ARCHIVE OF WORKING
OPINIONS
2002
CAN MUSLIMS BEFRIEND NON-MUSLIMS? (31 December 2002)
PROSPECTS OF IRAQ WAR LOOK "FUNNY" (8 December 2002)
CONDITIONS OF GLOBALIZATION DEMAND A GLOBAL AMERICAN VISION (15 November 2002)
WHY DOES "RIVER CREST ESTATES" MAKE ME SO SAD? (31 October 2002)
BUSH WILL NOT INVADE IRAQ (29 September 2002)
WHAT'S PRESIDENT BUSH REALLY THINKING ABOUT SADDAM? (5 September 2002)
THE USA AND THE WORLD NEED "ENLIGHTENMENT II" (1 August 2002)
ARAB INTELLECTUALS AVOID "THE BLAME GAME" (13 July 2002)
A NATIONAL MOMENT FOR RESTORING TRUST (18 June 2002)
FIGHTING TERRORISTS IS ONLY HALF THE JOB FOR BUSH (22 May 2002)
STOP APOLOGIZING TO THE WORLD FOR AMERICAN MASS CULTURE (30 April 2002)
BARNETT NEWMAN AND I, FIFTY YEARS LATER (10 April 2002)
SAMURAI SICK CALL (A personal reflection) (9 March 2002)
CORRECTING THE EXTREMES OF THE REAGAN REVOLUTION (10 February 2002)
ENRON: A CASE OF CORPORATE CHARACTER (13 January 2002)
13 August 1999; last updated 11 February 2004
Richard P. Richter
CAN MUSLIMS BEFRIEND NON-MUSLIMS?
(31 December 2002)
Islamonline.net features a "cyber counselor," a kind of Islamic Dear Abby. Through email, readers ask the cyber counselor for advice on how to behave as good Muslims.
I've been reading these questions and answers in an attempt to learn about the texture of Islamic life. Americans like me whose ignorance of Islam stunned them in the wake of 9-11 need to engage with Islamic culture. And well-intentioned Muslims need to engage with Western culture as they have not done before. It is one long-term way to help move the world, a few persons at a time, beyond the hostile strategies of the moment.
On Christmas day, appropriately, I found the cyber counselor dealing with the question of friendship between Muslims and non-Muslims.
Umar Nigeria emailed his concern that "various ayats in the Qur’an stress we should not take them [non-Muslims] as friends. So how should we behave and act towards them (especially their females who aren't well dressed)? ma'as-salaam."
The cyber counselor at first did not seem to offer much charity to non-Muslims. He quoted the Qur'an's guidance as follows:
"Let not the believers take the unbelievers for friends rather than believers; and whoever does this, he shall have nothing of (the guardianship of) Allah, but you should guard yourselves gainst them, guarding carefully; and Allah makes you cautious of (retribution from) Himself; and to Allah is the eventual coming" (A’lay Imran 3: 28).
But according to the cyber counselor, this scriptural edict is not as simple as it sounds. A good Muslim will not just put up a wall and refuse to communicate with non-believers.
For one thing, Islam is lenient toward Christian and Jewish believers, "People of the Book." Muslim men may even take Christian or Jewish wives even though they do not convert to Islam.
Further, Muslims ought to put on their best behavior toward non-believers, not their worst. The cyber counselor says, "Islam is not just for Muslims but it is for everyone and it is best represented when we treat others as we would be treated hence the importance of human rights in Islam. We are to guard ourselves against those that would have us behave below the standard of ethics that we set for ourselves." He quotes a wise saying of Sufi Kabir Helminski to reinforce this advice.
Buoyed by the words of the Sufi, the cyber counselor then offers a resounding affirmation of human rights. This begins to make an American non-Muslim feel more comfortable: "If we are firm believers in human rights and acknowledge Islam to be as a mercy to the world, then we must also translate this towards the non-Muslims who we come into contact with daily. As you have described there are aspects that we face challenging our nafs – personality or ego, but this is just a part of the many tests we face in life."
It turns out that the only non-believers Muslims need to shun are those who make war against them because of their religion and drive them out of their homes.
But what about those provocatively dressed Western women? The cyber counselor gives socially sophisticated advice on how to deal with them. Let them know "without words and without being rude that [their manner of dress] is not to your liking." The cyber counselor hazards that this will get to the women subconsciously. They might even eventually change their ways as a result of this mannerly disapproval. This counselor clearly is not a Taliban zealot. But he adheres in his fashion to the Islamic principle of female modesty.
So, would a Muslim accept me as a friend? Would I accept him--or her? Maybe so, maybe not. At least now I can see these questions as matters of taste, not matters of strict Islamic law. This insight may be one very small step for humankind toward peace on earth.
PROSPECTS OF IRAQ WAR LOOK "FUNNY"
(8 December 2002)
We're not invading Iraq yet.
Bush is still yipping at Saddam's toes, but he can't take the US into war immediately because he acquiesced in the participation of UN inspectors. We're in a seemingly unreal interlude. Hans Blix and his "blixens" are scurrying around the Iraqi landscape in blue hats looking for nukes in haystacks and germs in palaces. And the UN is preparing to run a fine tooth comb through the thousands of pages in Iraq's report on its weapons capabilities.
I watched Ted Koppel interview Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, on "Nightline" on 4 December 2002. This too seemed unreal. It did not seem like a real interview with a major leader while the world held its breath.
