Saturday, April 25, 2009
Historical Parallels
"I was just following orders." Such was the excuse offered by many Nazi military and political underlings later put on trial for their actions during the Second World War. This "Nuremberg defense" was judged then -- and has been repeatedly judged since -- as possessing little if any moral or legal validity; the military academy at West Point, for example, teaches that the obedience necessary to any effective fighting force does NOT mean that an American infantryman must sacrifice his or her own moral code, that soldiers must do whatever their commanders insist, no questions asked. Why should employees of the CIA be held to lesser standards? Yes, those who drafted the policies legitimating waterboarding, prolonged sleep-deprivation, and other practices now deemed immoral, illegal, or both should bear primary culpability for their subsequent implementation. And yes, the fight against terrorism has far more to recommend it -- morally and otherwise -- than an attempt to exterminate an entire people. But to condemn the architects of a given policy while, in effect, condoning the individuals who actually executed that policy seems ethically somewhat dubious: a real-life murderer, after all, may be sentenced to death, while someone who merely plots murder may win many a parlor game centered around killing. If torture is wrong, then anyone who acted as though they believed differently, whether they wielded the thumbscrews themselves or else encouraged others to do so, should be punished. If torture is acceptable (as indeed it may be in certain cases), neither promulgators nor practitioners deserve censure. Unless, of course, like Alfred Doolittle in Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, you believe that the same moral rules need not apply to the same groups of people (e.g., "the leaders" and "the led").
Sunday, April 19, 2009
FURTHER EVIDENCE OF HOMO SAPIENS' PROFOUND SUPERFICIALITY
Imagine there are two men competing to become the next president of the United States (or of any other country the bulk of whose people have at least some say in choosing their government).
Candidate A -- impeccably groomed, without a single hair out of place and exuding a mellifluous fragrance of the most expensive eau de cologne -- preaches a message of social divisiveness, of ardent nationalism, of perpetual conflict against those who do not conform to the accepted norm in either behavior or thought.
Candidate B -- tieless, crumbs dotting his roughly shaven face, and always looking as though he has just rolled out of bed -- speaks of tolerance, of fairness, of international cooperation.
Who would get YOUR vote? If you are the typical voter, like 99% of virtually any electorate, you will select Candidate A -- or, at best, reject both men as equally unworthy of support. Such is the inordinate emphasis people place on dress, grooming, and hygiene -- both for their own sake and (most illogically) as indicative of one's intelligence, integrity,and moral standards. While no politician's defeat can be attributed solely to a poor sense of fashion -- even dictators want to look sartorially sharp before their subjects -- a glance inside just about any corporate headquarters or law firm or retail store or government office reveals the extent to which society at large has come to judge "respectability" first and foremost by appearance, less visible qualities be damned (or at any rate ignored unless and until the employee can show he/she is "up to snuff" in terms of clothing and cleanliness).
To be sure, homo sapiens are not the only species to demonstrate this obsession with the literal as well as figurative externals of existence. But neither do other species make as many pretensions as humans do to "superiority," physical or otherwise. Need my equanimity at the prospect of humanity's eventual extinction require any further explanation?
Candidate A -- impeccably groomed, without a single hair out of place and exuding a mellifluous fragrance of the most expensive eau de cologne -- preaches a message of social divisiveness, of ardent nationalism, of perpetual conflict against those who do not conform to the accepted norm in either behavior or thought.
Candidate B -- tieless, crumbs dotting his roughly shaven face, and always looking as though he has just rolled out of bed -- speaks of tolerance, of fairness, of international cooperation.
Who would get YOUR vote? If you are the typical voter, like 99% of virtually any electorate, you will select Candidate A -- or, at best, reject both men as equally unworthy of support. Such is the inordinate emphasis people place on dress, grooming, and hygiene -- both for their own sake and (most illogically) as indicative of one's intelligence, integrity,and moral standards. While no politician's defeat can be attributed solely to a poor sense of fashion -- even dictators want to look sartorially sharp before their subjects -- a glance inside just about any corporate headquarters or law firm or retail store or government office reveals the extent to which society at large has come to judge "respectability" first and foremost by appearance, less visible qualities be damned (or at any rate ignored unless and until the employee can show he/she is "up to snuff" in terms of clothing and cleanliness).
To be sure, homo sapiens are not the only species to demonstrate this obsession with the literal as well as figurative externals of existence. But neither do other species make as many pretensions as humans do to "superiority," physical or otherwise. Need my equanimity at the prospect of humanity's eventual extinction require any further explanation?
Friday, April 17, 2009
Of Politics and Potboilers
A few days ago I finished another novel (though not the latest) by a man who has become one of my favorite contemporary purveyors of "non-literary" fiction: Richard North Patterson. Like other novelists whose bestsellers can be found at the corner drugstore as well as at Border's, Patterson employs a hefty dose of unbelievable coincidence, soap operatic melodrama, and stereotypically hokey sex. But unlike your average potboilers, Patterson's deal with serious, relevant issues -- issues such as abortion, gun control, and racism. Not only do his novels consistently demonstrate ample familiarity with the issues themselves, they also demonstrate a keen sensitivity to the broader political, legal, and social backdrop against which debate must take place -- all without ever sacrificing their sheer page-turnability. Patterson, in short, is that rarity of rarities: a bestselling writer who makes you think.
Richard North Patterson author page at Random House
Richard North Patterson author page at Random House
Thursday, April 9, 2009
JOHN Q. PUBLIC, 1912(?) - 2009
John Q. Public died this morning after a long and painful illness. He was approximately 97 years old.
Authorities have thus far refused to disclose either the precise cause or the exact location of Mr. Public's death. The deceased, however, is known to have been afflicted for many years with an especially severe case of encephalitis lethargica. The same affliction makes it unlikely for the deceased to have moved anywhere from the site of his last confirmed residence, a sanatorium near Lake Placid in upstate New York.
