Languages Dying. Big Deal.

Right now, someplace on Earth, the last speaker of an ancient language is approaching death. When this person passes away, alas and alack! Another language will be gone!

Actually, there is more than one such person. Languages are blinking out at a breathtaking pace these days. The Great Extinction, some linguists call it.

Ever heard of Jiwarli? I’m not surprised: the last native speaker died in Australia in 1976.

Chinook used to function as the language of trade in the Pacific Northwest, because so many of the region’s Native American tribes spoke it as a second language. Now, not even the Chinook speak Chinook.

In California at least 50 Native American languages are “endangered.” The estimated number of Shasta speakers, for example, is down to zero.

Roughly 6,000 languages were spoken in the world ten years ago.  Ninety percent of them will be gone ten years from now.

Phew! Sounds bad?

Not to everyone. John Miller, writing in the Wall Street Journal, asserts that every time a language dies, it’s time to celebrate, because it means another isolated tribe has joined the modern world.

He fails to mention what’s so great about the modern world, but he does have a point. Terms like “extinction” and “endangered” put the disappearance of languages on the same footing as the disappearance of species. But there is a huge difference.

One world, one language

A single species cannot survive on its own. The thinning down of species signals a threat to life on Earth itself. A single language, however, can do just fine. Calling the disappearance of languages “extinction” sneaks in the presumption that the process should be halted. Let us not take that premise without examination.

After all, fewer languages means more people speaking the same language. That trend leads, in the end, to all humans speaking the same language. What’s wrong with everybody on Earth being able to understand one another? Sounds to me like a key ingredient in any formula for world peace.  Why keep any dying language alive? Does a language have value, per se?

Here’s one main reason to mourn the death of a language. There are things you can express in any given language that cannot be expressed in any other. I say this as one who grew up with two first languages. There are things I can say in Farsi that I can’t express in English. Like what, you ask? I can’t tell you: we’re speaking English.

The opposite is true too, and here I can give an example. In Farsi, the intensifier too does not exist. You can say “much.” You can say “very much.” But you can’t say “too much.” (And note that “too much” isn’t just “very much” taken further: even a tiny amount can be too much—of certain poisons, for example.)

Or consider the Chinese writing system, which is based on characters derived from pictographs. If you’re literate in Chinese, I’m told, you can  see a whole poem at once the way you can with a painting. Clearly, therefore, a Chinese poem can never be fully experienced in English.

In an Australian language called Guugu Yimithir, there is no way to locate an object in relationship to the speaker. You can’t say “Jack is in front of the tree,” because it would be behind the tree to someone else. That sounds pretty limiting, eh? But wait. The syntax and vocabulary of Guugu Yimithir do allow you to identify the absolute position in space of an object. Gasp! How? I don’t know. I don’t speak Guugu Yimithir. Chances are, you don’t either. And we’ll never know, because Guugu Yimithir is one of those languages that is about to vanish from the Earth.

Let a thousand tongues wag

For purely utilitarian purposes, one language may well be all the world needs. There is no end to the things that can be expressed in English—or any language. But language is an expression of culture. Language diversity is a mirror of cultural diversity. If there is any value to different cultures existing in the world, there is a value to different languages existing in the world.

But, hey. One language in common doesn’t have to mean one language in toto. Why can’t everyone speak two languages? Or more? Let all humanity share one language and let 5,999 other languages bloom as well.

Nice plan, but good luck making it work—because language obeys nobody’s plan.

If one language carries all the messages related to work, study, shopping, getting around in public, etc., other languages become luxuries. What are you going to do with French, if you live in America? Yeah, I know, see French movies without looking at the subtitles. Big deal. As soon as a language stops carrying important messages, linguists say, it’s in trouble. Children learn the languages they need, but they don’t pick up extra languages “just for fun.” And languages die when children stop picking them up. All judgments on whether langagues live or die may therefore be moot, becuase languages mirrors underlying social realities. If people blend and merge, so do their languages. Wherever invaders have conquered some land and settled in with the locals, for example, invaders and invaded have ended up speaking the same language. One way or another, two languages become one.

Russian was born this way, when Vikings invaded Slavic speaking areas.

English was born when Germanic speaking Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded the Celtic-speaking islands. Christianity seeping in then gave that German a shot of Latin and turned it into Old English. French-speaking Normans conquered England, but were conquered by its language. Old English absorbed some French words (thereby turning into Middle English) but spit out the rest. So it went…and went. English is already fat on the flesh of languages it has devoured.

