Category Archives: Culture

Hitchens on mortality

Christopher Hitchens interviewed by Australia’s ABC TV (the full interview can be viewed on broadband here on Windows Media Player):

TONY JONES: I want to ask you what you think about Martin Amis’ idea that writers like you must actually believe in some form of life after death because not all of you, not all of the parts of you are going to die because the printed words you leave behind constitute a form of immortality. I mean, is he just being kind, or do you think that there’s a truth to that?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Littera scripta manet – “The written word will remain”. That’s true, but it won’t be that much comfort to me.

Of course I do write – I’ve always had the sense of writing, as it were, posthumously. I once wrote an introduction to a collection of my own essays. I stole the formulation from Nadine Gordimer who said you should try and write as if for post-mortem publication because it only then can screen out all those influences: public opinion, some reviewer you might want to be impressing, some publisher who might want to publish you, someone you’re afraid of offending. All these distractions, you can write purely and honestly and clearly and for its own sake. And the best way of doing that is to imagine that you won’t live to see it actually written, then you can be sure that you’re being objective and you’re being scrupulous.

I think that’s a wonderful reflection, but it doesn’t – it isn’t the same term as immortality at all.

TONY JONES: As you say in your memoirs, you’ve written for decades day in, day out – I think you said at least 1,000 words a day for many, many years – despatches, articles, lectures, books – in particular books. Doesn’t it give you some comfort that your thoughts, and indeed some version of you, is going to exist after your death, is imperishable?

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Well, if you want to know – because I try to avoid the blues when talking about all of this, but if you want to know one of the most sour reflections that I have when I think that I’m 61 now and I might not make 65 – I quite easily might not.

One of the bitter aspects of that is, well, I put in 60 years at the coalface, I worked very hard. In the last few years I’ve got a fair amount of recognition for it. In my opinion, actually, rather more than I deserve. Certainly more than I expected. And I could have looked forward to a few years of, shall we say, cruising speed, you know, just, as it were, relishing that, enjoying it.

Not ceasing to work, not resting on the laurels, but savouring it a bit and that – I was just getting ready for that, as a matter of fact. I was hit right at the top of my form, right in the middle of a successful book tour. I’m not going to get that and that does upset me. So that’s how I demarcate it from immortality.

Similarly, I’m not going to see my grandchildren – almost certainly not. One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That’s how the human species has done as well as it has.

The great Cuban writer Jose Marti said that a man – he happened to say it was a man – three duties: to write a book, to plant a tree and to have a son. I remember the year my first son was born was the year I published my first real full-length book, and I had a book party for it and for him – Alexander, my son – and I planted a tree, a weeping willow and felt pretty good for the age of, what?, I think 32 or something.

But, the thought of mortality, in other words of being outlived, is fine when it’s your children, your books or your trees, but it doesn’t reconcile you to an early death. No, it doesn’t.

The post-colonial era is slow coming

“It seems like the ragheads and the Pakis are worrying your dad, but your dad’s favorite food is curry and kebab,” sings Lowkey, summing up the multicultural dilemma facing quite a few white Englishmen.

Peyvand Khorsandi provides another multicultural vignette:

Golborne Road, on the outskirts of Notting Hill in west London, is home to two Portuguese cafés, Stella McCartney, and my favourite burger van, run by two Moroccan men. I’ve been a regular for almost 10 years – the van offers no ordinary fare. A ball of meat goes splat on the griddle as it’s evened into shape while onions sizzle.

Money and Arabic banter are exchanged – when the meat is crispy brown an egg is cracked open, stuffed alongside the patty into a heated bun with a sprinkle of chopped salad, fries and some warm, homemade, tomato sauce (fried prawns optional).

I am usually finishing off my second bowl of soup – they do a mean bean, lentil and pea – when the beaming parcel of beefy goodness is handed to me, smiling as a good burger should.

On Fridays Mohammed and Aziz repair to a mosque in the converted building opposite – customers find the van shut from around 12.30pm to 2pm. Caterers should hold these hours sacred but Mohammed and Aziz, as their prices testify, are not about money. The van’s closes for Ramadan.

The punters are largely Moroccan men but you do see Bohemian non-Moroccan women and men of all ages stopping off for a bite, too.

In the background the magnificent Trellick Tower — a hive of different people and cultures living next-door to, and on top of, each other — literally looks down on the rest of us.

If German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s declaration this weekend that multiculturalism has been an utter failure, was to be reduced to a motto, it might be this: we don’t want you, we just want your stuff.

That stuff includes all kinds of things from food, to cheap labor, to exotic artifacts, to land. But the one thing it excludes is non-native culture in the form of people.

If multiculturalism has failed it is only in as much as it has been conceived as a method for grappling with the legacy of colonialism. The problem with that notion is that colonialism hasn’t ended; it simply can’t be delineated on maps as clearly as it once could.

Meanwhile, out in the state that views itself as the most dangerous outpost of Western civilization, the old-fashioned colonial land-grabbing mindset was never more clearly expressed than it was a couple of years ago by Uzi Arad, currently Benjamin Netanyahu’s national security adviser. When asked whether it was time to abandon the two-state solution (and by implication for Israel to annex the West Bank) he responded: “We want to relieve ourselves of the burden of the Palestinian populations — not territories. It is territory we want to preserve, but populations we want to rid ourselves of.”

If there should be any doubt that we in the West remain shackled to mindsets shaped by colonialism, just look at the ever-widening chasm that separates Barack Obama as the embodiment of hope from Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States.

The only chance that our multicultural president could be enticed to take an action requiring only a modicum of political daring during his upcoming trip to India — to visit Amritsar’s Golden Temple where head coverings are obligatory — would have been if the Sikh religious custodians of the temple deemed a baseball cap acceptable. The don’t. (As a reader here suggested in jest: “Why can’t he just wear a kippah? It would fulfill the requirement, and he loves sucking up to the Israelis.)

