LET THE GREAT WORLD SPIN – FORWARD
WASHINGTON, D.C. – I've been avoiding this piece for a while. But after all that time abroad, all those countries visited, all those friends made and a very successful process of "Irishification" undertaken by my Irish friends over the past five months, I nonetheless find myself back in my long-time favorite coffee shop in the American capital with a drip coffee on the table next to me (beats the holy shit out of Nescafe!), an American flag on the wall to my right, the Jackson Five on the stereo and the summer issue of The Oxford American in my rucksack. Or is it backpack? And there I was thinking I'd re-Americanized…
Indeed, that will be the subject of this last post on "American, Abroad" – what's the relationship between my American-ness and my abroad-ness? If it's true that you can't go home again, that must be even more so the case when your first extended trip outside of North America is an odyssey of nine months, fourteen countries, two-plus new languages, tens of thousands of miles/kilometres flown/driven/walked/ran/cycled/swum, dozens of new friends and umpteen life-changing experiences. In other words, my "year" abroad might better be styled as "two lifetimes." It certainly feels like that long ago that I packed everything I thought I'd want for the next nine months into a couple of bags and drove to Logan airport to catch an overnight flight to Istanbul. I waved good-bye to my parents and walked to the gate without looking back – somehow I knew that I was bound for something good.
And oh, how good it was. Those of you who've been reading my oft-neglected blog have gotten some of the year's tableaux; as a quick re-cap, I'll highlight that I lived a ten-minute walk from the ocean for nine straight months; got to see Syria just months before it blew up; celebrated Thanksgiving with a turkey dinner in Turkey, Christmas with friends in Antwerp and Easter in the piazza of St Peter's Basilica; swam every day in Alanya; completed the toughest mountain walk in Ireland; backpacked the tallest mountain in Ireland with my best friends; watched every episode of Father Ted at least once – and then saw star Ardal O'Hanlon perform stand-up; spent a weekend in an Irish-speaking village; taught English in a Turkish primary school; grew a beard; went Nessie-hunting on Loch Ness; and made absolutely the most amazing friends during both semesters. To paraphrase one of them, I was so, so lucky. It's true, and I'm incredibly grateful for everyone, everywhere and everything that contributed to making this year what it was.
But now that I've mentioned the good stuff, I want to try to draw some lessons from both of the societies that so generously hosted me these past nine months. Thinking back to my "two visions of the future" post, I stand by all of the assertions I made then at the beginning of my Irish semester. The Turks have a roaring economy and a dynamic culture to match; they actually believe they're going to "win the future" without their prime minister having to exhort them to do so in his speeches. Europeans, for their part, have a highly-developed social and global conscience and cosmopolitan cultures to go along with that; in a couple of generations, they have united the perennially war-torn Continent into a near-borderless, single-currency Union that is striving to be worthy of the appellation.
Fair play to both. But for all their respective strengths, it is vital to bear in mind the shortcomings of the Turkish and European systems and learn from them. For their part, the Turks have an overheated, fundamentally unsound economy and a less-than-perfectly-free government. They might have come through the global recession in good shape, but their bullish economy does not appear built to last and is now the subject of some worry from officials at home and abroad; meanwhile, their fascinating and rich culture has far from solved the Islam-and-democracy conundrum once and for all. Turks are far better off than Syrians, to be sure, but I would not be shouting from the rooftops of Arabia for revolting Arabs to seek to replicate Turkish government and society.
And then there's Europe. Now, I admire many things about Europe and think that – at least on a surface level – the Europeans have a lot of good ideas and get a lot of things right that Americans aren't as quick to accept. That said, I think the greatest moral, political and cultural threat to Europe and the European project are the unacknowledged fears and hatreds of its less-cosmopolitan quarters. The U.S. has a ton of dirty laundry and an increasingly vocal know-nothing/isolationist/racist sentiment, but we generally do a better job of airing that in the public sphere than do Europeans. It's easy to think of the U.S. as having a less-than-stellar record in dealing with blacks, Indians and immigrants and of Europe as one big Sweden of human rights, social democracy and universal health care, but that's an incredibly dangerous over-simplification.
Europe, for its part is – to coin a term – a tree-house society: a happy little club that exists a little bit above The Rest of Us, focused on promoting the happiness and tidiness of its little clubhouse. Nice life if you can get it, but the club members make it harder than is generally acknowledged to gain membership and don't especially care what happens on the ground. The whole E.U. business remains mostly the dream of the Continent's posh "Eurocrats" and lacks sufficient buy-in from national populations, most of which are understandably more focused on keeping their own jobs and social benefits than extending stereotypically cosmopolitan ideals to all.
There's a reason America calls itself the melting pot and Europe is more often described as "cosmopolitan:" for all of the U.S.'s failings with regard to racism and protectionism, Europe is not properly a melting pot and its surface-level cosmopolitanism too often conceals a national xenophobia towards non-white/non-Christian/non-European people. At least American racists tend to be visible and vocal; Europe is not diligent enough about acknowledging and policing its most nationalistic/xenophobic agitators, and its leaders show a distressing tendency to navel-gaze and free-ride on American-provided security.
The other worries I have about the European model of social democracy – which I will be the first to admit has done tremendous good – are that it encourages nationalism and discourages entrepreneurialism and self-reliance. If citizens pay high taxes with the understanding that they will receive great social-security benefits in return, they will be understandably reluctant to loosen criteria for citizenship. More hands in the pot means less payout for everyone. On the other hand, knowing that you're entitled to an essentially livable wage courtesy of government even before doesn't exactly cultivate the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps spirit. As some Finnish friends freely acknowledged, the vaunted Scandinavian social security system actually dampens national creativity and drive to work and thus begs a free-rider problem. Be careful what you wish for, Michael Moore, because you may get exactly that.
Now, I know I'm not being perfectly fair here. "Europe," "Europeans" and "Eurocrats" are all loaded, over-general terms; my Euro-denominated Irish friends, for example, will be the first to tell you they're not really European. Europe is a lovely place and has many lovely people, what it lacks in my American perspective is dynamism and openness.
So if there is any one cultural value that undergirds America – and "American exceptionalism," if that exists – it is our unique blend of cultural openness and ingenuity. That spirit has always been our hallmark and our strength, and it's what everyone who worries about American decline is most afraid of losing. As I've said before, one of the universally-acknowledged beauties of Europe is how old and cultured everything is, but modern Europeans have been content to rest on the glories of past civilizations. The Romans didn't take over and say "Gosh, those Greeks sure built some pretty buildings and nice artwork. Let's keep the world united so that everyone can visit the triumphs of Greek antiquity." No: the Romans said "Look what those Greeks did. Let's do them one better!" Today, Europe is more in the business of preserving the past than building the future.
To my eye, America is on the fence between preservation and perseverance. We still talk a good game ("We went to the moon once!") but tend to shrink from commensurate action (that was then, this is now). W should not – can not – settle for preservationism: "Well, folks, we had ourselves a nice run there in the 20th Century. Time to let someone else run the show." Can you imagine, less than a century from now, the Chinese minister of defense giving America the sort of tongue-lashing Bob Gates just gave the Europeans: "Come on, America, you have got to take some responsibility for your own security instead of just doing endless home-improvement projects on your tree-house and passing endless self-congratulatory declarations on human rights!"?
Not in this man's America. But I don't say that because I'm still in my old "oo-rah, oo-rah!" mindset of previous years. I refuse to accept climbing up into our own tree-house while telling ourselves we sure did good by winning WWII and putting a man on the moon, didn't we? But I also refuse to accept our own strand of destructive navel-gazing, the messianic/apocalyptic rhetoric of the hard-core exceptionalists who thump their Bibles and blather that America is the city on the hill, the last best hope of freedom in this world.
Because we're not. We do certain things very well, but we're as full of shit as every other people and country on the face of this earth, and it's about damn time we started taking ourselves a bit less seriously because no-one else really does. We have our own problems here, chiefly our completely unsustainable economic and social models, which we doggedly pursue to the great detriment of the Earth and the world. In many ways, we're at least as bad for buck-passing as the Eurocrats: making and shipping all of the "Made in China" crap that fuels our perpetual-growth economic myth-model is helping neither our carbon footprint nor the global freedom of which we are supposedly the great beacon and final arbiter. As the economist Tim Robertson points out in his TED talk on the no-growth "happiness" economy, we buy shit we don't need with money we don't have to make impressions that won't last on people we don't know. And we've let that system get "too big to fail."
So here it is, my great synthesis of Europe and America: in the words of Lincoln, we need to appeal to "the angels of our better nature" on both sides of the Atlantic and fuse American can-do dynamism with European realism and social conscience. Whatever paternalistic patience I might have harbored for the know-nothing, isolationist fear-mongering of today's Republican Party is gone now, as I learned watching the Republican debate last week. To tell obvious lies with a straight face on national television and to impugn President Obama for being "too European" and too willing to engage with the rest of the world should be a capital crime. Why is no-one willing to stand up to these merchants of fear and disunion? Americans, insulated by friendly-ish neighbors and oceans, have always had an isolationist streak, but it is insulting to everyone's intelligence to pander to it, much less to make isolationism/know-nothingism a measure of ideological purity for a presidential candidate.
Though I certainly don't try to withhold my own personal biases and opinions from this blog, I have tried until now to keep from being too overtly partisan in this space. But in no uncertain terms, I will now say that if being a smart, engaged, socially-conscious, moral, realistic person with a vision for the betterment of the United States as a country and as a member of the world community makes my president "too European," give me that president over one whose foreign policy "experience" can be distilled to "I can see Russia from my house!" To be fair, I have tremendous problems with President Obama and the Democrats – spinelessness, lofty words backed by precious little action and European-esque navel-gazing, to name a few big ones – but I can at least respect someone who recognizes that America can and should improve at home and abroad and has got to do a better job of being a global citizen. That doesn't make us soft. That gives us tremendous soft power, and in these days of recession and military over-extension, soft power is gold.
