The European Union

Our Lindblad cruise on the Danube included some outstanding lectures by one of Lindblad’s resident historians, David Barnes, who incidentally is a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Historical Society (all the Lindblad staff we have met thus far are truly outstanding!). In one of his lectures he attempted to give us – all of us Americans – a European historian’s perspective on the EU. To begin with, he pointed out that recent polls show that less than a quarter of Americans are even aware that there is such a thing as the European Union, and even fewer have any idea what it is trying to accomplish.

Those Americans that are at least dimly aware of the EU tend to think of it as simply a large trading block, assembled to compete with America and therefore perhaps something of a threat to our economy. That, he argues, misses the point entirely.

To understand the political vision behind the EU, he argues, one must understand how thoroughly devastated all of Europe was by the two horrendous world wars of the 20^th century. The vision of the original founders of the EU was to knit all of Europe together so tightly – socially, economically, and politically – that there could never again be such wars among its member states. The vision is not unlike the vision the founders of the United States had, to bind the separate state into a single nation, while yet keeping the individuality of the member states. A byproduct of that effort may indeed include creation of economic and political power, but in the long run it is very much in our interests as well as Europe’s to avoid any further world wars on the European continent.

There are some in America, especially among the conservative right, who see the rise of the EU as a threat to our nation. That is probably a very short-sighted view, since a new world war on the European continent would be a much larger threat to us than any economic competition the EU might give us.

Life emulating art

I have been rereading John LeCarre’s wonderful book The Tailor of Panama. I think LeCarre has a wonderful talent for developing characters, even though many of his characters lead somewhat tortured internal lives. George Smiley, his quintessential spy character, mixes brilliance in his work with a quiet desperation in his home life. In the Tailor of Panama, a small-time British con man and ex-convict who has reinvented himself as a high-class gentlemen’s tailor in Panama is recruited (or rather blackmailed) by an ambitious British Secret Service agent into spying. Since he really knows no secrets, he is forced to invent his intelligence product, and his network of sources. As a good con man, he invents what his masters want to hear, so of course they believe him. In LeCarre’s novel, as in life, such a situation doesn’t end well.

By chance I am reading this just as the news breaks about the administration’s primary source of information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction; the source upon whom they relied in launching the invasion of Iraq and embroiling us in the current tar pit there. Rafid Ahmed Alwan (codename “Curveball”) turns out to be, in essence, a small-time Iraqi con man who made up a lot of stuff to make himself more attractive to the German intelligence agencies, and to improve his chances of winning asylum in Germany. The German intelligence agencies passed along his stories to the US intelligence community, but refused to let anyone but their own German intelligence agents interview him directly. And since his stories supported what the Bush administration wanted to hear and already believed, few questioned his reliability. Those few in the intelligence community who pointed out that there was little or no corroborating evidence to support his stories were pointedly ignored, just as they are in LeCarre’s story.

Many of LeCarre’s stories are about the workings of a bumbling, incompetent, even immoral intelligence agency staffed with self-serving career bureaucrats and presided over by not-very-intelligent political masters who hold their positions by virtue of belonging to the ruling class, and because of who they know rather than what they know. One cannot but wonder how far life in the present American administration mirrors the art in LeCarre’s novels.

Prague – Oct 18

Prague is a beautiful city, home of intellectual and artistic giants like Franz Kafka and Alfonse Mucha, and beloved of Mozart. But behind the elegant beauty of Prague lie dark shadows to remind us of the fearsome intolerance of which supposedly-civilized humans are still capable. In the old Jewish quarter in the heart of present-day Prague stands the Pinkas Synagogue, built in 1535 and in peaceful daily use thereafter for almost 400 years, closed by the Nazis when they invaded Prague and kept closed by the Communist reign that followed the war. On its walls today are inscribed the names of almost 80,000 Prague Jews who were deported to Nazi concentration camps and never returned, some 10,000 of them children. It is a profoundly moving experience to walk through this building, reading the names and looking at the pictures that the children drew as they awaited deportation and death.

