Optimism moves east

[imomus]

The story so far: As Angrael turns into a paranoid alliance of embattled security states lashing out with ever-increasing violence against the very people who control their energy resources, dragging the West ever deeper into a vicious circle of hatred, reprisals against civilians, and the erosion of all legitimacy, any tender-minded and optimistic view of our future slips away into a bloody sunset.

Is it really just ten years ago that we were talking about long booms rather than mid-flight explosions? Our prosperity was going to continue and increase, and we were going to use our wealth to help the poor. Everybody was going to love us. Our children would grow up in a world that was getting better.



This diffuse, warm sense of well-being wasn't just a side-effect of the MDMA tablets everyone was taking back in the 90s. It was related to a sense that world trade talks (the same ones that have just collapsed at Doha) might bring global justice, that information technology was going to raise educational standards and democratize knowledge, that a new post-industrial economy was going to complement bricks and mortar business, and that the 21st century, just on the threshold, would be a wonderland where lifespan would increase and diseases be defeated thanks to gen-tech.



The images on this page show some short-lived kids' bookstore in groovy, optimistic 1990s London, Paris, Berlin, New York or Tokyo, don't they? It went out of business in 2001, didn't it, replaced by a store selling black, beige and cream clothes and fallout shelters? Actually, no. This "haven for little imaginations" is Kids Republic, a childrens' bookstore in Beijing, China. It's just opened.

The optimism, tender-mindedness and benign curiosity apparent in this store (something about its spirit and design reminds me of Oto Kinoko, the sound store in Kyoto I blogged about excitedly earlier this year, only to find it had already closed down) represent everything we in the West have lost in the last ten years; lost because of our clumsy response to 9/11 and Angraeli realpolitik. Who, in the West, would have children now? But it's nice to know that, somewhere, optimism about the future is still intact.

In 30 or 40 years, the Chinese kids in this photo will be running the world. It's hard to imagine them making a worse job of it than we've done.

Comments

[bricology.livejournal.com]

"If we liberals don't have children and expose them in responsible ways to progressive values, we're going to be even more vastly outnumbered in the future (look at the American South)..."

Sorry, but I think that's a deplorable position. It's parallel to the arms race during the Cold War, and it's just as disingenuous. Did either the Soviet Union or the US really need to have enough nuclear weapons to be able to blow up all of the land mass on earth many times over? Of course not. Yet, the "need" for them was sold to both sides for decades, to the benefit of the politicians and military contractors, and to the detriment of the majority.

What you seem to be advocating is a baby race", where "our kind" needs to up our reproduction to be able to compete with the competition, for a goal that can only be described in terms of numbers and control. In fact, just about every ill that society faces is related to overpopulation, from pollution and the use of un-renewable resources to overcrowding to endangered species. Is it really worth exacerbating all of these things just to pop out more liberals?

[(Anonymous)]

Not to mention that such a view assumes, without evidence, that children mindlessly reproduce their parents' ideological positions. While plenty of fundamentalists' children remain fundamentalist, and plenty of hippies' children remain hippies, there are also many hippies' children who've become fundamentalist - and vice versa. If fundamentalism is more prevalent in the world, it is not (or at least not solely) because fundamentalists are the only ones reproducing. --2fs

[la-aquarius.livejournal.com]

Good point(s): I have to say that the image of a "baby race" is quite funny, though, but I don't mean that disrespectfully if it wasn't your intention. (But come on, that's just funny!)

My comments were partially tongue-in-cheek, but I do have to say that overpopulation isn't the issue in the U.S., which (with the exception of the continuing influx of immigrants from Central and Latin America, who are, we might note, both predominantly Catholic and more liberal than our Dobson friends) is approaching, like Japan and many Scandinavian countries, zero population growth.

The only problem with the analogy to the arms race, though, is that numbers do matter here: we vote to effect change, and even if there are a few conscientious and well-educated liberals in a particular district, well, if they're outnumbered, they're outnumbered.

Propagating isn't an answer, of course; education, activism, outreach are answers. I think the greatest thing a liberal could do right now is become a teacher. I tried it myself, but I couldn't hack it!

And as far as what the anonymous fellow below says, I don't necessarily assume that a child will take the same position as his or her parents (look at Family Ties! look at Ron Reagan and Lynne Cheney!). But, if the relationship between the parent and child is good and solid, it can have a lot to do with their world view.