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                           Imprimis, On Line
                            September, 1994
        
        IMPRIMIS (im-pri-mis), taking its name from the Latin
        term, "in the first place," is the publication of
        Hillsdale College. Executive Editor, Ronald L.
        Trowbridge; Managing Editor, Lissa Roche; Assistant,
        Patricia A. DuBois. Illustrations by Tom Curtis. The
        opinions expressed in IMPRIMIS may be, but are not
        necessarily, the views of Hillsdale College and its
        External Programs division. Copyright 1994. Permission
        to reprint in whole or part is hereby granted, provided
        a version of the following credit line is used:
        "Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the monthly
        journal of Hillsdale College." Subscription free upon
        request. ISSN 0277-8432. Circulation 545,000 worldwide,
        established 1972. IMPRIMIS trademark registered in U.S.
        Patent and Trade Office #1563325.
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
                   "A New Century and a New Optimism"
                           by Robert Bartley
                      Editor, Wall Street Journal
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
                            Volume 23, No. 9
              Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
                             September 1994
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
        Preview: In his commencement address to Hillsdale
        College's Class of 1994, Wall Street Journal Editor
        Robert Bartley reflects on the world the graduates are
        now entering.
        
             Though he admits that there are plenty of current
        causes for pessimism in foreign as well as domestic
        affairs, Bartley argues that they will not last if
        Americans return to the course set in the late 1980s.
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
        
        Historically, college has been considered a cloister, a
        place of personal and intellectual growth apart from
        the day-to-day cares of the world. Today, however, the
        typical college has become a crucible, a place for
        extracting the passions of politics, race, gender, and
        other contentious issues. Hillsdale College has
        struggled very hard to preserve the older tradition, to
        avoid the inducement of easy fads or the imposition of
        political correctness. I hope and expect that the place
        you graduates now leave will have given you a sturdy
        intellectual and moral compass.
        
        
                         The Miracle Year: 1989
        
        For in the times you now enter, you are sure to need
        it. A sense of history, or at least my sense of it,
        suggests we have turned a page and are already in the
        early years of a new era. We can only try to peer
        through the mists to discern the shape of the new
        millennium. For you are the first graduating class to
        be shaped by the 21st century--your century. In a
        historical sense, my century ended in 1989, when you
        were completing high school.
        
             In international affairs, 1989 was a miracle year.
        It saw the final withdrawal of Soviet troops from
        Afghanistan, an unparalleled retreat by the Soviet
        empire. It saw the remarkable spectacle of the
        Tiananmen Square revolt, with television cameras
        showing the world a brave dissident facing down Chinese
        tanks. It saw totalitarian regimes fall like dominos in
        Eastern Europe. Those of us whose lives were shaped by
        the Cold War never really expected to see the fall of
        the Berlin Wall and could recognize this symbol
        immediately as the end of an era.
        
             For it was more than the end of the Cold War; it
        was the end of the 20th century. This was a century
        that had also started late--in 1914--and its brevity
        was, as centuries go, its chief virtue. From the
        outbreak of World War I in Sarajevo to the breaching of
        the Iron Curtain in Berlin, mankind was caught in the
        grip of global confrontation: two world wars, the Great
        Depression, the Cold War, with the holocaust and self-
        inflicted genocide of Cambodia and numerous bloody
        regional conflicts thrown in, too.
        
             The violent epoch of the 20th century was
        something more than an accident of history. I would
        say, indeed, that it was a struggle over nothing less
        than the nature of man. What was at issue was whether
        man could be "shaped" by some omnipotent political
        system, or whether he possessed an indelible spirit
        that in the end would prevail over his would-be
        slavemasters.
        
             In this struggle, modern technology helped tip the
        balance in favor of the latter view. Although author
        George Orwell feared that technology would ensure that
        tyrants would prevail by 1984, in 1989, we learned
        technology was liberating. Totalitarian powers could
        not keep up with or stop the computer, the fax machine,
        or television. They were undone by the power of instant
        communication.
        
             The history I have recounted may already seem
        ancient to you, the experience I describe foreign. But
        it serves to make the point that you entered college at
        a moment of historic optimism. A bloody and even
        bizarre era had closed, and those who experienced it
        looked forward to a more hopeful future. And here in
        America we enjoyed an economic boom of record peacetime
        duration, a time when the only worry was an excess of
        "greed," not a shortage of jobs. The ancient problem of
        economics, namely scarcity, seemed solved.
        
