There are people who are constantly cursing their luck, and there are people who will play the ball as best they can from wherever it lies and see it as a challenge. They know that the one thing they can control is not the bounce of the ball but their own attitude toward hitting it. In that context self-confidence and optimism are powers unto themselves. There are cultures that, when faced with adversity or a major external challenge, tend to collectively say, “I am behind, what is wrong with me? Let me learn from the best to fix it.” And they learn to adapt to change. And there are those that say, “I am behind, what did you do to me? It is your fault.”
Adaptability without humiliation, for instance, certainly describes nineteenth-century Japan, a country that had done its best to have no contact with strangers and to seal out the rest of the world. Its economy and politics were dominated by feudal agriculture and a Confucian hierarchical social structure, and they were steadily declining. Merchants were the lowest social class, and trading with foreigners was actually forbidden except for limited contact with China and the Dutch. But then Japan had an unexpected encounter with a stranger—Commodore Matthew Perry—who burst in on July 8, 1853, demanding that Japan’s ports be open to America for trade and insisting on better treatment for shipwrecked sailors. His demands were rebuffed, but Perry came back a year later with a bigger fleet and more firepower. He explained to the Japanese the virtues of trading with other countries, and eventually they signed the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, opening the Japanese market to foreign trade and ending two hundred years of near isolation. The encounter shocked the Japanese political elites, forcing them to realize just how far behind the United States and other Western nations Japan had fallen in military technology.
This realization set in motion an internal revolution that toppled the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Tokyo in the name of the emperor since 1603, and brought Emperor Meiji, and a coalition of reformers, in his place. They chose adaptation by learning from those who had defeated them. They launched a political, economic, and social transformation of Japan, based on the notion that if they wanted to be as strong as the West they had to break from their current cultural norms and make a wholesale adoption of Western science, technology, engineering, education, art, literature, and even clothing and architecture. It turned out to be more difficult than they thought, but the net result was that by the late nineteenth century Japan had built itself into a major industrial power with the heft to not only reverse the unequal economic treaties imposed on it by Western powers but actually defeat one of those powers—Russia—in a war in 1905. The Meiji Restoration made Japan not only more resilient but also more powerful.
Alas, not every culture is able to deal with contact with strangers by swallowing its pride the way the Japanese did and vacuuming up everything they can learn from the stranger as fast as they can.
The Chinese actually had a phrase, “the century of humiliation,” that they used to describe the years stretching from the 1840s, when China first tasted British imperialism, to its invasion by Japan and further debacles. As The Economist noted in an August 23, 2014, story about China: “For centuries China lay at the center of things, the sun around which other Asian kingdoms turned. First Western ravages in the middle of the 19th century and then China’s defeat by Japan at the end of it put paid to Chinese centrality.” But after opening to the world in the 1970s, China used its history to energize its future. Particularly under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, it acknowledged it was in a divot, and reached out to the world to learn everything it could to adapt and catch up and reestablish its greatness.
By contrast, Russia let its humiliation get the best of it after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which President Putin once described as the “greatest tragedy of the twentieth century.” Lawrence E. Harrison, writing in a collection he coedited, Culture Matters in Russia—and Everywhere, noted:
[The] collapse of communism has left Russia humiliated—it has lost its great power status and is on the sidelines watching as former ally and competitor China moves toward that status. Russia’s export profile looks like that of a Third World country, with the lion’s share of exports dependent on natural resource endowment, above all petroleum and natural gas. The country that beat the United States into space has been unable to produce an automobile of export quality—not to mention its comparable shortfalls in information technology.
During this period of national humiliation, one can well understand why the Russian leadership expressed intense concern over the relatively poor performance of Russian athletes in the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
But even to this day, Putin continues to look for dignity for Russia in all the wrong places—such as harassing Ukraine or diving into the Syrian civil war—rather than truly tapping and unleashing the greatness and talents of his own people.
Some Arab and Muslim nations and terrorist groups have clearly fallen into a “Who did this to us?” mind-set. Asra Q. Nomani is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and an Indian-born Muslim who worked with Daniel Pearl before Pearl was murdered in Pakistan. On June 20, 2012, she testified to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, on the subject “The American Muslim Response to Hearings on Radicalization Within Their Community”:
In 2005, Joe Navarro, a former FBI special agent, coined the concept of terrorists as “wound collectors” in a book, Hunting Terrorism: A Look at the Psychopathology of Terror, which incorporated years of experience analyzing terrorists worldwide from Spain to today’s Islamic movements. He wrote that “terrorists are perennial wound collectors,” bringing up “events from decades and even centuries past.” He noted: “Their recollection of these events is as meaningful and painful today as when they originally took place. For them there is no statute of limitations on suffering. Wound collection to a great extent is driven by their fears and their paranoia, which coalesces nicely with their uncompromising ideology. Wound collecting serves a purpose, to support and vindicate, keeping all past events fresh, thus magnifying their significance into the present, a rabid rationalization for fears and anxieties within.”