A lifelong bachelor and, indeed, something of a recluse during his later years, Mr. Public leaves no known legitimate descendants -- the vociferous claims of several prominent contemporary politicians to the contrary notwithstanding.
Born within six months either way of the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, John Public -- the distinctive Q came later -- first attracted widespread notice upon the August 1914 outbreak of "the war to end all wars" (i.e., World War I). Photographs from that period reveal a patriotic spirit no less ubiquitous than infantile: now in Trafalgar Square waving the Union Jack, now at the Brandenburg Gate donning a miniature spiked helmet, now marching (or, rather, toddling) down the Champs Elysees to the (probable) accompaniment of the Marseillaise. How this prepubescent incarnation of seemingly kaleidoscopic nationalism could fly so quickly from one warring party to the next in the age before air travel remains a mystery, as does the original parentage of the child himself. Rarely, in any event, has an orphan of such uncertain antecedents found so many strangers eager to adopt him as one of their own. By 1917 even the United States, increasingly loath to open its borders to anyone whose name was not unmistakably Anglo-Saxon (or at least Anglo-Norman), was prepared to take in young Johnny Public -- who as a de facto if not de jure American citizen would one day take in some of the most powerful members of his newfound "family," along with a good many of his erstwhile "relatives" elsewhere.
That ironic turnabout, however, lay well in the future. Through the 1920s and into the following decade, young John Public kept a generally low profile. While from time to time he could be spotted at baseball games, movie palaces, speakeasies, and other venues popular with his larger, more amorphous namesake, the future icon of indiscriminate inclusiveness is himself invisible, for the most part, among the myriad individuals self-consciously striving to epitomize the epoch to which they all professed to belong. For the adolescent Public, as for the bulk of his contemporaries, the Roaring Twenties was a period of physical growth, social (mal)adjustment, behavioral experimentation -- a period, in short, of flexing that "power without responsibility" which a famous English writer once labeled the "prerogative" of prostitutes and press lords. (At the height of the Cold War decades later, it was charged that Mr. Public -- by then, of course, a well-established Establishment Figure -- had as a teenager been kidnapped by "Leninist agents" to serve the still somewhat shaky Bolshevik regime; but research among recently released Russian archives has thus far failed to corroborate this particular charge sgainst America's former archenemy.) Nor did the onset of the Great Depression add much to young Public's public stature. Though millions were united as never before in a common quest for economic salvation, economic hardship simultaneously weakened average individuals' willingness to share the sought-after prosperity with anyone not quite as average as themselves. And John Public in the 1930s possessed neither the emotional nor the practical wherewithal to bridge these peersistent demographic rifts through the force of his own exemplary unexceptionality.
Pearl Harbor proved the making of John Public. Whether -- in common with so many of his adopted conmpatriots -- he instinctively volunteered his services in the wake of the Japanese attack, or whather he was somehow coopted by the Roosevelt administration (via, say, a threat of deportation to one of the countless other countries -- including Japan -- which claimed him as a native son), remains a matter of dispute among historians. What is undeniable is the speed with which the outwardly nondescript Public -- not yet thirty years old, and languishing in apparently contented obscurity since the heady days of the previous global armageddonn -- came to embody the fears and hopes, needs and desires, passions and aversions of the entire country (pacifists, Axis sympathizers, and diehard isolationist Republicans excepted). Like Stainbeck's Tom Joad, only on a much wider scale, the face and figure of John Public could be seen everywhere a (white, Christian, American) man was in trouble, now exhorting the troops in the Pacific to show their Japanese foes even less mercy than the Germans, now reminding the folks back home that the slice of cheese or dollop of butter they sacrficed today would help fortify their boys in the field tomorrow, now at the side of the president himself urging him to be as "tough" with the Soviets as he was with the Jews. To what extent John Public actually changed the course of the war is a moot question: historical cause and effect are too complex to be explicable solely with reference to this or that individual, even one as protean as Mr. Public. But by war's end policymakers, generals, journalists, diplomats, and Hollywood moguls were all toasting "J.P." as the single most important contributor to Allied victory. So clamorous did the applause become, in fact, that its recipient felt constrained to adopt a middle initial -- the better to sustain his firm denial whenever accosted with a demand to know if he were "that John Public."
Be that as it may, the postwar years saw the apotheosis of John Q. Public -- and not only as an entry in the dictionary. Reporters sought his views on everything from atom smashers to Barbie dolls to capital punishment; advertisers solicited his endorsement -- free or otherwise -- of their products; government office-holders of all political stripes regularly invoked his name in support of measures under attack by less favored members of the electorate. Nor, it must be emphasized, was John Q. Public himself a passive participant in this seeming exploitation of his persona. On the contrary, his very malleability rendered him an ideal spokesman for a society where differences of opinion or taste or purpose were as much a part of the landscape as the chameleon in New England. Any stance he might take one week could be abandoned the next, with nnobody being the wiser -- or, at any rate, prepared to risk the consequences (e.g., loss of office) a demonstration of their newfound wisdom might incur. No wonder Life magazine titled its -- admiring -- 1957 profile of Mr. Public: "Move Aside, Lon Chaney! Here's a Man of More than a Thousand Faces!"
A comparable article could probably not have been written ten years later. Growing divisiveness over Vietnam, civil rights, the respective merits of heroin vs. marijuana, and other vital issues of the day led to larger cleavages (i.e., within the American polity) unbridgeable -- or so it appeared -- even by so consummate a master of consistent inconsistency as John Q. Public. Yet Mr. Public's public standing remained high enough to allow him to retain the ear, the resepect, and the confidence of groups across the occupational, generational, and ideological spectrum. The White House may have been at daggers drawn wih the Fourth Estate, parents may have thought their children revolting and vice versa, integrationists and segregationists may have kept their distance from each other -- but all were at one in insisting that John Q. Public was indeed on their side of the barricades. Thus the turbulent sixties ended (c. 1974) with Mr. Public the supreme symbol of a unity from which none were excluded except the inorrigibly unique.