             Politically, too, matters seemed to be returning
        to something that might be described as normality.
        Ronald Reagan's opponents might belittle him, but he
        was a successful leader of the nation, and his record
        reflected substantial progress. By the end of his term,
        of course, he was troubled by the Iran-Contra scandal,
        but that seemed relatively minor compared with the
        double-digit inflation that defeated Jimmy Carter, or
        the Watergate investigation that toppled Richard Nixon,
        or the pardon issue that hurt Gerald Ford, or, for that
        matter, Lyndon Johnson's wartime abdication from a
        second term, or the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
        Ronald Reagan was not only the first two-term president
        since Dwight Eisenhower, but he managed to pass the
        torch to his vice president.
        
             As you college students entered this cloister back
        in 1990, the stars seemed to be moving toward their
        proper place in the firmament. The economy was
        prospering, freedom and democracy were expanding
        throughout the world, and even domestic politics,
        despite the usual differences and disputes, seemed
        reasonably orderly. Shortly after you entered college,
        the speedy U.S. victory in the Gulf War was the climax:
        American arms triumphed in pursuit of clear virtue. In
        public opinion polls, the American president enjoyed
        popularity ratings approaching 90 percent. All that
        remained was to march into the benign world of the 21st
        century.
        
        
             The Problems of the 1990s: Can They Be Solved?
        
        But then the world changed, or at least the climate of
        national opinion became dramatically different. Even as
        the erstwhile optimism reached its height, the economy
        was dipping into recession. Recovery has been notably
        grudging. Today, you graduates will find a better job
        market than existed last year or the year before, but,
        despite the recent acceleration in the economy,
        employers are nervous about the future and hesitant
        about hiring.
        
             Not only are your prospects uncertain, but worse,
        some of your parents have lost the job security they
        had once assumed. (Since by historical accident medical
        insurance has been linked with employment, this new
        insecurity is the largest single source of the
        perception of a health care crisis in the midst of the
        miracles of American medicine.)
        
             And suddenly there is a new focus on our social
        problems. In part, this is because in Los Angeles we
        saw the first large-scale urban riots in more than a
        decade. But it is also because we increasingly regard
        ourselves as a crime-ridden society. We are suddenly
        aware of soaring rates of illegitimate births. This is
        no longer only a problem of urban ghettos. As
        television commentator Tony Brown says, the black
        community is on the outskirts of society, so whatever
        wind is blowing merely hits there first. And social
        scientist Charles Murray has sounded the alarm on the
        development of a new underclass among the white poor.
        
             In politics, the Gulf victory turned to ashes.
        President Bush was defeated after a lackluster
        campaign. His successor is now waist deep in the "big
        muddy" of the worst and most widespread political
        scandal since Watergate. The Senate majority leader has
        announced his retirement, like many of his colleagues.
        The most powerful member of the House of
        Representatives, the chairman of the Ways and Means
        Committee, faces possible indictment. Our whole
        political class is under intense suspicion.
        
             In foreign affairs, American arms were quickly
        bogged down in Somalia. The world still seems helpless
        to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. Even in our own
        backyard, we agonize over the dilemma of Haiti. Many
        world leaders from the Gulf War coalition like Turkish
        Prime Minister Turgut Ozal are gone, but Saddam Hussein
        remains. North Korea, one of the world's great
        backwaters, bids to become a nuclear power. And not
        only are the Tiananmen Square rebels still suppressed,
        but China is proclaiming itself as an economic miracle
        and political/social model for the new century.
        
             What has happened in such a short space of time,
        in the few years you have spent here at Hillsdale? What
        does it say about the American spirit and this
        society's ability to meet the challenges it faces? What
        does it mean about the new century we are now entering?
        
             Well, the good news is that many of our present
        disappointments are the result of specific and
        therefore correctable mistakes. The world would have
        been a better place if George Bush had finished the
        matter in Iraq, ousting Saddam Hussein and installing a
        new government. While we did urge this in the Wall
        Street Journal during the war, we were not farsighted
        enough to see the big mistake in Bosnia. The U.S.
        agreed to an arms embargo that left the Bosnians unable
        to defend themselves against the former Yugoslav army;
        the solution was not to send American troops but to
        create a regional balance of power. The mistake in
        Somalia was less the original intervention, which did
        help stop a famine, than putting American troops in a
        position relying on military support from the United
        Nations--a mistake President Clinton has seemed to
        acknowledge.
        
             The economy stumbled into recession because, under
        the indictment of "greed," Washington gradually
        abandoned a successful economic formula. In the 1980s
        under Ronald Reagan, the government cut taxes; since
        1990 it has been raising them. An aggressive monetary
        policy created some growth in 1993, but financial
        markets already fear that the price may be returning
        inflation. And if employers feel they are going to be
        saddled with health care mandates for every job they
        create, they are likely to create fewer jobs.
        