We ought never to forget that this Nazi atrocity was committed by a modern, Western, democratically elected government (yes, Hitler was lawfully elected by his constituents), operating within the legal framework in place at the time, justified by a “scientific” racial theory and a coherent official foreign policy, and with the full support of a great many people both within his nation and outside of it. If we think it can’t happen again, we are deluding ourselves. If we think it could never happen in America, we are deluding ourselves. Intolerance, irrationality, oppression and violence are endemic in human cultures, and are kept at bay only by ceaseless vigilance. We forget that lesson at our peril.

Postings will now resume

We are back from our trip and in reach of the internet again, so postings will now resume. Some of the next few posting will be based on experiences during the trip.

No new posts until November

We will be out of the country and out of reach of internet connections until early next month, so there will be no new posts until early November.

The importance of cultural context

There is a myth in the world that important things can be studied in the abstract. For example, there is a prevalent myth in the scientific world that scientific subjects like physics or mathematics or molecular biology can be studied in a “pure” form, unaffected by culture. The field of economics has been laboring for decades to build complex models that largely ignore culture. Our foreign policy in recent years has been pursued largely in ignorance of cultural effects.

I would argue that no human endeavor is free of cultural effects, not even pure science. Culture has significant effects in steering scientific research toward some areas and away from others – science is as driven by fads and prejudices and dominant “schools” of thought as any other human activity. Religion is certainly all about culture. And politics is all about culture, as is economics, which is why we are having such difficulty in exporting our political and economic systems to some other parts of the world.

Of course cultures are not synonymous with nationalities or ethnic groups. Families have unique cultures. Companies and corporations have unique cultures. Religions have unique cultures. All sorts of human groupings – teams, play groups, bridge clubs, army platoons, etc. – have cultural aspects. Newcomers to these groups have to learn “the way things are done” before they are fully accepted and integrated. Any married couple knows that the two sides of the family have cultural differences – for example a story that might be funny to one side of the family may be offensive to the other side, and woe betide the couple that doesn’t learn this quickly.

Indeed, I expect that most of the difficulties in cross-religion and cross-nationality marriages come from differing cultural expectations – on the proper roles of men and women, on the way to raise children, on the manner in which money is handled, on the acceptable ways to express closeness or anger, and thousands of other cultural aspects, most of them unspoken and even invisible to those within the culture – its just “the way things are done”.

So my argument is that the study of culture is fundamental to the study of just about anything else, and an awareness of these important cultural influences is central to understanding just about anything that matters, from science to economics to religion to politics to history to literature. To ignore the cultural influences that shape these enterprises is to miss the most important driving and shaping forces.

The Wisdom of History

The Teaching Company has put out another brilliant lecture series by Professor J. Rufus Fears (see my book list on the sidebar) entitled “The Wisdom of History”. Professor Fears argues that most of the really terrible things that have happened recently, such as World Wars I and II, Vietnam, and our current mess in Iraq could have been avoided had the nations involved only had leaders who had understood and learned from history. Or as Colin Gray has put it in the introduction to his book “Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare”: “[I do]…not argue that nothing changes, only that little if anything of importance does.” And of course the famous quotation from George Santayana also applies: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Working his way from Ancient Greece forward to the modern day, Rufus Fears shows that each age thought that “things were different” in their age, and the horrors of history couldn’t possibly be repeated in their time – an argument one hears yet again in our time. Surely democracies don’t fight wars with each other (in fact they do, and they are generally longer and bloodier than wars between tyrants), surely modern weapons have made all-out world warfare unthinkable (the same was said of the machine gun and the crossbow in their time), surely if we are all interconnected in a global economy we won’t have such wars (it has happened before, more than once). As usual, we all live in the midst of myths unsupported by history.

In fact, Fears argues, history shows that individual freedom is not a universal value, despite our current political rhetoric. Throughout history, the Middle East has been the graveyard of empires, a fact apparently unknown to the neoconservatives. History shows that nationalism (national self-determination) and religion are far more powerful and universal drivers of history, and that the lust for power is probably the single most durable and dependable human value across all societies. This will offend many who hold sacred our current American idealism, but his arguments and the lessons of history that support them deserve serious attention, if only because the history-blindness of our current political establishment will no doubt sooner or later put America on the “trash heap of history” along with all the great powers and empires of the past.