Tunku Varadarajan asks:

[W]hat does this decision to avoid Amritsar tell us about how this White House feels about Americans? Does it feel that ordinary Americans will pillory their president for having associated himself with “ragheads” in Amritsar? Is this a variant of that elite condescension for ordinary folks who are “bitter,” and who “cling to guns and religion”?

That Obama can’t find a way to explain the symbolism of a little square of cloth on his head — placed there by enthusiastic, welcoming Indian hosts who wish him and America well — suggests that he has lost confidence in his own intellect, his own charisma, his own eloquence. A man once celebrated for his promise of change now allows a state visit to be shaped by his fear of the blogosphere — and by his fear of abuse that might come at him from an ignorant subset of the American population. Let’s just call it the pygmification of a president, and lament the gutlessness of this White House.

The operative fears here no doubt include all those Varadarajan lists but he omits the most obvious one, the one that was probably decisive: the reasonable expectation that images of Obama with head covered, showing his respects at a foreign domed temple would feature in GOP attack ads during the 2012 presidential campaign. The political value of such images suggests that the “ignorant subset” this commentator dismisses, penetrate much more deeply into mainstream America than he cares to admit.

Obama’s failing — and it is unforgivable — is that rather than challenge prevailing prejudices he has chosen to accommodate them.

When he meets India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — note that he is a Sikh in a majority Hindu nation — will Obama muster the courage to put his hands together and say namaste?

The decline of the West

Perhaps the clearest evidence of the decline of Western civilization is the example of those who now shout it its defense.

In the name of protecting civilization, a movement promoting racial supremacism is infecting Western consciousness with the notion that a set of values and cultural constructions is now in jeopardy when in fact our civilization’s corruption is already well advanced.

If the progress of Western civilization came about through the unfettering of the power of the people in egalitarian societies, that trend was quietly reversed as citizens became consumers. In recent decades, that decline further deepened as economic “advance” turned out to be a mask concealing expanding inequality.

In the hollow culture which this has created, beyond employing a stock of well-worn platitudes about freedom and liberty, civilization’s self-appointed protectors find it easier to spotlight purported threats than describe exactly what they are defending.

In this context we should note that American culture remains influenced by European culture more than any other and to the extent that Europe provides a cultural compass, we should be alarmed at the direction this now points. An ocean will not protect us from its influence.

Christian Science Monitor reports:

A new survey in Germany shows that 13 percent of its citizens would welcome a “Führer” — a German word for leader that is explicitly associated with Adolf Hitler — to run the country “with a firm hand.”

The findings signal that Europe’s largest nation, freed from cold-war strictures, is not immune from the extreme and often right-wing politics on the rise around the Continent.

The study, released Oct. 13 by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, affiliated with the center-left Social Democratic Party, revealed among other things that more than a third of Germans feel the country is “overrun by foreigners,” some 60 percent would “restrict the practice of Islam,” and 17 percent think Jews have “too much influence.”

The study’s overall snapshot of German society shows new forms of extremism and hate are no longer the province of far-right cohorts who shave their heads or wear leather jackets adorned with silver skulls – but register in the tweedy political center, on the right and the left. Indeed, the study found, extremism in Germany isn’t a fringe phenomenon but is found in the political center, “in all social groups and in all age groups, regardless of employment status, educational level or gender.”

The year 2010 is marking a clear shift toward extremist politics across Europe, analysts say. An uncertain economy, a gap between elites and ordinary Europeans, and fraying of a traditional sense of national identity has just in the past month brought more hard-line politics and speech, often aimed at Islam or immigrants – into a political mainstream where it had been absent or considered taboo.

On Oct. 10, the city of Vienna, a cosmopolitan and socialist stronghold since World War II, voted the far-right Freedom Party into a ruling coalition. The party, which ran on an “anti-minaret” platform in a city with only one mosque, was formerly associated with nationalist Jorg Haider, but has been reinvented by an animated former dental hygienist, Heinz-Christian Strache.

On Sept. 19, Sweden, long a Scandinavian redoubt of social tolerance and openness, put the far-right Sweden Democrats into parliament for the first time.

Further, this week the Netherlands saw the rise to influence, if not power, of the anti-Islam party of Geert Wilders, a social liberal who argues for gay rights – but whose main platform is to ban the Quran and the practice of Islam in the Low Countries. Mr. Wilders’ party will formally participate in the Dutch ruling coalition without specifically joining it.

Ian Buruma writes:

All these countries may soon be following the Danish model, in which the illiberal populist parties pledge their support without actually governing, thereby gaining power without responsibility. Denmark’s Conservative government could not govern without the support of the People’s party. Sweden’s recently re-elected conservative Moderate party will have to rely on the Democrats to form a viable government. And Wilders has already received assurances from the conservative and Christian Democrat parties that, in exchange for his support, the burqa will be banned in the Netherlands and immigration curbed.

The influence of these slick new populists, waging their war on Islam, goes well beyond their countries’ borders. Nativism is on the rise all over the western world, and Wilders, in particular, is a popular speaker at rightwing anti-Muslim gatherings in the US, Britain and Germany.

European populism focuses on Islam and immigration, but it may be mobilising a wider rage against elites expressed by people who feel unrepresented, or fear being left behind economically. They share a feeling of being dispossessed by foreigners, of losing their sense of national, social, or religious belonging. Northern Europe’s political elites, largely Social or Christian Democrats, have often been dismissive of such fears, and their paternalism and condescension may be why the backlash in those liberal countries has been particularly fierce.

