Open Society by George Soros
George Soros has a new book out about the current global financial meltdown. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m finding that his older book Open Society, published in 2000, contains some timely warnings about what we’re going through. Soros thought then that the world was headed for a global crisis, and he believed that it would be triggered not by national policies or the actions of particular corporations but by the financial system itself. He thought at first that the Asian currency crisis of 1997-1999 would mark the crash. Though he freely admits he was wrong about that, his belief that factors such as inflated housing prices, reckless lending, and poorly regulated new securities would lead to catastrophe now looks prescient.
Open Society, however, is less about Soros’ financial wizardry than it is about his life as a philanthropist. The book is intended to be his central work, and it is a disarming combination of enormous ambition and surprising humility. Soros believes his Open Society Institute can accomplish what national governments, the World Bank, and the UN cannot in terms of advancing democracy, human rights, and the free flow of ideas. Yet he is far from believing that he himself has all the answers. As he describes it, each of the foundations in his international network has wide latitude to set its own priorities. The central headquarters appears to exist more to coordinate than to direct them.
Soros is so far from worshiping certainty that he has turned fallibility itself into a philosophical principle. Unlike the truths of science, he argues, the truths of human life are subject to what he calls reflexivity. Just as a physicist cannot determine the position of an electron without changing that position, each of us changes society through our actions and beliefs, and in an open society we are constantly reassessing and renegotiating the values we live by.
A closed society lives by a ruling ideology that stifles dissent, whether that ideology is Communism or (a greater threat today) what Soros calls market fundamentalism, the belief that the bottom line is or should the measure of all that is good. An open society makes it possible for us to disagree and to make the mistakes we need to be creative and to find solutions to the problems that face us.
