Prompted by a friend’s remark, I just got through re-reading Robert Kaplan’s
splendid doom’n’gloom piece from back in 1994. It has held up surprisingly well after ten years,
and is full of quotables, e.g.: “Whereas the distant future will probably
see the emergence of a racially hybrid, globalized man, the coming decades
will see us more aware of our differences than of our similarities. To the
average person, political values will mean less, personal security more. The
belief that we are all equal is liable to be replaced by the overriding
obsession of the ancient Greek travelers: Why the differences between
peoples?”
I am coming to think that in the early and mid-1990s, a veil was briefly
lifted, to give us some glimpses of the truth about humanity and our
collective future. When we saw what was behind the veil, though, we dropped
it rather fast, and have spent the past ten years in a dream of wishful
thinking.
I note in this context that next month marks the 10th anniversary of the
publication of Herrnstein & Murray’s book THE BELL CURVE. Looking back over
these ten years, the striking thing about that book is how little practical
consequence it had. There was really no follow-up in the world of real
politics, any more than there was to the insights offered by Kaplan and
Samuel Huntington. The No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, was written
as though THE BELL CURVE had never been published; just as the Iraq war and
the nation-building effort that followed took no account of Kaplan,
Fukuyama, or Huntington. “Humankind cannot stand very much reality.”
Perhaps God in his wisdom permits us to know more than we can bear to know.
Dark thoughts; I am sorry, I shall try to find something more cheerful to
post. In the meantime, if you have time (the piece is rather long), try
reading or re-reading Kaplan’s essay.