mood. Riots tore many of our cities apart. Failed social experiments had fostered skyrocketing crime rates. Our most cherished institutions were under assault in the universities and the press.

By 1965, talk of “know-how” was out of touch with the national mood. To many of us, it seemed a cruel joke.

Coming Soon: What Went Wrong? What Can We Do?

(***…a hive of scum and villainy… This is how Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi described Mos Eisley in the first Star Wars movie.)

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