De jure and de facto segregation

Here is an interview with the always compelling and lucid Nikole Hannah-Jones.  She lays out very clearly that much of the segregation we see today in schools in housing is not just an accident, or an unavoidable legacy of a racist past, but rather that there continue to be laws and actions promoted by lawmakers that maintain or advance segregation.

Beyond this though, I think it's time to get away from the debate about whether or not segregation is intentional.  Ms. Hannah-Jones says, "I have worked very hard to dispel the myth that somehow segregation that’s not required by law is less harmful, so we should be OK with it."  Often debates about systemic racism, which includes segregation, get bogged down in discussions about the personal character of specific people, usually white people.  But let's remember that the whole reasoning behind the Brown vs. Board decision that really pushed desegregation forward was not that segregation is only bad if it's done by mean people.  No, it was that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal", whether or not they are separate because of explicit meanspirited decisions.

Again, the author says it best:

Once again, we spend so much time trying to prove whether people are doing something racist or not. Can we get in the hearts and minds of how a parent is making a decision? We can’t do that. And really, it’s irrelevant. What we know is that whether people are explicitly racist or not, the patterns that we have seen since the founding of public schools remain the same. And that is: Not only are white parents taking an inordinate amount of public school resources, but segregated black schools are getting less of everything.

This continues to be relevant today, perhaps more than ever, because explicit segregation laws are illegal today nationwide, but at the same time segregation is as bad as it's ever bad, especially in the North.  Even within single school districts that are diverse overall, like in Chicago, we see segregation that reflects housing patterns and test-in school policy and a number of other factors.  Even if there were no ill will involved, it is clear that this arrangement is harmful to all involved; it produces some of the academically worst schools in the country for black and Latino students, and a handful of high-performing schools where "lucky" students succeed at the expense of their less fortunate neighbors.

The most powerful passage from this interview is something I've seen and cried about myself.  "You see these little black boys and black girls come in and they’re so excited to learn. They don’t know yet how little we value them. They don’t know yet that we’re going to shuttle them into inferior schools where they’re never going to have the opportunity to become someone like me. By middle school, you see that light is gone already. You see that they understand by the schools we built for them, just how little we think of them."

Here's the kicker, where the author draws together how racial fears and the commoditized vision we currently have of education, make this segregation so entrenched. 

And then you add into that the way we marketize the language of schools. To be a good parent you need to shop for every advantage for your child even within a public system, which is supposed to be about the common good. We’ve converted the idea of a public system to serving the individual needs of parents.

So you take this racialized history of education, you take all of the racial fears that white parents have about black children, and then you put on top of that this market-based idea of public schools. It creates a system that we have now.

Postscript on Among the Believers

I wrote a pretty scathing review of VS Naipaul's Among the Believers a few months ago, when I was just about a quarter of the way through it.  I wanted to follow up and soften some of my criticisms for, as the author of another book that I read recently and praised, Naipaul adopted a changing voice throughout the course of the book.  He started out naive and churlish, but gradually became more understanding of the dilemmas facing the people he spoke with in four countries that in that moment, 1980, were just beginning to grapple with the apparent inconsistencies of trying to infuse Islamic values into a modern state.  I feel that Naipaul's questions became less rhetorical and more genuine:  How can values from 8th-century Arabia inform the creation and governance of a just, functioning society in the late 20th century?  This softening in Naipaul's tone was aided by the fact that his journey happened to begin with the most hardline, uncompromising (and in many ways the most dysfunctional) Islamic governments in Pakistan and Iran, and end with places like Malaysia and Indonesia that have dealt for centuries with complex relationships between culture, government, and even other religions.

I have almost 40 years of hindsight since the book was written, and I can now view both Naipaul and his interlocutors in a more magnanimous way.  The revolutionaries and professed theocrats that he spoke with reject out of hand a demonic West.  Naipaul rightly points out the incoherence of declaring a rigid separation between a place like Iran or Malaysia and the rest of the world, especially when these places rely on the same fruits of modernity and of the "universal culture" that we all do--electronic gizmos, modern medicine, cutting-edge university learning, even the common canon of lots of novels and movies and TV shows.  I feel though that the absolutist arguments put forth by these, the first wave of political Islamists, aren't those put forth today, when the call of even the most fervent radicals is to somehow combine the fruits of modernity with a more Islamic system of values. Likewise, actual thinking people (aside from Breitbart-style talking heads) on the other side rarely feel the need to dogmatically defend a mythical "West". 

I obviously am not saying I agree with the prognosis of even these more mature, nuanced Islamist preachers, nor do I necessarily think it is very viable.  But the total incoherence of denouncing modern innovations while relying on them to do your denouncing, no longer seems so prevalent today.  As political Islam, or Islamicized politics, have become ascendent in different parts of the world, the difficult, boring, unromantic work of actually governing has demanded an acceptance and use of many modern institutions like Constitutions, division of powers, and other elements that were missing from the vision of many of Naipaul's interviewees who had only gotten as far as calling for a purer faith to guide leaders and subjects.  Even extreme cases like ISIS, that make deft use of modern technology to promote a vision totally antithetical to modern human values, either last a few years tops before they collapse under their own weight, or they remain as an insignificant peanut gallery criticizing those who govern while not governing anything themselves.

In my more pessimistic moments (which is to say most of the time), I don't believe in the progressive vision of human history.  I've said as much in a past blog post discussing the book Liberation Theology, in which Gustavo Gutierrez lays out a very directional, modern vision of history as a gradual progress towards something (in his account, this something is communion with God, but my point here is that he sees history as linear progress). I understand that the Medieval Europeans believed in history as a repeating cycle, a wheel of fortune in which better times were following by worse times, in an unending circle, not a line headed somewhere.  Things don't keep advancing or getting better; rather we are doomed to continue repeating the mistakes of the past.  This is also a Classical Greek mentality, an underlying suspicion that base passions will ultimately override or undercut any rational endeavor or noble progress.  When I am feeling this way, I see examples in the way that modern liberal democracy, itself a very progressive, modernist way of living and making history, is now being questioned and undermined by ethnic nationalism, that timeless, nonprogressive passion that we thought had been thoroughly discredited by the Second World War.

A brief caveat--nowhere am I calling into question that the history of scientific knowledge has indeed been one of clear progress, of today's innovators building on the lessons and achievements of prior thinkers and researchers.  I'm more talking about ideas, specifically the question of how best to run a society.

Recently though I've had more optimistic moments in which I do see history in a progressive light, precisely in terms of advances in the way we think of how to run a society.  This doesn't mean that societies today are necessarily better or more democratic than those of yesterday, but rather that they do seem to be building on the successes and mistakes of the past, and blundering through to an incrementally more effective or more legitimate way of running things.  Most places are not just repeating the mistakes of the past.  In the case at hand, I feel like the countries Naipaul profiles, and many others that started experimenting with how to embed Islamic ideals into the global framework of representative democracy and human rights, are at a very different place today than they were almost 40 years ago when he wrote about them.  Today we have examples of countries where religion encroaches on a strict, almost dictatorial secularism (Turkey), places where an officially Islamic state contains a lot of secular institutions, both within and outside of government (Iran), and lots of countries in between where Islamic law coexists more or less prominently and more or less easily with secular democratic institutions.  There are places like Nigeria, where some federal states are in part administered by sharia law and other jurisdictions with lots of normative Christian legislation, and places like Saudi Arabia, where a strict theocratic state avoids mass popular uprising through a mix of repression and monetary enticements to the populace. The question of how much cultural or religious idiosyncracy you can add to the liberal democratic model before you totally denature it, isn't exclusive to Muslim-majority nations. Whenever we debate which values and ideals to teach in our schools, how cultural minorities should be included and accommodated in our society, even whether to keep or abolish the Electoral College (which is of course an institution that intentionally overvalues the rural side of our character), we are figuring out how to apply pure democratic ideals to a messy real world context.

In short, the panorama that I see is of all countries in the world (not just the ones with a Muslim majority population) grappling with how to bring the Enlightenment ideals of representative democracy into a complex, ethnically diverse 21st century where human rights are to be respected, community and tradition should be given a certain due, patriarchy and other hegemonies are increasingly called into question, and the continued existence of our very planet is at peril.  I don't say that I know of many places where all of these challenges are being addressed very well, but I do feel that, at least in the types of developing countries that Naipaul wrote about in the 1970s and 1980s (not just the Muslim countries), today's governance systems have managed to work out and move beyond some of the apparent impasses that existed back then.

Media manipulation in Romero's time

I just finished a great biography of Archibishop Oscar Romero, which I mentioned briefly in a prior blog post.  I just wanted to share a few highlights that really struck me.