The question is what to do about it. One possible solution is to let populist parties join the government if they get a sufficient number of votes. The idea of a Tea Party candidate becoming US president is alarming, to be sure, but European populists could only be part of coalition governments.

True, Hitler’s Nazis took over Germany almost as soon as they were voted into power, but the new European right are not Nazis. They have not used violence, or broken any laws. Not yet. As long as this is so, why not give them real political responsibility? They would then not only have to prove their competence, but also moderate their attitudes.

Buruma’s assumption that governance inherently imposes a moderating effect, seems very dubious. Look at Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party in an Israel that prides itself on its Western identity. There’s little evidence that participation in government has forced them to turn away from extremism.

The underlying idea here is one that has guided the eviscerated Left for the last two decades: that the political challenges of the day can only be met by some form of reaction or accommodation through which the sacred political center can be reclaimed. The idea that the Left provides a genuine political alternative has — at least by mainstream politicians — been effectively abandoned.

This is the context in which an American underclass is expanding, ready to be corralled by rightwing, xenophobic opportunists.

The Guardian‘s Paul Mason went to Atlanta to see how economic decline is reshaping American society.

Unable to borrow or earn, a whole generation is being shut out of the American lifestyle.

Meanwhile, some states have begun a race to the bottom: slashing welfare, labour regulations and local taxes to attract investment. High-wage companies close and relocate to low-wage states, and foreign investment flows to the towns where labour costs are lowest. These states are being transformed by the arrival of low-waged Hispanic migrants even as the rightwing politicians who support the economics rail against the demographics.

As a result the so-called Sun Belt, identified by Republican strategist Kevin Phillips in the 1970s as the new political bedrock of conservatism, now feels like the unhappiest place in America. Median incomes in the south are, on average, $8,000 lower than in the northeast; poverty rates are higher than anywhere else in America — and so are the racial and religious tensions.

In the midterm elections politicians have promised to “do something” for the middle class. The kindest thing they could do is tell the truth: Americans have been living a middle-class lifestyle on working-class wages — and bridging the gap with credit. And it’s over.

Instead, the message is that the American way of life is as good as ever — just so long as it can be protected from foreign threats: the economic threat from undocumented Latino workers and the cultural threat from dangerous Muslims.

A real alternative, however, would go much further than pointing out that most Americans have for too long been living beyond their means — it would spell out that the American dream is built on a false promise and our concern should not be reduced to who has access to its fulfillment and who does not. That false promise is that the good life flows from the good stuff.

In one of the tales of Mullah Nasrudin, his friend finds him in misery with bleeding lips as he chews on red hot chillies. “Why do you keep on biting into those chillies?” his friend asks. “I’m looking for the sweet one,” the Mullah answers as he digs deeper into his basket. We too find it difficult to abandon that futile quest for a sweet chili.

America now suffers less from the consequences of easy access to credit than the fact that we have virtually no conception of material sufficiency. Our fascination with the future is driven by an experience of the present as defined by unmet needs. Ours is a condition of perpetual insufficiency. The land of opportunity is populated by people who can never have enough.

Only when we discover we have enough can we pause, take stock and consider what is of real value. The defense of civilization consists not in thwarting foreign threats but recognizing the ways in which we value or devalue civilization’s core assets.

We are now warned of a dreadful “Japanification” of America if consumers refuse to consume.

Is that all that Americans are: the earthworms of the global economy? Or might we find some hidden wealth through material loss?

Michael Vlahos: Chilean transcendence

By Michael Vlahos*

Miners. Trapped. No way out. Miraculously rescued. Happy end. End of story.

Not so fast.

The resurrection of Chile’s lost miners is a testament to the power of belonging and meaning in human life.

We humans live singularly evanescent lives. Our consciousness is like to the Moth: Done in the flicker of candlelight on a summer night. Gone in an instant.

Yet we live on because eternal hope lives in our collective self. We draw meaning from the river of humanity. Only in this way can we take comfort from the desperate enterprise of life — because our life is eternally shared. Because we belong to a river of life that must go on, our single summer night has meaning. In the end it is all right — because we go on together.

We know this is true. We know this is our prime directive because the shadows of our forgotten ancestors are still there to remind us. They proclaim the river of us in the cave paintings of Lascaux and at the seat of celebration that was Stonehenge.

We all have the same deep-wired drive to make our lives make sense joining ourselves to the river of sacred identity.

My work focuses on how “civilization” — complex post-Neolithic groups of societies — created a celebratory ritual we call war. In history war has always served to create identity, to celebrate identity, and to help identity migrate and transform. War is perhaps our most special human vehicle for framing and reframing consciousness, and for helping consciousness to change.

Since about 1800 war has served the nation-state, and since about 1800 our vision of the “nation” has been our collective benchmark of sacred identity. Peg the U.S. at 1776, France at 1789, and Latin America at 1810-1821. Then the rest followed.

Like it or not we in the West still inhabit a world where the nation is sacred. Our world, tarnished as it is, is still a realm ruled by religious nationalism. We are the reluctant inheritors of a tradition that once corralled hundreds of thousands of young men into a place so that they might selflessly clamber out of trench lines to certain death. We framed and wove for them the most perversely grand human sacrifice in all of humanity’s religious experience: All for the sake of our nations’ transcendence. All for us.

The West blindly drove through two world wars before it could truly see how self-destructive and primitive was its terrible blood ritual. War can celebrate identity and it can also kill it. But thankfully war is not our only ritual of identity.

Chile tells us that. The nation in modernity no longer needs battle to clear our pathways for collective meaning and national transcendence. In fact it never did. Blame Napoleon. His answer to the dispiriting bloodbath of Robespierre revolution was the gloriously bloodbath of battle where the whole nation might transcend.

But Napoleon’s vision brought European civilization to its knees — to its very last gasp — by 1945.

