What's in Store for Us?

摘要

Are we capable of averting disasters now on the horizon? Robert Heilbroner feared that we were not. He expected that we would repeat the past and put our current desires and comforts ahead of our concern for the future - until we hit a wall. He wrote An Inquiry into the Human Prospect in the 1970s and a revision in the 1990s. In both decades he had reason for alarm. Kurt Vonnegut was more than alarmed. He wrote, "I know now that there is not a chance in hell for America's becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power." These words appear in A Man Without a Country, published in 2005, when Americans were deluded into thinking they were lords of Iraq and Afghanistan. Vonnegut made it clear that he didn't leave the country, the country left him.