Symbols, however, are prone to outlive their usefulness, to be discarded once whatever they symbolize either no longer exists or, conversely, exists in such plenitude as to obviate all need for any "external" representation thereof. The 1980s in the United States witnessed a rare conjunction of both phenomena, a newly earnest solicitude for the first person singular flourishing alongside an equally impassioned determination to make all one's neighbors as oneself. Caught between these competing yet complementary forces, John Q. Public became superfluous. Though he continued to draw crowds on Capitol Hill, in the anterooms of Madison Avenue, and at American Legion outposts around the country, general neglect gradually impelled Mr. Public to withdraw from the public arena entirely. His last public appearance was at a patriotic rally outside Oswego on 12 September 2001 -- a rally at which Mr. Public was verbally assaulted for not bellowing the national anthem as lustily as everyone else; only his obvious age and frailty saved the octogenerian warbler from more tangible signs of hostility. Such is the gratitude that democracies from time immemorial have been wont to bestow upon those who most nearly exemplify the democratic ideal.
One may, of course, legitimately wonder how many would have noticed John Public's absence or presence at any point in his career. Seldom has a figure of such widespread and protracted renown left so meager a record of personal identity: there is no birth certificate, no school diploma, no driver's license, no library card, no bankbook, not even a single photograph to accompany the present obituary. Interviews, it is true, abound, but -- like the periodic references to Mr. Public in presidents' and other ostensible leaders' memoirs -- they are too contradictory to permit a definitive assessment of their subject's character and thinnking, while rumors of a massive, "tell-all" autobiography remain unsubstantiated. Someday, no doubt, an especially enterprising sociologist, political scientist, anthropologist, and/or gossip columnist will attempt to piece together the full story of this remarkable individual who paradoxically transcended mediocrity by embracing it. Yet in the final analysis John Q. Public's name and fame rest on a foundation far more durable than the printed word -- the same foundation that lent immortality to Shakespeare's "poor player." For few indeed have beem able to vent greater "sound and fury" than an aroused Mr. Public -- and fewer still, we daresay, could match Mr. Public in achieving so much of such lasting insignificance.
Burial services for the deceased will be private. A fund has been established, however, to erect a monument to Mr. Public at one or another of the literally innumerable localities where he was active. Interested parties may send their tax-deductible contributions to: The JQP Memorial Foundation, c/o Vox Populi, Inc., P.O. Box 666a, Grover's Corner, NH, 01212.
Authorities have thus far refused to disclose either the precise cause or the exact location of Mr. Public's death. The deceased, however, is known to have been afflicted for many years with an especially severe case of encephalitis lethargica. The same affliction makes it unlikely for the deceased to have moved anywhere from the site of his last confirmed residence, a sanatorium near Lake Placid in upstate New York.
A lifelong bachelor and, indeed, something of a recluse during his later years, Mr. Public leaves no known legitimate descendants -- the vociferous claims of several prominent contemporary politicians to the contrary notwithstanding.
Born within six months either way of the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, John Public -- the distinctive Q came later -- first attracted widespread notice upon the August 1914 outbreak of "the war to end all wars" (i.e., World War I). Photographs from that period reveal a patriotic spirit no less ubiquitous than infantile: now in Trafalgar Square waving the Union Jack, now at the Brandenburg Gate donning a miniature spiked helmet, now marching (or, rather, toddling) down the Champs Elysees to the (probable) accompaniment of the Marseillaise. How this prepubescent incarnation of seemingly kaleidoscopic nationalism could fly so quickly from one warring party to the next in the age before air travel remains a mystery, as does the original parentage of the child himself. Rarely, in any event, has an orphan of such uncertain antecedents found so many strangers eager to adopt him as one of their own. By 1917 even the United States, increasingly loath to open its borders to anyone whose name was not unmistakably Anglo-Saxon (or at least Anglo-Norman), was prepared to take in young Johnny Public -- who as a de facto if not de jure American citizen would one day take in some of the most powerful members of his newfound "family," along with a good many of his erstwhile "relatives" elsewhere.
That ironic turnabout, however, lay well in the future. Through the 1920s and into the following decade, young John Public kept a generally low profile. While from time to time he could be spotted at baseball games, movie palaces, speakeasies, and other venues popular with his larger, more amorphous namesake, the future icon of indiscriminate inclusiveness is himself invisible, for the most part, among the myriad individuals self-consciously striving to epitomize the epoch to which they all professed to belong. For the adolescent Public, as for the bulk of his contemporaries, the Roaring Twenties was a period of physical growth, social (mal)adjustment, behavioral experimentation -- a period, in short, of flexing that "power without responsibility" which a famous English writer once labeled the "prerogative" of prostitutes and press lords. (At the height of the Cold War decades later, it was charged that Mr. Public -- by then, of course, a well-established Establishment Figure -- had as a teenager been kidnapped by "Leninist agents" to serve the still somewhat shaky Bolshevik regime; but research among recently released Russian archives has thus far failed to corroborate this particular charge sgainst America's former archenemy.) Nor did the onset of the Great Depression add much to young Public's public stature. Though millions were united as never before in a common quest for economic salvation, economic hardship simultaneously weakened average individuals' willingness to share the sought-after prosperity with anyone not quite as average as themselves. And John Public in the 1930s possessed neither the emotional nor the practical wherewithal to bridge these peersistent demographic rifts through the force of his own exemplary unexceptionality.