Latin America, Western twin of European Modernity in the early 19th century, never fully embraced Napoleon’s victory-or-death vision. Sure there were skirmishes and scraps like the “War of the Pacific” between Chile and Peru, and of course the notorious Chaco War, but in retrospect these seem like outlier flare-ups compared to European civilization’s drive to self-immolation. Latin America still enshrines the passion of religious nationalism — but without its death-march wars.

So uniting a nation in the rescue of its lost miners makes perfect sense.

Look at the awful contrast. In the wars of religious nationalism the nation would be renewed by the sacrifice of its most precious children on the field of battle. It was an unimaginable blood-sacrifice — a collective ritual that demanded the most horrifying sacrifices for the nation to transcend.

But the miners offer an alternative ritual venue — and an alternative take on nationalism and sacred identity.

If the sacrifice of millions to shrapnel and machine guns in the world wars was for nothing, it was always, always lovingly conveyed and compared to a barely-disguised imagery of Jesus on the Cross.

Like him they died for us. Our own, our beautiful boys died so we might live and ascend as a nation.

But consider the Chilean alternative in the same sacral Christian-national context.

Jesus also came back from the dead out of a tomb in stone. Buried, the miners have come back to Chile — to the body of the nation — from a Stygian sarcophagus. Moreover the lingering and overhanging evil that may have placed them there — Latin America’s daunting legacy of racism and iniquity and latifundial-corporate evil — was instantly expunged by a Presidential commitment to Chile’s buried own.

Ancient legacies can be cast off. The nation can find celebration and renewal without war — and create that sacred moment when the people are one and whole again. The President — with his badge of office signifying the body of the nation — ritually embraces each miner as he emerges into the light of resurrection: Reclaiming them to the body of the nation.

The miracle that ties Chileans to the deep currents of their river is not in blood-sacrifice but rather the promise of a nation transcendent in new life.

*Michael Vlahos is Professor of Strategy at the United States Naval War College. This article first appeared at Huffington Post and is republished here with the author’s permission.

Rawabi, and the American mission to civilize the West Bank

Rawabi, and the American mission to civilize the West Bank
By Ahmed Moor, Mondoweiss, January 14, 2010

Rawabi

The Palestinian Authority, in coordination with the American government, is building a new settlement in the West Bank. This one is intended to provide 40,000 “Palestinians with homes in an American-style development.” The Huffington Post carries the whole story.

When I first heard about the Rawabi plan I was repulsed. It took some time for me to distill exactly what made me so uncomfortable. It wasn’t the Pavlovian conditioning; direct exposure to the Jewish settler colonies in the West Bank and Gaza has created a psychological association between objectively neutral architectural features – red-tiled roofs, trimmed hedges, cul-de-sacs – and racism and apartheid for me. It wasn’t that though; Rawabi seemed more profoundly wrong.

Rawabi is a painful outgrowth of the continued obliteration of Palestine. Here is something so clearly alien, something so obviously conceived in an alien mind, masquerading as Palestinian. Some State Department bureaucrat was saying to me, “We are destroying you and your culture to recreate you in our image.” Palestinian cities and towns, which grow organically – really, an amalgamation of family homes and municipal buildings – are now qualitatively inferior. The Palestinian village is old, antiquated, disorganized, dysfunctional, anarchical, loud and dirty. By contrast, Rawabi is new, organized, efficient, beautiful, clean, ordered and ‘American.’ Rawabi is the tangible materialization of the American mission civilisatrice in the West Bank, not to mention the project to alienate Palestinians from one another. [continued…]

The happiest people

The happiest people
By Nicholas D Kristof, New York Times, January 7, 2010

Hmmm. You think it’s a coincidence? Costa Rica is one of the very few countries to have abolished its army, and it’s also arguably the happiest nation on earth.

There are several ways of measuring happiness in countries, all inexact, but this pearl of Central America does stunningly well by whatever system is used. For example, the World Database of Happiness, compiled by a Dutch sociologist on the basis of answers to surveys by Gallup and others, lists Costa Rica in the top spot out of 148 nations.

That’s because Costa Ricans, asked to rate their own happiness on a 10-point scale, average 8.5. Denmark is next at 8.3, the United States ranks 20th at 7.4 and Togo and Tanzania bring up the caboose at 2.6. [continued…]

Wade Davis on endangered cultures

Wade Davis on endangered cultures
Wade Davis, TED Talks, February, 2003

You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel and one of the delights of ethnographic research is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way, or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, or that in the Himalaya, the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma, is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live in does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago.

And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives. We’re all born. We all bring our children into the world. We go through initiation rites. We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn’t surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art.

But what’s interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture. And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara. This is incidentally the fellow that I travelled into the desert with a month ago, or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma, Everest, the goddess mother of the world.

All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth. And this is an idea, if you think about it, can only fill you with hope. Now, together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet, and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. And you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity’s great legacy. It’s the symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species.

EDITORIAL: Barbarianism unmasked

Barbarianism unmasked
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 30, 2009

The conceit of every autocratic leader is that power fits comfortably upon his shoulders. Even if he has not been chosen directly by his people, his right to rule reflects a natural order.

The World Economic Forum at Davos, with all its trappings of civility and reflective sophistication, embodies the same conceit. This is the forum of world governance that repeatedly unwittingly exposes the chasm dividing the world from its leaders.

Yesterday’s session, “Gaza: the case for Middle East peace,” was a pivotal moment in political discourse between the West and the rest of the world. The self-righteous hubris of an enraged Israeli president collided with the outrage of those who refused to ignore his bloodied hands.

To fully understand what happened, watch the one-hour eight-minute discussion. (For readers who want to fast forward to the part where Shimon Peres starts venting his rage, drag the play marker across to 45 minutes 50 seconds.)

