The early part of the twenty-first century gave
the Western world one skull-cracking slap after another. The
downing of New York's World Trade Center; the battle with
militant Islam's holy warrior; the crash and scandal of major
corporations like Enron, Worldcom, and Arthur Andersen; and the
growth of China to superpower status—these were wakeup
punches. They handed us what may be our greatest opportunity and
our greatest responsibility since the Great Depression and the
Nazis threatened to topple the Western way of life in the
1930s.
Osama bin Laden's threats against America and against the
“false religion” of freedom of speech, secularism,
spiritual eclecticism, human rights, women's rights, and gay
rights have the potential to nuke us into a new dark age. As you
read this page, over ten thousand Wahhabi madrassas,
“suicide bomber factories,” salted on every one of
this planet's continents, are teaching children to make holy war
against you and me. The West, these kids are told, has nothing
left to give the world but immorality and decay. The teachers in
these madrassas peddle passion
brilliantly. They feed
the hunger for meaning with the junk food of
emotion—violence and righteous fury. But could the
madrassa teachers be right? Do we in the Western system
have nothing worth struggling for? Do we have nothing that's
worthy of idealism and belief?
Our civilization is under attack. But many of us don't want
to defend it. Why? There's a void in our sense of meaning. We've
been told that “the Western system” is one in which
the rich stoke artificial needs to suck money, blood, and spirit
from the rest of us. We've been told that the barons of industry
work overtime to turn us from sensitive humans into
consumers—mindless buyers listlessly watching TV while
growing obese on the artificial flavors, chemical preservatives,
and cheap sugars of junk food. And some of that is true.
But the problem does not lie in the turbines of the Western
way of life—it does not lie in industrialism, capitalism,
pluralism, free speech, and democracy. The problem lies in the
lens through which we see. Capitalism works. It works for
reasons that don't appear in the analyses of Marx or in the
statistics of economists. It works clumsily, awkwardly,
sometimes brilliantly, and sometimes savagely. So we need to dig
down to find out why.
We need to reveal the deeper meaning beneath what we've been
told is crass materialism. We need to see how profoundly our
obsessive making and exchanging of goods and services has
upgraded the nature of our species.
The Western system is not at all what we've been taught to
believe. This is not a mindless consumer culture destroying the
planet in an orgy of greed. It is the most creative and
potentially idealistic bio-engine this planet has ever seen. But
if we fail to open our eyes and spot this reality fast,
everything we believe in may easily disappear.
We need to stare a blunt fact in the face: Many of today's
corporations are creatively and morally asleep. But you and I
can wake them in a most ironic way—through a
strange-but-vital upgrade in the richness of our lives. We can
re-perceive the tale of capitalism's rise. We can lay out a new
and far more insight-saturated story of our origins—a
factual creation myth. And we can use this genesis story, this
re-perceived tale of our history, as a key to the quandaries of
work and daily living. We can use it as a cornerstone of a new
view of our future in a world of instant change.
We can reveal a central secret of the Western
system—we're not mere digits in a numbers game; we're
feeling people woven in emotional exchange.
RAISING THE DOWNTRODDEN
Here's a basic fact of the Western way of life: Hard as
we may find it to conceive, capitalism offers more things to
believe in than any system that has come before. Nearly every
faith, from Christianity and Buddhism to Islam and Marxism,
promises to raise the poor and the oppressed. But only
capitalism delivers what these ideologies and religions profess,
century after century. Capitalism lifts the poor and helps them
live their dreams. The proof is in the mega-perks we tend to
take for granted. Here are some examples.
In the early 1700s, cotton clothes were a luxury import that
only the super-rich could afford. The masses worked from day to
day in stiff fabrics that housed insects and that scratched and
tortured the skin. Changing into new clothes every few days or
laundering them regularly was impossible. There was little sense
in bathing if your shirt carried last month's stench. In 1785,
capitalism introduced the power loom and changed the very nature
of the shirt on man's back. By the twentieth century, capitalism
had made a T-shirt of cotton—the fabric of kings—the
norm for even the poorest sub-Saharan African.
In the nineteenth century, capitalism gave us another
universal: soap. Statistics show that Westerners grew
dramatically healthier and added decades to their lives
beginning in roughly the 1840s, when the soap-and-cotton
revolution kicked in.
In the early 1800s, sending an urgent letter to a relative
on a distant coast took months or weeks. Then capitalism built
the telegraph system and made sending messages across continents
and seas a matter of hours. In the 1990s, a mesh of
multinational corporations took another leap. They built the
mobile phone system and made it second nature to ring Taipei
from Tampa and Bangalore from Boston while you were walking down
the street.