To me, this phenomenon extends to the larger Muslim community, where there are wounds expressed in living room debates that earn many Muslims status as “couch jihadis,” as one U.S. law enforcement official referred to them in conversation with me. I grew up eavesdropping on these “couch jihadis” in the men’s sections of our dinner parties. Indeed, Mr. Navarro told me, “Collecting wounds becomes cultural” for communities worldwide. Clearly, knowing a community’s wounds is important to understanding its history, Mr. Navarro said, but he noted, “The beauty of extremism is that it doesn’t allow forgiveness.”
I have covered a lot of wound collectors in the Middle East, but, again, it is not universal. The very same Arab Muslim world that produced Nasser and bin Laden, so consumed with lashing out to overcome their humiliation, also produced Tunisia under Habib Bourguiba and Dubai under Sheikh Mohamed bin Rashid al Maktoum, who chose instead to dig deep, embrace change, learn from the other, and build out. The very same Latin America that produced the dictator Hugo Chávez in Venezuela produced the dynamic democratic president Ernesto Zedillo in Mexico. The very same Russia that produced Putin produced Mikhail Gorbachev, with his relatively more liberal vision for his country. The very same Southeast Asia that produced the genocidal Pol Pot in Cambodia produced the builder Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore.
Embracing Diversity
As for embracing diversity, it is more vital than ever today for creating resilience in a changing environment. Thanks to diversity, no matter what climate changes affect your environment, some organism or ensemble of organisms will know how to deal with it. When you have such a pluralistic system, adds Amory Lovins, “it automatically adapts to turn every form of adversity into a manageable problem, if not something advantageous.” (He’s paraphrasing his late mentor Edwin Land, who said, “A failure is a circumst
ance not yet fully turned to your advantage.”)
Because “pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity,” explains the Pluralism Project at Harvard on its website, “mere diversity without real encounter and relationship will yield increasing tensions in our societies.” A society being “pluralistic” is a reality (see Syria and Iraq). A society with pluralism “is an achievement” (see America). Pluralism, the Harvard Project also notes, “does not require us to leave our identities and our commitments behind … It means holding our deepest differences, even our religious differences, not in isolation, but in relationship to one another.” And it posits that real pluralism is built on “dialogue” and “give and take, criticism and self-criticism”—and “dialogue means both speaking and listening.”
Being able to embrace and nurture this kind of true pluralism is a huge asset for a society in the age of accelerations—and a huge liability if you cannot, for a host of reasons. Indeed, I would go a step further and say that the ROI—return on investment—on pluralism in the age of accelerations will soar and become maybe the single most important competitive advantage for a society—for both economic and political reasons.
Politically, pluralistic societies that also have pluralism enjoy much greater political stability. They have a much greater ability to forge social contracts between equal citizens to live together equally, rather than have to rely on an iron-fisted autocrat keeping everyone in line from the top down. In a world where all top-down command-and-control systems are weakening, the only way to maintain order is through social contracts forged by diverse constituencies from the bottom up. Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nigeria, for instance, are all stories of pluralistic societies today that lack pluralism and are paying a huge price for that—now that their diversity can no longer just be controlled from above. A working melting pot that melds diverse citizens who can then do big, hard things together will be a huge advantage in the twenty-first century, when so many more people will be on the move.
At the same time, in the age of accelerations, societies that nurture pluralism—gender pluralism, pluralism of ideas, racial and ethnic pluralism—tend to be more innovative, everything else being equal. A pluralistic country that embraces pluralism has the potential to be much more innovative, because it can draw the best talent from anywhere in the world and mix together many more diverse perspectives; oftentimes the best ideas emerge from that combustion. Even countries that are not ethnically or religiously diverse—think Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and China—can enjoy the fruits of pluralism if they have a pluralistic outlook; that is, if they develop the habits of reaching out to the best ideas anywhere in the world to adapt and adopt them.
As the social scientist Richard Florida observed in a December 12, 2011, essay on this subject on CityLab.com:
Economic growth and development has long been seen to turn on natural resources, technological innovation and human capital. But a growing number of studies, including my own research, suggest that geographic proximity and cultural diversity—a place’s openness to different cultures, religions, sexual orientations—also play key roles in economic growth.
Skeptics counter that diversity is an artifact of economic development rather than a contributor. They argue that diverse populations flock to certain locations because they are either rich already or are fast becoming that way.
An important new study by economists Quamrul Ashraf of Williams College and Oded Galor of Brown University should help put many of the skeptics’ claims to rest. “Cultural Diversity, Geographical Isolation and the Origin of the Wealth of Nations,” recently released as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, charts the role of geographic isolation, proximity and cultural diversity on economic development from pre-industrial times to the modern era.
It finds that “the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe.” To put it in plain English: diversity spurs economic development and homogeneity slows it down …
The evidence is mounting that geographical openness and cultural diversity and tolerance are not by-products but key drivers of economic progress.