I have long been worried that we seem to be in an era that is different from all prior ones in terms of how media has become so effective at manipulating public opinion, to the point that what is good is labeled bad, and vice versa.  To my thinking, it was as if we had come to a sort of epistemological end times in which even factually incorrect or morally abhorrent arguments could be framed and defended as being true and noble.  I even wrote a blog post in which I mused that the right-wing dictatorships of 1980s Latin America would have done better to simply spin their enemies into submission, instead of making them martyrs.

You can imagine then my surprise to find that Archibishop Romero had in fact been subjected to a vicious and ingenious spin campaign, not instead of but in addition to the very real violent repression.  It heartened me to some extent, first off to know that this trend I was seeing as unprecedented had in fact been deployed before, and secondly to see that it hadn't been that effective in the long term (though perhaps it is more effective in an age when we are so removed from direct contact with the world that a mass of people regard propaganda as being more real than reality itself).

Anyway, here are some amazing examples.  Just a month into his possession as archbishop, when Romero was really still trying not to offend the oligarchy too much, he was assailed by full-page ads taken out in the newspapers, and attributed to non-existent religious-sounding groups like the "Association of Catholic Women".  They even published a prayer for the exorcism of evil from the archbishop's soul, accusing him of sedition and incitation to violence.  This from the death squads that were massacreing unarmed civilians left and right!  There was a weekly magazine created for the express purpose of criticizing the Archbishop's sermons and actions.  Again, this only a few months into his term as archbishop, when he was still very equivocal in his political positions.  This magazine routinely referred to him as Monsenor Marxnulfo Romero (his real middle name was Arnulfo).  It was distributed for free in large companies and factories, and even government offices.  I can only imagine that there must have been an entire misinformed mass of working-class people who accepted these assertions at face value and sided with the murderous oligarchy.

A few years later, a group of his fellow bishops sent a letter to the Vatican accusing Monsenor Romero of being manipulated by Marxists and guerrillas.  This letter claimed that the plague of murders of priests had not been in fact carried out by government-allied death squads, but rather by their own guerrilla comrades, who suspected them of treason.  And the government orchestrating the violence was portrayed as a helpless victim, unable to ensure order because of the instability sown by Romero.

From there it got worse, with frequent (false) reports of the Archbishop's death on national news, as a tactic to intimidate him, and finally the reading of a list by the head of state repression, that placed Archbishop Romero as number two among public figures who had been infected by Communism and needed to be purged.

The last thing I wanted to share from this book is a line that I really liked.  In early 1980 (two months before he was murdered), "imminent civil war was in the air, and Monsenor Romero refused to accept these omens, more as a question of duty than for well-founded reasons; in effect, when all rational evidence is exhausted, hope remains an ethical obligation."  I have recently felt that hopefulness is the only right attitude to assume in many contexts, even when it is unrealistic, so it was nice to read such a reflection from a much nobler mind than my own.

For a diverse philosophy

I ran across this really cool article about the relevance of philosophy to daily life and professional careers.  More than this, it highlights the importance of studying philosophies from the non-Western canon.  China and India apparently have very well-developed bodies of formal, written thought that can expand our understanding of the human condition and reality because they approach these things from a different angle than Aristotle and his descendants.  The author also argues for more exposure of students and professors to philosophy from less-prominent voices within the modern West (Afro-Americans, feminists, Latin Americans), as well as Native American and African philosophies of the past and present.  I don't know much about philosophy, but the author's arguments make sense to me.

Neoliberal explanations of racism

Apparently Ta-Nehisi Coates is the latest target of a Cornel West beef.  I didn't know about this, and I'm frankly not too interested in learning the details beyond what's summarized in the article I'm about to cite.  What I really want to share though is this deft article's treatment of when economics are or are not useful in understanding white supremacy as it has been lived in the US during our history (hint--economics alone are usually not very useful in explaining racism).  Here the author summarizes a way of thinking that he characterizes as a neoliberal reading of white supremacy (and which he now views as a flawed line of thought, after having espoused it for a time):

In my idealism, I believed that white supremacy could be explained and solved by tying this nation’s actions to the Darwinian greed of capitalism and the apathy toward minorities who stood in the way of the supremacy of Western civilization’s need for domination. I believed that white people would never accept the inherent evil of white supremacy without its being tied to the macro-political reality of free-market economics.

Neoliberals are perfectly willing to discuss how the trans-Atlantic slave trade was a byproduct of capitalism and how the Industrial Revolution was the real death knell for slavery. They will talk about patriarchy as a part of cultural anxiety. But if anyone mentions the national complicity of white America in historical racism, they, like West, will accuse you of “fetishizing” white supremacy, with the clarion call that heralds the wincing of white people who refuse to realize the permanent strain of white supremacy that is still infecting America:

I agree with the author's current reading, namely that white supremacy is something that transcends a pure economic logic.  I don't know why this should be so hard to fathom--there are plenty of things in life that don't adhere strictly to economic incentives.  Love, childcare, eating habits.

I guess this assertion, that white supremacy is not purely an unintentional side effect of our market system, often draws resistance from people because it implies malice.  If white supremacy were simply an unpleasant collateral effect of an apathetic capitalist machine, then there are no guilty, conscious participants, and the ensuing oppression is a faceless thing.  If, on the other hand, you assert that white supremacy has always been a force unto itself (of course interacting with economic conditions, but not limited to them), then you are implying that there were and are moral, social, cultural aspects to the maintenance of white supremacy that have little to do with faceless market forces.  No, these aspects were and are enacted by human beings making their own choices every day to perpetuate the system.  Oppression is no longer an impersonal, accidental thing that just happens.  No, in this understanding of white supremacy, oppression is the very point, which implies that many people are capable of being nasty and hateful in a way that defies economic or any other good-faith analysis.

Here's the author's closing:

Ask the mothers and fathers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown Jr. about the “socioeconomic injustice” that pumped bullets into their bodies. Ask the children who attend inferior inner-city schools because white people don’t want to live next to them about the complexities of Wall Street. Macroeconomics, patriarchy and “pre-Du Bois thinking” never tossed a résumé in the trash because a black-sounding name was at the top.

Gender ideology as everything to everyone

This is a good overview of the tempest in Latin America surrounding a bogeyman called "gender ideology".  Basically, if you're trying to oppose a progressive social agenda (human rights, a negotiated end to war, you name it), a great way to gain a lot of traction for your cause is to allege that those in favor of this positive agenda are somehow imposing on the good citizens who would prefer to be able to discriminate against others based on gender, class, sexual orientation, or whatever happens to be their preferred mode of oppression.  You can say that the human rights advocates subscribe to "gender ideology", which doesn't really mean anything, but it effectively conjures up vague images of activists trying to turn your kids gay and tear down the Church.

This worked marvelously in Colombia to sabotage the peace process that would end a war that has raged for over a half-century.  Ex-president Uribe, plus a coalition of other oligarchs that would be at risk of being brought to trial for war crimes if the peace agreement were ratified, seized on the fact that the peace accord included explicit references to gender.  In this case these references were largely centered on the fact that women have suffered in specific ways during the war, things like being targeted for rape as a weapon of war, and they should be given special consideration, treatment, and reparations that respond to these violations that were based on their gender.  I don't know any sane human being that would oppose such a common-sense measure (in fact, in the field of international development in general, we do a lot of this gender-sensitive analysis, because whether you're talking about economic growth or health care or educational outcomes or a peace process, gender is real and it matters in designing your programs to achieve results).  But by conflating this gender-sensitive approach to peace and justice with a scary "gender ideology" that would turn your kids gay, Uribe and his ilk were able to derail the whole peace process.

The ultra-conservatives in the US don't really use the term "gender ideology", but they are thinking the same thing as their Latin American counterparts when they allege that an assertion of equal rights for queer people somehow represents an imposition, an oppression even, of redblooded Americans who want to discriminate in peace.  It is a similar line of thought that assumes that blacks protesting lynching and extrajudicial execution are somehow out to oppress whites, or that people who wish to speak Spanish at home are trying to impose their language on others.  In short, it is a way for oppressors who demand every privilege and advantage in society, to paint themselves as an oppressed group when someone tries to push back for their own equal rights.

One additional thing that I've noticed makes the term "gender ideology" so effective is that it is inherently ambiguous, in that when someone uses the term it is often unclear if they are referring to a bogeyman that they think really exists, or if they are referring to the fiction believed by this first group of people.  The result is that those advocating for equal rights for women and LGBTI people decry "gender ideology" as a falsehood invented by ultra-conservatives to justify inequality, while these same ultra-conservatives sincerely decry "gender ideology" as the real conspiracy being advanced by Leftists to undermine traditional society and turn everyone into a homo.  You can see this in action in the comments thread of the above-cited article.  Most commenters get the author's argument that the only "gender ideology" that exists is a bogeyman made up by the Right, but a significant minority of commenters sincerely rail against the "gender ideology" that they see creeping into their heretofore upstanding traditional Catholic societies.  It occurs to me that this ambiguity works to the advantage of the Right in this case, because while everyone will pick up on the anger and frustration that underlie use of the term by all sides, it is a lot more difficult to wrap your head around the meta-criticism being advanced by progressive voices, and a lot easier to accept the surface genuineness of the conservative voices that believe in the bogeyman.  Once again, simple but wrong trumps complex but accurate.