“Why did they fire at us? What did they want? We didn’t occupy. There was never a day of starvation in Gaza. By the way, Israel is the supplier of water daily to Gaza. Israel is the supplier of fuel to Gaza.”

Right now, the press has much less interest in exposing Peres’ lies than it has in the headline-grabbing moment — the point at which Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan left the stage in reaction to the insulting behavior of the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius.

The real story — the story that an obsequious press corps has chosen to under-report — was a tirade from Shimon Peres that should rank on a par with Nikita Kruschev’s outburst at the United Nations in 1960 when he pounded his shoe in protest.

Never has the word “peace” been spewed out with such venom as when Peres thundered, “Our aim is peace, not war.”

Yet in response, the bias of opinion inside the hall was quickly exposed. Even though fellow panels members were visibly shocked by the Israeli’s unfettered anger, once Peres had finished his verbal assault on anyone who might dispute Israel’s version of reality, he instantly received a warm round of applause.

Up to that moment, it seems possible that Erdogan might have been willing to allow a potentially impartial audience to form its own judgment, but since Peres’s outburst had not only repeatedly been directed with utter contempt at Turkey’s prime minister but apparently received broad approval among the Davos elite, he felt compelled to respond.

David Igantius reluctantly acquiesced, giving him one minute — but Erdogan exceeded his time. The moderator with taps on the prime minister’s shoulder insisted that, “with apologies, we really do need to get people to dinner.”

Turkey is currently in a position to play a vital, perhaps indispensable role in Middle East peace mediation but a columnist for the Washington Post takes it upon himself to cut short the prime minister’s remarks because the illustrious Davos crowd will be late for dinner!

Had Peres not been given the central seat and had he been sitting right next to Ignatius and had he exceeded his time, would the hack from Washington have had the audacity to try and shut up Israel’s president? It’s hardly likely. Ignatius would have shown due respect to a man whose authority he would never dream of questioning.

Erdogan’s choice to walk off the stage was simply a refusal to accept an insult. As a result he received a hero’s welcome on his return to Turkey.

Beyond the passion of the moment, the incident exposes the hypocrisy that is embedded in the West’s view of the rest of the world.

If Hugo Chavez, or Muammar al-Gaddafi, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or any other non-Western leader had spoken with the vulgarity, deceitfulness and rage that Shimon Peres displayed, the universal response would have been that this was unbecoming and unacceptable behavior for a political leader on a world stage.

The conceit of Western civilization (within which Israel sees itself embedded and by which Israel is treated as a full participant) is that it has nothing to learn from the dignity of others.

As the self-appointed custodians of civilization we fail to see the degree to which dignity is something we often lack, while so many of those we look down upon regard respectful, dignified behavior as a fundamental mark of humanity. Commensurate with the loss of our dignity has been the rise of our arrogance.

If Israel wants to understand why it is currently viewed with contempt by so much of the world, it should not only consider the misery it has inflicted on millions of Palestinians; it should also consider why it takes pride in having as its preeminent emissary a man who acts like a thug.

OPINION & REVIEW: A nation of dunces

The dumbing of America
By Susan Jocaby, Washington Post, February 17, 2008

“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today’s very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an “elitist,” one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just “folks,” a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”) Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country’s democratic impulses in religion and education. But today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture. [complete article]

Dumb and dumber: Are Americans hostile to knowledge?
By Patricia Cohen, New York Times, February 17, 2008

The author of seven other books, [Susan Jacoby] was a fellow at the [New York Public] library when she first got the idea for this book [“The Age of American Unreason”] back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.” [complete article]

A class of 300 million
By Susan Jacoby, Los Angeles Times, February 17, 2008

Who will be ready for the presidency on Day One? Who is best qualified to be commander in chief? Who is tough enough, charismatic enough and competent enough to do the job?

These are all important questions, of course, but they ignore a crucial element of presidential leadership — the ability to educate the public about the preeminent issues of the day.

Our greatest presidents, in the judgment of historians and in popular memory — including Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt — would never have succeeded as commanders in chief had they not first succeeded as teachers in chief. And two of the most conspicuous presidential failures in recent history — Bill Clinton’s healthcare reform plan and George W. Bush’s open-ended war in Iraq — can be traced, in part, to the inability or unwillingness of both men to educate the public about complex, long-term issues.

The duty of the president as public educator is not only more important than ever but, paradoxically, more difficult to carry out today than it was at a time when the attention of Americans was not fragmented by continuous access to infotainment. No 21st century president can count on what Roosevelt could — an audience of at least three-quarters of the American public every time he took to the radio for one of his “fireside chats.” And none of the 2008 presidential candidates is equipped with the experience of educating the public that Lincoln acquired during the famous debates he conducted about slavery with Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Illinois senatorial campaign. [complete article]

NEWS: Muslims reach out to Christians

Muslims send warm Christmas message
Reuters, December 25, 2007

More than 100 Muslim scholars have addressed warm Christmas greetings to Christians around the world, a message notable both for what it says and the fact that it was sent at all.

The greeting, sent by a group of 138 Sunni, Shiite, Sufi and other scholars who recently proposed a dialogue with Christian leaders, called for peace on Earth and thanked church leaders who have responded positively to their invitation. [complete article]

Muslims join Christians for Mass
By Usama Redha and Kimi Yoshino, Los Angeles Times, December 26, 2007

Outside Mar Eliya church, not much had changed since last Christmas: Concrete blocks still surround the building and guards check the IDs of those entering.

