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Passage 1
A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap if not properly handled, but it may become a driving force. When the United States entered a glowing period after World War II, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale. America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed.It was inevitable that this primacy should narrow as other countries grew richer. The retreat from predominance proved painful. By the mid-1980s, Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness. Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition. By 1987, there was only one American television maker left, Zenith. Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market. America’s machine-tool industry was on the ropes. For a while, it looked as though the making of semiconductors, which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty.
All of this caused a crisis of confidence. Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted. They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing, and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well. The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America’s industrial decline. Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.
How things have changed! In 1995, the United States could look back on five years of solid growth while Japan struggled. Few Americans attributed this solely to such obvious causes as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle. Self-doubt had yielded to blind pride. “American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet, has learned to be more quick-witted,” said Richard Cavanagh, executive dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity,” said Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute. William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believed that people would look back on this period as “a golden age of business management in the United States.”
Passage 2
Being a man has always been dangerous. The ratio of males to females is about 105 to 100, but this ratio drops to near balance at maturity, and among 70-year-olds, there are twice as many women as men. However, the great universal of male mortality is being changed. Now, babies survive almost as well as girls do. This means there will be an excess of boys in the crucial years when they are searching for a mate.More importantly, another chance for natural selection has been removed. Fifty years ago, the chance of a baby surviving depended on its weight. A kilogram too light or too heavy meant almost certain death. Today, much of the variation is due to genes, removing one more agent of evolution.
There is another way to commit evolutionary suicide: stay alive but have fewer children. Few people are as fertile as in the past. Exceptions exist in some religious communities, but very few women have 15 children. The number of births, like the age of death, has become average. Most of us have roughly the same number of offspring.
India shows what is happening. The country offers wealth for a few in the great cities and poverty for the remaining tribal peoples. The grand mediocrity of today, where everyone is the same in survival and number of offspring, means that natural selection has lost 80% of its power in upper-middle-class India compared to tribes.
For us, this means that evolution is over; the biological Utopia has arrived. Strangely, it has involved little physical change. No other species fills so many places in nature. But in the past 100,000 years, even our lives have been transformed, but our bodies have not. We did not evolve because machines and society did it for us.
Passage 3
When a new movement in art attains a certain fashion, it is advisable to find out what its advocates are aiming at, for however farfetched and unreasonable their principles may seem today, they may be regarded as normal in years to come. However, the case of Futurist poetry is rather difficult, for whatever Futurist poetry may be, even if it admits its theory may be right, it can hardly be classed as Literature.This is what the Futurist says: noise and violence and speed. Consequently, our feelings, thoughts, and emotions have undergone a corresponding change. This speeding up of life requires a new form of expression. We must pour out a large stream of essential words, unhampered by stops or qualifying adjectives, of finite verbs. Instead of describing sounds, we must make up words that imitate them; use many sizes of type and different colored inks on the same page, and shorten or lengthen words at will.
Certainly their descriptions of battles are confused. But it is a little upsetting to read in the explanatory notes that a certain line describes a fight between a Turkish and a Bulgarian officer on a bridge off which they both fall into the river, and then find that the line consists of the noise of their falling and the weights of the officers: “Pluff! Pluff! A hundred and eighty-five kilograms.”
This, though it fulfills the laws and requirements of Futurist poetry, can hardly be classed as Literature. All the same, no thinking man can refuse to accept their first proposition: that a great change in our emotional life calls for a change of expression. The whole question is really this: have we essentially changed?
Passage 4
Aimlessness has hardly been typical of postwar Japan, whose productivity and social harmony are the envy of the United States and Europe. But increasingly, the Japanese are seeing a decline of traditional work-moral values. Ten years ago, young people were hardworking and saw their jobs as their primary reason for being, but now Japan has largely fulfilled its economic needs, and young people don’t know where they should go next.The coming of age of the postwar baby boom and the entry of women into the male-dominated job market have limited the opportunities of teenagers who are already questioning the heavy personal sacrifices involved in climbing Japan’s rigid social ladder to good schools and jobs. In a recent survey, only 24.5 percent of Japanese students were fully satisfied with school life, compared with 67.2 percent of students in the United States. Additionally, far more Japanese workers expressed dissatisfaction with their jobs than did their counterparts in the 10 other countries surveyed.
While often praised by foreigners for its emphasis on the basics, Japanese education tends to stress test taking and mechanical learning over creativity and self-expression. “Those things that do not show up in test scores—personality, ability, courage, or humanity—are completely ignored,” said Toshiki Kaifu, chairman of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party’s education committee. Frustration against this kind of thing leads kids to drop out and run wild. Last year, Japan experienced 2,125 incidents of school violence, including 929 assaults on teachers. Amid the outcry, many conservative leaders are seeking a return to the prewar emphasis on moral education. Last year, Mitsuo Setoyama, then education minister, raised eyebrows when he argued that liberal reforms introduced by the American occupation authorities after World War II had weakened the “Japanese morality of respect for parents.”
But that may have more to do with Japanese life-styles. “In Japan,” said educator Yoko Muro, “it’s never a question of whether you enjoy your job and your life, but only how much you can endure.” With economic growth has come centralization; 76 percent of Japan’s 119 million citizens live in cities where community and the extended family have been abandoned in favor of isolated two-generation households. Urban Japanese have long endured lengthy commutes and crowded living conditions, but as old group and family values weaken, the discomfort is beginning to tell. In the past decade, the Japanese divorce rate, while still well below that of the United States, has increased by more than 50 percent, and suicides have increased by nearly one-quarter.
Passage 5
If ambition is to be well regarded, the rewards of ambition—health, distinction, control over one’s destiny—must be deemed worthy of the sacrifices made on its behalf. If the tradition of ambition is to have vitality, it must be widely shared, and it especially must be highly regarded by people who are themselves admired, the educated not least among them. However, it is the educated who have claimed to have given up on ambition as an ideal. What is odd is that they have perhaps most benefited from ambition—if not always their own, then that of their parents and grandparents.There is a heavy note of hypocrisy in this, a case of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, with the educated themselves riding on them.
Certainly people do not seem less interested in success and its signs now than formerly. Summer homes, European travel, BMWs. The locations, place names, and name brands may change, but such items do not seem less in demand today than a decade or two years ago. What has happened is that people cannot confess to their dreams as easily and openly as once they could, lest they be thought pushy, acquisitive, and vulgar. Instead, we are treated to hypocritical spectacles, which now more than ever seem in ample supply: the critic of American materialism with a Southampton summer home; the publisher of radical books who takes his meals in three-star restaurants; the journalist advocating participatory democracy in all phases of life, whose own children are enrolled in private schools.
For such people and many more perhaps not so exceptional, the proper formulation is, “Succeed at all costs but avoid appearing ambitious.”
The attacks on ambition are many and come from various angles; its public defenders are few and unimpressive, where they are not extremely unattractive. As a result, the support for ambition as a healthy impulse, a quality to be admired and fixed in the mind of the young, is probably lower than it has ever been in the United States. This does not mean that ambition is at an end, that people no longer feel its stirrings and promptings, but only that, no longer openly honored, it is less openly underground, or made sly. Such, then, is the way things stand: on the left, angry critics; on the right, stupid supporters; and in the middle, as usual, the majority of earnest people trying to get on in life.
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