The Pogo Factor
How Cultural Blindness Has Infected America’s View of the World
In the four years since the United States invaded Iraq, it’s become clear that our campaign there has gone terribly awry. We invaded Iraq with too few troops; we destroyed the Iraqi civil administration and military without having a suitable instrument of government ready in the wings; we expelled from public employment anyone with a connection, no matter how tenuous, to the Baath Party—which included most people who could be described as human infrastructure for Iraq. The list of errors goes on and on. Even the Vice President acknowledges that “mistakes were made” (although, presumably, not by him).
But how did the highly educated and powerful American people make such a horrendous, catastrophic series of blunders? As Pogo, the cartoon opossum, once famously said, “We have met the enemy and they is US!” Yes, that’s right: We, the American people—not the Bush administration, nor the hapless Iraqis, nor the meddlesome Iranians (the new scapegoat)—are the root of the problem.
It’s woven into our cultural DNA. Most Americans mistakenly believe that when we say that “all men are created equal,” it means that all people are the same. We generally believe that behind the “cute” and “charming” native clothing, behind the “weird” marriage customs and the “odd” food of other cultures, all humans are motivated by and yearning for styles of life that will be increasingly unified as time and globalization progress. That is what Tom Friedman seems to have meant when he wrote that “the world is flat”; that is, that humankind is being driven by technological and economic change towards a future of cultural sameness. In other words, whatever differences of custom and habit that still exist between peoples will pass away soon and be replaced by a world culture rather like that of the United States in the 21st Century.
To be blunt, our foreign policy tends to be predicated on the notion that everyone wants to be an American. In the months leading up to the start of the Iraq War, it was common to hear seemingly educated people say that the Arabs, particularly Iraqis, had no way of life worth saving and would be better off if all “that old stuff”—their traditions, social institutions, and values—were done away with, and soon. The U.S. armed forces and U.S. AID would be the sharp swords of modernization in the Middle East.
How did Americans come to believe that the entire world is embarked on the same voyage, and that we are the navigators showing the way to a bright future?
Drawing on the Pogo metaphor, I seek to explain why, thematically showing how our own culture is a rich blend, brewed from such elements as;
-The Enlightenment and the Influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau. These tendencies have pushed us toward the belief in the essential unity of mankind and the need to liberate humanity from the “bonds” of traditional attitudes. Implicit in this is a belief in “progress” in human affairs, that what is past after all, is just “history” --a uniquely American attitude towards the past. This has led to a view that mankind is fated to “come together” in a globalized single world culture in which old ways will be relegated to museums. As a result many Americans have little or no interest in history; we believe that events in the past are no longer significant asmankind marches on.
- Overweening optimism. The virtually unlimited resources which lay before the early European settlers offered the prospect of an endlessly expanding economic “pie.” The previous notion that man’s life would be “nasty, brutish and short” has all but disappeared from American society and has been replaced with a view of life that for all problems there are solutions. There is little sense of the “tragedy of man’s fate” in America; to the contrary, people in California sometimes seem to see death as an un-natural event.
- Puritan utopianism. The settlement of Massachusetts by English Calvinists and the triumph of their cultural heirs in the American Civil War biased the country in the direction of a belief of an earthly Utopia. Among the features of this Puritan tendency to hold “black and white” positions on morality and virtue is the continuing emphasis on the narrative of the early English settlements on the east coast of the country. In what is now “accepted wisdom,” the Pilgrims and Puritans of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay colonies are held up as models of exemplary virtue and the true founders of the country even though their colonies were theocracies which tolerated no dissent, selected their immigrants on the basis of wealth which provoked the first English-Indian War (King Philips War) soon after they arrived. On the other hand, “accepted wisdom,” taught almost universally in the schools, holds that the settlers at Jamestown, Virginia were crass, lazy wastrels and “good for nothings” that would have died out if it had not been for a “bit of luck.” Clearly this attitude of a lack of forgiveness for FELLOW ENGLISHMEN originated in a lack of willingness to tolerate a level of “difference” so small as that between Puritans and Anglicans. This attitude persists to this day and is on display every Thanksgiving when it is widely and falsely proclaimed that the feast of Thanksgiving originated at Plymouth. The New England claim is accepted by nearly all even though the historical record is clear that the custom began at Jamestown.
