Clash of Civilizations

On his show last night, Bill Maher had a mini-debate with Fareed Zakaria about the China-US rivalry. Both agreed, as I do, that this relationship is the most important one of the mid-twenty-first-century. Beyond that, Maher claimed that he expected China would out-compete the US because of its impressive record in constructing such things as high-speed rail systems. Zakaria argued that the US has some important advantages, including an open society with lots of talented incoming immigrants and a strong network of international relationships. China’s population, on the other hand, is set to decrease, and its only international treaty is with North Korea. I’m inclined to agree with Zakaria in this debate.

 

At one point Maher suggested that the US could be like Britain, a country that accepted second place after the US overtook it in political and economic influence. Well, sure, why not. Except that I see the China-US rivalry not as country vs. country but as ideology vs. ideology. The real contest is between authoritarianism and democracy. I’m hoping for a victory by democracy in this clash, and I wouldn’t mind if China were to become democratic and then suddenly outpace the US on every front. Unfortunately, current indications are that democracy is not in the cards for China.

 

President Xi Jinping is pushing hard to tighten authoritarian controls and in doing this is reversing that China’s recent liberalizing trends. Furthermore, his aggressive stance abroad has pissed off (Zakaria’s words) Japan, India, Vietnam, and other Asian neighbors with its new concept of itself as a “Wolf Warrior.” China’s Wolf Warrior ideal, widespread today in films and popular culture, is like a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude that you’d expect from an adolescent with wounded pride, not from a great nation. It’s kind of like Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series with its ethos of hurt feelings. Of course, American militarism is a problem of its own, but one I won’t deal with here beyond acknowledging its existence.

 

The emergence of China’s Wolf Warrior spirit is not too surprising given that the Communist government has long promoted a national myth-history that focuses on China’s wounded pride from “a century of humiliation” at the hands of the western powers and the Japanese. The past bullying by westerners and the Japanese is real, but the promotion of a sense of hurt feelings over this past is kind of pathetic. It’s obviously part of the Communist authority’s effort to control the thinking of its citizens. By making people feel victimized about past bullying and at the same time promoting the idea that the Chinese Communist Party represents the essence China, the leaders are able to twist criticism of its policies into criticism of China itself. In this way they tap into the wounded pride ethos and stir up popular resentment against criticism of the party. 

 

The Chinese Communist Party has been stoking resentment over China’s past for 70 years now and through this resentment has cultivated an attitude of nationalistic belligerence. It’s a belligerence that the government sometimes finds hard to control and could eventually push Chinese leaders into confrontations that are dangerously provocative to the US or to its Asian neighbors. China’s insistence on absorbing Taiwan into its authoritarian orbit - by violent force if they deem it necessary - is one area in particular where danger lies.

 

China would be so much better off if it were to reject the Leninist idea of party thought-control and reach instead into its own deep roots for a sense of identity. According to a longstanding Confucian ideal, good rulers strive to gain followers and influence through wisdom and benevolence. Grabbing territory by military conquest was regarded as immoral. Following a Confucian path, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) could, without military threat, draw Taiwan so powerfully into its orbit that the issue of violent reunification would seem pointless, even downright idiotic. It wouldn’t be hard, if the PRC were only willing to open its society to a free press, guaranteed freedom of expression generally, and transparency in governance. Such a transformation would enable the government to act with confidence and benevolence on the world stage.The people of Taiwan already enjoy democratic freedoms, why does Beijing pretend that the Chinese people can’t be allowed the same?

 

Xi Jinping is no fan of an open or transparent society. One indication of Mainland China’s stifling restrictions is the recent disappearance of tennis star Peng Shuai. About three weeks ago, Ms. Peng posted on social media an accusation of sexual harassment by a government official. Her post was quickly taken down. Following this came further notices claiming to be hers which denied the original accusation and insisted that she was doing fine. I don’t believe she is, and neither does the world of women’s tennis. One short, simple gesture indicating that it respects its own deeply rooted Confucian morality would be for the Chinese government to allow Ms. Peng to travel internationally and be interviewed by those who are concerned about her fate. The fact that this is not happening is a measure of the Chinese government’s lack of self-confidence. The world would be a much better place if the U.S. were to restrain its global militarism and China were to open its society to free expression and thereby assume an honored place in the international community of like-minded nations.

 

                                  Peng Shuai

      

(By the way, here’s a plug for Fareed, who is presenting a special on CNN Sunday evening: China's Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America.)

