The crisis convulsing Washington this week, and the country for a much greater duration, is just one symptom of a society no longer capable of thinking beyond the next quarter. In a world of growing complexity and interconnectedness, our focus on the near-term may prove to be our downfall. Our political future, financial stability and environmental fitness are all vulnerable to the consequences of short-term thinking.
Plenty of others will write about the $700 billion bailout, the muddled congressional response, the failure of leadership at the White House and the unprecedented power contemplated for the Executive Branch during its darkest hour of incompetence. The crisis is not only unsurprising, but entirely predictable, going back to 1997 (House of Cards on a Bed of Sand, 9/27/08). The causes are many, including the obvious human failings of greed and raw hunger for power, but the genesis reaches deeper into our collective psyche. We are impatient with complexity, want instant gratification, refuse to acknowledge nuance, and demand simplicity in all we do.
The common denominator of all major problems we currently face can be traced back to this insistence on quick solutions. Our attention span has diminished to a vanishing point. The colossal failure on Wall Street is just one consequence of our limited foresight. Our narrow perspective also allows us to ignore climate change, disregard the loss of tropical forests and biological diversity, dismiss the impacts of our health care crisis, and discount the importance of biomedical research and the physical sciences. In each of those cases just listed, funding and support can only be justified with a view to the distant future. We have lost that vision.
Consequently, we are destroying 40 million acres of pristine forest every year, losing species at a rate 1000 times greater than natural background extinction, dumping 6 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, polluting our air and water, and draining a finite supply of oil without investing in replacement technologies. Citizens of the world have come to accept these growing threats to our own survival because we have become severely nearsighted. Looking beyond the immediate is the only way we can work toward solutions to these accelerating crises.
Our infrastructure crumbles in a heap of twisted steel and concrete because we do not invest in our future, only in the next fiscal quarter. Our educational system is collapsing on a scale similar to the meltdown on Wall Street, but receives much less attention for the same reason. Our students rate poorly compared to almost every other industrial country. We test below many so-called Third World nations at time when technology is driving economic growth. As with the environment and climate change, revitalizing our educational system is not a problem amendable to a short-term solution. The problem is compounded because the American public is becoming alarmingly illiterate in science, making public support for research and education increasingly problematic, in a vicious feedback loop. That matters. The Chinese celebrated their first spacewalk today, a technological tour de force, while the United States was bailing out failed banks and rescuing rich executives. We are in grave danger of losing the battle for superior technology, and that matters too. Asian countries are teaching their students math and science, not arguing whether Creationism should be taught in their schools. They are teaching biology free from religious ideology. That ideological contamination has caused the United States to fall behind Singapore, Australia, Israel, Sweden, and Finland in the vital area of stem cell research, another victim of scientific illiteracy, a casualty of short-term perspective.
We must break the shackles of immediacy and start thinking more wisely about our future. Listen carefully to Obama and McCain. The stark difference in their approach to long-term thinking becomes quickly evident. Obama calls for more, and wiser, support for science, renewable energies, education, and the environment, all the problems that demand a look toward a more distant horizon. We can afford nothing less.
Leadership is not simply a list of policy proposals. We look to our president for a vision of the future. We need a president to lead us where we must go, not necessarily where we want to go to satisfy our immediate urges. With a properly articulated vision, a president can move a country in the right direction in spite of the incredible inertia fighting any change. McCain represents that inertia, and a history we can ill afford to repeat. We are modifying the chemistry of our atmosphere, and destroying the resources that sustain us. The past is not our guide to the future. The call for change is not an empty slogan; it is an imperative of our survival.