             Bill Clinton has done much to create his own
        troubles, not least by joining the popular chorus
        against "greed," and though the Democratic Party won
        the election it is in disarray.
        
        
                 The Role of Technology and Competition
        
        The change in the national mood can be thus explained,
        yet, there must be something more to the explanation.
        There will always be mistakes, and those I have
        recounted are not catastrophic ones. If the heady
        optimism of 1989 cannot withstand these blows, it never
        was very sturdy. In part, of course, it was too good to
        be true and was bound to be a passing moment. Optimism
        is not the natural state of mankind. In retrospect, the
        years immediately after World War II look like a golden
        era, with the Marshall Plan, the containment policy, an
        unparalleled generation of world economic growth. But
        to those who lived them, those years, too, were filled
        with strife and doubt. Our recent pessimism is the flip
        side of an exaggerated optimism.
        
             That said, though, I suspect the new pessimism
        does indeed tell us something about the coming century.
        While you have been cloistered here in Hillsdale, I
        think society has been starting to realize that for all
        its promise the new era will not be a very forgiving
        one. It will be dominated, and it already is, by
        instant communications and global interdependence.
        
             Contrary to Orwell's fears, this technology
        liberates us from totalitarians. But it is also likely
        to make democratic governments less stable, if only by
        broadcasting every leader's mistakes and foibles. Not
        surprisingly, we have recently seen established
        political structures toppling not only in the former
        Soviet Union, but in Italy, Japan, and France.
        
             Economically, the same forces throw every company
        and every worker into worldwide competition. There is
        less room for traditional leeway--for example, for the
        loyal middle manager whose old job is now done by a
        computer. The new world economy means especially acute
        competition for the unskilled and uneducated.
        
             And if the march of communications and technology
        militates against confrontation with a totalitarian
        superpower, it provides plenty of opportunity for
        national pirates. With international communications and
        internal chaos in Eurasia, indeed, we may actually see
        the global criminal conspiracies of James Bond novels.
        
             In short, the new century, not unlike all other
        centuries, will provide plenty of reasons for pessimism
        if you start to look for them. But ultimately pessimism
        is a snare and a delusion. Yes, there will be new
        problems to confront, but there will also be new
        opportunities to seize; in fact, the new century will
        be resplendent with opportunity.
        
             Haiti or Serbia or even China does not represent
        the menace of a new Stalin or Hitler. Despite the
        recurrent follies of our politicians, our political
        institutions have survived longer than any others and
        remain the models most likely to be followed in the
        next century.
        
             We are still the richest society in the history of
        mankind, with our health and our environment improving
        rather than deteriorating. Over the next decades more
        and more of the world will join us. While competition
        will be a short-term burden, it will also be a long-
        term blessing. As the 18th century free market
        economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith promised, it
        will create new jobs, products, and wealth, and not
        just for the "haves" but for the "have-nots" at every
        level of society.
        
             This economic advance, of course, will not
        necessarily buy happiness. For that we will need a
        spiritual rebirth, and there are many signs that this
        is at hand.
        
        
                    Choosing Optimism over Pessimism
        
        In the new century, we can, and should, choose optimism
        over pessimism. The danger of pessimism is that it is
        likely to be self-fulfilling. And it is particularly
        debilitating in what is sure to be an age of constant
        change. The forces of technology will be constantly
        tearing down the old understandings, the old borders,
        the old ways of doing things. We will be plunged into
        paralyzing confusion unless we seize new opportunities
        and embrace the optimistic view that holds that
        problems can be solved, that progress can be made.
        
             In this tumult of change, one of the hardest
        things to remember is that some things do endure:
        Reason remains a constant force; civilization is
        cumulative, not rebuilt overnight; work and merit
        deserve rewards; progress relies on honesty and virtue.
        If you, the Class of 1994, can remember this as you
        leave your cloister to enter the world, you will
        discover that the new century is cause for optimism.
        
        
             ---------------------------------------------
        
        Mr. Bartley joined the Wall Street Journal in 1962 and
        assumed direction of the editorial page ten years
        later. In 1983, he was named a vice president and was
        appointed to the Dow Jones management committee.
        
             He writes many of the newspaper's editorials, and
        he has introduced new features that have helped make
        the Journal America's largest daily newspaper with a
        readership of 1.8 million.
        
             In 1980, Mr. Bartley won the highest award in
        journalism: the Pulitzer Prize. He has also recently
        written a best-selling book, The Seven Fat Years: And
        How to Do It Again.
                                  ###
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