Sometimes languages blend so thoroughly that whole new tongues spring forth. In the 1500s, for example, Turko-Mongol warriors swept out of central Asia, through Farsi-speaking regions, and into India. They recruited soldiers from all the areas they conquered. In their army camps, one heard a cacophony of Farsi, Hindi, and Turkic. Soon, however, the soldiers in those camps spoke a single new language blended of three. Urdu, it was called, which just meant “army” in Turkic. Urdu is now the official language of Pakistan.

Given the natural tendency of languages to merge, the disappearance of minority languages seems like an inevitable bi-product of globalization. Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad. Get over it, dude, it’s going to happen. Or is it?

Get together and split

Language has a powerful tendency to branch as well as blend. If you’re going to England, remember not to compliment anyone by saying, “Nice pants!” because over there “pants” means “underpants.” And there are hundreds of usages like that. Two groups of people with the same language and culture got separated by an ocean and a few centuries later they were speaking British English and American English. No one planned it. No one could have stopped it.

Indeed, dialects can grow so far apart that the speakers of the same language eventually become mutually unintelligible. I just visited a small town in Appalachia, and I must tell you, with my West coast accent, I had trouble carrying on a conversation with the cashier at the Wal-Mart there. I wonder how that Kentucky cashier would fare chatting with an English-speaking Hindu from Delhi?

Many full-blown languages, such as Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, did in fact start out as dialects of the same language. But when Spanish and Italian formed, Spain and Italy were so far apart, most people in one place never spoke directly to people from the other place. That’s how dialects keep branching.

The technology monkey wrench

Today, technology might interrupt the process. You can get to an Internet terminal within a day in just about any city on Earth. Even remote villages, from Africa to Afghanistan, have access to satellite TV now. One afternoon last spring, I found myself sitting in a teahouse in a small town outside Peshawar near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, watching a CNN news broadcast in English followed by a punk band shrieking in, well, I guess it was English.

In short, most Earthlings are now in contact with a global stream of language, and that stream is dominated by English. If things keep going the way they are, all humanity may well end up speaking English.

But there is another force at work here too. People resist losing their own language in favor of someone else’s. It doesn’t matter if the other language is more functional for getting along in the world.

That’s because language does more than carry practical messages. It enables a way of thinking unique to itself. This goes way beyond vocabulary—way beyond phenomena like the Inuit having 100 words for snow (which, incidentally, may not even be true.) It goes to the deep structure of a language, the whole how it works. The still-developing brain of the young child hardwires to accommodate the language the child is learning. The syntactical connections of the language reflect the neural connections in the brain. Language and thinking are intertwined. When I switch to speaking Farsi, it’s not what I’m thinking that changes but how I’m thinking.

Language has the power, therefore, to invoke a sense of identity in its speakers. When native speakers of a language begin talking among themselves, their group identity, separate from other groups, comes alive and gains strength.

Forbidden tongues

Not surprisingly therefore, languages don’t just die; they are also sometimes killed, or at least their murder is attempted. That is, rulers who speak a different language from their subjects often take measures to suppress their subjects’ language. In the 19th century, for example, the British government outlawed Gaelic in Ireland.

By the same token, groups who are trying to reclaim a political and cultural identity take steps to preserve their special language. Today, Native American activists in the United States are busy trying to revive Native languages. Native language immersion preschools have sprung up on both coasts. Mary Abbot, director of the California Native Network, says, “By learning the language, the native world view and values begin to re-establish themselves. A whole way of being is encoded in the language.”

But can languages be created? 

In 1887, Polish physician Ludwig Zamenhof perfected Esperanto, a brand-new language built from scratch on rational principles: for example, every letter in Esperanto has one sound. Every sound is represented by the same letter or letter combination. The grammar has but 16 rules, and all the verbs are regular. What’s not to like?

Zamenhoff proposed Esperanto as a global second language and nobody’s first language. He succeeded wonderfully in his second goal: Esperanto, today, is nobody’s first language. Is it anybody’s second language? Esperanto enthusiasts claim that millions of people speak it worldwide. They may be right, but I’ve never met one or met anyone who has met one. As far as I can see, Esperanto remains a curiosity for language hobbyists and one more proof that language can grow like an organism, but cannot be built like a machine.