Education vs. Catastrophe

On Bill Maher’s show last week, Columbia professor John McWhorter made a crack about the huge chunk of time students waste in college. He described them as spending four years pretending to like Shakespeare. McWhorter is a smart guy and a professor of linguistics, so I’m not sure why he would disparage the value of a liberal arts education. But there it is.

His comment was part of a conversation joined in by Maher, the gist of which was that post-secondary education, when it is not preparing students for a specific job, is a pointless exercise.

 

This is not a new idea. Back in 1966, when I had just finished my freshman year, two of my parents’ friends asked me what I was majoring in. When I told them political science*, one of them smiled sarcastically at other and said, “What does a political scientist do besides teach other political scientists?”

 

My somewhat feeble answer was, “They teach other people too.” But if he had asked me that same question today, I would have had more to say. I might have started by pointing out that the more political science classes students take, the less likely they will be to storm the Capitol in an effort to destroy American democracy.

 

The truth is that education at the college level is supposed to teach people a number of things that are not job-related, one of them being how to support and protect democracy.

 

The mission statement of the liberal arts college where I taught for some 30 years starts like this: “Rollins College educates students for global citizenship and responsible leadership, empowering graduates to pursue meaningful lives and productive careers.”

 

Yeah. There it is:

 

Global citizenship

Responsible leadership

Meaningful lives

 

I think that last reference to “productive careers” is a relatively new addition, aimed at encouraging parents to understand that their kids will get a job after they graduate. And they do.

 

Two Rollins graduates of my acquaintance from the class of 2010 majored in Classics and English. They are now happily and productively employed as, respectively, a nurse and a children’s librarian. They are not only verifiably good at their jobs, they are also appreciative of the level of understanding about the world that their educations gave them. Their lives are rich and meaningful, and neither one of them participated in the violent assault on the Capitol last January.

 

One of the most dramatic social transitions of the last decade has been a shift of educated Americans toward the Democratic party and of the less well-educated toward the cult-like Trumpian GOP. It’s very clear that the better educated a person is, the less likely they will be to accept the wacky, self-serving ideas that Trump and his servile followers in Congress are dishing out. Education is a good thing, even (or especially) when it is not merely job-oriented. It’s weird that intelligent adults like Maher and McWhorter would sneer at it.  

 

So let me end with a tidbit I gleaned from my education, a remark by H. G. Wells: “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

 

Last January 6 should remind us that education is not necessarily winning this race.

 

                    H. G. Wells - 1866-1946

 

 

*This was before I discovered the glories of anthropology in my junior year.

 

The Establishment - Then and Now

 White supremacists are the greatest domestic threat we face as a nation. So said Attorney General Merrick Garland and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas who testified before the Senate last May. 

According to them, “Those who advocate for the superiority of the white race” are the single greatest domestic threat facing the United States.

 

                Garland and Mayorkas Testifying

 

What’s interesting about this for me is not that white supremacists are a major threat – old news – but the positioning of “the Establishment” against it. You can hardly get more Establishment than the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security and there they were calling out the bigots among us. This is a welcome change for people of my generation who grew up viewing “the Establishment” with hostility and contempt.

 

And the Establishment did deserve contempt in the 1960s and beyond. At that time we had a viciously racist president in Richard Nixon. We also had a notorious bigot running the FBI, namely, J. Edgar Hoover. Beyond this, systemic racism was entrenched and seemingly immovable in every nook and cranny of that era’s institutions.

 

Of course, we can’t say that today everything has changed completely for the better. But we can say that almost everything has changed at least a bit in the right direction. How great is it that our vice president and Secretary of Defense are African-Americans, and that the leaders at Justice and Homeland Security are striving to remind us all about just how nasty and dangerous America’s bigoted weirdos have become? As a child of the Sixties, I say, all this is pretty great.

 

But how did those creepy characters – Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, QAnon wackos, and the rest – get to be so dangerous? I say it’s the Republicans’ fault. Starting with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, continuing with Ronald Reagan’s bigoted “welfare queen” fantasies, and George H. W. Bush’s Willie Horton ads, the GOP has been cultivating racial hatred as a key part of its electoral strategy for decades. The culminations of this unethical racial pandering are the presidency of Donald Trump and the violent assault on the Capitol last January 6.

 

So now the battle lines are almost the opposite of what they were in the 1960s. Inside the White House and Congress we have men and women who are trying to counter the effects of our deep, enduring traditions of injustice. Outside in the streets are throngs, mainly white male throngs, trying with all their might to stop justice and the rule of law from prevailing. Injustice and lawlessness are their bread and butter and thereby lies our danger.

 

Our best long-term hope, I believe, lies in the success of the Biden presidency. That’s why I am hoping that this week’s legislative agenda gets through more or less intact. If Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer can make the economy more efficient and more responsive to the needs of middle class and working-class people, the pull of racial bigotry will begin to lose its appeal. Not for everyone, but for enough people that we will be able to move forward as a united society toward more justice and fair play for everyone. If and when that does happen, I will happily send a congratulatory bouquet and a deeply sincere peace offering to my old enemy, the Establishment.

 

 

 

 

The Tragedy of Afghanistan

Afghanistan’s collapse was all but inevitable it seems, largely because of two underlying factors: ignorance on the part of Americans and widespread corruption in the Afghan government. Some would add a third factor, namely the duplicity of Pakistan in its support of the Taliban, but I will leave that aside for now. I draw these conclusions from my reading of the work of anthropologists and other scholars who have extensive experience studying Afghan society.

 

In 2015 Indiana University anthropologist M. Nazif Shahrani wrote an article with this pessimistic subtitle “Karzai-style Thugocracy or Taliban Theocracy?” Quoting U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, among other American officials, Shahrani wrote that we made the decision to cooperate with warlords despite their lack of support from the local Afghans, mainly because these “thugs” were useful in combat against the Taliban. They were, but only for a limited time.

 

Here are some excerpts from Shahrani’s article:

 

‘‘The U.S. initial support of warlords, reliance on logistics contracting…and the deluge of military and aid spending which overwhelmed the absorptive capacity of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) created an environment that fostered corruption…

‘‘The necessary preconditions for combating corruption did not exist due to delayed understanding of the nature of Afghan corruption, decreasing levels of physical security…, lack of political will on the part of both the international community and [the Afghan government], and lack of effective popular pressure against corruption.” (p. 284)

 

Later, in the same article, Shahrani predicts a Taliban victory - six years before it actually took place. Here’s what he wrote:

 

“The Taliban...have intensified their fight because they think they can overrun the chronically corrupt, ethnically divided, and morally bankrupt thugocracy the U.S. has left behind. Sadly, Afghanistan is likely to fall victim, once again, to the Taliban - or ISIS style theocracy—men with loaded guns, sharpened knives and explosives strapped on their chests, ready to butcher and die for total victory.” (p. 297-98)

The trust-destroying effects of official corruption was made worse by the failure of American or NATO officials to understand and accommodate locally established systems of justice in rural communities. The legal cases that most concerned the Afghans were about property boundaries and legitimate rights of inheritance. And, while Afghan villagers traditionally relied on clan elders and other community leaders to adjudicate their disputes, the American-backed government set up formal courts reflecting western ideas of what a proper judiciary should look like. Distrust of the government weakened these courts and so did their failure to pay attention to the villagers’ needs. Here are some observations by anthropologist Noah Coburn*, who has spent much of the past two decades living in Afghanistan:

“…in the small Afghan town in which I spent time conducting research between 2006 and 2008…, there was little demand among town residents for a formal judicial presence, particularly in the form of a court or local prosecutor. For the most part, small-scale disputes were resolved through local councils of elders…and for larger cases, people would head to one of the courts in the larger town down the road.”

But the American-backed officials ignored the traditional system of justice that the Afghans had always relied on. American efforts were directed at drug trafficking and prosecuting major crimes which were barely relevant to most Afghans. They seemed to have no interest in or understanding of how Afghan villagers traditionally handled disputes

The Taliban, of course, knew how to respond to the disputes that the locals cared about and, though not everyone admired their harsh version of justice, they at least were providing the judicial services that the locals demanded. Their integration into local communities and the lack of such integration on the part of the corrupt urban government was the Talibans’ ticket to success.

The fall of the Afghan government has been shockingly sudden, even though many have seen it coming for years. There is great tragedy in the American and Afghan lives that have been lost on this mishandled mission and in the horrors that many Afghans will now face under Taliban rule. The women of Afghanistan are particularly vulnerable to Taliban religious fanaticism. We can only hope at this point that the abuses they suffer will not be as cruel as our worst fears lead us to expect.

 * Noah’s latest book: Under Contract: The Invisible Workers of America’s Global War