Aziz managed to talk to Koppel about Bush and the US with the ironic detachment and worldly ease of a drama critic. Koppel managed to maintain his stoic but patronizing calm even as Aziz tweaked Washington "warmongers." Ted's gaze held steady—with a twinkle, to be sure--as Aziz calmly observed that Bush was simply out to control Iraqi oil and elevate Israel to imperial status. And Ted sat stony-faced as Aziz, with weary disdain, dismissed his bottom-line question: did Iraq, as the Bush administration alleged, have something to hide?
In "Up Close," his new late show immediately following "Nightline," Koppel that same night turned his attention in a taped interview to Garry Trudeau, the Doonesbury man. Trudeau talked about the way he inserts real public figures into a cartoon context.
Trudeau starts with a real public figure, Bush 43, say. (Trudeau finds this easier to do than he otherwise would because he knew George when as Yale undergraduates they worked together on ordering the beer for parties.) He turns his subject into a cartoon of the same name with Trudeau's imaginary words ballooning from his mouth. The result is supposed to be funny in the way the "funnies" are funny--cartoonish.
This cartoonish effect, however, is supposed to remind you of the real public figure, Bush 43, with which the process started. That reminder is supposed to evoke a satirical insight into the real Bush 43.
But that does not convert the cartoon into op-ed journalism; it retains its identity as the "funnies."
Trudeau seemed to be saying that he has it both ways. He deals with reality; and he deals with his made-up "reality." And the two have a bearing on one another.
This insight helped me to think about Koppel's interview of Aziz.
Ted and Aziz both cleverly turned themselves into cartoon characters in front of the camera. They talked in Trudeauian balloons and in doing so made themselves look "funny." But—you had to remind yourself that Aziz is a genuine participant in the international crisis at hand and that Ted is a serious seeker of the facts about it on our behalf. The satirical effect of the show was to cast the Iraqi crisis in a "funny" light that perhaps illuminated the real situation.
"Nightline" is not Doonesbury. Tariq Aziz is not a joke. Ted Koppel is not a cartoon character. When Trudeau works, he squeezes a journalistic op-ed spin from his cartoons. When Ted and Aziz appeared together, they created a cartoonish effect--unwittingly or not--out of serious TV journalism.
But that did not make the prospect of a war in Iraq funny at all.
CONDITIONS OF GLOBALIZATION
DEMAND A GLOBAL AMERICAN VISION
(15 November 2002)
The November elections around the country hinged on decisions of a small percentage of the nation's voters. Still, President Bush now has a mandate--because he says he has a mandate, as one pundit put it.
That mandate--self-proclaimed and media-affirmed--now will lead to a Republican push for a "permanent" tax cut favoring mainly the wealthy. It will result in the appointment of right-to-life judges, long delayed by Democrats. It will accelerate Republican action to reduce funding for protecting the environment and providing safety nets for the poor and needy. It will allow Republicans to lower the temperature of corporate reform in response to recent scandals.
And in international affairs, it will give Bush a confident feeling when he has to make a decision about invading Iraq. It will tell him that his general conduct of the war on terror is on the right course.
The American mainstream media loves a winner, Republican or Democrat. It has affirmed the Bush declaration of a mandate. We do not hear much from news shows or pundits about the inherent weakness of the Bush administration's approach to the complex global situation. They are busy chattering about US military preparations for an attack on Iraq.
This public opaqueness makes all the more urgent the need for long-range, in-depth consideration of American global policy.
The Bush "mandate" is a mandate for the nation to reconsider carefully what America is doing in the world.
The Bush people believe that they are geo-political realists. They believe that their tough stance on grounds of American self-interest offers the best immediate protection from those who would harm us. They rattle sabers, position the US unilaterally, and strategize preemptively in order to show our unprecedented power. This power and the will to use it have the best chance, in their view, of ordering the world to our advantage.
Their recent paper on military strategy makes no bones about this. It declares that we are number one and will rebuff any challenger, friend or foe, to that position.
Short-term, Bush's brashness has had a bracing effect internationally. It has forced, if not shamed, the United Nations to endorse his view of Iraq. It has persuaded Saddam Hussein to agree to renew inspections. Under Bush, America's readiness to exercise its power helps stabilize the fluidity of global affairs. Even our most heated enemies at least now know where we're coming from; they will be less likely to miscalculate our resolve in the face of future attacks.
But America's use of visible power to order current events is a tactic. It demands a strategic global context to be viable. Aside from some occasional rhetoric, Bush has yet to embed his tough short-term actions in a foresighted American agenda for the new era of globalization.
The bullyboy "we're number one" tactical agenda promises little long-term hope for America. It is not realistic to expect the US to sustain its unilateral position astride the globe over a long period of time.
To be sure, whatever comes, the US will continue to be vital. We will continue to renew our open-ended national life with the enthusiasm and ambition of immigrants from all over the world: America in some unique sense IS the world. Our business and financial maturity will keep our economic engine going.
But rising centers of power in China, Russia, and India and the rising consciousness of the Muslim third of the globe assure that in the 21st century a single superpower will be unable to control global development. America is destined to participate in an agenda created and shared by all the nations and peoples of the world, like it or not.
The actions of the Bush people say that they do not like it. In one of the presidential campaign debates, Bush said the US should behave "humbly" toward other nations. One would not associate the word today with the US policy position in the world.