Third World Green Daddy 71: Postcolonial parenting

Recently my oldest son saw a reference to Columbus, and he didn't really know who he was.  I was surprised at this, since I'm sure we must have talked about him at some point, but no, my boy didn't recognize his name either in English or Spanish.  After my initial shock, and after mulling it over for a while, I guess I'm okay with this.


First of all, my son hasn't even turned seven yet, so if there is some historical figure he doesn't recognize right now, I just explain it to him, and over time he'll presumably get to know a good chunk of the characters from the historical cast.  This is what I ended up doing for Columbus, who I described as one of the first Europeans to come to America.  And I think that's fitting--Columbus is just one more part of the cast.  My boy doesn't yet know who Napoleon is, or Louis XIV, or Shaka Zulu, or probably even Gandhi.  This is not because he isn't learning history, and certainly not because I'm hiding "real" history from him in favor of an alternative, politically-correct history, which is usually how a certain brand of conservative caricatures any departure from an orthodox account of history centered on powerful white men.

My son does know Malcolm X, and Archbishop Romero, and Simon Bolivar.  He knows the story of the Pilgrims (both the sappy Thanksgiving legend and a more nuanced version of the early New England colonies).  He knows about the ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, about the Maya pyramids, about Spanish colonial rule, about the American Revolution and Colombian independence.  He is getting an understanding of slavery and the Second World War and Civil Rights and the Cold War.  So my boy is definitely getting a robust dose of history--there's just a lot to cover, and after seven years of life he's just at the beginning of things.

It's natural that my family's framing of history should start and focus on the US and Latin America, and Columbus is just one small part of this history.  Columbus is taken by many as a symbol of the Discovery of America, but if you conceive of American history as starting in 20000 BC and continuing to the present, Columbus didn't really discover anything.  His symbolic role is more a part of a mythical, Eurocentric vision than any real factual account of history.  Even if you take the more nuanced and historically accurate view that the contact between America, Europe, and Africa (which admittedly started with Columbus for all intents and purposes, Vinlanders notwithstanding) was probably the most important event in the history of modern America (and maybe the world, for that matter), Columbus is again just a symbol, and as such no better of a symbol nor a more important of a player than Cortes or Pizarro or any other number of explorers and conquistadors.

The fact that my son does know Simon Bolivar and Francisco Morazan, but not yet Columbus, is for me a triumph of the educational systems he's passed through, not a failing.  In the Latin American countries where we've lived, Columbus Day is called Dia de la Raza, and celebrates all of Latin American history, with a heavy emphasis on indigenous cultures.  Likewise, the history he's seen in school talks a lot about the Spanish colonial period and the independence movements.  This is something that I feel is missing in the standard US history curriculum, which sort of jumps from Columbus to the Pilgrims, then on to the American Revolution.  The entire colonial period in North America, from Jamestown to the Revolution, is a 170-year blur.  I know that there is a whole narrative out there that alleges that activist/progressive teachers and school administrators are neglecting "real" US history in favor of politically-correct vignettes, and thus impoverishing our children from the "correct" knowledge they need to have.  One's treatment of Columbus is often seen as a litmus test for this--you are either a dippy Liberal that reviles him, or a redblooded patriot that venerates him?  I would argue against either of these extremes.  Columbus is just one in a long list of important people in American and world history.

I would argue that more emphasis on the long pre-Contact history of the Americas, plus a bigger focus on the colonial period (a la what seems to be the norm in Latin American school curricula) would in fact enrich US curricula, not impoverish them.  Kids will learn eventually about Columbus and Washington, I guarantee you.  But instead of rehashing tired old legends year after year, it would be great if they received a cumulative construction, a new piece every school year, of the entire breadth of our hemisphere's rich history, from the Siberian hunters that settled our land to the new immigrants that are redefining it in the 21st century.

I know that my children will get a healthy dose (perhaps an overdose) of the officialist history centered on powerful white men like Columbus.  They'll definitely get to hear about him and Washington and Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and that's good, because not only are they important figures, but this style of history is part of the cultural currency that we're all expected to have.  But since I know that they'll hear plenty of this stuff, I make a point to expose them to the stuff they might not see in school or TV or even in lots of history books.  African and Asian empires, grassroots popular movements, peasant and labor uprisings, black American scientists and inventors.  Expanding their knowledge base to include these oft-neglected parts of history represents an enrichment, not an impoverishment.

Missions

I just finished watching the 1986 film "The Mission" again, for the first time in a long time.  It was just as powerful and blood-roiling as ever.  It made me revisit something I've been thinking about a lot recently--on the one hand just how jaded and flawed the world is, and on the other what our (my) relationship should be to noble, sometimes hopeless causes in this world. 

I guess this line of thought started for me in April in the wake of the Mother of All Bombs attack in Afghanistan (remember that?).  It got my wife and myself thinking about nuclear war, and how ignoble and pointless it would be to die in an instant, my beautiful boys and my wife and me and everyone we care about, all gone in a cataclysmic flash.  No cause we died for, no choice or protagonism in the matter, no larger good we contributed to, just a few meaningless deaths among millions.  This then started me thinking that even the righteous, celebrated deaths (Malcolm X as he challenged himself and others to think in new ways about race, Monsenor Romero as he consecrated the Eucharist in a Mass for peace) must have felt pointless at the time for those who suffered them.  In posterity we've added the aura of honor and incorporated these deaths into a larger narrative, but the dead didn't get the benefit of these ennobling reframings.  From their point of view, they were in the middle of a struggle and got ignobly shot down before they could finish.  Dr. King at his death probably didn't feel like the hero we've since made him to be, but rather must have felt frustrated that, after a number of early legislative successes, he wasn't able to convince people that structural poverty and imperialist war were just as inherently, baldly immoral as legalized segregation had been.  Malcolm X's death or Gandhi's death must have felt to them like the culmination of the collapse of everything they'd worked for.  Only in retrospect do we see these deaths as noble sacrifices to a cause that ultimately won, or at least that was ultimately morally vindicated.

When I was in my teens and early twentites, I yearned to be part of one of these struggles between good and evil, and I revered the idea of a virtuous death in support of a lost cause.  I wasn't a jihadist or a Dylann Roof type--rather I was thinking about the sacrifices of those on the side of justice and decency in moments like the Civil Rights movement, or under totalitarian dictatorships, or during the bloody civil wars that racked Latin America in the late 20th century.  If you really believe in an afterlife for the pious and the just, then dying should be no problem.  But seeing the case of the Jesuits in Paraguay as represented in The Mission (which admittedly condenses about 150 years of history into one coherent fictional narrative) reminded me that I no longer relish the idea of a worthy death. 

In part it's probably because I'm more of a coward than I used to be, and certainly because I'm more attached now to the things of this world.  I enjoy life so much, and enjoy being around the people I love, and I just don't want that to end yet.  Beyond the baser instincts of self-preservation though, I think my reluctance toward martyrdom is because I so worry about those who would be left behind after I were to die.  If there is indeed a pleasant afterlife for those who die defending what's right, then it doesn't represent for me the solace that it once did.  Dying for the cause is the easy way out--living through the ugly times is much harder.  It's understandable that as a callow youth, centered on my own beliefs and principles, even my own salvation, with few binding ties to this world, I would buy into the idea of a noble death in service of God and His people.  Go out in a blaze of glory, and who cares what else happens?

From my perch now though in early middle age (does 35 count as early middle age?), such a martyrdom seems almost selfish.  What of those left behind?  The Guarani left to suffer torture and dispossession and enslavement after the priests are mowed down in pious dignity.  The Salvadorans with twelve years of civil war ahead of them after Archbishop Romero is sent to his well-deserved place among the saints.

No, I see that in such a situation, my main thought at my last breath would be one not of glorious ascetic completion, of leaving behind my terrenal existence to enter into oneness with God, but rather a feeling of anguish and worry for those I could no longer defend or aid.

I don't know that this new attitude toward death changes anything about my day-to-day values and actions.  What is clear to me is that we are still called to be willing to die for a cause.  But I'd rather live for one, rather share in the struggle and stick around to move it forward as much as I can.  This is of course selfish too--I want to see some success, not just die thinking the movement might not succeed. 

