Wang Huning and the Eternal Return to 1975

A few years back Ross Douthat published an interesting book titled The Decadent Society: How We Became Victims of Our Own Success. The thesis of Douthat’s book is simple: American society is stagnant. Our blockbusters and our books are remakes from the ’80s; our political coalitions and political programs all date back to the 1970s; even the technological progress we have seen over the last three decades pales in comparison to the revolutions that occurred in the decades before. We may celebrate “change agents” but we no longer have any. America is stuck in what Douthat cleverly labels an “eternal recursion to 1975.”1

My essay “On Life in the Shadow of the Boomers” was written in response to The Decadent Society. It was mostly focused on the cultural angle of Douthat’s thesis. Douthat’s claims of technology are downstream the arguments of the Thielites. I assessed their arguments in the essay “Has Technological Progress Stalled?“2 Between these two pieces you see my general take on Douthat’s thesis: his assessment of American cultural and political stasis is broadly correct, but he overstates how unusual stasis is in American history. Political and cultural transformation occurs via a sort of punctuated equilibrium (see also my essay “Culture Wars are Long Wars“) and we just happen to be living at the tail end of an equilibrium phase.

On the other hand, Douthat understates the true scope of technological stagnation. Nothing the internet has delivered remotely compares with the transformation of human civilization that occurred during the second industrial revolution. In 1975 technological change was the most important facet of American life. It is no longer.

Were Wang Huning to read Douthat’s book, I suspect he might agree with me.

This month the Center for Strategic Translation has published several excerpts from Wang’s famous travelogue, America Against America.3 Long before he was the arbiter of China’s official ideology Wang was a young political scientist eager to learn about the outside world. A rising star in Chinese academic circles, he traveled to the United States in 1989 on the invitation of the American Political Science Association. Based primarily at the University of Iowa, Wang visited dozens of cities and states before he returned to China. A few years later he published America Against America to share what he had learned on this journey. Part travel diary, party philosophical reflection, America Against America was published well before Wang began his upward climb in the Party ranks. This makes it an unusually honest statement of the ideas and ideals of one of China’s most powerful men.

I think almost every analysis of America Against America published in English gets this book wrong. Most describe it as a treatise on American decline, a screed against American decadence, and so forth. It is very difficult to read America Against America cover to cover and walk away with that conclusion. For every passage of piercing critique there is some other section of unqualified admiration. For the most part Wang’s tone is contemplative and curious. He is driven to discover what aspects of the American experience are accidents of American history, and which point to more general lessons that might be applicable to his home country.

One of Wang’s reoccurring obsessions is the nature of American technology. I am surprised how little most reviews of America Against America have to say about this aspect of Wang’s work. In the book’s first chapter Wang positions the question of American technology as the central concern of his book. To quote the CST translation:

The United States is a very developed society in many respects. Anyone who comes to the US will feel a sort of “future shock.” [In this situation], one type of person will just think about how they can enjoy being in America; another type of person will ponder why there is an America….

Today, America’s development, with its economic prosperity, political processes, lifestyle, and international status, has sown a lot of uncertainty in the world. People in developed countries have this fundamental concern: human science and technology and material life have developed up to this stage. Is this stage contrary to human nature? Will it cause the depletion of the earth’s resources? Will it ultimately lead to the destruction of mankind? Members of the Club of Rome are deeply concerned about this and have long voiced concern over this issue.

However, people in developing countries have a completely different set of questions: what forces created such an awe-inspiring material civilization? What administrative and intellectual systems created the conditions for this development? Is such an end-state the result of chance, or was it a historic inevitability? People begin feeling uncertain about this system, which makes them feel uncertain about their own system. In any case, America  has created this uncertainty.4

This is the question Wang wants to explore in America Against America. How did the Americans create “such an awe inspiring material civilization?” While Wang is more fox than hedgehog, everything else in the book is ultimately downstream this opening question. We put this more poetically in the introduction to the translation:

Wang’s focus may surprise his American readers. Americans often think that constitutionalism, liberal democracy, and universal truths about the equality of man are the United States’ most significant gift to humankind. But from the start of the 20th century to its close, foreigners in the mold of Wang Huning have honored the United States as the land of Edison, not the land of Jefferson. They understand that it was American entrepreneurs, scientists, and generals who forged the industrial civilization humanity now calls home. All the key pieces of this vast complex—be it electrification or assembly lines, semiconductors or skyscrapers, modern air travel or modern air conditioning—were invented or commercialized in the United States.

It is this America, the America that pioneered the greatest transformation the human species has experienced since foragers began farming 12,000 years ago, that so awed the young Wang Huning. He gazed at the cityscapes and spaceports of the United States with envy—and uncertainty. America Against America is his uncertain meditation on how the United States achieved these feats, and, by extension, what China might do to one day match them.5

Over the course of America Against America Wang offers many different hypotheses for American technological progress. The most interesting argument is the one most relevant to Douthat’s book: Wang’s ideas on what he calls the American “spirit of the future.” Wang is astonished with how future oriented American society is:

The concept of pragmatism and the requirement to “deliver value” permeate every part of the American spirit.

That pragmatism, reflected in ever-changing social life and human behavior, means that everything must achieve useful, practical, and realistic ends, while standards of value that are indiscernible, unattainable, or seemingly non-existent are rejected. In the contemporary United States, such a spirit is made more concrete by the expression “money first”, whereby quick financial gain is the litmus test of pragmatism and anything that makes money has an overpowering value. In a way, making money has become the essence of pragmatism in the current age.