Pearl Harbor proved the making of John Public. Whether -- in common with so many of his adopted conmpatriots -- he instinctively volunteered his services in the wake of the Japanese attack, or whather he was somehow coopted by the Roosevelt administration (via, say, a threat of deportation to one of the countless other countries -- including Japan -- which claimed him as a native son), remains a matter of dispute among historians. What is undeniable is the speed with which the outwardly nondescript Public -- not yet thirty years old, and languishing in apparently contented obscurity since the heady days of the previous global armageddonn -- came to embody the fears and hopes, needs and desires, passions and aversions of the entire country (pacifists, Axis sympathizers, and diehard isolationist Republicans excepted). Like Stainbeck's Tom Joad, only on a much wider scale, the face and figure of John Public could be seen everywhere a (white, Christian, American) man was in trouble, now exhorting the troops in the Pacific to show their Japanese foes even less mercy than the Germans, now reminding the folks back home that the slice of cheese or dollop of butter they sacrficed today would help fortify their boys in the field tomorrow, now at the side of the president himself urging him to be as "tough" with the Soviets as he was with the Jews. To what extent John Public actually changed the course of the war is a moot question: historical cause and effect are too complex to be explicable solely with reference to this or that individual, even one as protean as Mr. Public. But by war's end policymakers, generals, journalists, diplomats, and Hollywood moguls were all toasting "J.P." as the single most important contributor to Allied victory. So clamorous did the applause become, in fact, that its recipient felt constrained to adopt a middle initial -- the better to sustain his firm denial whenever accosted with a demand to know if he were "that John Public."
Be that as it may, the postwar years saw the apotheosis of John Q. Public -- and not only as an entry in the dictionary. Reporters sought his views on everything from atom smashers to Barbie dolls to capital punishment; advertisers solicited his endorsement -- free or otherwise -- of their products; government office-holders of all political stripes regularly invoked his name in support of measures under attack by less favored members of the electorate. Nor, it must be emphasized, was John Q. Public himself a passive participant in this seeming exploitation of his persona. On the contrary, his very malleability rendered him an ideal spokesman for a society where differences of opinion or taste or purpose were as much a part of the landscape as the chameleon in New England. Any stance he might take one week could be abandoned the next, with nnobody being the wiser -- or, at any rate, prepared to risk the consequences (e.g., loss of office) a demonstration of their newfound wisdom might incur. No wonder Life magazine titled its -- admiring -- 1957 profile of Mr. Public: "Move Aside, Lon Chaney! Here's a Man of More than a Thousand Faces!"
A comparable article could probably not have been written ten years later. Growing divisiveness over Vietnam, civil rights, the respective merits of heroin vs. marijuana, and other vital issues of the day led to larger cleavages (i.e., within the American polity) unbridgeable -- or so it appeared -- even by so consummate a master of consistent inconsistency as John Q. Public. Yet Mr. Public's public standing remained high enough to allow him to retain the ear, the resepect, and the confidence of groups across the occupational, generational, and ideological spectrum. The White House may have been at daggers drawn wih the Fourth Estate, parents may have thought their children revolting and vice versa, integrationists and segregationists may have kept their distance from each other -- but all were at one in insisting that John Q. Public was indeed on their side of the barricades. Thus the turbulent sixties ended (c. 1974) with Mr. Public the supreme symbol of a unity from which none were excluded except the inorrigibly unique.
Symbols, however, are prone to outlive their usefulness, to be discarded once whatever they symbolize either no longer exists or, conversely, exists in such plenitude as to obviate all need for any "external" representation thereof. The 1980s in the United States witnessed a rare conjunction of both phenomena, a newly earnest solicitude for the first person singular flourishing alongside an equally impassioned determination to make all one's neighbors as oneself. Caught between these competing yet complementary forces, John Q. Public became superfluous. Though he continued to draw crowds on Capitol Hill, in the anterooms of Madison Avenue, and at American Legion outposts around the country, general neglect gradually impelled Mr. Public to withdraw from the public arena entirely. His last public appearance was at a patriotic rally outside Oswego on 12 September 2001 -- a rally at which Mr. Public was verbally assaulted for not bellowing the national anthem as lustily as everyone else; only his obvious age and frailty saved the octogenerian warbler from more tangible signs of hostility. Such is the gratitude that democracies from time immemorial have been wont to bestow upon those who most nearly exemplify the democratic ideal.
One may, of course, legitimately wonder how many would have noticed John Public's absence or presence at any point in his career. Seldom has a figure of such widespread and protracted renown left so meager a record of personal identity: there is no birth certificate, no school diploma, no driver's license, no library card, no bankbook, not even a single photograph to accompany the present obituary. Interviews, it is true, abound, but -- like the periodic references to Mr. Public in presidents' and other ostensible leaders' memoirs -- they are too contradictory to permit a definitive assessment of their subject's character and thinnking, while rumors of a massive, "tell-all" autobiography remain unsubstantiated. Someday, no doubt, an especially enterprising sociologist, political scientist, anthropologist, and/or gossip columnist will attempt to piece together the full story of this remarkable individual who paradoxically transcended mediocrity by embracing it. Yet in the final analysis John Q. Public's name and fame rest on a foundation far more durable than the printed word -- the same foundation that lent immortality to Shakespeare's "poor player." For few indeed have beem able to vent greater "sound and fury" than an aroused Mr. Public -- and fewer still, we daresay, could match Mr. Public in achieving so much of such lasting insignificance.
Burial services for the deceased will be private. A fund has been established, however, to erect a monument to Mr. Public at one or another of the literally innumerable localities where he was active. Interested parties may send their tax-deductible contributions to: The JQP Memorial Foundation, c/o Vox Populi, Inc., P.O. Box 666a, Grover's Corner, NH, 01212.
My Country Right or Wrong?
"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend," wrote the English novelist E. M. Forster, "I hope I would have the guts to betray my country." When I first came across this statement some years ago, I thought it reflected a great deal of geopolitical naivete; and even today I think Forster's dichotomy is somewhat oversimplistic. After all, the majority of our friends are quite likely to be our compatriots as well, so betraying the one automatically means betraying the other. But the more I read and observe of the world around me, the more convinced I become that Forster had the right idea. Whether you call it patriotism, nationalism, or just plain flag-waving, blind loyalty to one's country, to ANY country, is intellectually indefensible, morally questionable, and responsible for the greatest crimes committed by humanity over the past three centuries.
