I have been rereading George Friedman’s new book The
Storm Before The Calm. It takes a couple of readings to really grasp
the complexity of his “two cycle” premise.
Friedman posits that the current political and social unrest
is in part the result of growing tensions as an old system that used to work is
beginning to fail. That old system, born at the end of the last cycle in World
War II, was the growth of a technocracy to manage the affairs of government, but
a technocracy now increasingly unable to manage the growing size and complexity
of government. The ineptness, confusion and slowness of our “expert” agencies
like the CDC and the FDA in the present pandemic are prime examples, especially
when compared with the more successful responses in some other nations.
It occurred to me that we see that very conflict present
right now in the tension between the medical experts, who want to keep the
nation closed down, and the economic experts, who think we need to open up the
economy whatever the medical consequences or we will destroy too many jobs. As
Friedman points out, the problem with experts is that their expertise often tends
to be deep but narrow, and they often don’t see the whole picture.
This conflict also reflects the social and economic
divisions that were apparent in the last election. Progressives, who favor the
medical solution, tend to be well educated knowledge workers who have done well
in recent decades, and who have been perhaps inconvenienced by the shutdown,
but not badly hurt by it; they mostly still have their jobs and paychecks, even
if they have to work from home. On the other side are the service workers and manufacturing
workers and all those in the gig economy, who were already hurting financially
before the pandemic and for whom the continuing shutdown is a financial
disaster, the more so as more and more companies are forced out of business permanently,
meaning their jobs won’t come back.
This of course gets recast in political terms in today’s
heated climate, between “blue” groups who favor continuing shutdowns and “red”
groups that favor reopening the economy, with each side hurling invective at
the other. In truth both sides have a
valid point, and the rational resolution is probably some careful balance
between them, which seems to be what many state governors are leaning toward,
whatever the federal advice or media demands are.
I find Friedman’s “deep currents” approach to the current
unrest much more edifying and useful than the endless attacks on personalities
that clog the airwaves these days.
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