On the other hand, it cannot be overlooked–and it is rather curious–that there is yet another spirit that pervades society, which I would call “futurism.” In this overly materialistic society, it is rare to see a force that can overwhelm pragmatism. However, [here] the idea of futurism carries a particularly strong appeal and allure. Thus futurism also makes up a fundamental component of the general spirit of [American] society. It may be difficult to win hearts with other ideas, but [here] the ideas of futurism are powerful. 

To me, futurism refers to something that has no direct effect at the moment, but will have an effect in the future, whether that something be a tangible object, an abstract concept, or a state of being. From this viewpoint, it becomes clear that pragmatism and futurism are a contradictory dichotomy, with one seeking value from the present moment and the other from the future.6

Thus for Wang, the American obsession with the future is the one countervailing force in American life strong enough to moderate the atomizing tendencies of modern capitalism. He sees evidence of American futurism everywhere he looks: in the science fiction blockbusters Americans watch, in the ambitious urban planning committees of American cities, in farsighted Pentagon budgeting and base building, in the money Americans pump into the university education system, and in the fantastic engineering marvels Americans build. Wang specifically points to the Strategic Defense Initiative (aka. Reagan’s Star Wars program), the Texas based Super-Conducting Super Collider, and the Biosphere 2 research facility as three contemporary examples of Americans’ willingness to pour resources into outlandish ventures that promise a glimpse at a better future.

But wait—the Strategic Defense Initiative did not produce any technological breakthroughs before Congress closed the program down in 1993. The Super Collider was never finished. Biosphere 2 is now a museum. University budgets are being cut across the country. The U.S. Navy now faces terrible crisis precisely because of the Pentagon’s unwillingness to budget for the future. Urban planners are tied down by unshakable vetocracy. The science fiction blockbusters of the last decade are all sequels or remakes of the blockbusters of yesteryear.

Wang’s confidence in American ambition is expressed in a one particularly painful passage:

If tomorrow someone were to propose building a highway across the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to Europe, or a highway running across the Pacific Ocean all the way to Asia,” Wang concludes, “it would not be considered crazy. On the contrary, people would think this was an amazing idea.7

These are not new sentiments. Foreigners were saying things like this about the American people all the way back in the 1820s. I do not think this would be most foreign visitors first observations about Americans today. It is, however, the sort of thing foreign visitors say about China. If a road was to be built across the Pacific today, we would expect the Chinese to build it.

This is not a judgement about the relative power or even economic vitality of China and the United States. Rather, it is a judgement about which society cultivates, in Wang’s terms, a greater “spirit of novelty.” In 1989 Wang feared that China could not advance because its people were not willing to accept an American pace of change. Events have proved these worries wrong: in the years since Wang published his book Chinese society has changed at a pace with no parallel in world history. Almost everything Wang celebrates about American society in these passages—the American people’s indomitable drive to build, their quick acceptance of new technologies into their daily lives, their celebration of science and technology, their willingness to sacrifice time and money in the present for the sake of technical advances that will only bear fruit after a generation of labor, an optimistic and future oriented worldview—are now more characteristic of his own society. Even the world’s most famous living science fiction novelist is Chinese.

Technological societies have their own problems, of course, and Wang does not shy away from pointing out the problems that come from confusing moral progress with technological advance. He lists many pathologies of high-tech life. Those passages will be published in the next batch of CST translations. All I will say for now is that I find it remarkable how well his criticisms of tech-addled, commodity-driven social relations now apply to China. Here too China is more American than America is.

This suggests that Wang really has keyed in on principles that generalize. But the contrasting Chinese and American trajectories over the last three decades do pose some problems for Wang’s arguments. A key theme in both of the excerpts from America Against America that CST has published is the relationship between technological innovation and national tradition. In the United States, Wang argues, technological innovation is a cultural tradition with a century of history behind it. Technological revolutions do not erode the traditions that hold American society together because technological revolution is the tradition that holds American society together. China lacks such a tradition: there technological change promises much greater social disruption.

It is possible that the entire framing is bollocks: one might claim that attitudes towards technology and change are merely downstream industrialization. Ideas follow experience. From this point of view it is not that embracing a pro-technology ideology leads to technical advance, but that experiencing technical advance (especially the technical advances of the second industrial revolution) causes people to embrace technology. Optimism is a natural consequence of economic growth.

The trouble is that economies do not always grow. No boom lasts forever. Perhaps it was with an eye to the American history of boom and bust that Wang observed:

So, what forces have driven people in this society to strive for generations to reach this level of success? Many specific concepts to explain this have been suggested, such as innovation, work ethic, industriousness, and thrift. But what is most important is whether these forces can become a cultural gene: a tradition. Regardless of the factors that are conducive to social development, if these factors do not become a tradition, they will not become deeply rooted in a society.

It takes the efforts of several generations for factors like this to have an effect on a society. Americans talk constantly about innovation and, in reality, the American tradition of innovation is very strong. The Chinese also talk constantly about innovation, but China’s tradition of innovation has had its ups and downs.8

China’s explosive economic growth, and the technological change that goes along with it, is only one generation old. Now the Chinese economy slows. Now I we will see whether the Chinese embrace of technological progress was simply a byproduct of “factors that are conducive to social development” or if it is has become a “cultural gene… deeply rooted in society.”

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Your support makes this blog possible. To get updates on new posts published at the Scholar’s Stage, you can join the Scholar’s Stage Substack mailing list, follow my twitter feed, or support my writing through Patreon. If you found this post worth reading, you might find some of my other essays on science, technology, and American or Chinese life worth reading. In addition to the pieces written linked to above, check out “Watch Xi Jinping Slowly Strangle the Dengist Paradigm,” “Mr. Science, Meet Mr. Stability,” “Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order,” “Lessons from the 19th Century” and “Myths of the Over-Managed.”

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