Preparing for the Twenty-First Century. - book reviews

Remember Thomas Malthus, the gloomy English cleric who prophesied, in 1798, that England's population growth would lead the country to poverty and mass starvation? Well, he's back, this time with computer graphs.

Paul Kenneoy, Dilworth Professor of History at Yale, has written a self-consciously Malthusian book about the global trends that will swamp us in the next century. Pick a trend, any trend - population growth? global warming? water shortages? biotechnology? Kennedy discusses each one carefully, and by the end of every chapter he gets quite depressed.

This is not an entirely facetious point. In fact it is what makes this highly intelligent book incomplete. Preparing for the Twenty-first Century gathers together an impressive array of data and integrates it in a sophisticated manner. It is lucid and even well-written. But the book is informed by a deep philosophical pessimism which makes it more effective for the sounding of alarms than as a comprehensive discussion of the issues it raises.

Many of the trends that Kennedy describes are, by themselves, very troubling. But it is wrong to dwell on these trends alone and to ignore the human response that such pressures cause. In the past, great pressures have caused people either to respond and counter these forces or at the very least to adapt and survive. This is why many dour predictions from the past - the "Club of Rome" report, for example - have not materialized over time.

Nineteenth-century England survived, indeed flourished, because it was able to counter the demographic pressures upon it. Malthus was disproved by three great counter-trends that he did not foresee: mass immigration to America and other new worlds, the technological improvements in agriculture, and, most especially, the Industrial Revolution. Wealth grew faster than the population, thus unlocking the "Malthus trap."

Today, Kennedy points out, there are no new lands to fill, and while giant leaps in technology happen daily, they take place in the laboratories of the advanced industrial world. The population explosion, meanwhile, is taking place in the poorest parts of the so-called Third World. It is this mismatch that is novel and that troubles Kennedy most.

But consider one extraordinary advantage that a poor country today has over its eighteenth-century predecessors. We know what creates wealth. Over the last three centuries Europe and America stumbled onto the recipe for economic success-free enterprise, the rule of law, and an openness to education, innovation, and experimentation. Today we know that this is the only secure path to development, and we see countries of every shape, size, and color that follow this path succeed. A generation ago the East Asian countries of South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand were spoken of in the same breath as Bangladesh and Burma. Today we speak enviously of the East Asian model of success. (Of course, these countries have not solved their demographic and environmental problems, but these issues are being addressed in the context of an ever-expanding economy, which makes all the difference.)

Again, Kennedy has his doubts. He fears that most countries will not be able to emulate the historic success of Holland, England, the United States, and Japan. Few countries have the cultural receptivity to innovation and enterprise necessary to become winners" in the twenty-first century.

The root of the problem, then, is not the structural pressures themselves but the willingness and ability of a country to adapt to these forces. The essence of the problem today is cultural. Can ancient and once powerful civilizations come to terms with the fact that to become a successful state today implies copying and adapting important Western traditions and practices? Can they accept that to become more modem they must become more Western? This is the question that has paralyzed the Arab world and India and that still plagues China and Japan. One Indian writer, advocating an indigenous approach for his country, explained, "Even if we succeed on their terms, we will remain slums of the West."

But modernity is not so Western as to rob people of their identity. Milhons of middle-class Asians and Latin Americans hold together modern practices and ancient beliefs with relative ease. And cultures are far more adaptable than we imagine. Over the past century we were told successively that Catholicism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Shintoism all emphasized the wrong attributes for economic success. But as states within these civilizations sought to succeed, people adapted their cultures in innovative ways, and today we marvel at how perfectly suited "East Asian culture" is to capitalism and only wonder what took them so long. (As for being slums of the West, comparing Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo to New York, London, and Berlin, one is left wondering which are the slums and which the shining cities.)

The reason that Kennedy has become so controversial a figure, however, has little to do with his discussions of robotics or global warming. Paul Kennedy is America's foremost "declinist." (In fact it was in a review of his last book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that Samuel P. Huntington coined the term. The more conventional-sounding "decliners," Huntington explained, could mean that the writer and not his subject was declining, clearly not the case with Kennedy.) In this book Kennedy continues the argument of Rise and Fall, that the United States is in relative decline and that, if unabated, this trend will result in the gradual loss of America's worldwide influence and global position. This argument has been met with jeering catcalls, particularly in conservative circles.