In his classic novel 'The Pioneers', James Fenimore Cooper bas his hero, a land developer, take his cousin on a tour of the city he is building. He describes the broad streets, rows of houses, a teeming metropolis. But his cousin looks around bewildereD.All she sees is a stubby forest. 'Where are the beauties and improvements which you were to show me?' she asks. He' s astonished she can' t see them. 'Where! Why everywhere,' he replies. For though they are not yet built on earth, he has built them in his mind, and they are as concrete to him as if they were already constructed and finisheD.Cooper was illustrating a distinctly American trait, future-mindedness: the ability to see the present from the vantage point of the future; the freedom to feel unencumbered by the past and more emotionally attached to things to comE.'America is therefore the land of the future,' the German philosopher Hegel wrotE.'The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European,' Albert Einstein concurreD.'Life for him is always becoming, never being.'In 2012, America will still be the place where the future happens first, for that is the nation's oldest tradition. The early Puritans lived in almost Stone Age conditions, but they were inspired by visions of future glories, God' s kingdom on earth. The early pioneers would sometimes travel past perfectly good farmland, because they were convinced that even more amazing land could be found over the next ridgE.The Founding Fathers took 13 scraggly Colonies and believed they were creating a new nation on earth. The railroad speculators envisioned magnificent fortunes built on bands of iron. It's now fashionable to ridicule the visions of dot-com entrepreneurs of the 1990s, but they had inherited the urge to leap for the horizon. 'The Future is endowed with such a life, that it lives to us even in anticipation,' Herman Melville wrotE.'The Future is the Bible of the FreE.'This future-mindedness explains many modem features of American lifE.It explains workaholism: the average American works 350 hours a year more than the average European. Americans move more, in search of that brighter tomorrow, than people in other lands. They also, sadly, divorce more, for the same reason. Americans adopt new technologies such as online shopping and credit cards much more quickly than people in other countries. Forty-five percent of world Internet use takes place in the United States. Even today, after the bursting of the stock-market bubble, American venture-capital firms-which are in the business of betting on the future - dwarf the firm,s from all other nations.Future-mindedness contributes to the disorder in American life, the obliviousness to history, the high rates of family breakdown, the frenzied waste of natural resources. It also leads to incredible innovations. According to the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, 75 percent of the Nobel laureates in economics and the sciences over recent decades have lived or worked in the United States. The country remains a magnet for the future-minded from other nations. One in 12 Americans has enjoyed the thrill and challenge of starting his own business. A study published in the Journal of International Business Studies in 2000 showed that innovative people are spread pretty evenly throughout the globe, but Americans are most comfortable with risk. Entrepreneurs in the US are more likely to believe that they possess the ability to shape their own future than people in, say, Britain, Australia or SingaporE.If the 1990s were a great decade of future-mindedness, we are now in the midst of a season of experiencE.It seems cooler to be skeptical, to pooh-pooh all those IPO suckers who lost their money betting on the telecom futurE.But the world is not becoming more French. By 2012, this period of chastisement will likely have run its course, and future-mindedness will be bacA.futureB.realisticC.historicalD.present
A.B.'
C.'
D.
E.
F.future
B.realistic
C.historical