"Realists" don't like to talk about ethics for fear of sounding soft. What faces the US, however, is the ethical issue of our relations with other nations and other people in the world under conditions of globalization-- the revolution in communications, finance, and enterprise made possible by technological connectivity.
Peter Singer of Princeton University hit this nail on the head in his essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education (11 October 2002), "Navigating the Ethics of Globalization." Singer said:
My thesis is that how well we come through the era of globalization (perhaps whether we come through it at all) will depend on how we respond ethically to the idea that we live in one world.
The current Bush approach emerges from a vision of world order that is unsuited to the conditions of globalization. And those conditions will only intensify in the years ahead.
The conditions of globalization give new urgency to the Singerian vision of an America participating in the governance of world affairs through international law and protocol.
The conditions of globalization also give new meaning to homeland security. Even the world's single superpower cannot now assure itself of security within its borders, as Singer points out in his essay. The rest of the world now interpenetrates America just as American power and culture interpenetrate the world.
If we cannot unilaterally order world events and if we cannot provide safe haven for ourselves from external attack, Bush tactics alone will not serve America's best long-term interests.
The US needs to embrace the reality of a world that now is inescapably interconnected. It needs to base its vision of the future and the policies leading to its realization on that reality. It needs to lay to rest the belief that a single superpower can command the affairs of the globe as it thinks best.
This requires the US to join the global community as a respectful participant in humankind's greatest project. That project begins with the acknowledgment of an irreducible common ground on which all human beings stand--an ethical affirmation of shared humanity. Every nation state now should extend its protections, to some degree, to people beyond its borders. Every religious, ethnic, and tribal organization in the world now has that same obligation to care about others as well as their own.
Isolation and separation are impossible strategies for keeping order in the global situation. The US, no less than other nations, needs to assure the future of its own people by trying to assure the future of other people. Our solutions to our own problems must now be cast in global terms.
In The New Yorker (18 November 2002, pp. 50-55), David Remnick reported from Turkey while the world waited to see whether the US would invade Iraq. He found virtually no Turks with sympathetic feelings toward us. One Turk interviewed by Remnick captured the geopolitical essence of it all in a few words:
It's a one-superpower world, and that is a fact....Being alone is hard. If you fine-tune your policies, you can create a peace that could last a long time. But, if not, an opposition front will grow over time, and it will develop alliances and counter the existing supremacy.
A desire to succeed drives Bush. The specter of Senior Bush's failure to win reelection haunts his every move. That drive may push him to gain insight before it is too late. He has a brief period before launching his reelection campaign in which to expand his vision of global conditions and redirect policies appropriately.
Bush may attempt to change. But given the depth of his "realist" convictions, he may fail to follow through. He may end by echoing the title of the new book by basketball great Charles Barkley--I May Be Wrong but I Doubt It.
IF "DEVELOPMENT" MEANS "PROGRESS,"
WHY DOES "RIVER CREST ESTATES" MAKE ME SO SAD?
(31 October 2002)
What a new sight I now see along Route 29 between my old home village, Mont Clare, and Collegeville, a strip of state road just a few miles long.
This was "the country" when I was a kid. There were farm fields or woods on both sides of the road. I went to grade school with kids from the scattered farmhouses along this route. Beyond the road in the background were the tops of the trees along ravines leading down to the Schuylkill River. We kids roamed those ravines. We knew their sudden drops and rises, their streams spilling over rocks to the river, their wild birds, their squirrels, their colonies of evergreens. The sight of them was familiar and reassuring years after our childhood romps ended.
Down a tree-lined lane, River Crest nestled against the ravines out of sight from Route 29. River Crest in my earliest memory was a collection of buildings that provided asylum for tuberculosis patients; later it was a treatment center for drug abusers and I don't know what other types of needy people. Through its long history, its sign on Route 29 (it morphed at some point from River Crest to Ken Crest) signaled that a sylvan haven of some sort, aiming to do humanitarian good of some kind, was back there.
When I was commuting as a student to Ursinus College in the early 1950s in a beat-up Plymouth coupe, the brief ride on Route 29 from Mont Clare to Collegeville was an important prelude to my academic day. I could drive safely without worrying about the light country traffic. The fields and trees on either side calmed the mind after a night of studying. I could review last night's reading in my head while navigating the high crown of the road. I could get myself ready for whatever classroom encounters lay in store.
Sometimes I would return home after dark. The fields and woods would lurk silently at the edges of my vision while I peered over the lights of the old Plymouth puncturing the night. In the few farmhouses I passed, lights would be low or extinguished.
As the stretch of country road had prepared me for the day, so it had eased me down for the evening. It became a vital piece of my college experience.
Years later, "development" came to Route 29. The highway builders threw a bridge across it for the high-speed Route 422 bypass between King of Prussia and Pottstown. The original two lanes on old Route 29 multiplied to six (or is it eight?) where they built the ramps on and off the bypass.
A Mennonite farm couple used to sell flowers and vegetables right about there in the summer and fall. Their white wooden roadside stand was a marker for me on my daily run to and from campus. Their stand and their house--the whole farm--yielded to make way for 422. An automotive light-and-sound show now greets you twenty-four hours a day.
Drug companies and other corporate enterprises built their campuses in the nearby corn fields. Their employees morning and evening now glut the old roads of the area as well as the 422 bypass.