Success is not guaranteed though, and such a desire to see it is unreasonable and unrealistic.  Even the greatest among us, Malcolm, Gandhi, Dr. King, Romero, they all probably died with the premonition that their struggle was to fail, and I can't say that such a premonition would be unfounded.  Blacks in the US have continued to be marginalized since the 1960s, whether they have insisted on justice by force or by appeal to the better angels of our nature.  India has not evolved out of religious intolerance and persecution of minorities.  The fight against poverty in the US never gained momentum; the structural racism was never too successfully attacked.  And El Salvador is back to a morally turbid state of de facto civil war.  So even if these historical figures hadn't died when they did, I imagine they would be disappointed, feel abandoned, as they must have when they did die.

Or maybe they did find solace, not in the thought of impending Paradise, but rather in knowing that they were part of something worthy and true, that whether or not this cause was to succeed in their lifetime or anyone else's, it was the correct thing to do.  I think that the great fighters were certainly driven by this conviction in life, were indeed given no other choice by their conscience but to do what was right.  Usually this drive must seem like more of a burden and a goad.  It is a hassle to do what's right, it is difficult and cumbersome and often inglorious.  This compounded by the fact that in the course of doing what's right, you frequently doubt the very rightness of it, the soundness of your own discernment and conviction (even Christ felt this in Gethsemane).  My wife reminds me though that feeling you are a part of something, believing in something, is what makes death tolerable, even if it's for a lost cause.

So maybe, just maybe, this red-hot prod of conscience, which denies you solace or complacency in life, does allow you to enter death with some tranquility.

Third World Green Daddy 70: Postscript (and postmortem) on pregnant reading

A big part of what motivated me to write my last Third World Green Daddy blog post on what I've been reading during my wife's pregnancy was another book that I didn't mention in the blog.  It's called "Expecting", by Gordon Churchwell, and is about a man's experience of his wife's pregnancy.  I also picked it up at my office's "library", which is a bookshelf where people leave books they're finished with and don't want to keep.  I thought it would be yet another way of really getting into the moment of my wife's pregnancy.

The book started out mildly entertaining, but not quite what I was hoping it would be.  The author is by his own admission a self-absorbed consumer living a yuppie life in Park Slope, Brooklyn.  So a lot of the themes he touches on seem less universal and relatable, as one man reading another's experience of manhood and pregnancy, and more the idiosyncratic whinings of someone very much defined by his rarified, hard-to-relate, super-bourgeois New York City context.  He and his male friends seem universally peeved to be distracted from their professional and leisure pastimes (art, corporate achievement, long-distance biking, etc.), and thus see their gestating babies as a threat to their high-income, low-responsibility lifestyle.  They are pissed off at their wives, who are all self-absorbed uber-mommies, living every cliche to a T as they lose all interest in life outside of their own uterus.  Very little of this was relatable to me--I mean, if you really don't want a baby, just don't have one.  It's no big deal.  The attitude that most resonated with me was a pithy, throwaway (but well-executed) description of a proverbial Mexican peasant family:

Peasants in Mexico don't think like this.  Pregnant!  Happy!  Celebrate!  Another baby?  We'll have four sleeping in our bed instead of three.  We'll feed them.  We'll work harder.  We'll make more tortillas.  They have a very different attitude about life.  Children are treasures.

Aside from the condescending and racist overtones of this characterization, I found myself much more on the same page as these peasants, not as the hypereducated "East Coast liberal" caricatures that seem to actually populate the reality the author lives in.  Frankly I think a bit of benign neglect, both toward their own self-image and pastimes, as well as toward their future kids, who will surely become yet another manifestation of their self-absorbed way of living, would do well for all of these parents-to-be.

Throughout the book, Churchwell calls for more recognition of and assignment of a male role during pregnancy and childbirth.  I can get on board with this in theory, but the author just keeps whining about not being the center of attention, at the same time as he doesn't evince much actual interest in the pregnancy in the first place.  So it's really not a good-faith call for more active male recognition coupled with more active male involvement in pregnancy.  He's wanting to get, but not willing to give.  It's more like when white folks complain about being marginalized when people of color mention any of their own concerns.  You know, life just sometimes isn't all about you.  I have to say I never went through this feeling of resentment toward my wife and kid, though I admittedly was not surrounded by self-righteous, self-centered, neurotic people as the author seems to have been.

To me, a practical man as Churchwell claims to be would get involved in the practical logistics of choosing a hospital, weighing different childbirth options, stocking up on diapers and strollers and bottles and all the other accoutrements of childrearing.  This is a role that a man is perfectly capable of fulfilling, and at least for me it made me feel a "part" of the pregnancy.  Or if he were into art, he could make art for the baby, or play music for it in utero.  Just make a role for yourself, and do it.  However, in the hyper-analyzed world that the author lives in, maybe you can never be satisfied with your role, because you end up simply consuming stereotyped roles for everything you do, or analytically criticizing those very stereotyped roles.  For instance, Churchwell speaks of fathers' going to prenatal visits as if it's some sort of virtue signaling, a declaration of being "with-it".  But can't you just be interested and concerned about the progress and health of your fetus, without trying to either fulfill or defy some pre-defined stereotype?  Again, doing this type of stuff would seem to offer precisely what Churchwell wants--a way for a detail-oriented, technologically and scientifically astute, assertive man's man to contribute his strong points to the pregnancy.

Lastly, Churchwell has a latent derision and misogyny underlying everything he writes.  He is scornful and disgusted by how his wife looks and acts, and his first instinct is always to dismiss the concerns of pregnant women or their advocates.  I assume he's trying to come off as witty and iconoclastic, but it comes off like when white supremacist internet trolls try to be daring by saying racist things.  In the end you aren't being witty or daring, or challenging the politically correct status quo.  You're just contributing yourself now to a shitty, oppressive state of affairs that you are too self-absorbed to even realize exists.  The author speaks with reverential deference toward an idealized, objective scientific establishment whenever a specific medical procedure is in question, and has difficulty understanding what the big deal is about episiotomy and things like that.  He begrudgingly comes to understand the concerns of those who would question some of the obstetrical status quo, but only after the evidence becomes insurmountable for him.  Otherwise, he can't fathom why someone (female) might not want people probing them with metal implements or slicing their 'taint with a razor.   These concerns all seem pretty straightforward to me, without much need for cerebral equivocating.

By the end of the book he sort of comes around.  On the one hand, Churchwell offers some fascinating and well-researched histories of medicine and childbirth, as well as an in-depth exploration of the (circa 2000) latest research on the physiological changes that take place in men and women during pregnancy and parenthood.  Seemingly aided by this, Churchwell gets more interested in his wife's pregnancy by the seventh month or so, and takes on a less self-centered voice.  So I ended the book on a positive note, appreciating his exploration of how having and raising children changes us profoundly, not only emotionally and mentally, but even with an endocrine, physiological basis underpinning it all.

In researching this blog post, I learned that Mr. Churchwell died shortly after his book was published.  This made me waver on even writing the post.  I don't want to disparage the dead, and the more I thought about my response to the book's mediocre early passages, the more I thought it probably wasn't even worth critiquing.  Then I found an article about his ex-wife, who found out that he had been carrying on multiple affairs while they were married.  This confirmed for me that I might be on to something with my detection of a certain self-centered misogyny in Churchwell's work, and that it might indeed be worthwhile to comment on it.  Indeed, it made me wonder as I read that what seemed to be such a frank, tell-all account of his life was really hiding a huge part of who he was, the same part he successfully hid from his wife and daughter until his death.  I can relate to this--not the unfaithfulness part, but the way in which whatever we write or share of ourselves is inherently an incomplete picture of our entirety.

But again, the real clincher for me is that Churchwell redeems himself in the end, both as a writer and a father, by getting beyond his initial pettiness and egotism and exploring some truly universal themes of how parenthood changes both men and women from the people they were before.

Third World Green Daddy 69: Reading my way through a pregnancy

When I recently got the news that my wife was pregnant again, I was sublimely ecstatic.  Of course I had been thrilled when I learned of the prior two pregnancies, but this pregnancy was different, both in how unexpected it was, and how expectant I was.

During my wife's pregnancy with Sam, I was very active, very conscious of the pregnancy and getting ready for the childbirth and childrearing.  He would be my first biological child, and in my typical busybody fashion I set about doing all sorts of logistical preparations:  getting or making clothes and other supplies, setting up hospital logistics, figuring out bottles and breastpumps and diapers,  But I was so busy doing, and it was all so new, that it sort of went by in a flash, and I couldn't step back and think about it.

When Paulo was in the womb, I was less conscious than with Sam.  Caro and I had worked out the mechanics and logistics once before, so they didn't require as much time or thought.  In addition, we went through four jobs and five living spaces in the course of Paulo's pregnancy, so I for one was sort of overwhelmed, just keeping my head above water.  I was much more involved in Paulo's childbirth itself than I had been with Sam, but when I finally did catch my breath, I realized that that pregnancy had gone by again in a flash, and I had been even less able to stop and enjoy it than with Sam's gestation.  Where I'd written fifty-some Third World Green Daddy blogs during Sam's first few years, I wrote just a few during Paulo's gestation and infancy, and these were often way late.  Witness my writing about life in DC almost a year after we'd left--I just didn't have much time to write when I was trying to juggle a new job and a new baby.