But inside, hundreds of Iraqi worshipers — Christians and Muslims — were crammed into the overflowing Chaldean Catholic church Tuesday, celebrating the holiday and the fact that they felt safe enough to venture out of their homes to attend Christmas Mass. [complete article]

Iraqi Christians pack churches for Christmas Mass despite violence
AP, December 25, 2007

Thousands of Iraqi Christians picked their way through checkpoints and along dusty streets lined with concrete blast walls, packing churches in Baghdad on Tuesday for Christmas Mass. [complete article]

NEWS & ANALYSIS: Iraq’s shifting alliances; diminishing authority; imperiled culture

Ruthless, shadowy — and a U.S. ally
By Ned Parker, Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2007

“Abu Abed, you’re a hero,” the retired Shiite teacher shouted from the home she had fled last winter, when the bodies of Shiites were being dumped daily in the streets of her Amiriya neighborhood.

The fighter, wearing green camouflage and dark wraparound sunglasses, kept walking, his hand swinging a black MP-5 submachine gun.

No more than 5 feet 6, with a roll of baby fat, this Sunni Muslim gunman is an unlikely savior of Amiriya: a former intelligence officer in Saddam Hussein’s army, a suspected onetime insurgent, a man who has photos of his brothers’ mutilated corpses loaded in his cellphone.

To many Iraqis, Abu Abed is a Sunni warlord whose followers have spilled the blood of Shiite Muslim civilians and U.S. troops. But to the people in Amiriya, he is the man who has, with ruthless efficiency, restored order to a neighborhood where the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq held sway. [complete article]

Shiite lauds, warns ‘Awakening Councils’
By Patrick Quinn, AP, December 21, 2007

Former Sunni insurgents – wearing masks and wailing in grief – joined a funeral procession Friday for a leader killed for turning his guns on Islamic extremists instead of America in a contested city that al-Qaida in Iraq once considered its capital.

The burial of 29-year-old Naseer Salam al-Maamouri, placed in a casket draped with the Iraqi flag, also served as a show of resolve for the tribes that have chosen to back the U.S.-led struggle to regain control of Baqouba, the strategic urban hub of Diyala province northeast of Baghdad.

For the moment, the tribal militias – known as Awakening Councils, Concerned Citizens and other names – have given U.S. and Iraqi forces a key advantage in seeking to clear extremist-held pockets in and around Baghdad. But the Sunni militiamen are demanding something in return: permanent jobs and influence in Iraq’s security forces.

The Shiite-led government has been slow to respond, despite Washington’s fears that the tribal support could collapse into chaos without swift integration into the standing forces. [complete article]

Do U.S. prisons in Iraq breed insurgents?
By Gordon Lubold, Christian Science Monitor, December 20, 2007

American officials have detained thousands of insurgents in the months since the surge of forces began this spring, in an effort that most agree has improved security in Iraq. But now the commander of the American detention facilities in Iraq is wondering aloud if holding all those detainees is breeding a “micro-insurgency” and asking whether it’s time to begin releasing thousands of people.

The two main detention facilities operated by the US military in Iraq, at Camp Bucca near Basra and Camp Cropper in Baghdad, have swollen to hold nearly 30,000 detainees. That’s not the 40,000 individuals Army Gen. David Petraeus allotted for when American forces began to implement the Baghdad security plan this spring. But it may be too many, says Marine Maj. Gen. Doug Stone, who oversees detainees for the US-led force.

Holding thousands of “moderate” detainees runs counter to the notion of winning over a population in a classic counterinsurgency, he says. General Stone believes many of these Iraqi insurgents were never motivated by anything more than money and most only desire to live peacefully. Many can be safely released back to society, back to their families and in their neighborhoods without straining security or their communities, he says. [complete article]

Disaffected Iraqis spurn dominant Shiite clerics
By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, December 21, 2007

Two years after helping to bring to power a government led by Shiite religious parties, Iraq’s paramount Shiite clerics find their influence diminished as their followers criticize them for backing a political alliance that has failed to pass crucial legislation, improve basic services or boost the economy.

“Now the street is blaming what’s happening on the top clerics and the government,” said Ali al-Najafi, the son of Bashir al-Najafi, one of four leading clerics collectively called the marjaiya. Speaking for his father, the white-turbaned Najafi said he wished that the government, all but paralyzed by factionalism and rival visions, was more in touch with ordinary Iraqis.

“We were hoping that it would have been better,” he said.

The marjaiya, led by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, still wield enormous power in Iraq. But if a critical mass of Iraqis stops listening to them, it could hinder efforts toward political reconciliation and strain the fragile unity of the Shiite parties that head the government. The loss of clerical influence could also hurt the political fortunes of Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite politicians and America’s main Shiite ally, who has closely aligned himself with Sistani. [complete article]

Can Iraqi sites that have survived seventeen centuries survive the US military?
By Ben Macintyre, The Times, December 22, 2007

American soldiers in Iraq have been issued with thousands of packs of playing cards urging them to protect and respect the country’s archaeological sites, in an effort to curb the destruction and plunder of Iraq’s antiquities.

Each card in the deck is illustrated with an ancient artefact or site, with tips on how to preserve archaeological remains and prevent looting.

The seven of clubs, for example, is illustrated with a photograph of the great Ctesiphon arch in Iraq, with the words: “This site has survived for seventeen centuries. Will it survive you?” The seven of spades declares: “Taking pictures is good. Removing artefacts for souvenirs is not.” The jack of diamonds is even more blunt. Alongside a picture of the Statue of Liberty, it asks: “How would you feel if someone stole her torch?” The effort to induce greater cultural awareness among US troops comes amid dire warnings from international archaeologists that Iraq’s ancient heritage is in greater peril than ever. [complete article]

U.S. convoys struggle to adjust to policy change
By Jamie Gumbrecht | McClatchy, December 21, 2007

In the first month that they were in Iraq, someone threatened, shot at or tried to blow up the soldiers of the Kentucky National Guard’s B Battery, 2nd Battalion, 138th Field Artillery 12 times. Last month, there were only three such incidents.