- The Demeaning of Native Cultures. Nothing could be more illustrative of the effect of these “strains” in our thinking than the sorry history of our centuries of struggle against the “native Americans.” From the very beginnings of European settlement in Virginia and New England, the settlers showed very little understanding of or sympathy for the Indians. The settlers’ viewed the Indian as a savage, to be Europeanized at best or destroyed at worst. The existence of institutions like the CarlisleIndianSchool which were specifically designed to eradicate Indian ways and to make “white people” out of “red people” speaks volumes about early and continuing settler attitude towards those who were “different.”
--Distrust in local knowledge.Those few government people who mastered Indian ways and dealt with them as equals rather than as a backward and ignorant race were themselves treated as “suspicious,” unsound, or of doubtful loyalty. The US Army officers who commanded the Indian Scouts in the Apache Wars of the 1880s were hugely successful as peace makers and leaders of warriors in battle but they were shunned within the army and were never given any other positions of responsibility. This same ethoscontinues today. Military or diplomatic officers who master the languages, customs and thinking of foreign peoples are viewed through a lens of mistrust, and are said to have “gone native.” At West Point in the last twenty-five years the number of foreign language credit hours required for graduation has steadily diminished even though the army is faced with a wider and wider diversity of foreign adversaries.
-- The China Hands.A 20th Century example of the fate in store for “area experts” in the US government was the treatment given the “China Hands,” the Foreign Service and Army China specialists who reported with deep insight on the likely outcome of the Kuomintang – Communist civil war after World War II. They correctly reported that the Communists under Mao Tse Tung were widely popular and capable within a specifically Chinese context. They predicted that the Communists would win the war. They were right and for their insight they were called communist sympathizers and driven from public life.
--The Green Berets. In Vietnam the men of the army’s Green Berets were carefully picked for their ability to learn languages and the psychological elasticity needed to adapt to truly alien (in many cases Stone Age) tribesmen and villagers and to lead them in battle. They succeeded in that task only to find that the Big Army (the murder army, as TE Lawrence would have called it) disliked them and their “native ways” and sought continuously to denigrate them and to “trap” them in some violation of the trivia of military law.
(This attitude penetrates even to the arts in American society. In Francis Coppola’s rendering of the Joseph Conrad story “The Heart of Darkness,” the tale is set in the central highlands of Vietnam where Colonel Kurtz, an officer described as an intellectual Green Beret with a doctorate from one of the “Ivies,” is literally driven mad through exposure to the culture of the Montagnard peoples among whom he lives. His men are driven mad as well, apparently because as “carriers” of the alien culture they are its victims as well as potential agents of infection. To solve this “problem” the army sends yet another Green Beret, this one an intelligence man as well, to kill Kurtz and eradicate the alien cultural infection. The director’s cut of “Apocalypse Now” has to be seen to grasp the full import of all this.)
--And now, Iraq.In the “run-up” to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush Administration studiously avoided asking the opinion of the substantial body of men and women who had a deep knowledge of Iraq, preferring instead to rely on the advice of activists and émigrés who had “agendas” for some particular outcome in Iraq. When asked why the “Old Iraq Hands” were not consulted the response was always the same, “They have gone native.” “Going Native” is clearly a very bad thing to most Americans. In Afghanistan from 2003 to the present, senior officers were outraged by the wear of local clothing and the growth of beards by Green Berets even though this minor adaptation to the local scene had paid “big dividends” in working with the tribes.
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In America we have been pushed to believe in a melting pot of common thinking. This belief system has been fed to us in the public schools, through Hollywood, and now in the endless prattle of 24-hour news networks. It has become secular religion, a religion so strong that any violation of its tenets brings instant and savage condemnation. So called “neo-conservatism” is merely a self-aware manifestation of the widespread American belief that people are all the same. The repeated assertion by President George W. Bush that history is dominated by the existence of “universal values” is proof in the pudding.
Americans invaded an imaginary Iraq that fit into our vision of the world. We invaded Iraq in the sure belief that inside every Iraqi there was an American trying to get out. In our dream version of Iraq, we would be greeted not only as liberators from the tyrant, but more importantly, from the old ways. Having inhabited the same state for 80 years, the Iraqi people would naturally see themselves as a unified Iraqi nation, moving forward into eventual total assimilation into the unified human nation.
Unfortunately for us and for them, that was not the real Iraq. In the real Iraq, cultural distinction from the West is still treasured, a manifestation of participation in the Islamic cultural “continent.” Tribe, sect, and community remain far more important than individual rights. One does not vote for candidates outside one’s community unless Baathist, Nasserist, or Communist. But Iraqis know what Americans want to hear about “identity,” and be they Shia, Kurd or Sunni Arab, they tell us that they are all Iraqis together.