Finally, the housing developers seized large hunks of remaining land. One of the last big tracts to go is in the River Crest area. Bulldozers have demolished the old stone farmhouse that stood next to the River Crest property. A kid whose family name was Bray lived there when we went to grade school. The River Crest buildings have disappeared, along with trees. Earth movers have scooped out the topsoil and sculpted the landscape for streets and an 18-hole golf course. The promotional sign has gone up and the sales trailer has opened for business.
According to the slick brochure, the houses coming soon will range from "carriage homes" in the $300,000s to big singles in the upper $400,000s. The singles have impressive names such as "The Waterford Federal" and "The Savoy Versailles." Toll Brothers, the developers, co-opted the old "River Crest" name for their new "estates."
I'm guessing that more than 200 homes are going up. At two vehicles per home on average, they will spill more than 400 additional cars and SUVs onto my old country road every day. The new kids in the "estates" also will require additional school buses on the road.
This final ruination has been waiting to happen for many years. Whoever bought the Bray homestead a long time ago apparently became a squatter on his own property. The weeds took over around the stone house and the roof rotted while he waited. I guess he rented the fields to a remaining farmer but even they went uncultivated in the end. He hung on until the price was right and then sold out.
I'm holding up pretty well. This is no surprise. The economic and demographic dynamics of our region made this inescapable. Over time, I've become accustomed to the disappearance of important persons, places, and things of my youth.
Nevertheless.
When I drive now between Mont Clare and Collegeville, I can think of nothing but destruction and loss.
"Development" brings progress and prosperity, it says right here. Why, then, am I feeling that the new "River Crest Estates" is taking my old turf backward not forward? Why do I seem to hear a primitive beast chewing up something irreplaceable? Why does the sight of this make me feel so sad?
BUSH WILL NOT INVADE IRAQ
(29 September 2002)
Here's one theory:
Bush is mad (angry, that is) because Saddam survived the Gulf War and then tried to kill his dad. So, Bush is maddened (over the top, that is), as we see in his monomaniacal rhetoric about waging war on Iraq. The war on 9-11 terrorists gives him a pretext.
This "mad theory" has robust American appeal. It resonates with our cherished frontier mythology. The good gunslinger.
Of course, the danger is that Bush will unleash hell in the world if he really backs his rhetorical swagger with guns--including the hell of germ attacks on the streets and in the subways of what once was Fortress America.
Is he that mad?
Here's another theory, based on the belief that he is not that mad:
Call it the "Karlian theory."
Months ago, Karl Rove, Bush's top political strategist, let Republicans know that the war theme would win the November elections for them--and the message slipped out to the general public.
The Karlian theory explains the remarkable timing of Bush's war dancing.
In Congress and the UN, in the media, at cocktail parties, in forums on campuses--everywhere as leaves start to fall and the November elections near, people are talking of war on Iraq.
The daily war whoops are drowning out meaningful talk about many pressing issues that deserve attention--what to do about the stalled economy, unemployment and underemployment, the distress of medical costs, the need to motivate corporations to give employees a fair shake, the dissolution of the social safety net as funding evaporates in mounting federal and state deficits, the neglect of environmental damages, the implementation of alternatives to oil as an energy source.
Worst of all, the whooping about Iraq is excusing Bush from explaining why we have not yet "smoked out" bin Laden. It is excusing him from telling us how he envisions the larger strategy for destroying Al Qaeda--which was primarily what the war on terrorists was supposedly about. It is excusing him from explaining our plans for helping reconstruct Afghan society on democratic rather than tribal principles. It is excusing him from biting the hard diplomatic bullet of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is excusing him from telling us about programs to foster peaceful long-term engagement between the West and the Islamic world.
But here's the key: The Karlian theory holds that Bush will not attack Iraq.
In the run-up to the November elections, the theory holds that Democrats will be trapped into supporting a seemingly just war by a determined-seeming president. They will be blocked from advancing their compelling domestic issues. And presumably they will be clobbered at the polls. Flag-draped Republicans will thus recapture the Senate and tighten control in the House before an attack on Iraq has to be launched.
Immediately after the November elections, the Karlian theory holds that Bush will change the subject.
Early on, he gave us the impression that he would go it alone into Iraq, probably at high noon, without a by-your-leave from Congress or the UN. With Karlian craftiness, he has allowed himself to be pushed into conceding that Congress and the UN ought to sign on first. If the dithering in both bodies does not delay the attack on Iraq indefinitely, any number of other happenings could come along to do the same job. "And they will," as Bush would say.
By mid-November, Bush will be talking again about more tax cuts or educating every child, whatever. Maybe bin Laden will show up, dead or alive, and refocus the pursuit of Al Qaeda. Maybe Arafat will finally depart and compel Bush to turn attention again to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. Maybe inspections in Iraq will somehow satisfy the world. Whatever.
"But Bush couldn't be that cynical," you say. "Consider his moral clarity. If he backed away from attacking Iraq now, he would lose his political credibility."
The Karlian theory holds that you can trust Karl to enable Bush to talk his way through the change in subject.
"But they couldn't be so blatantly political about it," you say.
The Karlian theory holds that, from the viewpoint of the White House, everything is blatantly political anyway. Declarations that Bush would never talk of going to war for blatantly political purposes are, of course, blatantly political.
We will know by November whether facts support this Karlian theory. What a disappointment if it proves to be valid--politics will have trumped patriotic statesmanship. But what a disappointment if it does not prove to be valid--we probably will be in the soup of war.
