Young people do not need to carry history as part of their identities. They can Google the lessons of history whenever they need them.
I care very deeply about our nation's ability to maintain leadership in a world when Western civilization will no longer be as dominant as it has been. This, I tell myself, is why I continue jostling back and forth in an online forum with a group of older, white Ivy League conservatives.
I should also admit that it is fun watching them courting the unlikely group of Tea Party heroes who have taken control of the Republican Party's defense against otherness, now when, to their conscious or subconscious Ivy League minds, otherness is President of the country.
The rise of otherness creates a libidinal threat, a lost of status, a sensation of falling. I teased in Politics as a Video Game. I enjoyed joking that their libidinal defense was now in the hands of male avatars in a video game—Cowboy Rick Perry, Big Daddy Herman Cain, and Bomb Thrower Newt Gingrich. I would not have thought of it as a joke if I believed that any of these action heroes had a chance of becoming President.
As the last of the heroes was being swept off the battle field, I had to find another way to tease. So I accused them of trying to practice analogue thinking in a digital world. "Maybe Obama's not 'The Other.' In a digital world you guys may be 'The Other,' I said—knowing that this would make them feel even more anachronistic. I was suggesting that in the digital age Obama might not be a minority. They might be.
They took the bait. One of them asked: "What do you mean Obama's thinking is not analogue, it is digital?" I had them right where I enjoyed having them. I could take them all around Robin Hood's barn and arrive at a conclusion that expressed my concern that America not end up an angry minority in a world that, in my view, only America has the ingredients to lead.
People from different cultures do not experience the world as many people still do in Western culture, I said. The difference is not a difference in political, social or economic circumstance. The primary difference is in how people experience time, I wrote, knowing that this would jolt.
Then I proceeded slowly: For all of the advantages that the pervasiveness of writing brought to the Western mind that pervasiveness trapped Middle Eastern and Western European civilizations (which means to some extent the Americas and Australia) in linear time, trapped in their own historical analogues.
Far Eastern and African civilizations did not benefit from all-pervading written traditions. The written traditions of Eastern civilizations tended more towards recording eternal truths rather than historical, cultural or scientific analogues. African civilizations, which remained largely in the oral tradition, are freest of linear time. Now when these non-western people pick up the advantages that the Western World gained from the pervasiveness of writing, non-westerners are doubly blessed—freer, but enriched.
I am not angry at the Ivy League guys or my country, and so I added: America can be even more doubly blessed because it has not only supplied leadership in Western historical, economic and scientific analogue, it is also culturally part African, and Hispanic and Asian—freer than Europe of linear time.
Which other Western country has a leader with an African father and such a large population of people of African origin who, because of racial segregation over a long period, adapted African modes of thinking to life in the Western World?
Conservatives are most resistant to America's African-ness because they tend to operate from a historical analogue that is for the Tea Party blue grass, country 'n western, the American frontier; and for you Ivy League guys, the history that creates your identities comes from the Great Ideas of Western civilization.
Most Progressives, because they favor social, political, and economic evolution, more eagerly embrace an expanded sense of American identity, a wider range of analogues, but they are not digital. That is why Obama confuses them so much.
Most people outside the Western World, and young people inside the United States, are digital. For them reality does not exist as a continuous flow of time and space. Digital technologies have made it possible to call up information from different times and places instantly.
As digital thinkers Young people do not carry history as part of their identity as you Ivy League guys do, I said. The young Google the lessons of history only when they need them.
Because he is digital, President Obama is the best leader we could have for our transition to leadership in a future dominated by countries blessed with cultural advantages in the rapidly evolving dominance of digital thinking.
Remember the United States, China, Japan, India, and Brazil will soon be the five largest economies in the world. None of the other four are Western. We can remain among them only if we free ourselves from our own historical analogues and embrace our double blessing. That blessing is America's real exceptionalism.
George Davis is creator of the forthcoming series of world-sourced, interactive books, Barack Obama, America and the World.
