The War on Society’s Structure

Our social structure is necessary to sustain us as a species. Has it kept up with our amazing technological advances in the last hundred years? What about the last fifty years? If you are concerned about this, what about the next fifty years? Will the society we know and love today survive or will we find ourselves in another dark age? How can we fight to keep our social composition in place but also in step with the technological advances? Read the following essay to learn Robert Freer’s opinion on the challenges we face as our social structure is under continuous attacks.

By Robert E. Freer, Jr., President of The Free Enterprise Foundation

Let’s review. Earlier this year I told you, “For every one in a million student in China, there are 1300 just like him. In India there are 1100. The 25 percent brightest students in China exceed the total population of North America. (That’s 28 percent for India.) They have more honors students than we have students.” This was just a small part of my article titled “Shift Happens” that illustrate the vast changes going on in our world and the competitive pressures it was bringing to bear on our own students in today’s single world market. When I think about the changes in the world around us, I can remember the wonder of the 1950s when as a schoolboy, I was told that man had advanced more in the previous 50 years than in all of recorded history to that point. Wow what an age! What a time to be alive I thought.

While I have done no confirmatory research, if someone told me that the succeeding 50 years resulted in that same statement being true in 2000, I would believe them and chief among these developments is the digital revolution which allows the collection, storage, manipulation and sharing of all man’s applied knowledge in space hardly larger than a modest sized paperback book. All the while the social structures which have sustained us for millennia are under assault. Ah, there is the rub! As a species we have not changed. Our needs for love and validation of our individual importance as human beings continues but without the stability of our time proven social structures.

The structures are there, but under severe assault. The unsupervised, intense personal relationship experimentation at a young age that is the norm in today’s world, the neglect of education to ground our children in our history and culture, the lack of agreement by society on methods to insure that too much is not lived too fast are absent and we are the worse for it.

Those who follow us are absorbing all the disjointed impressions that a digital world can provide without a sustaining structure to contemplate and absorb in a life sustaining way all that science provides. We are not providing any semblance of education in life. Knowledge unleavened with a well developed respect for others and the self respect that comes from sacrifice and hard work to achieve and preserve that which has been won by the hard work of those who came before is unsatisfying at best.

This is true on a worldwide scale and when combined with the destructive power in today’s world of even one undereducated boy soldier taught only to hate, is it any wonder that the world, despite science’s promise, continues to be poised a few minutes before midnight on doomsday’s clock of utter destruction.

Those in our society who contend we are neglecting education are right! But education in what? We need the sciences, but a society that does not know where it came from has little chance of knowing why or where it is headed. Education of all Americans requires a firm grounding in our history. Wherever the young student comes from, and whether a first generation or fifteenth generation American, the nobility and sacrifice of those who came before must be ingrained. Sure they, like us were fallible but each generation has taken the torch of liberty and equality and advanced our understanding of what that requires. While still working on both, we lead the world in our devotion to their pursuit and are making real inroads on a sense of what true fraternity means.

I have titled this piece “World in Chrysalis,” because in the midst of all the change around us there is a sense of the unknown about the world of tomorrow. It is wrapped in a cocoon of dark shadows. What will it be? Will it sink into medieval darkness and despotism? Will world peace and prosperity be confounded by narco-terrorism? Will it sink into protective continental islands of protectionism? Will China succeed in bringing its nation intact into modern times while remaining at peace with its neighbors? Will we come to peace with our turbulent history?

The world sorely needs steady leadership, and we are the only nation to have the strength to provide it. There is a vocal element within that would have us turn our back on our responsibility and withdraw into ourselves. That we cannot do. Any effort to withdraw would only compound our problems.

The generation coming of age not only has the unfinished agenda of reforming the entitlements on our books, controlling our borders and assimilating our immigrants but also confronting a world at loose ends, where we are being savagely attacked by a low budget, high return open platform style of warfare that is difficult for any nation to control.

John Robb, in his book, Brave New War, (John Wiley & Sons, 2007) convincingly sets forth a view of the 21st century’s most troubling battleground. Our goal must be to stop those who conduct the war of sudden, rapid and chaotic events that totally cripple a segment of society and which can be launched at low cost and little planning. The threat of this style of warfare to increasingly complex global systems cannot be exaggerated, and modern democratic government is hard pressed to effectively control it. The very success of our internationally integrated systems is the underbelly of weakness these terrorists attack.

Mr. Robb’s book describes it as “… fighting a thousand tiny armies.” In some cases they are cohesive enough to form what he calls “proto states” such as Hamas and al-Qaeda but always utilizing a sparse operational network loosely connected to its administrative network and whose goal is a political structure incompatible with the connectedness it attacks. There is no compromise possible for these “holy” warriors.

I encourage my readers to find and read Mr. Robb’s book for a sobering view of our enemy and the price we must be willing to pay to maintain our civilization much as it is. My conclusion is that though I continue to have confidence in this generation, I believe much is cloaked in unanswered questions regarding the world they are inheriting and the challenges they will face and the world that will emerge in the coming decades. Much depends on a steady exercise of our concentrated willpower to have it come out alright. Only the future holds the answer to that question.

Copyright © 2007 by Robert E. Freer, Jr. All rights reserved

About the author: Robert E. Freer, Jr. is President of The Free Enterprise Foundation. He is a Visiting Professor, at The Citadel and elected in 2005 to be their first John S. Grinalds Leader in Residence. A regular contributor to the Mercury, He can be reached by E-mail at The Citadel . Copies of his earlier columns can be found The Free Enterprise Foundation.

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