Commemorating 9-11 one year after, a speaker said that "today, humanity holds in its hands the opportunity to further freedom's triumph over all its age-old foes. The United States welcomes its responsibility to lead in this great mission."
The speaker further said, "As we preserve the peace, America also has an opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom and progress to nations that lack them. We seek a just peace where repression, resentment and poverty are replaced with the hope of democracy, development, free markets and free trade."
George W. Bush, the speaker, was sanely outlining a broad American vision for responsible world leadership in those commemorative remarks. We can hope that he will get around to re-reading them and beginning to act on them--beating his words into ploughshares, as it were.
If you buy into the Karlian theory, though, you won't be expecting that until after the November elections.
WHAT'S PRESIDENT BUSH REALLY THINKING ABOUT SADDAM?
(5 September 2002)
President Bush ended his August vacation by meeting with Senators to explain the case for "regime change" in Iraq.
AOLNews reported on 4 September 02 that Bush told Senators, "Today, the process starts." He was referring to the process of consultation that will lead him finally to "talk about ways to make sure he [Saddam Hussein] follows up on his agreements.''
So, at this writing Bush has not declared war on Iraq.
His vice president virtually has done so, however. His defense people virtually have done so.
But former Bush-41 staffers and some of old Bush's old soldiers, in the same media forums, have virtually rejected the war option for now.
Amid the media cacophony, many are searching the president's utterances for his core meaning.
Here's one stab at guessing his state of mind:
I have to get rid of Saddam to complete Pop's job. Otherwise that @**!!## Dowd in The New York Times will keep on calling us both "wimps." Grrrr.
Good that I can also find solid policy reasons—not just my Texas dander--to dump him. The evil one really could be gearing up to kill a lot of Americans. Or arming Islamist terrorists to do it. I have to protect America against that. Rumsfeld has the firepower to do the job anytime I give the word.
Too bad I can't just give it without going through all the hullabaloo with Congress and UN "allies." Too bad so many people expect me to lay out a nation-building plan after we take him out. Why can't everybody see what's so obvious to me? Oust him and the whole world will cheer us and help the Iraqis. God bless her, Condi always says my strength is my moral clarity.
I think I got it. I'll stir up a public argument over the way to get him out.
I'll stay clear of the debate. The media—poor innocent sheep—will follow my lead and focus on Iraq. So will Congress and the UN.
They'll all forget what we're not getting done in Afghanistan.
They'll forget about the business scandals among my former CEO friends and supporters.
They'll forget all the softheaded push for solving the so-called social problems mounting in America. Compassionate people, not politicians, should be dealing with those anyway.
This general amnesia will help Republicans in the November elections.
Best of all, the public argument I stir up will keep Saddam pinned down, whether or not he has the weapons to kill a lot of Americans. He won't kill Americans with the attention of the world on him. He knows everyone would instantly understand my moral clarity. The world would cheer my snuffing him out if he struck first.
I can get away with saying nothing about the way we will get him until the time is ripe. I'll keep everyone on edge until I know that my decision will help Republicans in the elections. Then, "Let's roll."
But, you say, this stab at a Bush introspection leaves out a lot of very big concerns. You're right.
THE USA AND THE WORLD NEED "ENLIGHTENMENT II"
(1 August 2002)
The United States of America came into being on the wings of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.
That's where we got our universalistic impulses, our special sense of destiny.
That's why our nation became the world's champion of individual human rights, the rule of law, political and social freedom.
That's why we believe that being the lone superpower on the globe is a natural result of the superiority of our system.
That's why we swing our massive military club with such vigor—we believe that our might serves right.
In the last third of the twentieth century, postmodernist criticism discredited the pretensions of the Enlightenment. It stripped bare the Eurocentric bias of Enlightenment universalism. It showed that Enlightenment ideas finally depended not on the power of reason but on the sheer power of social institutions to enforce them.
And that is why people see a paradox in the American position in the world today. We are where we are under false pretenses, as it were. People see worm holes in our Enlightenment foundations. They see us acting on our self-interest and our hegemony rather than on enlightened principles.
The critique of Enlightenment stands. Its limits are perhaps best symbolized by America's icon, Thomas Jefferson, the quintessentially enlightened American. The wings of Jefferson's thought were not powerful enough to take him beyond the custom of his time and place: he could not decide to free his slaves. In microcosm, Jefferson's limits were the limits of the American nation and of the Enlightenment that inspired its founding. Postmodernist critics simply brought to the surface the all-too-human flaws that the Enlightenment harbored from the start.
The virtue of Enlightenment ideas also stands. Postmodernist critics were able to identify its flaws because they enjoyed the conditions that flow from reasonable discourse freely expressed by individuals protected by law. The Enlightenment led to these conditions.
Going forward, the US will falter if it continues to base its triumphal role in the world on a mistaken understanding of the Enlightenment. The virtue of Enlightenment ideas does not necessarily transform our military, political, and economic actions around the globe into strokes of reason and light.
To contribute to a better world, we need to re-invent the Enlightenment. The US and the rest of the world need Enlightenment II.
In Enlightenment II, we will remain Eurocentric to the extent that we will continue to argue for individual human rights, the rule of law, political and social freedom.
However, we will depart from the original Enlightenment by denying that the modern social systems of Europe and North America are the particular models for general replication of Enlightenment principles around the globe.
