As of late, it seems that postmodernism -- with its acknowledged sense of self-awareness, self-reference and ennui -- has experienced a spurt of popularity. Postmodernism encourages us to comfortably poke fun at the past -- predicted alien encounters on Jupiter and the belief in female "hysteria" -- a past which never foresaw the discoveries of the present.
It's common to laugh at the monocled enthusiasts of American history -- the miracle health juggernauts of the 1920s and 1930s, like John Kellogg and Sylvester Graham -- whose practices seem even to mock themselves, with bullheaded hypotheses about the best forms of human nutrition. And we can tease Stalinists lightheartedly about the Communist dream as a front for tyranny. The Cold War mindset in general feels wholly foreign to us today, giving '80s action movies their dated, alien (and overly-coiffed) feel.
However, despite our technological and political advancements, we still suffer the same pitfalls of short-sightedness as the historical fools we deride. Take, for example, the Atkins and South Beach Diets. While these may have seemed like unpromising fads originally, they swept the nation with fervor and alleged scientific backing. And now, to add to our collective shame, it has been discovered that multivitamins are most likely completely ineffective. Taking multivitamins, of all things, discovered to be a fool's errand! All of these practices, so recently the keywords for the cutting edge of nutrition science, will sound foolish and dated soon enough, and they will enter our history to the sheepishness of millions of people. Society can be described as a long period of Man smacking himself on the forehead after glutting himself on the false promise of disproven ideologies.
This serves as a jumping-off point for a much more general analogy to the American mindset: what has happened with multivitamins and carb-free diets seems to have happened with American supremacy as well.
The superiority of American ideology has suffered a devastating blow from the economic crisis. Now it's time for a revolutionary era of self-awareness; a mainstream questioning of our nation's character -- and, more noticeably, another of many liberal and progressive phases of our history. Credit default swaps are the Atkins Diet of the world economy; everyone brought home the bacon, but the dangers of such recklessness were ignored, because everyone was doing it (a decidedly unfunny comparison).
We must step back now, and embrace the very real possibility that the American voice has lost much of its influence in the world, as John Gray, a columnist for the British paper The Guardian, (happily?) purports: "The era of American global leadership is over ... The Iraq war and the credit bubble have fatally undermined America's economic primacy ... The control of events is no longer in American hands."
What we once believed to be inexorable -- the U.S. model of capitalism, police power and liberty -- has been degraded by failures in international intervention and fiscal leadership. We will look back and feel stupid. Many Democrats have for about eight years, so give them credit for their prescience.
And so we're left with the inevitable aftermath of failure, a time of regrouping and reevaluating how to approach the future. Will we rise to the occasion and prove that American failure, like scientific progress, is a contiguous series of mistakes and corrections but also improvements, guided by the invisible hand of morals, politics and culture? Will we finally do away with our cynical arrogance long enough to recognize our own flaws? Hopefully.
I try to look for a parable to our college lives, because this is an opinion column in a daily college paper. The adopted invincibility of adolescence strikes a chord, perhaps. But I shouldn't want to admonish us for a collective belief in our own invulnerability. That would be preemptive.