Nationalism is, in the first instance, inherently irrational, because countries themselves have no eternal or completely objective reality. Of the roughly two hundred sovereign states existing today, none -- NONE -- was in existence two thousand years ago, and there's no guarantee any of them will be around two thousand years hence. So why devote one's body and soul to something that is merely a product of historical circumstances, circumstances that may -- and often do -- change from one generation to the next. Nor does it make any sense to pledge loyalty to a place just because we happen to have been born there. If the Germans, Italians, and Japanese who fought in the Second World War had grown up in one of the countries they attacked, they would have recognized the absolute absurdity of hating someone just for being Polish or French or Chinese. And the fact that we can change our country of residence almost at will -- can move from living in, say, America to living in China, and vice versa -- further illustrates the utter subjectivity of "national identification." What we term "national identity" is not an objective product of reality but an artificial construct imposed upon us by diverse elements of our surroundings -- parents, schools, the media, government. If you grew up in a household where everyone wore black all the time, does that mean the only acceptable or most desirable color is black? Loyalty to a single flag or anthem or strip of territory has equally little to commend itself to any thinking person.
Regrettably, most people don't think -- at least about their own identity. It's so much easier simply to accept whatever labels others bestow upon us. When people ask ME if I'm American, I reply, "I'm from America" -- not because I hate the country of my birth, but because I simply don't identify with it; I don't identify wholly with ANY country. To most people my answer is not so much wrong as just incomprehensible, for "the nation" is such a key part of their own identity, the single largest, most powerful group to which they belong -- always provided, naturally, that everyone else in the group agrees to let them in.
No national grouping, of course, can be large enough to encompass all of humanity, and it is this deficiency which transforms blind patriotic fervor from an individual character flaw to a grievous international scourge. Behind the assertion, "I'm American," "I'm French," "I'm German," "I'm Japanese," "I'm Chinese," lies the corresponding conviction, "You're NOT American," You're NOT French," "You're NOT German," "You're NOT Japanese," "You're NOT Chinese." And from such denial of others' similarity to ourselves it is but a short step -- a VERY short step -- to denying that others have the same rights as us, including, ultimately, the right to live. For nationalism spares us the trouble of having to make moral judgments for ourselves. That which we might heartily condemn in the abstract becomes acceptable, indeed downight admirable, when perpetrated by members ot the group to which we so proudly proclaim our unqualified allegiance. A loook at any reasonably thorough account of human behavior during the last hundred years will bear out my claim time and time and time again.
It was a nineteenth-century American admiral who coined the phrase, "My country right or wrong" -- a sentiment nowadays as prevalent in Beijing and Bogota and Budapest as it is in Washington. An uglier slogan in ANY language is hard to imagine. Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice gave eloquent expression four centuries ago to our common humanity, to the hopes and fears and desires that all of us share simply by virtue of being human. Nationalism denies that common humanity. One may legitimately respect and admire certain ideas or principles or customs which pervade a particular country and seek to extend the same elsewhere. But to make the country itself an object of unconditional veneration is to sanction thoughts and deeds as vicious as they are stupid. Better by far to confine our affections to those we know personally. Do such firsthand acquaintances always merit our affection? No, not always. But delusions about a friend usually hurt none but ourselves.
POSTSCRIPT
Above is the transcript of a speech I gave at a Toastmasters International meeting in Beijing. A week afterwards I was, in effect, kicked out of that particular TM club -- a small but telling sign of China's insistence upon intellectual conformity. Who says ideas no longer matter?
Nationalism is, in the first instance, inherently irrational, because countries themselves have no eternal or completely objective reality. Of the roughly two hundred sovereign states existing today, none -- NONE -- was in existence two thousand years ago, and there's no guarantee any of them will be around two thousand years hence. So why devote one's body and soul to something that is merely a product of historical circumstances, circumstances that may -- and often do -- change from one generation to the next. Nor does it make any sense to pledge loyalty to a place just because we happen to have been born there. If the Germans, Italians, and Japanese who fought in the Second World War had grown up in one of the countries they attacked, they would have recognized the absolute absurdity of hating someone just for being Polish or French or Chinese. And the fact that we can change our country of residence almost at will -- can move from living in, say, America to living in China, and vice versa -- further illustrates the utter subjectivity of "national identification." What we term "national identity" is not an objective product of reality but an artificial construct imposed upon us by diverse elements of our surroundings -- parents, schools, the media, government. If you grew up in a household where everyone wore black all the time, does that mean the only acceptable or most desirable color is black? Loyalty to a single flag or anthem or strip of territory has equally little to commend itself to any thinking person.
Regrettably, most people don't think -- at least about their own identity. It's so much easier simply to accept whatever labels others bestow upon us. When people ask ME if I'm American, I reply, "I'm from America" -- not because I hate the country of my birth, but because I simply don't identify with it; I don't identify wholly with ANY country. To most people my answer is not so much wrong as just incomprehensible, for "the nation" is such a key part of their own identity, the single largest, most powerful group to which they belong -- always provided, naturally, that everyone else in the group agrees to let them in.
No national grouping, of course, can be large enough to encompass all of humanity, and it is this deficiency which transforms blind patriotic fervor from an individual character flaw to a grievous international scourge. Behind the assertion, "I'm American," "I'm French," "I'm German," "I'm Japanese," "I'm Chinese," lies the corresponding conviction, "You're NOT American," You're NOT French," "You're NOT German," "You're NOT Japanese," "You're NOT Chinese." And from such denial of others' similarity to ourselves it is but a short step -- a VERY short step -- to denying that others have the same rights as us, including, ultimately, the right to live. For nationalism spares us the trouble of having to make moral judgments for ourselves. That which we might heartily condemn in the abstract becomes acceptable, indeed downight admirable, when perpetrated by members ot the group to which we so proudly proclaim our unqualified allegiance. A loook at any reasonably thorough account of human behavior during the last hundred years will bear out my claim time and time and time again.