We will abandon the foregone conclusion that Enlightenment principles lead to a homogeneous global culture. We will come to accept the open-endedness of development around the globe. We will accept the limits of human logic and language, which postmodernism elucidated for us. That is, we will stop believing that we can adequately express--and implement--the shape of the world to come.
We will become willing to acknowledge and accept surprises in the narrative that other people write for themselves under conditions of globalization.
Such a departure will sharply reduce the hubris that the strident certainties of the original Enlightenment imbued in us Americans.
Enlightenment II will compel us to put a narrower frame around our special sense of destiny. That sense will deserve to persist because we will continue to assert the importance for people everywhere on the globe of the principles of individual human rights, the rule of law, political and social freedom--however variously these principles play out in particular places. But Enlightenment II will not extend our felt entitlement to "enforce" these principles unilaterally.
Enlightenment II will shape our national role into a transnational role that the US never has played before, even in our most internationalist moments. It will mean the end of some nationalistic themes that have persisted from the start, themes that are dear to our hearts and that color our very sense of ourselves.
Enlightenment II will lead to a world sharply different from today's. But it will not deliver a script that will determine ahead of time precisely how the future will differ.
At the moment, the US is stuck in a domestic battle between ideologues of Reagan neo-conservatism and liberals of various ideological stripes. The war on terrorists happens to make this domestic ideological battle more complicated, but it does not cancel it. (Indeed, the administration in the White House uses the war on terrorists to reinforce the conservative position in the ideological battle.)
The ideologues who are waging this domestic battle will not resolve it. Their arguments--on both sides--are derivative, tactical fireworks that need their opposite to mean anything. This ideological battle awaits resolution at a deeper level. The US will begin to see the virtue of Enlightenment II and to act on it when our thinkers (as opposed to our ideologues) begin to agree on its philosophical sense and its historical applicability. The sooner we see that beginning, the better.
ARAB INTELLECTUALS AVOID "THE BLAME GAME"
(13 July 2002)
Ideas shape human experience. We live in a modern world shaped by the ideas of Locke and Darwin, Adam Smith and Rousseau. We imagine the extension of the modern world into a postmodern phase because of the ideas of Derrida and Baudrillard and Foucault.
Intellectuals are the unelected legislators of the world, if I may modify a thought from Shelley, who declared poets to be the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
With this insight in mind, I have been wondering since 9-11 about the intellectuals in the Muslim world. In a working opinion, I thought of the attack on America as the start of a long cultural engagement between the West and Islam, an engagement that would outlast the immediate need to destroy terrorists. The outcome would be a new accommodation between two cultures and the long-term prospect of global comity. The facilitators of this outcome, I imagined, could be intellectuals of Islam and the West, thinking, talking, and writing together about a better world.
I have seen some evidence that academic conferences are being organized to explore the non-Islamist (that is, peaceful and life-affirming) strengths of the Islamic faith and culture. But the urgencies of geopolitics and military strategy continue to overshadow processes of genuine cultural engagement, at least as far as I can see.
Western intellectuals such as Bernard Lewis and John Esposito have been trying to acquaint us with the motivating ideas of Islam past and present. Perhaps they have counterparts in the Islamic world who are explaining the West to Muslims and not just blaming it. But my weak radar has not picked them up.
An apparently encouraging sign recently came in the form of a report prepared by "Arab intellectuals from a variety of disciplines." Commissioned by the United Nations, it was dubbed the "Arab Human Development Report 2002", released in Cairo on 2 July 2002 and generously covered that day by the New York Times ("Study Warns of Stagnation in Arab Societies").
The lead author of the report was Nader Fergany, a labor economist in Egypt. Rima Khalaf Hunaidi was the "driving force behind the survey", according to the Times. She is director of the UN development program's Arab regional bureau and former deputy prime minister of Jordan. An advisory team member was Clovis Maksoud, former Arab League representative at the UN, now director of American University's Center for the Global South.
In its lead, the Times said that the report warned Arab societies to address "a lack of political freedom, the repression of women and an isolation from the world of ideas that stifles creativity." Statistics showed the lagging state of Arab culture when measured against yardsticks in politics, education, scientific research, and the like.
Next day, Thomas L. Friedman optimistically opined in a Times op-ed piece about the report. It pleased him to find an "unbiased, objective analysis" by Arabs for Arabs.
I was surprised that Friedman did not play up what seemed to me most significant about the report. It did not indulge in what Bernard Lewis called "the blame game." It avoided Islam's tradition of blaming the West for its woes. Instead, it used Western measures of politics, education, and the like to define those woes. This seems to be encouraging. Perhaps the report can become a tool in the Islam-West engagement that must develop a head of steam.
But I say this cautiously. The Arab intellectuals involved in the report had an apparent Western tilt going in. I wonder whether other Islamic intellectuals, more deeply ensconced in the Arab culture and less exposed to Western methods of critical thinking, have accepted the premises and conclusions of the UN report.
Whatever the case, the UN deserves credit for enabling Arab intellectuals in a world forum to express a critical view of Arab problems. It is one of a thousand steps required on both sides to set the stage for positive Islam-West engagement.
A NATIONAL MOMENT FOR RESTORING TRUST
(18 June 2002)
Here are some dots on the screen:
Catholic bishops, after being lectured by victims of priestly sexual abuse, developed new policy for controlling the behavior of the ordained clergy. They hope to restore the confidence of the faithful in the church and in its priesthood.
You get the picture. "Restoring trust" is the line connecting these dots.