P. V. Kannan is the cofounder of 24/7 Customer, which began as a call center operation in India and, since 2007, has expanded into a customer service/analytics company with a thousand clients around the world. I have watched his company grow from a start-up in Bangalore, with a lot of people answering phones, into a global big data services firm where high-paid data engineers are working on screens. When I asked him what his clients look like today, Kannan responded: “I go into a client in Sydney and their data expert is sitting in California and they are talking about their call centers in the Philippines and India and their top management is spread around the world—and even those in Sydney [all] come from different countries. The whole stereotype of all white men in one place is gone. If you are running a smart company today, it is filled by people from everywhere … Pluralism allows you to be fast and smart.”
This is only going to become more true as Moore’s law and the Market move deeper into the second half of the chessboard. Lovins argues:
Let’s say you have two genomes. And genome A has one gene that is perfectly adapted for today’s system of cold and genome B has twenty genes, only one of which is expressed as resistance for cold. Genome A has one option to mutate the gene until it randomly hits on the solution to the problem or it dies. Genome B might have twenty offspring. Genome B has twenty potential answers. It will express or modulate each of those twenty, and there is a very good chance that one of them will be the right solution to the problem it faces.
One of the most valuable tutorials on the virtues of diversity I received came in 2014, when I took part in Showtime’s Years of Living Dangerously documentary series on the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation around the world. My contribution was to look at how climate change and environmental destruction had affected Syria, Yemen, and Egypt. The interview I learned the most from, though, happened in Salina, Kansas, and it underscored the close parallel between monocultures and polycultures in nature and politics. Our film crew came out to America’s wheat-growing farmland to illustrate how the drought that hit wheat farms in central Kansas in 2010 ended up raising bread prices in Egypt and, as we’ve seen, helping to fuel its revolution in early 2011. Our visit was built around an interview with Wes Jackson, founder and president of the Land Institute, an experimental farm where his team of bioscientists is trying to develop a perennial variety of wheat, called Kernza, that would not require annual tilling and planting. Jackson, a bioscientist and MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awardee, started the interview by giving me a tutorial on the prairie, which I wrote up as a column along the following lines:
The prairie, Jackson explained, was a diverse wilderness, with a complex ecosystem that naturally supported all kinds of wildlife, as well as American Indians—until the Europeans arrived, plowed it up, and covered it with single-species crop farms: monocultures, mostly wheat, corn, or soybeans. Annual monocultures are much more susceptible to disease and pests and require much more fossil fuel energy—plows, fertilizer, pesticides—to maintain resilience, because in a monoculture, one pest or disease can wipe out the whole field. They also exhaust the topsoil, which is so vital for life. Polycultures, by contrast, noted Jackson, provide species diversity, which provides chemical diversity, which provides much more natural resistance to disease and pests and “can substitute for the fossil fuels and chemicals that we’ve not evolved with.” They also naturally maintain the topsoil. That is why during the Dust Bowl years of the thirties, Jackson noted, all the monoculture crops died but the remaining parts of the polyculture prairie, with its diverse ecosystem, survived. The polyculture prairie stores water, cycles nutrients, controls pests, and becomes ever more diverse, productive, beautiful, and adaptive.
As I
listened to Jackson explain all of this, I responded: Isn’t it interesting that Al Qaeda often says that if the Muslim world wants to restore its strength, it needs to go back to the “pure” days of Islam, when it was a monoculture in the Arabian Peninsula, unsullied by foreign influences? But in fact the golden age of the Arab-Muslim world was between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, when it became arguably the world’s greatest polyculture, centered in Spain and North Africa. That was a period of great intellectual ferment in the Arab-Muslim world, which became the place to study science, math, astronomy, philosophy, and medicine. And what drove this intellectual ferment was the way Islamic scholars of the day bridged and integrated the very best teachings from a wide variety of civilizations, from China and India to Persia and Greece. It defined polyculture and made the Arab world incredibly wealthy, healthy, and resilient.
Unfortunately, today in the Middle East Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, using funding from the sale of fossil fuels and cash donated by Sunni fundamentalists from the Persian Gulf, are trying to purge Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Syria of any religious or ethnic diversity. They are trying to plow up all the polycultures of the region—think of Baghdad, Aleppo, Palmyra, Tripoli, and Alexandria, once great melting pots of Jews, Christians, and Muslims; Greeks, Italians, Kurds, Turkmen, and Arabs—and turn them into monocultures, making these societies much less able to spark new ideas. Al Qaeda and ISIS are effectively trying to opt out of evolution to become a specialized closed system. To put it another way, diversity and tolerance were once native plants in the Middle East—the way the perennial polyculture prairie was in the Middle West—and it gave that region enormous resilience and healthy interdependencies with so many other civilizations. Al Qaeda and ISIS, using high-density fossil fuels, are trying to wipe out all that diversity and create a monoculture that is enormously susceptible to conspiracy theories and diseased ideas. This has left that region barren, weak and unhealthy for all its inhabitants.
Thank You for Being Late Page 37