So yes, America, it is time to "put away childish things." Put away the religio-reactionary template of the conservative. Put away the know-nothingism and isolationism and fear-mongering. Put away lying and "truthiness." Put away the go-it-alone, exceptionalist, "man on the moon," WWII-inspired rhetoric and start acting in the world's best interest. Put away the deadly fallacy of perpetual growth. Put away unsustainable environmental, nutritional and population practices. Put aside knee-jerk, masturbatory, fawning media coverage of people and ideas that aren't actually newsworthy (this means you, Sarah Palin, climate deniers and everyone who thinks that tornadoes happen because God is angry at gays/Jews/Muslims/Obama/blacks/evolution/abortion/sharia-law-in-America). And most of all put away elected officials (or anyone else) who scores points by acting like a four-year-old and insisting that if we deny facts like climate change loudly enough, they will go away. Such behaviors only serve to kick problems down the road to future generations in America and throughout the world, and willfully screwing up the future is about as un-American a behavior as you can get.
Let's instead have an adult conversation in this country for once. Stop the yelling, stop the lying, tell partisan zealots of any stripe to feck off, and actually sit down and apply our famous American ingenuity and democracy to the great problems that face us. How to start getting carbon out of the environment? How to get everyone fed in a way that doesn't kill the planet or ourselves? How to solve the population crisis? How to move forward towards a sustainable ecological and economic model for the future? How to find happiness instead of the vapidly virtual "connection" of materialism and hundreds of Facebook friends without a single relationship?
As plenty of people smarter than I have noted, facing any one of the above issues would be daunting; seeing so many bills come due at the same time is going to require the most revolutionary global adaptation every undertaken. And we'd better start now: if the world doesn't get together and start tackling this stuff, there will be Malthusian hell to pay. As things currently stand, Republicans are pandering to the richest .01% of the population and peddling "the soft bigotry of low expectations" (in George W. Bush's own words!) and dreams deferred to the rest of us. Meanwhile, the Democrats have so thoroughly ceded control of the American political narrative that they merely split hairs with Republicans about which visions/tenets of New Right conservatism to follow rather than presenting a genuinely alternative agenda. To "win the future," we're going to have to re-imagine America, and both parties are shamefully and woefully devoid of new ideas.
I don't have the answers. Don't pretend to. But I'm not willing to accept that we as a nation and as a species can't face this most monumental and existential of challenges and not pull through it. As a personal challenge, I'd encourage everyone to take a page from the modern revolutionary playbook and start putting the internet to good use. There are loads of brilliant people out there with great ideas on everything from population to food/agriculture to health care to no-growth economics and the "happiness" economy, and it's vital that we be paying attention. Try spending 20 minutes to an hour every week searching for and reading some kind of alternative news source on a topic that interests you or, better, one that you know nothing about. Listen to TED talks. Find out what a "CAFO" is and what it means to you. Google the ingredients in your Diet Coke. Get to know Tim Robertson, Jared Diamond, Carl Safina and Michael Pollan. Sign up for a new weekly email from Utne, Mother Jones, Longreads.com, or some other cool site neither you nor I have ever heard of. Read a book about the financial crisis. Ask yourself, "Who is the president of Yemen and which country is he in today?" (Hint: it's not Yemen.)
Michael D. Higgins, an Irish politician and intellectual, said that "The conservative can exist in comfort only by averting his gaze. To choose to know is to risk being presented with a dilemma. That dilemma, put simply is that, once one knows, you can from that moment, only life in the bad faith of guilty silence or act." With the internet putting the majority of human knowledge at your fingertips, you're averting your gaze these days if you're getting by on only the front page of your local newspaper or even less. Even if you and Google really don't get on, there are plenty of books out there that cover this stuff in even more detail than blogs. Maybe it's my inner European talking, but I'm urging you to challenge yourself. Get out there, get pissed, and then get ahead by getting as smart as you can.
And don't keep it to yourself, either – once you choose to know, you have to act. Share some links. Start a book group. Log out of Facebook and call a friend. Better yet go have coffee with someone and compare notes from your weekly "knowledge sessions." Trust me, if one of you reads up on farm subsidies and the other reads up on the financial system, you'll have a great conversation and leave that coffee shop loaded for bear. Goodness knows this country needs to be doing more actual push-ups, but we also need to do mental push-ups. Learning is habit-forming. Catch it!
So that's that. I'm back and I'm not averting my gaze. Call it intellectualism, call it Europeanism, call it Beltway-insiderism, call it cosmopolitanism, call it the hubris of thinking I'm well-travelled after visiting just over a dozen of the world's 193 independent states. Whatever. I'll choose to ascribe it to seeing that there's a massive big world out there and realizing that every School of Foreign Service/Culture and Politics instinct I've got is telling me it's a pretty cool planet we live on and we'd better get serious about making it a better one. Climbing up into our tree-houses and pulling the ladders in after us isn't going to help anyone. To lift a line from Angels in America, "the world only spins forward." Let's roll with it.
***
A note on the title: I shamelessly stole Let the Great World Spin from Irish-born novelist Colum McCann's wonderful book of the same name. It is required reading. The idea that "the world only spins forward" came to me from a speech by Wellesley High School teacher Adam Cluff, given at WHS commencement June 2010.
