August 9, 2010 at 16:02 The New York Times' Twitty Orientalism
One can’t help but love-hate the New York Times. It has all the erudition, the exuberant intelligence, and the pure twittiness of a first-semester graduate student. Like that erstwhile pupil, a NYT trend-story reporter has a knack for unearthing a great insight...and teasing a dubious inference out of it...and framing it as the most important revelation the world has ever seen.
This Sunday, I didn't have to search long to find a golden Times contribution for a grad-level colloquium on silly: a business story titled "But Will It Make You Happy?" The trend is Americans spending less disposable income on retail goods, an alleged shift from conspicuous to "calculated" consumerism. Fair enough; but the localization of this trend is an order of magnitude of twitty. It nods to a common and insidious NYT theme, one that’s killing intelligent discourse on America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: the cult of the simple.
Subjects of said Times story are Tammy Strobel and her husband Logan Smith, Californians of similar age and status to yours truly. Harried by the demands of her project-management job and lifestyle, Strobel "stepped off" what she calls the "work-spend treadmill":
Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number…
Now, Ms. Strobel and her husband live joyously and harmoniously in a 400-square-foot Portland, Oregon, studio. He's a grad student; she's a freelance writer. They have virtually no expenses, so she's free to hike, exercise, volunteer for a yoga nonprofit, and love life.
Sounds awesome, truly. We all want to believe that a simplification of the Thoreau type is possible. Even I bought a copy of The Four-Hour Work Week once upon a time. Then I remembered that I attended very expensive schools, possess a whopper of a debt burden, work at a nonprofit, and have a wife, a dog, and two cats. Simplification, in my case, ain't so simple. Nor is it for most people.
And yet the Times loves to titillate its well-educated, favorably heeled audience with this old myth that life can be reduced to its basic atomic elements, and the force binding them is pure wondrous joy:
Status quo living - (cars + mortgage + malls) + (organic food * outdoor living)
=
HAPPY
Quod erat demonstratum.
Faith in simplification and reductionism is also what drives many Westerners' fascination with "non-Western" things: from the cultural (see Buddhism, Sufism, Baha'ism, Theosophy, and Ms. Strobel's affection for yoga) to the commercial (oil and natural gas reserves) to the strategically significant (the Suez and Viet Nam, once upon a time). Many of us come to embrace the otherness of these things not merely because they're exotic, but because they're exotically simple - especially compared to our crazy, breakneck, technologically-fueled, dual-overhead cam-driven, democratically messy lives. I can fondly recall my first excursion to Uzbekistan as a high-school exchange student, mystified by a distant society that, it seemed, could be fully explained by Tamerlane, Islam, and hot chai.
Innocent enough, I suppose. Except that when I returned, Rotarians, local news reporters, and college admissions officers all sought my expertise on "the Uzbek."
OK, you say. Orientalism exists. Undergrads know that. And to be sure, at points in the past decade, there’s been a greater push toward nuanced understandings of global culture in some circles. We’ve witnessed the birth of a new post-9/11 generation of academics, think-tankers, and diplomats, as likely to read Said and Spivak as Galula and Van Creveld. In the US security establishment, the ascendancy of Gen. David Petraeus and his mandarins has mitigated a lot of the old simple conflict memes. But he’s no savior, and the very fact that we now talk of “surges” and “human terrain” as game changers suggests the military’s cultural advance has been a very incremental one.
More concerning, though, is how in the past year or two – since the election of Barack Obama, really – public discourse on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has fallen into a feedback loop of stupid simplifications. War skeptics begat war cynics, who begat isolationists and conspiracy theorists, who think WikiLeaks is the savior of mankind, the Taliban are the rightful “owners” of Afghanistan, and everything will be better once Western forces leave both countries. And skeptics of immediate withdrawal have followed suit with simplistically stupid arguments, selling US-led troops as the saviors of civilization and counterinsurgency as a can’t-miss strategy. (See: Time magazine and this distressingly racist post.)
Both sides, whether they realize it or not, are being fatally orientalist. First, they assume that they understand the complexities of the conflicts and the distant cultures they affect. Second, they purport to be interceding on behalf of those cultures. Finally, they assume that what the US and its allies do – leaving or staying the course – will make all the difference to those cultures. At a time when everybody should be acknowledging that there are no panaceas, everybody is offering one.
I have no counter-panacea. I will, however, recommend two books that should help to complicate your views on the wars, while hopefully purging the Times trend-story simpleton out of you:
Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World, Nir Rosen. Anyone who’s read journalist Rosen knows where he stands; The Weekly Standard angrily wrote that his access to insurgents beat other reporters’ because “he’s on their side.” But in this postmortem on the waning wars, Rosen tells a richly reported, nuanced story that often gives well-intentioned military interveners their due. Especially fascinating is his argument of how the US didn’t just fuel Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq; it virtually created them out of thin air. Said would be proud. Aftermath is due out in November, and I’ll publish my review of an advance copy at my other job.
The Betrayal: A Devastating Report on the Sabotage of Our "Other War" in Southeast Asia, Col. William R. Corson. Published in 1968, and distressingly never reprinted, this book should be on your Amazon used-books list. Corson commanded the Marines’ small-unit pacification program in Vietnam, and his account – part jeremiad, part self-advertisement – is still one of the best doses of realism injected into the COIN debate. Even today, the smartest Marines read Corson to appreciate the limits of American power and know-how.
Reader Comments (3)
The NY Times hasn't done much to garner respect in Malaysia recently: http://www.thenutgraph.com/new-york-times-admits-mistake/
This little piece itself has some of the erudition, the exuberant intelligence, and the pure twittiness of a first-semester graduate student.
Six semesters, actually, but fair enough!