It was a nineteenth-century American admiral who coined the phrase, "My country right or wrong" -- a sentiment nowadays as prevalent in Beijing and Bogota and Budapest as it is in Washington. An uglier slogan in ANY language is hard to imagine. Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice gave eloquent expression four centuries ago to our common humanity, to the hopes and fears and desires that all of us share simply by virtue of being human. Nationalism denies that common humanity. One may legitimately respect and admire certain ideas or principles or customs which pervade a particular country and seek to extend the same elsewhere. But to make the country itself an object of unconditional veneration is to sanction thoughts and deeds as vicious as they are stupid. Better by far to confine our affections to those we know personally. Do such firsthand acquaintances always merit our affection? No, not always. But delusions about a friend usually hurt none but ourselves.
POSTSCRIPT
Above is the transcript of a speech I gave at a Toastmasters International meeting in Beijing. A week afterwards I was, in effect, kicked out of that particular TM club -- a small but telling sign of China's insistence upon intellectual conformity. Who says ideas no longer matter?
Sunday, April 5, 2009
An Intractable Imperfection
Of all the practices which render "human civilization" a contradiction in terms, perhaps the most pernicious is that of irrational discrimination -- of treating others as inferior to oneself on account of their skin color or their gender or their nationality or their sexual orientation or their religious beliefs or the size of their wallets. What makes such discrimination even more horrific is that the cause of the bigotry which lies behind it is as easy to discern as it is difficult to eliminate.
While different bigotries may have different impetuses at different times, at bottom virtually all those who impose, enforce, or agree with discriminatory measures against fellow human beings they do not regard as "fellows" share one trait in common: a notable dearth of empathy. If men, whites, Christians, straights, billionaires could put themselves in the shoes of women, blacks, Jews, gays, paupers, at least half the world's injustices would vanish overnight -- or never have come to exist in the first place. And the only effective way to foster such empathy is through education -- in the form of personal examples set by parents, in the form of classroom discussions run by teachers, in the form of government- or business-sponsored programs on television, in the form of subjecting tomorrow's would-be bigots to firsthand experience of bigotry today. This last would seem an especially powerful pedagogical tool, given the average person's innate self-centeredness.
To be sure, I am hardly the first to recognize the importance of education in shaping one's attitude toward others. The musical "South Pacific" contains a dandy little tune about how "you've got to be carefully taught" to hate people who seem different from you. The same message has been hammered home in hundreds if not thousands of intellectually more "reputable" venues. And the number of individuals who dedicate their lives to preaching tolerance continues to grow.
Yet grounds for optimism remain few. Narrow in scope, most of these educational endeavors aim to reduce this or that particular manifestation of bigotry rather than bigotry per se. So the world still abounds with philosemitic Christians who hate gays, gay-friendly heterosexuals who loathe blacks, and men of every creed and color who look down upon women.
A more fundamental problem concerns the "nature of the beast" itself (and I use the word "beast" deliberately). However great their education, most human beings -- not all, by any means, but the overwhelming majority -- are simply incapable of imagining themselves to be someone other than who they are -- and thus unable to cultivate that level of empathy without which neither bigotry nor the resultant discrimination can ever be laid to permanent rest. Gradually, it is true, homo sapiens may -- MAY -- do more to deserve that appellation. But should aliens from another world one day decide to eliminate their human inferiors, humanity would certainly have no legitimate reason to protest.
While different bigotries may have different impetuses at different times, at bottom virtually all those who impose, enforce, or agree with discriminatory measures against fellow human beings they do not regard as "fellows" share one trait in common: a notable dearth of empathy. If men, whites, Christians, straights, billionaires could put themselves in the shoes of women, blacks, Jews, gays, paupers, at least half the world's injustices would vanish overnight -- or never have come to exist in the first place. And the only effective way to foster such empathy is through education -- in the form of personal examples set by parents, in the form of classroom discussions run by teachers, in the form of government- or business-sponsored programs on television, in the form of subjecting tomorrow's would-be bigots to firsthand experience of bigotry today. This last would seem an especially powerful pedagogical tool, given the average person's innate self-centeredness.
To be sure, I am hardly the first to recognize the importance of education in shaping one's attitude toward others. The musical "South Pacific" contains a dandy little tune about how "you've got to be carefully taught" to hate people who seem different from you. The same message has been hammered home in hundreds if not thousands of intellectually more "reputable" venues. And the number of individuals who dedicate their lives to preaching tolerance continues to grow.
Yet grounds for optimism remain few. Narrow in scope, most of these educational endeavors aim to reduce this or that particular manifestation of bigotry rather than bigotry per se. So the world still abounds with philosemitic Christians who hate gays, gay-friendly heterosexuals who loathe blacks, and men of every creed and color who look down upon women.
A more fundamental problem concerns the "nature of the beast" itself (and I use the word "beast" deliberately). However great their education, most human beings -- not all, by any means, but the overwhelming majority -- are simply incapable of imagining themselves to be someone other than who they are -- and thus unable to cultivate that level of empathy without which neither bigotry nor the resultant discrimination can ever be laid to permanent rest. Gradually, it is true, homo sapiens may -- MAY -- do more to deserve that appellation. But should aliens from another world one day decide to eliminate their human inferiors, humanity would certainly have no legitimate reason to protest.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Why I am a Zionist
Deeply aware of the harmful consequences wrought throughout history by unflinching adherence to this or that particular ideological creed (political, economic, theological, artistic, whatever), I have little sympathy -- intellectual or otherwise -- with "isms" of any sort. Far better, I think, to consider situations and problems on a case-by-case basis rather than try to subordinate everyithing to the kind of ideological strait-jacket that most isms represent. To this longstanding distrust of ideational systematization, however, I make two exceptions. One is individualism. The other is Zionism. And my belief in individualism is subject to all sorts of constraints.
