Larry Allums: America the bold but not so beautiful | News for Dallas, Texas | Dallas Morning News | Opinion: Points

My friend and mentor, Dr. Larry Allums, published an op ed in today's paper. Please enjoy:

Larry Allums: America the bold but not so beautiful News for Dallas, Texas Dallas Morning News Opinion: Points

For those who, like me, are pro-American and looking for insights into an uncertain future, Joel Kotkin's optimism in The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 is close to infectious. Amid pronouncements of America's decline or prophecies of its imminent doom, his forecast of our continuing vitality is a welcome respite.

Perhaps the most convincing aspect of Kotkin's claim for our success in the 21st century is that he avoids the sort of triumphalism that has the sound of excess – the hollow vanity Aristotle lists as one of the extremes either side of the golden mean of "greatness of soul." Nor does Kotkin go to the opposite extreme and suggest that America must now discover humility and share its past greatness with other nations. Rather, he really does claim not only a material greatness but a kind of greatness of soul for America, by which he seems to mean a quality not measurable as much by the data he uses so expertly as by a kind of interior, collective character sown into the soil of our founding that continues to nourish new growth, regardless of the massive change our democracy habitually thrives upon.

Describing America's "fundamental strengths," Kotkin ironically but perhaps appropriately employs a non-Anglo word: "These traits provide the United States with what Japanese scholar Fuji Kamiya has described as sokojikara: a reserve power that allows it to overcome both the inadequacies of its leaders and the foibles of its citizens."

This rather mythic designation – mythic in the sense that it attempts to get at the essential character of a people – carries strong overtones of an American destiny, but clearly post-colonial and post-imperial. Kotkin believes that simply in following our internal compass and allowing our character to guide crucial choices, our ascendancy during this century will be, if not assured, certainly much more likely and, if we work at it, virtually guaranteed.

Working at it means striking a balance, Kotkin says, between piety toward our "ancient ideals" and openness to future change –in which case "the United States can emerge as a land of unprecedented opportunity: a youthful, evolving nation amid an advanced industrial world beset by old age, bitter ethnic conflicts and erratically functioning economic institutions."

This hopeful prospect hinges upon a momentous "if," because the two factors needing to be balanced are by nature in tension, if not opposition. Having in a sense begun in impiety – revolt against Mother Country – Americans are habitually ready to embrace change at piety's expense.

Notoriously, we find it easy to turn on a dime away from our past, perhaps because it almost never carries immediate consequences. Whether we can achieve the balance Kotkin so easily calls for will depend on our ability to manage another balancing act: between measurable and non-measurable dimensions of education, or between things that matter in terms of material worth and those that matter in terms of moral and spiritual value.

Our natural openness to change is, according to Kotkin, a primary nutrient in the soil of the American character, and for him being open includes embracing not just new technology but the kind of change we are currently experiencing as social and political crisis: what immigrants bring to the full flowering of the American Dream. Kotkin's assertions are, after all, grounded in a demographic forecast, that our population will grow by 100 million during the first half of the century – "demographics as destiny," as he dramatically puts it. Of Scotch-Irish descent and therefore part of a diminishing subset of Americans, I nevertheless found myself easily agreeing with most every point of his pro-immigrant stance.

Whereas "anti-natalists," slow-growth advocates and racial purists would regard continuing immigration as disastrous, Kotkin sees it as our source of ascendancy over the countries most often cited as our potential vanquishers – mainly India, China and the European Union: "Only successful immigration can provide the markets, the manpower and, perhaps most important, the youthful energy to keep western societies vital and growing," he writes. For me this sorts well, if not eloquently, with the Rev. Martin Luther King's image in his "I Have a Dream" speech of the Founders' "promissory note" to which "every
American was to fall heir."

The questions are, where will the next 100 million Americans live, and what will they do in this future epoch that will at once be an extension of the old and an emergence of the new?

Kotkin's answers are consistently provocative and sometimes troubling – especially to those who envision a future of urban renewal and a commensurate shrinking of America's dogged preference since World War II for suburban life. Not so, says Kotkin: "Rather than be forced to cluster in cities, Americans are likely to increasingly opt for communities that blend the single-family housing patterns of suburbia with basic urban amenities."

As a transplanted city dweller from the Deep South, I devoutly prefer urban life and believe in the city-center concept, but Kotkin's scenario doesn't put me off, because it avoids an either-or conclusion. The next 100 million, he says, will be enough for the vitality of both city and suburb. If he's right, and it appears he is, that "we're moving beyond the industrial model, with economic activity diffusing from great population centers," then perhaps we're entering a period when people of varying circumstances can choose not to live in urban areas and still aspire upward as Americans always have.

Until recently, civilizational advances have typically resulted in forced movements toward urban cores. We seem now to have reached a true turning point – when the movement will go back the other way, to the suburbs and beyond, even to the great American Heartland for which Kotkin foresees a dramatic resurgence.

Kotkin's bright estimate of America's potential has great appeal, but there's something beguiling, almost Pied-Piper like, about the neutrality of his predictions. It seems to me traceable to his use of the word sokojikara to define that deeply imbedded, almost mythic quality of the American character. My reservations have to do with two issues he minimizes or leaves out of his equation: education and beauty.

The first, education, is prominent among our national concerns, yet it is almost always discussed or debated only in terms of work-force skills and measurable knowledge. True, these are vitally connected to our national destiny on a material level. But tunnel-visioned as we are with high-stakes testing, we rarely contemplate the importance of a whole curriculum in ensuring our vital future in a changing, threatening world.

Like Kotkin, we seem to assume that matters of character and ideals – the very things that define sokojikara – will take care of themselves, that they are self-renewing and that as long as we remain politically correct, both our native-born and immigrant youth will somehow acquire the values, the moral habituation, that will keep us strong in heart and soul. At best, this is placing a lot of faith in the permanence of American Identity; at worst, it is risking the continued existence of America itself.

The other issue conspicuous by its absence from Kotkin's account is beauty, which has everything to do with education. Beauty is a forbidden subject today, especially in academe, yet the core of our education ought to focus precisely on beautiful things, which certainly include cities and suburbs.

Beauty matters in innumerable and often unmeasurable ways. According to the ancient Greeks, true education involves learning about what is good – the good thought, the good judgment, the good action – and what is good is necessarily beautiful. The Greeks in fact had one word – kaloskagathos – that coalesced the two into an inseparable meaning. Kotkin implies that there are no real distinctions to be made in terms of beauty – no beautiful cities or suburbs; only those that succeed, that is, those we prefer.

Kotkin's omissions don't invalidate his vision of America in 2050. In fact, there is room in his copious forecast for educating future Americans in what is both good and beautiful. Moreover, I would say that such an education is necessary if we are to be, as he predicts, "a beacon and a model," a new version of the City on the Hill of old – "exceptional in everything from culture and science to agriculture and politics."

Dr. Larry Allums is director of the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture. His e-mail address is lallums@dallasinstitute.org.