America is in a moment of reflective analysis of systemic shortcomings. The picture looks bad because so much seems to have been going wrong at high levels of the systems that orchestrate our society. It looks good because American institutions are reflexive and adaptable. They are showing the capacity to change themselves.
This moment of facing up and 'fessing up could lead to a restoration of trust--but only if the reflective analysis is sustained and penetrating enough. Americans also have limited attention spans and a proven propensity to believe snake oil salesmen.
We can only hope that the candor and commitment of this national moment will lead people to restore their trust in leaders and their institutions. We can only hope that leaders and their institutions will deserve restored trust.
FIGHTING TERRORISTS IS ONLY HALF THE JOB FOR BUSH
(22 May 2002)
Leadership involves deciding what to talk about and what not to talk about.
The public will tend to talk about what leaders are talking about and to ignore what they're not talking about.
With its intense spotlight on Washington, the American press makes sure that this process works day in and day out. When the White House speaks, the press reports. Readers and viewers are alert to the headlines. At the same time, they tend not to think about what is not reported.
The Bush administration has been talking about the perils and prospects of the fight against terrorists. Dick Cheney assured the public that another surprise attack from al-Qaeda is a question of "when" not "if." FBI Director Robert Mueller assured us that suicide bombers like those in Israel will operate on American soil one of these days. President Bush in Florida told the Cuban-American constituents of his brother Jeb that he will keep America's thumb in the eye of Castro's regime. Bush made clear to Saddam Hussein that America wants to drive him out one way or another.
Such expressions of continued hostility with non-traditional terrorists and traditional adversaries are inevitable. As long as the US is on the war footing that began with the attack on America on 9-11, Bush and his team have to talk about them.
However, without diminishing America's effectiveness in fighting terrorists, the Bush administration needs to go beyond its fixation on hostilities.
It has to talk--now--about America's peaceful, positive, non-violent agenda for leading the world's peoples toward a global civil society that values prosperity and peace over poverty and enmity.
This talk can't wait until we have blown up the last terrorist cave—there will always be another cave. The objective of the Bush administration right now should be to formulate policies of hope for those who are hopeless. Bush should be talking about the ways and means for America to facilitate better lives in the "streets" that hate us so. This talk should get equal billing with his bellicose talk of war on terrorists.
The hard-headed heavies in the Bush administration, I fear, are poorly equipped to embrace such a necessary piece of our total US strategy. They scorned "nation building" before 9-11. Post-9-11, they seek social, economic, and political improvement in far places only as the immediate war on terrorism necessitates it.
Even while fighting terrorists, the Bush administration ought to be planning and pursuing policies aimed at enhancing lives around the globe. This would require of them a will to recognize that the American agenda for the world has to be one of serving others, not just ourselves. It would require them to alter narrow attitudes toward global finance and foreign aid, not to mention environmental stewardship. It would require a more inclusive approach to cooperative action with other nations.
Events have handed America a unique role as the leader of the nations of the world. Now our leaders need the power of mind and will to assure that we succeed in that role. They have to assure that around the world we are building even as we are destroying.
Would that Bush would talk about that.
STOP APOLOGIZING TO THE WORLD FOR AMERICAN MASS CULTURE
(30 April 2002)
"McWorld." We know the argument. US mass culture is being foisted on an unwilling world by the irresistible power of global corporations, supported by our hegemonic imperial power. Our superficial, tasteless, violent mass culture is destroying authentic local values in far corners of the world. While the locals munch a Mac and watch a Mouse or a murder on TV, they also are bulking up on resentment against America-in-their-face.
Americans have always been the best critics of America. That's why so many of us feel that this "McWorld" hypothesis sounds embarrassingly valid. Our mass culture IS noisome in many ways. We often wish that our commitment to ideals of freedom for individuals and democratic process for governments received more attention than the more tangible and tacky outcomes of economic globalization.
History professor Richard Pells of the University of Texas at Austin recently offered a corrective to this self-critical view of the global spread of American culture. His article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (12 April 2002) refreshes our sense of America's cultural worth in the world.
Pells describes the complex process by which American mass culture came into being. It did not start with the products of the image mills of greedy corporations. It arose rather from the migration of the world's peoples to America during the last two centuries.
Before America exported its popular culture to the world, the huddled masses and foreign intellectuals and artists brought to our shores their own rich mix of influences. In the air of freedom, as Pells tells it, these influences melded into the amalgam of the world that American culture really is.
What Americans have done more brilliantly than their competitors overseas is repackage the cultural products we received from abroad and then retransmit them to the rest of the planet....Americans have specialized in selling the dreams, fears, and folklore of other people back to them.
Pells finds in our contemporary popular culture the exuberant traces of European modernist painting, literature, and architecture. The relative simplicity of English has facilitated the spread of our mass culture around the world, Pells says. The heterogeneity of America's vast market for cultural products "has forced the media...to experiment with messages, images, and story lines that have a broad multicultural appeal." The first world market, in other words, was here at home. Pells analyzes the growth of the film industry in Hollywood at some length to exemplify the way America appropriated foreign influences and mixed cultural styles.
He concludes that many respond favorably to American mass culture because they recognize in it the traces of their own experiences and interests.
American mass culture has not transformed the world into a replica of the United States. Instead, America's dependence on foreign cultures has made the United States the replica of the world.
