All of that said, America has followed massive immigration with anti-immigrant isolationism in the past and gotten over it. If Obama and crew can open our borders and fight the protectionists, I think we’ll recover.

Interesting reference to the GI bill – I think most of the world thinks the U.S. had a solid chance of greatness after WW2 but it seems that the fireworks are now fizzling out and it isn’t at all clear why. I’m sure that U.S. citizens feel this much more sharply than we do. In your original post, you hint that both China and the Islamic world somehow turned inwards – do you think this has been a factor? From outside, it has seemed that there was an increasingly isolationist trend through the post-Reagan years, which your theory would indicate is a massive mistake and one that the new administration will struggle to overcome.

I currently live in Melbourne, Australia and we seem to have a problem not of declining education but of declining links between education and surrounding industries, so the start-ups and small-scale companies that ideas need to get through infancy are few and far between. Not sure if this has been a factor in the U.S and I guess that China bypasses this issue by the Govt injecting huge capital into new projects.

Interesting questions. The US has prospered partly because we were among the first countries to have widespread high school education, then widespread college education — both of which we’re presently falling behind on, by the way.

Widespread high school education began in the 1940’s and was a popular movement. I don’t think the federal government had a direct role but someone who knows more might correct me. Attendance grew from 6% in 1900 to 88% in 2000.

I believe widespread college education started with the GI Bill after WWII. I think most colleges and universities are public, although the most prestigious ones are mostly private. Public universities are state rather than federal. A few public universities are highly ranked,at least at the graduate level (Berkeley, Michigan, UCLA). I went to Berkeley as a freshman and thought it was pretty poor, but they made no secret that they were trying to drive us out so as to have manageable class sizes in the last 2 years.

Your last question requires a history of the industrial revolution — I recommend a book called “The Birth of Plenty” by William Bernstein. But I think the answer to pricing out is no, if you buy Richard’s theories. But our declining education could drag us down.

Lewis’s title is supposed to be from a Muslim political perspective and the questions is why, after dominating their world for centuries, they found themselves behind the West. It’s about military power but also about why their science and arts, once the world’s most advanced, stopped progressing.

But you raise good points. One of the things I wonder is why Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad all came in roughly the same thousand years (500bc to 500ad). Then nothing much in terms of great spiritual teachers since. The other major religions (Judiasm, Hindu) are much older.

I strongly believe it is a very very big mistake to assume something went “wrong”. That in it self would be a limiting concept. The assumption includes in part the idea that if they were to have continued in their paths they would then be as the West is right now or even potentially gotten here earlier. In either case this further assumes these cultures, including the West, have or had the same end point perspectives. As we try to understand our present global predicament it think it’s crucial to consider the “why” from many different perspective and consider answers not considered before.

One example is that we can consider shifts in the collective thought process around core life questions. We tend to trivialize the past with respect to profound social understanding. It is possible that, by having gone through so many social economical and political ups and downs, they simply got tired of their own “rat race” and/or stopped the active pursuit of dominance in exchange for being content with what they had. In the past 100 years the West has definitely had its share of realizations impacting our lives through ever changing fades, most of which are borrowed from Chinese, Indian and Islamic spirituality. At that time especially humanity was blessed with some of the most profound philosophers, saints and poets of our time and the impact that they had on the families of past can not be underestimated. A lot of the insightful notions that many of us try to incorporate in our lives today are the ones that were introduced long ago using the latest jargon to personalize and own the message. So this suggests

The first sentence should read:

The dominant view held amongst many around the world, however much of a myth, with regards to ‘The American Dream’…

Not careful proofreading on my part. See even I’m an example of the failure of education…haha.

I actually contend that the loss of hope is the underlying principle.

The dominant view held amongst many around the world, however much of a myth this, about ‘The American Dream’ and the “good” of modern capitalism and materialism perhaps began to stream into the larger consciousness with Vietnam, Nixon/Watergate, then the rise of globalization with the OAPEC Oil Crisis, the stagnation of wages for males since the 1970s, the rise of deregulation, demise of unions, undermining of dissenting voices since the Regan era, and the dependency on fundamentalist consumerism, and assimilationist ideology that even so-called “liberal” Democrats like Clinton and perhaps even Obama are a part of, which essentially seeks to maintain this system in spite of indications of its failings.

This paradigm has perhaps led to the “intrinsic” value of education become that became powerful again since the Enlightenment less, and led to a status-quo supported Hobbseian/Darwinian perspective, by elites and anyone else seeking to reach the top of the heap.

The TV program ‘The Wire’ and some recent films like ‘The Edge of Heaven’ are arguably some of the best artistic works exposing this problem, and the desperate need for humans to find something new. The problem is that it does not seem to be offered at this point, so naturally dissenting voices and real agents of change will feel more dispondent.

This is then about the loss of hope, and possibly the eventual decline of society. Maybe this is a natural cycle. Sad, but perhaps true.