Low National Expectations

Posted on December 20, 2004 in Occupation of Iraq Reading

My mother took me out to the garage yesterday and showed me a stack of magazines that I had collected many years ago — mostly old copies of Mother Jones and Coevolution Quarterly. I separated out the ones I didn’t want and put the ones I did want in the back of the car. Last night, I cracked the Summer 1983 issue of CQ to an article by University of Arizona professor Carl Hodges who shared his experience of being present when a moon rock was presented to the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheik Ziad Ben Sultan Al-Nian. It remains a timely tale:

By the time the rock had made its way back around, the topic of conversation had changed to “What value is there to science in general?” and questions started to be directed towards me as to why Abu Dhabi was spending millions of dollars on the Arid Lands Research Center that the University of Arizona was establishing.

Sheik Ziad listened to all this. Then when the rock had made its way back to him, he began to lecture the group. He explained that before the coming of the Western oil experts, everybody in Abu Dhabi rode on camls and times were extremely tough. These foreign scientists came and discovered this great wealth under the ground. It had always been there, and yet the Abu Dhabians themselves were not clever enough to develop it. Now, because of the oil, they were rich beyond their wildest dreams.

They should invest their riches in science and technology, he said, because any society that could make the decision to send a man to the Moon, and do so, could easily make the decision that they didn’t need oil. And if the West were about to make such a decision, the oil would be worthless, and they would all be riding camels again.

Later on the oil embargo hit, the price of oil skyrocketed, and the West capitulated. I found myself amazed that we in the United States did not believe that we could do without the Arab oil.

Twenty one years later we remain fatally addicted to the black fuel. Like junkies in a crack house, when our supply is threatened we kill for it. Hodges mentions the failure of Jimmy Carter to rise to the challenge of ending our dependence. To that name we must add Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and the Usurper who may be styled the Great Co-Dependent if not the biggest Addict of all.

But this nation no longer dreams, no longer attempts to achieve. Instead it strives for the easy marks, plays for thrills rather than lasting results. We’re a nation of gamblers now — quite different from the nerds who brought back Apollo 13 from the endless abyss using only their slide rules and less than 10K of onboard memory. We maneuver for power and control. We seek to set the game for our advantage at the cost of human lives. Because we did not end our dependence on oil, Fallujah happened.

Worst of all, we are governed by a class which doesn’t care. It thinks so little of us that it knows that we will capitulate time and again to its wishes. Hodges adds to his anecdote:

My favorite management article is a small paper written by Sterling Livingston of Harvard years ago called “Pygmalion in Management,” where he showed that the number one factor determining the performance of people that work for an individual is the expectation of the supervisor as to the performance he’ll receive.

Our leaders expect too little of us other than resignation. We’ll turn over our social security checks for the insecurity of market-driven individual accounts. We’ll march off and kill Iraqis because our leaders care more about their oil companies than about our national and personal independence from fossil fuels. They think very little of us. The time has come for us to rise beyond their expectations and show them the direction this country must take.