Behind Theodor Herzl's push for a Jewish state lay two (distinct but overlapping) motives. One was his belief that the Jewish people, if joined together in their own community and allowed to give full vent to to all their abilities and aspirations, could make even more indelible contributions than they already had to human civilization. Antisemitism comprised the other, more immediately visible spur to Herzl's vision. It was the Dreyfus Affair in France which convinced Herzl that Jews could never be truly secure lving among the Gentiles, that only a state of their own could guarantee the Jews' survival, literal and otherwise. Regarding the notion of a Jewish "collectivity" whose existence would somehow benefit the whole human race I am agnostic at best; when it comes to creativity and genius, lving among one's own "kind" is often far more stultifying to individual creativity and genius than dwelling amidst strangers and enemies (as the Jewish experience itself amply attests). But Herzl's prognosis of the antisemitism which makes a Jewish state a vital necessity rather than just a desirable luxury remains all too accurate.
While I have never encountered any antisemitic remarks directed against me personally, evidence of antisemitism -- or, at the very least, of an inclination to view Jews as somehow different from, and by implication inferior to, everyone else -- has not been lacking in my experience. More memorable indications include the following:
(1) One of my students in Hungary, in an essay dealing with the subject of money, repeated the old canard about Jews controlling most of the world's finances. And a leading historian in the university department where I taught insisted that the Jews themselves -- by virtue of their wealth as well as their predominance in certain fields such as law and journalism -- bore the lion's share of responsibility for the Nazi onslaught against them. (That most Magyars continue to attribute the actual slaughter of 400,000+ Hungarian Jews in 1944-45 to the fewer than 300 Germans who entered the country in mid-1944, rather than to the thousands upon thousands of the Germans' willing Hungarian helpers, is, I believe, a reflection less of antisemitism than of nationalism. After all, today's Hungarians show a similar reluctance to criticize their forebears' discriminatory "magyarization" policy of the nineteenth century.)
(2) At a two-hour seminar I conducted on antisemitism, students of Latvia's leading university revealed a veritable array of standard antisemitic stereotypes: Jews were unduly clannish and didn't want to be friends with anyone else, Jews cared only about making money, Jews were averse to working the land (i.e., as farmers), Jews felt no attachmment to the countries where they lived, etc., etc., etc. (It was while living in Latvia, too, that I witnessed vestigial antisemitism from another, far more respected source, the BBC, whose coverage of the then-latest Israeli-Palestinian clash was hopelessly one-sided. An interview with a Palestinian spokesperson began with a civil question about why they were fighting Israel, while an immediately subsequent interview with the Israli Defense Minister began thus: "So, Mr. Minister, how many Palestinians did you kill today?" To be fair, though, it was another BBC broadcaster who reported starker proof yet of Europe's still vibrant antisemitic tradition: an editorial cartoon in Madrid's leading newspaper which depicted an image of Jesus above a Bethlehem church that Israli soldiers had fire upon in an effort to dislodge several Palestinian gunmen who had taken refuge there. The caption below the Jesus drawing read: "My God, my God, have they come to crucify me again?" Old ways of non-thinking do die hard, don't they?)
(3) In an (outwardly civil) argument on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the head of the Thai branch of an internationally renowned NGO told me that the Jews did not need a homeland of their own, that Jews who were persecuted in places like Russia or Syria could be helped by those Jewish moguls who dominated finance, government, and the media in the West.
(4) More than one Russian I met during my brief stay in Kazan referred -- casually, not maliciously -- to "Jews" and "Russians," as though a person could never be both. (This, however, was far less annoying to me than certain remarks made by a guest American lecturer -- an expert on early modern Polish Jewry -- during one of her scheduled public talks at the university. To a student who asked her assessment of Russian antisemitism past and present, the professor replied that reports of such were grossly exaggerated, that [for example] not all the czars were against the Jews [though precisely who she had in mind was never clarified], that she herself -- with a discernibly Jewish last name -- had been treated with the utmost courtesy and respect by all the Russians she had met during her trip. One harlly needs a PhD to spout -- or spot -- such nonsense.)
(5) In our first -- and last -- sustained conversation on politics, the woman whose house I lived in during my recent stay in San Francisco said that "the Zionists" were to blame for blocking the arms embargo which would've prevented Hitler from launching war in 1939. That such a claim rested on more (or should I say less?) than a singularly perverse non-reading of history was later demonstrated by (among other remarks) the woman's scathing denunciation of "the Zionist/Jewish scum" who had made her life so miserable. (Or so she loudly proclaimed in the course of a telephone conversation the bulk of which, mercifully, I could not overhear.)
(6) In talking about Israel's recent attack on Gaza, one of my newfound acquaintances here in Korea has admitted he hates Jews -- less on account of Israeli actions than because of some bad dealings he (or his company) had with an overseas Jewish financier. Further conversation seems to have changed his mind, at least as far as Israel is concerned (he freely admitting his ignorance on that subject). But to what extent he still harbors a vestigial antipathy toward "the Jewish race" I cannot say with any certainty.
Individually, each of these episodes betokens little but stupidity and/or bigotry on the part of its protagonist. And even collectively, they cannot be said to signify anything so ominous as a "trend" or a "forecast." But they do serve as sharp reminders that the antisemitism of which Herzl spoke over a century ago remains alive and well, even in places where the "Jewish question" has never really existed.
Which is not to suggest that we are on the verge of a second Shoah. For reasons having more to do with geopolitics than with humanitarianism, no sane person or government today seriously contemplates attempting to finish the job Hitler began; had the people of Darfur or the victims of the Khmer Rouge or the Muslims of Bosnia possessed nuclear weapons, the rest of the world would no doubt have looked upon their respective plights with somewhat less "blinded" vision. But personal experience as well as extensive reading has convinced me that nary a gentile eye would blink if the Jews just "disappeared," either figuratively (i.e., through assimilation) or literally. Thus I regard the continued existence of Israel as a moral no less than a strategic imperative. That Israel is also a haven of individualism represents merely another point in its favor.