But in the four years since my second son was born, I have taken on much more of the parenting duties, and I feel like I've grown a lot as a person in the process.  I am calmer, wiser, better able to focus on what I really consider a priority for myself, and to prune out things that aren't as important to me.  I have come to appreciate the personalities and quirks and strengths and weaknesses of two very different little people, and also to adapt myself to how they see things, how they experience the world.  Each milestone of Paulo's took on special significance for me, since I also saw it as the end of something.  When he stopped breastfeeding, I thought, "That is the last time we'll breastfeed a baby."  When he outgrew clothes I put them aside, assuming they'd have to wait years until our grandkids came along.  When he lost interest in a particular baby book, I thought that I would be putting aside that part of me and of our relationship, at least until a grandkid and perhaps forever.  This letting-go was the bookend to that first joyous discovery, when I was 28 and with newborn in hand, that I was recalling the songs and stories and shared rituals that my parents had given me and that had lain dormant for 20 years or more in my mind and heart.  Now I would have to deactivate that part of me that had been reactivated for the last five years or so.  I think this was less traumatic for Caro, since Paulo was her third child (arriving 18 years after her first), and she had really been able to enjoy and cherish these moments with him.

But for a few years now Caro and I have been considering bringing another child on board.  We've looked into adoption in the three countries we have ties to, but because of our mobile, transient lifestyle, we haven't found a way to make it happen.  Each country's adoption authority is accustomed to dealing with people who live there long-term, who have community ties the agency can interview, a permanent household the agency can visit.  We just don't quite fit into that box.

At the same time we've gone back and forth on whether to have another birth child.  Caro was pretty happy to finally be getting her "normal" body back, after years of pregnancy and post-pregnancy and then the unexpected sedentary office lifestyle that we had been able to avoid during our years in Colombia, before Sam came along.  I was worried about population pressure on the world scale and adding my own little bit to it.  But then we'd have spells of dreaming of a new baby, of all the special moments and rites and warmth.  It didn't seem to make much difference in any case, since even when we were in a "trying" phase (or at least not an actively "preventing" phase), Caro wasn't getting pregnant.  She figured that age or mileage or the inevitable medical travails that accumulate over a lifetime had gotten the better of her reproductive apparatus.

This was fine--we're flexible and tend to accept what life gives us.  I did though sometimes recall with nostalgia the different steps of pregnancy and babyhood, the preparations, the dreaming, the milestones, the siblings meeting a new family member, the pride and the challenges, all of that stuff.  And I felt bad that I hadn't had a chance to savor these when I was actually going through them.  With Sam I had been so busy living them that I didn't appreciate them, and with Paulo I was removed, trying to get the rest of our life in order while Caro's belly grew. 

But then came the Sunday morning when I was sitting on the toilet and little Pauli slipped a positive pregnancy test under the door to me, special delivery from his mom.  And since then I've been in a euphoria.  I could start all over again!  All those things I'd thought I was leaving behind as Paulo outgrew them, could have a final encore performance!  And this time I'd be much more aware, much more conscious not only of what I was doing, but of the momentousness and meaning and joy of each thing, beyond the tangible doing itself.  I felt like Scrooge when he wakes up Christmas Day and learns he still has a chance to turn things around.  Not that I'd been shirking or miserly as a father before, but this pregnancy and infancy I could savor for what it was, neither worried nor uncertain as with a first child, but rather appreciative with the knowledge that it would be my last stab at the experience.  I've heard that older parents enjoy and appreciate certain moments more, because they have an accumulated wisdom, and often have known the agony of childlessness, in a way that younger parents don't.  I don't consider myself too old at 35, but I do feel like an older parent in this sense.

One of the ways this heightened consciousness has played out is in a voracious desire to read during my wife's pregnancy.  With my first son I read lots of fairy tales, poetry, even the Bible to him while he was in utero (I had a lot of free time, as I was not formally employed!).  I didn't have as much time during my second son's pregnancy, but we started The Odyssey, and finished getting through it when he was a newborn.  In this same latter vein, and influenced by both my sons' current interest in Classical civilizations and myths, I got an edition of The Aeneid translated by the same guy who did my dad's copy of the Odyssey that I'd read to Paulo.  I've been becoming gradually more diligent about reading sessions of the Aeneid with Caro's tummy.

I'm also reading a lot for myself.  I recently finished The Local Food Revolution, a mind-blowing tome that lays out the pretty bleak picture for human life on this planet in the next few decades (more on that in an upcoming blog).  When that got too heavy, I turned to Ruben Dario's Blue, a sort of intentionally frivolous but masterfully lyrical work of what he called "poetic prose", which actually has a lot of astute social commentary hidden beneath the ruby inlays and marble statues and French-style gardens and porcelain fairies.  I'm also reading a fascinating biography of Archbishop Romero called "Shepherd of wolves and lambs".  I need to finish this in time to give it to someone in Colombia for Christmas, so I'm rushing a bit.  It highlights a piece of Catholic social teaching that I've only recently come to appreciate again after years of focusing on the option for the poor:  that the rich are in fact often those most in need of ministering and salvation, as they are the ones sinning by oppression, greed, corruption, and the like.  So while we need to protect and advocate for and empower the poor, we also need to think of the rich not just as enemies but as souls in need of healing.  Romero juggled that delicate balance between fearlessly fighting for the poor, but without demonizing the oppressive oligarchs that he often counted as personal friends.

None of this has anything to do with babies, but for some reason I've been inspired to read these things, and mentally associate them with the current pregnancy.  More explicitly baby-related is Dr. Spock's book of childrearing, which thus far I've just skimmed to learn more about what Sam and Paulo are going through developmentally at this point.  My wife has a plethora of childbirth books related to her part-time vocation as a doula.  Most of these aren't too interesting to me, but there's one called the Birth Partner that is next on my reading list.

Lastly, I found a book called Baby Bargains (the 2004 edition or so) in the free library shelf at my office.  I wanted to check it out to make sure we're covering all the bases in terms of getting the basic supplies--diapers, crib, stroller, etc.  My wife wouldn't have done it--she hates consumerism more than I do, and is particularly set off by the US style of scientific consumerism epitomized by this tome, which basically gives advice on how to shave a few dollars off the price of a lot of shit you probably don't need anyway.  Anyway, I've now done my due diligence, and feel reaffirmed in my conviction that we don't need that book, and can just get our diapers and bottles and stuff the same places we always have.

Of course this list wouldn't be complete without some stuff for my current boys.  We've been plugging away at a great translation of the Arabian Nights for a few months now, and they love that, but I've also made a point to do regular readings of Where Did I Come From?, which has a very useful, concise month-by-month breakdown of fetal development.  This gives a nice complement to bringing our boys to ultrasounds and planning what they can do to take care of the baby (one guy wants to do bottle and pijama detail, while the other is oddly fascinated by changing diapers!), all in the spirit of getting them involved and excited.

Junk food and obesity in Brazil

This is a disturbing profile of how junk food companies are inserting themselves into developing countries to bring low-income consumers into their fold of loyal clients.  It focuses on the example of Nestle in Brazil as an archetype of what's happening worldwide.  Poor people who weren't eating a diet sufficient in quality or quantity to prevent stunting and cognitive impairment in themselves and their children, are now bombarded with junk food, which adds a bunch of calories that lead to obesity, diabetes, and a whole host of new problems, in addition to the stunting and cognitive impairment that still persist (since the junk food doesn't have the vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, and other components essential to healthy growth and development).

American culture and international development: a primer by J.

This is a series of four articles written a few years ago by J., the leading author/blogger/bard of international development workers.  The first article alleges that something in US culture makes it difficult for us not to focus on the donor but rather on the needs of poor aid beneficiaries.  The second article expands on this idea, claiming that we are inclined to see as paramount the right or even destiny of Americans to offer aid to others, even if that aid is ineffective or harmful.  We are more concerned about this right to give (and to feel good about giving) than the right of the recipient to dignity and effective help.  The third article looks specifically at donation of gifts-in-kind by regular people, from giving your old clothes to Goodwill for someone else to buy, to packing up nasty old socks or shoes or whatever to send to hurricane victims that don't really need them.  I am embellishing a bit on J.'s thesis here, but the problem is basically that this type of aid is usually more about my need to get rid of stuff (and not feel wasteful about it) than about meeting the real needs or desires of anyone else.  The last article is a bit of a departure from the thread of the prior three, but I think it's the most important for those of us who are serious about doing good development aid (or really good policy-making or governance or anything).  In it, J. discusses the American penchant for seeking simple explanations, and regarding with suspicion any explanation that seems too nuanced, or even the acknowledgement that something is complex.  We seek easy answers, and love to flock to the seeming straight-shooter with a quick, confident answer, even to the point of going for snake oil salesmen over scientists (witness our political preference for people who are totally unqualified, immoral, and corrupt, as long as they seem to shun complex thought and the ever-dreaded political correctness).  But this is not the way to get good results in any field.  The world is complex, increasingly so as we become more socially and technologically advanced.  Would you want someone inexperienced to offer a "simple" fix to your computer bugs?  Or a qualified, thoughtful technician who can recognize complexity and work with it?  Why would we answer any differently when the issue at hand isn't our computer but rather the wellbeing of the poor or the social ills of our society?

