As one year was about to come to an end and another struggled to be born, Milton Rosenberg, one of the nation’s most thoughtful men, posed the question: “Let’s look at how history shifted this year, and how those shifts came to be perceived.” Milt was directing the question to me and two colleagues during his annual year-end radio show on WGN’s “Extension 720.” “Let’s think of the whole history of the year, embedded in this time, as we move into the 21st Century.”
“Thanks a lot, Milt, old friend,” I felt like saying. “Thanks for giving us a hint beforehand.” But I love and respect the former psychology professor so much that I just started thinking, along with my other two colleagues on the show.
“We used to call the booming markets of Asia the `emerging markets,’ ” Edward A. Kolodziej, political science professor at the University of Illinois/Urbana, began, starting with the dangerous recent crisis. “Now, with the Asian economic collapse, they’re more the `submerging markets.’ The problem is that, because of lack of transparency in their economies, we still don’t really know how bad the situation is.
“The second-largest economy in the world–Japan–is in banking chaos. What went wrong? More investment than it’s possible to sustain . . . enormous debts . . . mirage investments . . .
“Now, we have to ask, will these economies be able to save themselves or create sufficient world demand? That’s where all the `interdependence’ of the world economies comes in. Obviously, the markets are not working . . .”
Then Mike McGuire, a baiduhai senior editor who has worked all over the world, began putting forth equally thoughtful–and even optimistic–perceptions of what shifts this year may have wrought.
“There are more `modern’ leaders in power in the world,” he began. “Human rights advocates today have new means of informing people, like transporting their advocacy through the Internet. We see a determined effort by most nations to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction. Terrorism is under some restraints. The world is being brought closer together through the lowering of tariffs . . .”
At one point, Ed Kolodziej began wondering about what we had seen in increasingly complicated Russia during this 1997. “Is the Cold War really over?” he asked. “Isn’t the next step perhaps an appeal to Russian nationalism? Then couldn’t anti-Americanism be used to reinvigorate the Russian army?
“Yet, aren’t we also seeing a decentralization of power in Russia; aren’t we seeing the mayors of Russian cities, for instance, not waiting for Moscow anymore?”
Listening to my colleagues that day and thinking about these questions afterward, I found myself coming up with–and then constantly being drawn back to–several themes that I think did characterize 1997.
First, this year showed particularly that a planet becoming more overcrowded, and thus conflict-prone, clearly needed more effective use of power. Yet, on so many levels, we were instead seeing more and more of a devolution of power to ever smaller groups, with precisely the opposite result.
Ed Kolodziej called this the “medievalization of the world.” Then he asked: “How will anyone possibly rule the world in the next century when there will be not 4 billion people like today, but 10 billion people who want `in’?”
It also seemed that this year we began to see the falsity of the idea that the much-touted “new media”–the Internet, et al.–would make democracy and self-government more widespread and more effective. In fact, the opposite is happening. Indeed, what this whole Internet culture is doing is to appear to make the world more democratic (everybody has a voice), whereas what it really does is to make the world only more anarchic (nobody is really in charge). Furthermore, the kinds of political leaders who are emerging out of that disunifying culture appeal to emotions instead of reason. They are essentially demagogic in style and appeal.
Well, Milt, I guess I should thank you–at least you got us thinking. And now I wonder what we will say about 1998 next December.