Linguists try to preserve dying langauges by archiving them. They make dictionaries of the languages. They describe the grammar, record native speakers telling stories, collect books written in the language, even create writing systems for dying languages that have none. One group, the Long Now foundation, has created a “Rosetta disk,” a small nearly indestructible nickel object on which is inscribed, in microletters, 27 pages from Genesis in 1,000 languages—for the benefit of some future linguist who may find the disk someday when most of these languages are dead.

But none of this keeps a language alive. It merely embalms the corpse. A language thrives only if some group of people wants to speak it. That’s why language preservation really comes down to politics.

Gaelic is returning to life, only because some Irish people want to reclaim their Irish identity. Hebrew was nearly a dead language, preserved only in Jewish religious rituals and texts, but now that the state of Israel exists, it is a healthy living language again.

Language is peculiarly impervious to legislation. Maybe someday we will all speak the same language. Maybe we won’t. Whatever happens won’t be the result of anyone deciding what is correct. Language will decide what it will do—and whatever it decides will be correct.

9/11 and the American Empire

Ten years have passed since those airplanes crashed into the  World Trade Center.  A journalist just asked me what I thought about this past decade from an Afghan American perspective: how had it changed the Afghan American community?  And what about the American intervention in Afghanistan–did it help, did it hurt,  is it succeeding? What are the prospects for peace in that region? 

Certainly, these are all legitimate and interesting questions. They’re questions I care about.

But today, to be honest,  I am thinking more about the impact of 9/11 on America than on Afghanistan.  And I’m not just referring to the curtailing of civil liberties and the anxiety about terrorism that been so pervasive over the last ten years.  I’m pondering the truly stunning world historical impact of the event. 

I suspect that future historians will look back to this decade as the turning point for the American empire. That, they’ll say, is when the collapse began. I hope I’m wrong,but that’s what I suspect.

And it didn’t have to be.  If it turns out that way, it will be because of vast and avoidable errors. It will because of the way the George Bush and his administration responded to the crime of the young century.  It was never necessary for America to give Osama bin Laden what he wanted–a war.  That was a policy decision–a choice.  It was never necessary for the president of the United States to treat Osama bin Laden as if he had the global stature and power of a Stalin or Hitler. That was a choice. Bin Laden didn’t have an army, he didn’t have a mass following, he didn’t have territory or resources or even an authentic political program. His only power was the power of propaganda and in order to  use that effectively, he needed someone to magnify his bullhorn.  George W. Bush obliged. 

Context is all.  What was happening in America as a whole when the terrorists attacked New York and D.C.?   Consider the bigger picture. In the nineties, this country pretty much lost its manufacturing base to the Third World, thanks to globalization; but it looked like it wouldn’t matter because we were inventing new technologies that would spawn a whole new “information economy.”  Throughout the Clinton years, the stock market boomed and everybody had jobs because venture capitalist were investing madly in technological start-ups that seemed to have vast potential.

Except for one little problem.  No one had a clue how these start-ups were going to make money.  There was no business model for the information economy.  Quite the opposite.  People would still pay for the underlying hardware, but not for the information it carried because that could now be gotten for free,  thanks to all the technological innovation. And whatever information wasn’t free was radically devalued because the new technologies made so much more information available that the law of supply-and-demand kicked in, making any particular piece of information nearly worthless.  In 1995, there were a few thousand magazines being published in America, at most, and that’s where you went to for a certain sort of information.   In 2005, where you went to for that sort of informatino was a blog–and in that year there were an estimated 64 million blogs. There are many more of them now. 

And yet it took just as much time as ever for people to produce good information–to gain expertise in a subject, to research the particulars of a question, to draw smart conclusions, to shape data into a form usable by others.  An economy in which the products cost time, effort and resources to make but cost nothing to buy–isn’t an economy. 

By the time Bush took office, capital was in flight from Smell.com and its ilk. Unfortunately there was no new industry to fly to.  So capitalists parked their money in real estate while they waited for something to break.  And because money was coming into real estate the price of it began to climb. 

But money stops being money when it’s parked, because money isn’t a thing with value per se:  it’s only a measure of value, and real value consists only of economic activity and interactivity. Period. When the value of real estate climbs, nothing of actual value is increasing.  Nothing is being built, no goods or services are changing hands. The price of real estate might climb but the growing value is an illusion. 

These trends were already emerging when Bush took office.  A crisis was coming. