A chorus of opinion is growing around the world that this is a much greater development than just a passing financial crisis in America; it is being viewed as a turning point in history with America starting to lose its post-World War II superpower dominance.
Not only is America stumbling its way through the most serious financial crisis since the mid 1930s but it is also facing stiff competition from China in the economic arena. Its lead in world-class education is also coming under threat.
And it is not just in America that ancient and prestigious universities are being re-assessed. Wrote Britain’s Guardian newspaper on October 2, 2001: “Prominent dons are beginning to think the unthinkable about Britain’s oldest academic institution [Oxford University]: it is in decline… The causes may differ…but the prognosis is the same: Oxford is in steady decline.”
Take a look at Harvard University, perhaps the most prestigious university in the world today. The Harvard University Business School has produced countless numbers of the stock brokers and investment managers prominent on Wall Street, America’s financial heartland.
As this column has argued in this series, the U.S. financial crisis has its origins in the moral breakdown of American society and with it, the fabric that kept the country strong and dominant.
In an interview with the BBC World Service radio programme “Business Daily” on Wednesday October 1, 2008, Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel Corporation, the world’s largest manufacturer of computer microchips, said: “If you go to a US university and you ask the graduates where do you wanna go to work…you hear them answering…’I’m gonna become an investment banker, I’m gonna work at Wall Street. I’m gonna manipulate money and with it work in the financial engineering world’…So there has been a lot of this attitude of easy come, easy go…And to a degree we are seeing this financial meltdown today is an indication of that…”
In a 2006 book on Harvard titled Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, a former Harvard professor Harry Lewis commented: “I have almost never heard discussions among professors about making students better people… “Harvard teaches students but does not make them wise.”
This attitude begins to shed further light on why all those unquestionably intelligent and competent Wall Street brokers, many of them graduates of Harvard and the other elite American universities, have so destroyed the U.S. financial system to the extent that it now threatens to cause a worldwide economic recession.
More than 30 years ago, the Soviet dissident and Nobel Prize laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in exile in America for four years, had seen the hollowness of the western education system and the emptiness of the materialistic western society.
Solzhenitsyn — who died earlier this year — was invited to deliver the commencement address at Harvard University on June 8, 1978. Although he had spent years writing about and exposing the evils of the brutal Soviet system in Siberia principally in his two-volume work, the Gulag Archipelago, the moral decay and laxity in the West presented him with a new perspective on life.
At Harvard University, he compared the free, Capitalistic West and the oppressive Communist world of the Soviet Union and the East Bloc. His sophisticated audience that day was not amused by what they heard:
“I could not recommend your [American] society in its present state as an ideal for the transformation of ours [Soviet Union]. Through intense suffering our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive…A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger. Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life’s complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper and more interesting characters than those produced by standardized Western well-being…”
Solzhenitsyn, in that 1978 address, anticipated how America’s moral laxity and playful attitude would render it uncompetitive in the future.
After a fact-finding tour of the Far East during and after the recent Beijing Olympics, a Canadian citizen wrote these observations in the Canadian newspaper, the Londoner of September 24: “What we are dealing with today in Asia are modern, wealthy and hard-working cities and countries that are emerging as world leaders. Attitudes in London and Canada are going to have to change.”