Finding ourselves in the wrong Iraq, Americans have stubbornly insisted that the real Iraqis should behave as our dream Iraqis would surely do. The result has been disappointment and rage against the “craziness” of the Iraqis. We are still acting out our dream, insisting that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s Shiite sectarian government “unify” the state, imagining that Maliki is a sort of Iraqi George Washington seeking the greater good of all. He is not that. His chief task is to consolidate Shiite Arab power while using the United States to accomplish the deed. To that end, he will tell us whatever we want to be told. He will sacrifice however many of his brethren are necessary to maintain the illusion, so long as the loss is not crippling to his effort. He will treat us as the naifs that we are.
Through our refusal to deal with alien peoples on their own terms, and within their own traditions, we have killed any real hope of a positive outcome in Iraq.
What are the features of the ideological and attitudinal “blinders” that we wear when looking at foreigners and which cause us to ignore the actual differences in alien peoples? I think that they are:
-A belief in the inevitability of social progress.
-A belief that the future of mankind lies in political forms similar to ours.
-A belief that a single world culture is emerging.
-A conviction that ‘economic determinism” is the measure of humanity.
-A belief that the “melting pot” phenomenon is universal.
-A relentlessly negative attitude towards religion among our “elites.”
-A belief in “American Exceptionalism” as leader of the “progress” of humanity that allows us to do whatever we think right.
Table of Contents
The book will be structured in the following way:
Introduction – A discussion of the varying aspects of human cultural and social patterns among the peoples of the world and the effect that cultural blindness in the history of Europe and Japan has had in making war and suffering a common feature of life in many places, especially in the developing world. This section will provide examples of ways in which this disability has contributed to policy errors which have had a disastrous effect. The notion will be introduced here that the United States is in no way exempt from this phenomenon and may, in some ways beespeciallysusceptible to it because of the unusual origins and development of its own dominant culture (that of New England and the Middle West).
Chapter 1 -- Origins. This chapter will develop the historical and philosophical “roots” of the American cultural features described in Chapter 3; The Puritan founding of New England with its Utopian view of the New World as the location of the “New Jerusalem,” thought to be a perfected form of human society, the commercial culture of modern America focused on materialism to the exclusion of non-material values, isolation behind two oceans as a factor in the insularity of American thinking, a pronounced tendency to disregard “history” as a source of significant knowledge, an indifference to the study of foreign languages as the repository of other people’s group identity, a national preference for the study of what might be called “practical” subjects like the hard sciences, engineering, accounting and the like rather than subjects like the humanities, area studies, and languages.
Chapter 2 – The “mind set” that leads to Cultural Blindness in America will each be discussed in detail. They have been enumerated previously above but to remind, here they are again:
-A belief in the inevitability of social progress.
-A belief that the future of mankind lies in political forms like ours.
-A belief that a single world culture is emerging.
-A conviction that ‘economic determinism” is the measure of humanity.
-A belief that the “melting pot” phenomenon is universal.
-A relentlessly negative attitude towards religion among our “elites.”
A belief in “American Exceptionalism” as leader of the “progress” of humanity that allows us to do whatever we think right.
Chapter 3 --The evidence of “blindness” to the culture of others will be explored throughout American history. The record of our dealing with the Amerindian nations will be described in the context of incomprehension of the vitality and legitimacy of Indian life. Beginning with the first “Indian war” in New England in 1665, through the “Ghost Dance” war against the Sioux in the 1890s, and the insistence on transforming the Indian into pseudo Caucasians in places like the CarlisleIndianSchool will be explored. (Pictures of Indians in European clothes at Carlisle, etc will be included.) The Civil War is another example of cultural misapprehension between regions of the country that persists to this day. American “adventures” in many places in Latin America often resulted in the eventual rise to power of dictators like Duvalier in Haiti and Somosa in Nicaragua. American intervention in the Mexican Revolution exacerbated the struggle among the factions and eventually led to Villa’s raid into New Mexico and the subsequent Punitive Expedition in 1916-17. (Author’s father served in that campaign) American misjudgments about the nature and motivations of the various “players” in Mexico contributed to the long struggle there. This analysis will be brought forward to the recent past through the use of Vietnam as a prime example of our inability to understand local conditions on the basis of local realities and local custom.