But confirmation that the roads have become safer came a few weeks ago when a flier went up in the 2-138’s office at this base 20 miles north of Baghdad.

“Effective immediately,” it read, “assume all civilian vehicles are friendly.” [complete article]

NEWS: The Kalima Project

Two cultures, one language: Arabic translation of great works aims to bridge divide
By Boyd Tonkin, The Independent, November 22, 2007

The greatest Yiddish-language writer of the 20th century features on a list of 100 books chosen to inaugurate a daring, long-term project to bring landmark foreign works to Arabic-speaking readers.

The Collected Stories Of Isaac Bashevis Singer, by an author who was raised in Poland but for decades dominated Yiddish writing in New York, will join titles ranging from Sophocles and Chaucer to Stephen Hawking and Haruki Murakami among the first selections of the Kalima translation programme.

The Kalima (meaning “word” in Arabic) project aims to revive the art of translation across the Arab world and reverse the long decline in Arabic readers’ access to major works of global literature, philosophy, science and history. [complete article]

OPINION: The rise of racist liberalism

How liberals lost their anti-racism
By Arun Kundnani, IRR, October 3, 2007

A new sentiment has gripped the mainstream of liberal thinking in Britain over the last few years. It is an attitude that regards Muslims as uniquely problematic and in need of forceful integration into what it views as the inherently superior values of the West. For this new breed of liberal, previously cherished norms of multiculturalism should be discarded and the fight for racial and religious equality is irrelevant. The publication this year of Nick Cohen’s What’s Left? how liberals lost their way and Andrew Anthony’s more sharply argued The Fall-Out: how a guilty liberal lost his innocence provide the clearest statements yet of what this new liberalism stands for. Their core argument can be stated straightforwardly: the major problem facing the West is a failure to stand up for its Enlightenment values. Liberalism has been infected by guilt – which prevents it from defending itself against external threats, chief among them ‘Islamism’, which is held responsible not only for terrorist violence but also for Muslim separatism in our cities. What precisely an Islamist is is left unclear; after all, a realistic definition of Islamism – as a wide range of political movements, some violent and some constitutional, generally with social conservatism at their core – would require the reader to pause for a moment before the ritual denunciation of all Islamists as irrational, nihilist and totalitarian.

But Cohen’s and Anthony’s main target is not so much Islamism as the appeasing attitudes they detect among liberals. Anthony writes that, since the 1970s, liberalism has been corrupted by White guilt which leads liberals to think that everything will be OK as long as they don’t interfere in other people’s lives, especially the lives of other ethnic groups. But this is fantasy: in practice, White liberals have not usually shied away from using the power of the state to intervene in the lives of non-Whites, either in Britain or in the neocolonialism of the ‘war on terror’. Moreover, at the conceptual level, liberalism has always lacked the means to generate the kind of social solidarity which Anthony wants to see. Individualist indifference has been a feature of liberal democracy since its inception. The slave-owning liberal democracy of early nineteenth-century America could not be said to be a society suffering from what Anthony calls a ‘guilt-warped vision of the world’, yet Tocqueville wrote of its citizens that ‘each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of the rest’. [complete article]

OPINION: Western values were imported

A lesson in humility for the smug West
By William Dalrymple, The Sunday Times, October 14, 2007

About 100 miles south of Delhi, where I live, lie the ruins of the Mughal capital, Fateh-pur Sikri. This was built by the Emperor Akbar at the end of the 16th century. Here Akbar would listen carefully as philosophers, mystics and holy men of different faiths debated the merits of their different beliefs in what is the earliest known experiment in formal inter-religious dialogue.

Representatives of Muslims (Sunni and Shi’ite as well as Sufi), Hindus (followers of Shiva and Vishnu as well as Hindu atheists), Christians, Jains, Jews, Buddhists and Zoroastrians came together to discuss where they differed and how they could live together.

Muslim rulers are not usually thought of in the West as standard-bearers of freedom of thought; but Akbar was obsessed with exploring the issues of religious truth, and with as open a mind as possible, declaring: “No man should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is to be allowed to go over to any religion that pleases him.” He also argued for what he called “the pursuit of reason” rather than “reliance on the marshy land of tradition”.

All this took place when in London, Jesuits were being hung, drawn and quartered outside Tyburn, in Spain and Portugal the Inquisition was torturing anyone who defied the dogmas of the Catholic church, and in Rome Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake in Campo de’Fiori. [complete article]

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: When anthropologist becomes counter-insurgency technician

Army enlists anthropology in war zones
By David Rohde, New York Times, October 7, 2007

In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.

Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team’s ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations — in one case spotting a land dispute that allowed the Taliban to bully parts of a major tribe — has won the praise of officers who say they are seeing concrete results.

Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division unit working with the anthropologists here, said that the unit’s combat operations had been reduced by 60 percent since the scientists arrived in February, and that the soldiers were now able to focus more on improving security, health care and education for the population. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Anthropologists can now save lives and help win the war on terrorism. “We’re not focused on the enemy. We’re focused on bringing governance down to the people,” says Col. Martin Schweitzer, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. The Pentagon has turned into the Peace Corps! Right.

Not surprisingly, when it’s for internal consumption the story becomes a little different. In a presentation at the Pentagon earlier this year, an official reported that mapping the human terrain “enables the entire Kill Chain for the GWOT [Global War on Terrorism].” And as it applies to the US air force, here’s how the “kill chain” is described:

Because enemies have learned to limit the amount of time they and their weapons are in sight and thus vulnerable, these mobile targets require a different approach. The Air Force must compress its six-stage target cycle of Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage, and Assess, also known as F2T2EA, or, more simply, the “kill chain.”