In America's current engagement with Islamic countries and a changing Europe, our motives and values often appear in the harshly negative light of the "McWorld" hypothesis. We need correctives such as that of Pells to keep a balanced perspective on ourselves.
We are what we are because we have political, social, and economic institutions that facilitate migration and mixing. America has answered humanity's needs by allowing that the only final answer is to establish conditions that permit untried possibilities drawn from anywhere in the world.
The world is too complex. We cannot expect distant places and peoples to adopt our eclectic culture--much less the free institutions that enable it to flourish--just like that. We can stop being so apologetic about it, though. It represents values that lie deeper and count for more than the hamburgers and TV sitcoms produced by multinational corporations.
BARNETT NEWMAN AND I, FIFTY YEARS LATER
(10 April 2002)
Barnett Newman: an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through 7 July 2002. Curator, Ann Temkin, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at PMA.
When I was in my twenties, the art that I most admired was the exciting new abstract expressionist work coming from the New York School.
The abstract expressionists seemed to be representing the post-World War II vision of a new generation of Americans. My friends and I wanted to be lined up with that vision, even though we were too young to have been in the war (just as some of the artists had been too old or otherwise unfit to be in uniform).
The abstract expressionists through the 1940s and 1950s were showing that American art was cutting loose from Europe's cultural and esthetic traditions. The war put America out front and installed us as the leader of the free world. New York, in particular, emerged as the quintessential city of world modernity. The time was ripe for American artists to ignore Paris and seek the central subject and form of the twentieth century here at home--especially in the excitement of the most modern city in the world, New York. It was time for American artists finally to weigh the anchor of the past. It was time to embrace the presentness and newness that set apart modern American life from its cultural roots in Europe.
To many people my age, the abstract expressionists seemed to appear out of nowhere in those post-war years. At the time, my friends and I were not greatly interested in the historical explanations of their emergence. It was enough for us to know that they were radically redefining art in America and forever altering the way we would look at the world around us.
We were simply eager to be riding the newest wave of modern style, and we knew that the abstract expressionists were steering the boat. To be young, to be modern, to be with it, to dismiss the past as a junk heap, to be in favor of a future starting now--we could assert all this in a flash by declaring our admiration for the work of the abstract expressionists.
It was a high and mighty moment for de Kooning, Gottlieb, Motherwell, Newman, Pollock, Reinhardt, Rothko, Still, to name the best known but not all the abstract expressionist practitioners. Their hard, bold paintings were announcements about a new sensibility. They announced that through their paintings we could confront the meaning of contemporary human experience with new eyes and new ideas. Their works were fresh markers on our native cultural landscape. They marked out what our gut told us we could and should value.
My recent visit to the brilliantly mounted Barnettt Newman exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art carried me back to that moment of my young adulthood half a century ago. Meandering among Newman's canvases, with their memorable colors and lines, I recalled how he and his fellow painters shocked America and the world.
The shock for many on the street--and for guffawing cartoonists--was one of outraged incredulity. They could not believe that critics and buyers would see value in so many canvases depicting nothing recognizable and displaying hardly any of the painterly skills found in familiar works of art. A broad segment of the public felt sure that the whole abstract expressionist movement was a big hoax.
The shock for others, of course, was one of awed recognition. They were witnessing something newly meaningful in the world. They believed that this group of painters was redefining in an unprecedented fashion the very subject and the very function of art. They saw that while this new art emerged from uniquely American circumstances, it was presuming to touch meanings that transcended nationality. It was presuming to resonate with the absolute out of which every human striving was thought to flow.
In other words, the paintings of the abstract expressionists combined novelty of expression with a presumptive ultimacy of significance. I think it was that daring combination--the immediate with the ultimate--that made them so attractive to my friends and me when they were coming freshly out of the studios in those years and making (shock) headlines. These luminous works seemed to deny that the modern world was deeply fragmented, despite mounting social, political, and cultural arguments to that effect—and despite the belief of some that the artists themselves were contributing to our downfall. They seemed to assert that human meaning and value would be secure even if a Cold War miscalculation (or calculation) put the whole human experiment at risk. They asserted that modernist culture, beyond its variousness, open-endedness, and vulgar contradictions, remained expressive of an order independent of the temporal, beyond the contingent.
We admirers saw in these paintings that the enduring order lay not in political or religious or cultural regimes. It lay in what the abstract expressionists were revealing about inner emotional life. They were finding the shapes and rhythms of nothing less than absolute being.
We would not have sensed these profound connections in abstract expressionist paintings if we were not so completely in the grip of the "high" modernist culture that prevailed in America from the end of World War II until the explosions of the 1960s. All the military and economic mayhem of the twentieth century had not yet dislodged a predisposition in modernist culture to espouse a universal value grounded in a presumed order somewhere outside time. The achievement of the abstract expressionists was to move the locus for such universal value from an external cosmos to the interior world of individual human feeling. By painting the effects of completely private feeling, they were presuming to point toward universal significance.
This linkage justified for us the havoc that the abstract expressionists brought down on the traditions of painting. They made the canvas itself into something to be experienced directly. This destroyed the idea that the canvas was just a conveniently bounded space to be shaped into a representation of the world more or less realistically. Barnett Newman was the abstract expressionist who spoke most forcefully about the necessity to abandon the old subject of art and to discover the new subject appropriate for a changed world. He said:
The fetish and the ornament, blind and mute, impress only those who cannot look at the terror of the Self. The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting and sculpture