Behind Theodor Herzl's push for a Jewish state lay two (distinct but overlapping) motives. One was his belief that the Jewish people, if joined together in their own community and allowed to give full vent to to all their abilities and aspirations, could make even more indelible contributions than they already had to human civilization. Antisemitism comprised the other, more immediately visible spur to Herzl's vision. It was the Dreyfus Affair in France which convinced Herzl that Jews could never be truly secure lving among the Gentiles, that only a state of their own could guarantee the Jews' survival, literal and otherwise. Regarding the notion of a Jewish "collectivity" whose existence would somehow benefit the whole human race I am agnostic at best; when it comes to creativity and genius, lving among one's own "kind" is often far more stultifying to individual creativity and genius than dwelling amidst strangers and enemies (as the Jewish experience itself amply attests). But Herzl's prognosis of the antisemitism which makes a Jewish state a vital necessity rather than just a desirable luxury remains all too accurate.
While I have never encountered any antisemitic remarks directed against me personally, evidence of antisemitism -- or, at the very least, of an inclination to view Jews as somehow different from, and by implication inferior to, everyone else -- has not been lacking in my experience. More memorable indications include the following:
(1) One of my students in Hungary, in an essay dealing with the subject of money, repeated the old canard about Jews controlling most of the world's finances. And a leading historian in the university department where I taught insisted that the Jews themselves -- by virtue of their wealth as well as their predominance in certain fields such as law and journalism -- bore the lion's share of responsibility for the Nazi onslaught against them. (That most Magyars continue to attribute the actual slaughter of 400,000+ Hungarian Jews in 1944-45 to the fewer than 300 Germans who entered the country in mid-1944, rather than to the thousands upon thousands of the Germans' willing Hungarian helpers, is, I believe, a reflection less of antisemitism than of nationalism. After all, today's Hungarians show a similar reluctance to criticize their forebears' discriminatory "magyarization" policy of the nineteenth century.)
(2) At a two-hour seminar I conducted on antisemitism, students of Latvia's leading university revealed a veritable array of standard antisemitic stereotypes: Jews were unduly clannish and didn't want to be friends with anyone else, Jews cared only about making money, Jews were averse to working the land (i.e., as farmers), Jews felt no attachmment to the countries where they lived, etc., etc., etc. (It was while living in Latvia, too, that I witnessed vestigial antisemitism from another, far more respected source, the BBC, whose coverage of the then-latest Israeli-Palestinian clash was hopelessly one-sided. An interview with a Palestinian spokesperson began with a civil question about why they were fighting Israel, while an immediately subsequent interview with the Israli Defense Minister began thus: "So, Mr. Minister, how many Palestinians did you kill today?" To be fair, though, it was another BBC broadcaster who reported starker proof yet of Europe's still vibrant antisemitic tradition: an editorial cartoon in Madrid's leading newspaper which depicted an image of Jesus above a Bethlehem church that Israli soldiers had fire upon in an effort to dislodge several Palestinian gunmen who had taken refuge there. The caption below the Jesus drawing read: "My God, my God, have they come to crucify me again?" Old ways of non-thinking do die hard, don't they?)
(3) In an (outwardly civil) argument on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the head of the Thai branch of an internationally renowned NGO told me that the Jews did not need a homeland of their own, that Jews who were persecuted in places like Russia or Syria could be helped by those Jewish moguls who dominated finance, government, and the media in the West.
(4) More than one Russian I met during my brief stay in Kazan referred -- casually, not maliciously -- to "Jews" and "Russians," as though a person could never be both. (This, however, was far less annoying to me than certain remarks made by a guest American lecturer -- an expert on early modern Polish Jewry -- during one of her scheduled public talks at the university. To a student who asked her assessment of Russian antisemitism past and present, the professor replied that reports of such were grossly exaggerated, that [for example] not all the czars were against the Jews [though precisely who she had in mind was never clarified], that she herself -- with a discernibly Jewish last name -- had been treated with the utmost courtesy and respect by all the Russians she had met during her trip. One harlly needs a PhD to spout -- or spot -- such nonsense.)
(5) In our first -- and last -- sustained conversation on politics, the woman whose house I lived in during my recent stay in San Francisco said that "the Zionists" were to blame for blocking the arms embargo which would've prevented Hitler from launching war in 1939. That such a claim rested on more (or should I say less?) than a singularly perverse non-reading of history was later demonstrated by (among other remarks) the woman's scathing denunciation of "the Zionist/Jewish scum" who had made her life so miserable. (Or so she loudly proclaimed in the course of a telephone conversation the bulk of which, mercifully, I could not overhear.)
(6) In talking about Israel's recent attack on Gaza, one of my newfound acquaintances here in Korea has admitted he hates Jews -- less on account of Israeli actions than because of some bad dealings he (or his company) had with an overseas Jewish financier. Further conversation seems to have changed his mind, at least as far as Israel is concerned (he freely admitting his ignorance on that subject). But to what extent he still harbors a vestigial antipathy toward "the Jewish race" I cannot say with any certainty.
Individually, each of these episodes betokens little but stupidity and/or bigotry on the part of its protagonist. And even collectively, they cannot be said to signify anything so ominous as a "trend" or a "forecast." But they do serve as sharp reminders that the antisemitism of which Herzl spoke over a century ago remains alive and well, even in places where the "Jewish question" has never really existed.
Which is not to suggest that we are on the verge of a second Shoah. For reasons having more to do with geopolitics than with humanitarianism, no sane person or government today seriously contemplates attempting to finish the job Hitler began; had the people of Darfur or the victims of the Khmer Rouge or the Muslims of Bosnia possessed nuclear weapons, the rest of the world would no doubt have looked upon their respective plights with somewhat less "blinded" vision. But personal experience as well as extensive reading has convinced me that nary a gentile eye would blink if the Jews just "disappeared," either figuratively (i.e., through assimilation) or literally. Thus I regard the continued existence of Israel as a moral no less than a strategic imperative. That Israel is also a haven of individualism represents merely another point in its favor.
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