Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the 21st Century. - book reviews

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 1993 by Gerald F. Kreyche

By Zbigniew Brzezinski / Charles Scribner's Son's, 1993, pp. 240, $21.00

The National Security Advisor to the Carter Administration, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has given readers an eye-opening look at the problems of the geopolitical future. He begins by analyzing the immediate past and uncertain present. With the demise of the Soviet Union, leaving the U.S. as the only superpower, he suggests the nature of America's increased, but changing, responsibilities.

His contention is that the 20th century is pockmarked by the killing of nearly 170,000,000 through wars and pogroms against innocents. Since many of those slain were intelligentsia, there now is a leadership vacuum. The century also has witnessed the gargantuan struggle between totalitarianism and democracy and presently faces the emergence of Third World countries that are seeking to better themselves.

Brzezinski traces the roots of political consciousness to the French Revolution, which gave birth to nationalism, idealism, and rationalism. Coupled with widespread literacy, technological effects extending the Industrial Revolution, and the increasing urbanization of society, these have proved decisive for shaping the present world.

Throughout, he contrasts ideologies shared by communism (the Soviet Union and China) and fascism (Germany, Spain, and Italy) with the democracies of the West. The former, he terms "coercive utopias"; the latter, "permissive cornucopias." Communists and fascists replaced God and fundamental religious values with their own doctrines and leaders such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini. Ironically, using the Marxist argument to rebut its own charges, all contained within themselves the seeds of their own destruction.

Marxism, Brzezinski writes, had a more universal appeal to the elite, for it had a rationalistic base and sought its goals on moral grounds to improve society in general. Nonetheless, it proved to be an abject failure, neither living up to its theoretical goals nor bettering human material conditions. It produced only an unworkable bureaucracy.

Yet, permissive cornucopias--i.e., Western democracies--are not without sin and must change radically if they wish to lead the world. They are perceived by the Third World as morally decadent, espousing the philosophy that greed is good and being burdened by problems of violence, crime, freedom that approaches license, ethnic fighting, family breakup, demands for rights that ignore correspondent duties, and endemic xenophobia. If Freud's observation that the mark of maturity is the postponement of pleasure, then the democracies have yet to grow up, for immediate gratification is the hallmark of the current age.

As the planet enters a truly post-modern world, there can be no guarantee that America will continue to be its leader. That will be possible only if the U.S. cleans its own house. This involves addressing the problem of the national debt; correcting shortcomings in health care, education, and civil rights; and curbing the insatiable demand for litigation.

Zbigniew Brzezinski has given readers a knowledgeable and provocative book that could serve as the basis for reducing global conflict.