The Importance of Future Preference

Martin Walker, writing in the Wilson Quarterly, wonders if the United States is becoming too satisfied (Execupundit note: Europeanized?) and is losing a quality that produces greatness:

future preference.

An excerpt:

One way to look at American history over the past century or so is to suggest that in the late 19th century the United States became the world’s farm, the source of cheap food that fed its own swelling population and much of the rest of the world. In the first two-thirds of the 20th century, it became the world’s workshop, the source of industrial innovations and goods, and, when needed, of munitions. Over the past generation, as European, Japanese, and Chinese manufacturers began challenging its dominance, the United States became the world’s graduate school.

The most recent ranking of the world’s universities (the criteria included the Nobel and other international prizes, articles cited in leading academic journals, research results, and academic performance) was published in 2005 by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University. Of the world’s top 10 universities, only two, Oxford and Cambridge, were not American. The third non-American university to make the list was Japan’s Tokyo University, at number 20. The highest-ranking non-British European university, at number 27, was Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. America dominates the world’s brainpower and scores well on this classically Quigleyan measure of care for the future. If the global mass middle class is indeed straining the biosphere beyond endurance, it will be universities in America—if anywhere—that produce the research and innovation needed to repair the damage.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, the first volume of which was published in 1835, remains perhaps the most perceptive book ever written on the young republic. Tocqueville’s ideas and judgments have continued to ring true, including the cautionary notes he sounds along with his expressions of admiration. His celebrated warning about a singular American weakness provides the counterpoint to Quigley’s essential optimism: “The prospect really does frighten me that they may finally become so engrossed in a cowardly love of immediate pleasures that their interest in their own future and in that of their descendants may vanish, and that they will prefer tamely to follow the course of their destiny rather than make a sudden energetic effort necessary to set things right.” These many years later, Tocqueville’s concern seems more prescient and urgent than ever.