Concerned anthropologists such a Roberto Gonzalez are asking, “Where is the line that separates the professional anthropologist from the counter-insurgency technician?” By the Pentagon’s own admission there appears to be none. Instead of being deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, perhaps anthropologists could do more useful work inside the Pentagon itself.

OPINION: When anthropologists become counter-insurgents

Pledging to boycott the “war on terror”
By Roberto J. González and David Price, Counterpunch, September 28, 2007

The Pentagon is increasingly relying on the deployment of “Human Terrain System” (HTS) teams in Afghanistan and Iraq to gather and disseminate information on cultures living in the theatre of war. Some of these teams are assigned to US brigade or regimental combat units, which include “cultural analysts” and “regional studies analysts.” According to CACI International (one of three companies currently contracting HTS personnel for the Pentagon), “the HTS project is designed to improve the gathering, understanding, operational application, and sharing of local population knowledge” among combat teams. Required experience includes an MA or Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, sociology, or related social science fields, and applicants must obtain a secret security clearance to be eligible for employment.

In this environment it is not surprising that the Science Applications International Corporation-one of the top 10 US defense contractors-has begun describing anthropology as a “counter-insurgency related field” in its job advertisements. Prior to joining HTS teams, some social scientists attend military training camps. Recently, Marcus Griffin, an anthropology professor preparing to deploy to Iraq boasted on his blog that “I cut my hair in a high and tight style and look like a drill sergeant…I shot very well with the M9 and M4 last week at the range… Shooting well is important if you are a soldier regardless of whether or not your job requires you to carry a weapon.” The lines separating researchers, subjects, protectors, protected and target are easily confused in such settings, and the concerns of research ethics are easily set aside for more immediate concerns.

Although proponents of this form of applied anthropology claim that culturally informed counter-insurgency work will save lives and win “hearts and minds,” they have thus far not attempted to provide any evidence of this. Instead, there has been a flurry of non-critical newspaper accounts in publications including the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor that portray these HTS anthropologists as heroically serving their nation without bothering to report on the ethical complications of this work. Missing are discussions of anthropologists’ ethical responsibilities to disclose who they are and what they are doing, to gain informed consent, and to not harm those they study. Portraying counter-insurgency operations as social work is naive and historically inaccurate. [complete article]

EDITORIAL: Sustaining culture

Sustaining culture
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, August 8, 2007

We live in a culture marked by its inattention to the unseen. Small wonder that as we trample on other cultures we neither recognize the damage we are doing nor anticipate the unforeseen and unwanted consequences we will later reap.

In “Ancient Nomads Offer Insights to Modern Crises,” the New York Times provides a fascinating glimpse into some of the less-considered reasons why America got Iraq wrong.

Ilan Greenberg writes:

Recent investigations have challenged long-held views of nomadic culture as purely transient, with little impact on the urban, sophisticated societies that emerged later.

Instead, scientists like [Washington University archaeologist] Dr. Frachetti are discovering that nomadic cultures are flexible, switching between transient and more sedentary ways of life, and assimilating and inventing new ideas and technologies. Nomads created durable political cultures that still influence the way those countries interact with outsiders or negotiate internal power struggles.

While the view that tribe and clan — the basic building blocks of nomadic, or semi-transient societies — influence the contemporary politics of some countries is nothing new, specialists in nomadic studies argue that policy makers have overlooked important “cultural intelligence,” like family relationships, when analyzing governments that grew out of tribal traditions.

“Families, tribes these are the things that matter here,” said Oraz Jandosov, co-chairman of a Kazakhstan opposition political party. “Foreigners talk about these things, but it’s only talk. They don’t understand them.”

Countries like Iraq and Afghanistan may take on the trappings of modern, Western nation-states, with parliaments, justice departments and other governmental agencies, researchers say. But politics are still driven by the customs and institutions of nomadism, in which political disputes were settled at the level of family, clan and tribe.

“In and of itself you can’t graft what happened two thousand years ago and say that’s what it is today, but it helps to understand how these societies have found successful strategies and how they respond to outside forces,” Dr. Frachetti said. “By not exploring the depth to which nomadic populations have contributed to local political systems, we are naive to an important aspect of the social fabric of parts of the Near East and Central Asia.”

The United States military has learned the importance of tribes in Iraq, as evidenced by its policy of arming Sunni Arab tribal chiefs in Anbar Province to fight the leading insurgent group there, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

Yet, despite calls for a deeper appreciation of cultures far from the mainstream, “the United States government hasn’t been willing to pony up the money to educate” policy makers on “these areas with deep nomadic traditions,” said a Central Asia specialist working for the United States government.

* * *

The conceit of those of us who inhabit technologically advanced societies is that we are as advanced as our technology. (Keep that thought in mind next time your computer or your car breaks down.)

I would contend, to the contrary, that the more we (as Thoreau said) become the tools of our tools, the more we lose our mastery of and appreciation for the real building blocks of culture. The advancement, sophistication, and development of our societies has brought with it an unremitting cultural impoverishment.

As we become expert in text messaging, we become less adept in conversation. We acquire megabytes of iTunes but never learn or pass along a single ballad. We know the storylines in many a TV show yet are barely acquainted with ancient narratives from epic verse and drama. The cultural repositories that once provided the primary stock in popular image, phrasing, and metaphor, have been marginalized by a mass media that operates in the thrall of manipulative advertising techniques and commercial imperatives.

Before we can be expected to respect and understand other cultures, we first need to appreciate culture itself. And while, with justification, we worry about the loss of natural resources and an imperiled environment, we need to pay closer attention to those equally fragile resources that can only be sustained within and between human beings. Otherwise we will end up impoverished and ultimately destroyed by our own wealth.