Anyway, I would highly recommend these four quick pieces as a great primer for anyone interested in how international development should work, and why it often falls short of this ideal.

Profile of a man from Wrigleyville

This is a cool profile of a friend of my mother's, from my neighborhood of Wrigleyville, Chicago.

Virtue signaling

I have written in past posts about the perverse tendency in much public discourse to label as bad things that are in fact honorable, like honesty, inclusion, and the pursuit of the common good.  While I knew this existed, and had an inkling that it was due to an odd mix of cynicism and contrarianism and antipathy, I have only recently discovered a term that encapsulates this twisting of the honorable into something reprehensible:  "virtue signaling".  I had never heard this before, but it perfectly captures the charge of those who would ridicule any advocacy for good things.  Anyway, here is an article that I agree with, which argues that the problem with our modern discourse is not in fact virtue signaling but rather the cynicism that insists that any sincerely held position is merely "virtue signaling" (while lauding as honorably forthright any advocacy of the basest, most incoherent instincts like racism and oppression).

A book by Sherman Alexie

Another book I read recently is Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.  It's a young adult novel with a fair dose of funny drawings.  It is a really great coming of age story, and a portrait of life on a modern impoverished Indian reservation.  A challenging thing for me was that the essential thesis of the book is that reservations are such toxic places that the only way for Indian people to live a dignified, decent life is to get off the reservation and away from their people.  This is a theme also present in a lot of writing and talking and thinking about the black American ghetto--the debate around whether it is more desireable (or possible) for low-income black Americans to improve their lot by removing themselves from the ghetto, or rather to develop and improve the ghetto itself, in situ.

I don't know exactly where I stand on this latter debate--given my professional and personal proclivities towards community development, I would like to think the best solution for any impoverished place is to make the place better, such that the community remains intact but now more healthy and prosperous.  At the same time, ghettos (like reservations) are by definition a forced concentration of desperate people into a place separate from the rest of society, and certainly from society's prosperity.  So it makes sense when you see studies that indicate that the only way for poor children of any color to truly prosper is to integrate them with more economically prosperous people, thus opening up similar opportunities (cultural, economic, professional, etc.) to the poor kids as their better-off counterparts.  For instance, there is a pretty robust body of evidence that indicates that the only successful innovation in US public education was desegregation.  None of the innovations of the past twenty years (small schools, charter schools, Classical schools, more tests, fewer tests, etc.) that maintain our resegregated status quo have been consistently successful at closing the gap between rich and poor students.  There just isn't a good way to enable people to prosper if they are only around other poor people and the pathologies of poor communities.  (All this said, a recent study seems to call into question the importance of elementary school quality at all in terms of improving economic wellbeing in poor students).

In any case, the dichotomy that Alexie presents, between remaining with your people and your culture (while remaining mired in poverty, violence, and substance abuse) or leaving them in order to prosper, to me seems less pronounced for other ethnic communities with high poverty rates, because due to their sheer size, there exist large communities that are predominantly Latino or black and thoroughly middle or upper-class.  So you can get out of the impoverished ghetto but still be around people of your ethnic group.  But I don't know of many places in the US where an Indian can be around mainly Indians and yet not be surrounded by poverty.  At the very least, the context Alexie presents doesn't offer this option. So his book challenges all of us to think about those lines and tradeoffs between individual success and ties to family and community.

I'm back with a book recommendation

I've been gone from this blog for a while, I know.  Sorry about that.  Among other things I was busy reading a lot.

One trashy thing I devoured during a week when my wife was out of town and I had no one to talk to after tucking in the boys is a thriller novel (what I refer to as airport books since they always sell them in airport bookstores) called "The Third Secret", by Steve Berry.  It is a tale of murder and mystery and action, centered on the Vatican and the secrets revealed at Fatima by the Virgin Mary.  It's like a thinking man's DaVinci Code, with a lot more actual history, better character development, and a lot less New Age Gnostic speculation (though its essential message is sort of New Age Gnostic).

Cosmos and watching the world burn

I wrote some time ago about mychildren's developing sense of empathy. I wanted to add a postscript. Recently we started watching Neil DeGrasse Tyson'sremake of the Cosmos television miniseries. At some points though my eldest son has to avert his gaze, because the vastness and magnitude of time and space is overwhelming to him. I feel this is a natural consequence of possessing a healthy portion of empathy and curiosity, which in turn leads to humility—if you observe the world enough, you will be confronted occasionally with the knowledge of how small you are and how little you know. This awe and humility are in my eyes a major source of wisdom, Socrates's old adage of knowing how ignorant you in fact are. It is in direct contraposition to a lot of people on the national political scene today, who seem arrogant, resolute, even proud of their ignorance.

It made me think of an article I readabout the current US campaign to undermine European and globalinstitutions. The article made a number of references to the importance of understanding historical context, such as this GK Chesterton quote that "one should never tear something down until one knows why it was built in the first place". But the article also sagely pointed out that many people simply seem to take joy in watching the world burn (I would go so far as to say that some people even want to hasten its burning). I have often observed this tendency in other contexts. The guy in a traffic jam that knows honking won't help the matter, but is nevertheless the first to lean on his horn and set off a chaotic cacophony of honking and ill will. The internet troll who just wants to offend and piss people off because it makes him feel powerful. The maladjusted kid on your block that always wants to cause trouble and suffering. These are all a certain character type that I guess is always going to be present at a low level in any society. But it seems like there are certain moments in history when these base instincts to destroy and drive chaos, which are normally kept at bay by the natural tendency of civilization to preserve itself, gain an upper hand. In such moments the acts that would normally earn someone criticism and censure, become accepted and even celebrated. The maladjusted, violent kid in your Sarajevo neighborhood that everyone used to ignore or even ostracize, becomes a dominant player, even a role model, and whole mobs of people join the cause of destroying, oppressing, and ethnic cleansing. The backwoods wacko who advocated race war and sovereign citizenship becomes more and more mainstream as people entertain extreme ideas that they used to reject out of hand. 

I'll defer to Yeats on this one:

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Unreason in the USA

This is a long-form article that traces the trajectory of anti-rational, magical thinking in the US.  It confirms a lot of my observations of the state of our thought and discourse in the States.

One point that occurs to me after reading the article, and that the article itself doesn't really touch on, is that the rise of magical thinking is perhaps in part due to an increasing disempowerment of many people in many aspects of life.  In a hyper-industrialized and hyper-globalized context like the modern US, most of us don't have a direct connection to or control over the different components of our material reality.  Not just the food we eat and the clothes we wear, but even the houses we inhabit, the cars and other machines we use, the very landscaping surrounding us, are very rarely the result of our own doing.  Our food or clothes have long come from other producers, but in the past most of us knew at least something of gardening, sewing, knitting.  Nowadays I feel like fewer people know how to fix things in their house, repair or maintain their car, prune and care for their yard.  Even those of us who do know are limited in our agency by the industrialized nature of things--being handy these days often just consists in buying a replacement part for something, not necessarily being able to manipulate the faulty part yourself.

I haven't done any exhaustive, rigorous study on this, but I know that a great deal of my own feelings of empowerment in life have come from being able to directly affect things around me.  My yard looks the way it does because I make it that way.  I'm able to identify and pick fruits from trees I cross.  I can fix a toilet or an electrical appliance when needed.  In short, I feel that I understand something about how the world works, and this extends to higher-level, abstract things like policy-making, economics, social organizing.  This is probably in large part because my job requires me to participate with communities and businesses trying to effect economic, political, or social change.  Because I understand the complexities of how this change comes about (or fails to come about), I don't ascribe the workings of the world to mysterious unseen forces and conspiracies.

But I think a lot of people in the US don't enjoy the privileges, autonomy, and empowerment that I do.  If you didn't understand or have any say in how your community and your nation is run, you'd probably be likely to think it's run by an opaque cabal.  If you don't even know how your food gets to your plate, or don't have the knowhow or the agency to fix household items, the world probably looks pretty bewildering.  I think that ultimately magical thinking and conspiracies are a sign of helplessness.

