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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By the late sixties, the notion of American Know-How was hopelessly outdated.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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TWILIGHT OF “KNOW-HOW”

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Part Two of a Three-Part Series

The twilight cometh…

By the mid-sixties, ‘know-how’ was outmoded. To mention it was to mark oneself as hopelessly unhip and unaware. The assassination of President Kennedy had soured the nation’s mood, riots tore many of our biggest cities apart, the Vietnam war appeared endless and unwinnable, and street crime was skyrocketing. America’s most cherished institutions were under assault by leading public intellectuals. Talk of ‘know-how’ was out of sync with the national mood.

Events of the seventies generally reinforced this timid, embittered, and cynical spirit. For millions of us, the Watergate Scandal destroyed faith in our government’s essential decency. We questioned its regard for the well-being of the people. Double-digit inflation, repeated recessions, and repeated energy shortages undermined confidence in our material futures. The catastrophic loss in Vietnam, the Iranian Hostage Crisis, and the Soviet Empire’s seemingly unstoppable advances cast a shadow over the future of America itself. The country seemed to be in its twilight.

Many of us took refuge in unrestrained hedonism. We dosed ourselves with psychoactive drugs, entertained multiple lovers, spent inordinate amounts of time in recreational activities, and avoided work when we could. The period was called the “Me Decade” for a reason.

We’ve gone through numerous twists and turns since then, our cultural competence and self-confidence waxing and waning by turns.

In early 2016, we seem to be in another trough. Our largest political parties are discredited. Republicans exhibit pathetic and inexplicable weakness. Democrats appall us with their excessive ambition, the social disruption inherent in their embrace of identity politics, and the moral bankruptcy of their governing model. Our military forces, despite overwhelmingly superior training and weaponry, face defeat after defeat at the hands of barely organized bands of savages. Our national government is mired in seemingly unpayable debt, and few of our leaders even bother to ask how we’re going to deal with it.

How did this happen?  How could ‘know-how’ have slipped through our fingers? Can we recover it?

We believe there is a way back. But it will not be easy.

The Twilight of “Know-How” to be continued…

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