This disempowerment that is prevalent in an industrialized, globalized society like ours, where most of the material reality around us comes to us as if by magic, is further exacerbated by the rising inequality in the US, both economic inequality and inequality in access to political power. Even in my privileged case, I have to admit that I often feel powerless.  This doesn't lead me personally to resort to magical thinking, but the resignation I feel at times when I see entrenched socioeconomic and power structures perpetuating a problem, does bear some of the same traits as the magical thinking of conspiracy theorists.

I don't have a solution to all this, but I do think that perhaps if people (starting with youth?) became more involved in issues of local governance in their communities, they may start to better understand the complexities of government, of the economy, and of social structures, which would at once empower them and illustrate that the real world is a complex but comprehensible place with no need of magical thinking to explain it.  Granted, there are plenty of delusional people that get involved in local politics in order to push Creationist textbooks or perverse policies like segregation.  But I have to believe that if more people got involved in the running of their own communities, it would bring them a bit more down to earth.

Inca engineering

Here is a 2013 symposium that I have been watching a bit of in my free time.  It's about engineering in the Inca empire, and covers things like bridges, roads, terraces, and urban planning.  It seems that they did another such symposium two years later, in 2015, but I haven't started watching this yet.  In my former life I was tangentially involved in Andean archeology, so this kind of stuff fascinates me, though I haven't been able to keep up with it as much recently.  In the past I linked to a video about a suspension bridge that is still rebuilt in the Inca fashion every year in a small town in Peru.

You can find these videos, as well as many other cool discussions of Native American culture, history, and present, on the National Museum of the American Indian seminar archive site.

Next time I'm in DC I'd love to visit the whole exhibit on Inca engineering, which opened just before I left the city and is luckily open until 2020.

The economic engine of refugees

In honor of Labor Day, this is an interesting article that discusses the major economic force represented by refugees and other migrants.  They contribute valuable work to their host country economies and tend to pay more taxes than they use in services.  Most impressive in magnitude is how much money they send back to their origin countries.  There is a whole economic sector that has sprung up around this.  Western Union is the major player, but there are many others taking a chunk out of refugees' and migrants' hard-earned wealth that they send back home.

Unwalkable cities

This is an article about Jakarta, Indonesia and how unfriendly it is for pedestrians.  I have been in a few cities myself that are shockingly, even aggressively, anti-pedestrian, with poor sidewalks, gleaming streets, countless overpasses and other structures that facilitate life for drivers and make it harder for walkers.  This type of car-dependent urban planning is troubling anywhere, but at least in the US, where there is widespread car ownership, it can be said to appeal to the masses.  But in developing countries where car ownership is relatively limited, this car-focused development is especially bad, because it represents an explicit opting for the interests of the wealthy few.  Granted, the rest of people adjust to the prevailing conditions, building their lives around motor vehicles (motorcycles for the better-off, buses and shared taxis for the rest), to the point that even the poor come to "prefer" the car-centered way of doing things.  But in the end it's bad for everyone.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

I have mentioned a number of times a book of my dad's from the late 80s called The Rise and Fall of theGreat Powers. It took me a long time to finish, which is I guess why I mentioned it over a long course of time in multiple blog posts.

I finally finished this book, and wanted to share a few final impressions. First off, I was surprised time and again by the analyses and projections at the end of the book, which lay out possible futures for the US, China, Japan, the EU, and the USSR. Many of them were remarkably prescient—the inevitable demographic and political decline of the Soviet Union (and the radicalization that would work at the heart of its Muslim populations in the wake of the Afghanistan invasion), the uncertain future of the EU which could either go really well or really poorly, the meteoric rise of China. Obviously the author didn't precisely predict the fall of the Eastern bloc, and was pessimistic about the possibility of the EU's consolidating a common currency. He underestimated the pace of China's economic growth, and didn't foresee the stagnation of 1990s Japan.

Most striking to me though was the continued relevance of the themes explored in the book thirty years ago. There is a lot of discussion of nuclear war planning, of the rise of ethnic nationalism and totalitarianism in the 20th century around the Second World War, the inevitable tensions between the US and Russia as leading superpowers, the unresolved detente of the Korean War.  I am sad to say that these themes are regaining relevance today.  If I'd read the book ten years ago, I probably would have thought that it was dated, that nuclear war and a renewed Cold War with Russia were a threat that we just didn't have to worry about anymore.  I likewise wouldn't have dwelled too much on the 1980s tensions in the Korean peninsula.  And the appeal of ethnic nationalism to a defeated people would have been an interesting study in German history, but I wouldn't have so tangibly and immediately applied it to my own country, today.  But these themes that I would have glossed over as relics of the past now seem more relevant than ever.

Another major theme throughout the book's arc, from the Hapsburg era to the 1980s, is the escalating cost of war and weaponry. In this respect, Kennedy predicts that the US and maybe a few others will remain the only superpowers, since it is so expensive to build up a modern military and weaponry systems. However, this is somehwat challenged by the recent trend toward disruption as opposed to full-on major power confrontation. Even important powers like China and Russia are apparently opting for morevolume of lower-tech weapons, because with low-tech weaponry you can disrupt the dominance of a high-tech superpower at a fraction of the cost of maintaining that dominance.  From a recent Reuters article, "Carriers, ... give Washington’s rivals a cheap opportunity to score big. For the cost of a single carrier, ... a rival can deploy 1,227 anti-carrier missiles".

I will close with a long quote from a long-time employee of the State Department on the occasion of his more or less forced retirement.  I think it does a good job of explaining how the US can, or cannot, succeed in diplomacy.  He says that the only way for us to continue to advance our interests in the long-term is by stressing our values and principles.  If we try to dominate through propaganda and misinformation, we will lose out to Russia; we can't compete with them in that field.  If we try to treat diplomacy as a commercial transaction, we will lose out to China, the master of that approach.  But if we appeal to the hope, liberty, the ideals and principles that we stand for, we can continue to hold the attention and the sympathy and the admiration of the rest of the world.

The United States is the world’s greatest economic power, the world’s greatest military power, and with your vigilance, it always will be.  But the greatest power we project is hope, the promise that people can establish liberty in their own country without leaving it....

If we wall ourselves off from the world, we will extinguish Liberty’s projection, as surely as if, as the Gospel says, we hid our lamp under a bushel basket.  If we do not respect other nations and their citizens, we can not demand respect for our citizens.   If our public statements become indistinguishable from disinformation and propaganda, we will lose our credibility.  If we choose to play our cards that way, we will lose that game to the masters in Moscow.  If our interaction with other countries is only a business transaction, rather than a partnership with Allies and friends, we will lose that game too.  China practically invented transactional diplomacy, and if we choose to play their game, Beijing will run the table.

Business made America great, as it always has been, and business leaders are among our most important partners.  But let’s be clear, despite the similarities.  A dog is not a cat.  Baseball is not football.  And diplomacy is not a business.  Human rights are not a business.  And democracy is, most assuredly, not a business.

Ungrateful refugees

This is an article from a woman who came to the US as a child, a refugee from Iran.  She makes the case that refugees should be no more grateful than anyone else, and that the case for accepting refugees is not because they make your country great (because not all of them will, though I personally would argue that countries with more diverse populations are in fact better off), but because it's simply the right thing to do.  These are similar arguments to ones I've expressed, not in relation to refugees but just in terms of providing a decent, dignified life for everyone in a society, not just the lucky few that our supposed meritocracy deems worthy of respect.

In her own, stronger words, Ms. Nayeri explains why she shouldn't be particularly grateful for having been received as a refugee to the US when she was a kid:

what America did was a basic human obligation. It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks. It is your duty to answer us, even if we don’t give you sugary success stories. Even if we remain a bunch of ordinary Iranians, sometimes bitter or confused. Even if the country gets overcrowded and you have to give up your luxuries, and we set up ugly little lives around the corner, marring your view. If we need a lot of help and local services, if your taxes rise and your street begins to look and feel strange and everything smells like turmeric and tamarind paste, and your favourite shop is replaced by a halal butcher, your schoolyard chatter becoming ching-chongese and phlegmy “kh”s and “gh”s, and even if, after all that, we don’t spend the rest of our days in grateful ecstasy, atoning for our need.

I would add, from a non-refugee viewpoint, that my reading (or my twisting) of her argument is that it is not a paean to ingratitude, but rather a call that we should all be grateful, all of us who are alive.  If the US is a great place to live, then the native-born should be just as grateful as the refugee to be there.  And ideally committed to making the entire world a decent place to live, for all of its people.

Despite herself, Ms. Nayeri does end on a note that seems to reiterate the benefit to the receiver country, an argument she explicitly rejects earlier in the essay:

the world is duller without [immigrants] – even more so if they arrived as refugees. Because a person’s life is never a bad investment, and so there are no creditors at the door, no debt to repay. Now there’s just the rest of life, the stories left to create, all the messy, greedy, ordinary days that are theirs to squander.

The bottom line is that offering sanctuary to those in need is just common decency, and the refugee should only be as grateful to live somewhere as the native-born are to live there.  And in the end, common decency is rewarding to all, because it allows those who are helped to realize their potential in a way they wouldn't have otherwise, which in turn enriches the world for the rest of us..

Black heroism in Night of the Living Dead

I'm not a big horror movie fan.  But when I was in college, I saw Night of the Living Dead during a dorm Halloween movie night, and I was pretty impressed.  Actually my first reaction on seeing it was that I was glad I hadn't seen it when I was younger, because the whole zombies-breaking-into-a-house motif would have scared the wits out of me.  I mean, I was terrified of that premise even without having seen the movie, just having heard about it as a kid.

Anyway, what I thought was really interesting about the movie was that it seemed to offer a subtle challenge to the prevailing order of racial oppression and disdain in 1960s America.  The smartest, most level-headed character was a black man, and after weathering the storm of the zombie attack, he is anticlimactically shot down by a police helicopter that thinks he himself is a zombie.  An ambiguous but very thought-provoking set of images.

I had long wondered if anyone else shared my reading, until recently when I came across this article that advances and develops a much more detailed and thought-out version of my interpretation.

Ashenden or the British Agent

I just read Ashenden (also called The British Agent) by Somerset Maugham.  I'd never read anything before by him, but I knew that he was considered a godfather of spy literature, so I had to try it out.  I really enjoyed the book--it reads like a proto-LeCarre, with the antihero spy, the quiet, non-James Bond action, and the detailed reading of British class idiosyncracies.  It's off-copyright now, so you can download it for free here.  It is fascinating to see how much of World War One-era culture and espionage is similar to how we still do things today.  It's from a hundred years ago, but the characters don't seem antiquated or old-timey at all.  It's also a fun coincidence that lately I've been watching the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles with my sons, since much of the series depicts Indy's espionage escapades in the same war and the same era.

Anti-fascist video from the US War Department

This is a pretty lucid take-down of ethno-nationalism and fascism more generally, dating from 1947.

Lost City of the Monkey God

I just finished reading The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston.  It is a wide-reaching account of the National Geographic-funded expedition to rediscover the remains of a major civilization in the dense jungle of the Mosquitia region in Honduras.  Wide-reaching because the author deftly goes into recent, colonial-era, and pre-Hispanic history of the region, as well as offering detailed considerations of archeological practice and even human epidemiology.

Early on in the book there are a few more predictable passages of Preston's first impressions of a country he's never been to and is linguistically and culturally unequipped to understand.  The mundane details of modern Tegucigalpa read as exotic landscape, rife with poverty and pollution and violence that seems sometimes more informed by a lurid imagination than by what's in front of him.  It doesn't help that his initial guides are often hucksters that want to play up their own derring-do and heroism by spinning tall tales about how rough everything is in Honduras, and by extension how tough they are for surviving it.  Those of us who have spent a lot of time as expats in developing countries have surely seen this a fair amount, and perhaps been tempted to ourselves partake in the trend, swapping stories of how badass we are for coolly confronting the exagerrated dangers of our adopted homes.

But it is to Preston's credit that, as he the person becomes more familiar with the nuance of the country he's visiting, his narrative becomes less wide-eyed and sensationalist, and you feel that he is really picking up on a lot of the essence of what he's seeing. 

Anyway, here's a better review of the book that should give you an idea of if you want to read it for yourself.

A Tuskegee airman reflects on racism

Here is a sad reflection from the oldest of the living Tuskegee airmen.  Firstly sad because, despite his service to country during the Second World War, he was excluded from civilian jobs and full civic and economic participation in his country after the war.  And secondly because, with his 102 years of experience, he feels that racism is a pernicious problem that doesn't seem to go away.

How does foreign aid help middle America?

A lucid contribution on how foreign aid helps domestic wellbeing within the US.  The focus in on aid to Central America, but it is more broadly applicable.

RAISE act

This is an informed and astute analysis of the RAISE Act, the Republican-sponsored immigration reform bill.  The analysis is written by Lyman Stone, a conservative blogger who writes what I think are fair, honest, and relatively hate-less thoughts on migration dynamics in the US and elsewhere.  More than anything, I appreciate that in this and in other articles I've read from him the fact that he is a sincere conservative, meaning that he has certain ideas or preferences for how a society should be run, but he is very conscious of and averse to the ethnic nationalism that has stained the Right Wing in the US and elsewhere.

In his analysis of the RAISE act, Stone is overly concerned in my opinion with the idea of integration of immigrants in US society.  I'm not saying that it's not important for a society to have cohesion and interaction among its members.  But Stone harps a lot on ethnic enclaves whose members don't integrate into US society.  I would offer a few arguments for why this is a misplaced concern. 

First off, US society is constantly evolving and changing.  This is inherent to the society.  Think of all the things that are now "typically American" that are really inheritances from Irish or German or Italian or Mexican immigrants, all of whom maintained certain cultural idiosyncracies because there were so many of them and they maintained ethnic enclaves where their food and language and ideas were preserved, developed, and evolved while they gradually entered the US mainstream.  If all our immigrants in the past had been evenly spaced across the Anglo population instead of concentrated into certain enclaves, and encouraged to rapidly adopt Anglo-American cultural practices, we wouldn't have the pizza or beer or hot dogs or hamburgers or music or movies or politics or philosophy that have enjoyed such important specific contributions from strong ethnic components.  We'd still be eating corn pone and talking like Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Our US culture today would probably be unrecognizable to an American of 1885, and I am glad for it.  If we try to freeze our society at one point in time and demand that any newcomers just maintain that status quo, it is an arbitrary and silly exercise, and it keeps us from the constant change and evolution that has been one major hallmark of our society.

More importantly than this, I think Stone's focus on immigrants' apparent hesitation to integrate into US society is grounded on some fallacies.  Namely, I don't think immigrants are in fact that hesitant to integrate into US society.  My understanding is that, by many measures, immigrants today are integrating faster than those of the past.  There is more intermarriage, quicker learning of English, etc.  Immigrants in the early 20th century often didn't learn English for decades, and their kids took a long time to as well.  Immigrants today, and especially their kids, have to pick up English almost immediately.  I think that many monolingual Americans see immigrants speaking a different language with each other and assume it is because they can't speak English.  But the fact that you know a second or third or fourth language doesn't mean you don't speak English.  So one fallacy is that immigrants are in fact hesitant to or unable to integrate into US society.  This has been totally counter to my experience. 

Another fallacy that Stone seems to rely on is that there is one "US culture" to integrate into.  By his own admission (in other writings), Mr. Stone dislikes and dismisses cities in general, refuses to spend much time in them, and is a proud Kentuckian.  All of these run counter to the mainstream of US society--most of us are not rural, spend a lot of time in cities, and are not from Kentucky.  Is Mr. Stone's unwillingness to adapt and "integrate" into mainstream US society a cause for concern or censure?  I would say not.  If he wants to live his American identity a certain way, that's his right and prerogative, and the rest of us are also in fact richer for it.  The same goes for a Pakistani-American who likes living in a certain area of Chicago and hanging out with a lot of other South Asians.

But the last and most important fallacy I pick up from Mr. Stone is the idea that immigrants live in segregated enclaves mainly due to their own personal choice.  Obviously there is merit to the idea that many people of a certain background seek out others of that background when they arrive somewhere new.  This provides support networks, familiar faces and ideas, a certain degree of safety.  Of course you will seek out some people of your own background to help you settle in.  But I don't think many people migrate to the US from elsewhere in order to be exclusively around people from their origin country.  Those who leave their countries are preseumably the most open to new experiences, to being around different people, sometimes even to rejecting their home culture.  No, I would argue that the existence of monolithic ethnic enclaves is largely a result of "mainstream" white Americans not wanting to be around too many other kinds of people.  Chicago's Latino neighborhoods have undergone a massive influx of Latinos since the 1980s, but equal to or greater than this influx has been the flight of the whites from these neighborhoods.  The first Latinos arriving in these areas chose to live in white neighborhoods.  It was the whites that fled.  Likewise, Chicago's black neighborhoods were initially forced to be all black by laws, and in the and 1960s when this de jure segregation was struck down, blacks sought to live around whites.  It was the whites who fled.  And it is the whites who continue to refuse to look in now-nonwhite neighborhoods when they are making housing decisions.  So to summarize, I think that the bogeyman of immigrants' self-segregating is at the very least exagerrated, if not totally invalid.

All this said, I would encourage my readers to check out Lyman Stone's (much more statistically-informed) thoughts on migration.  I certainly will be doing so.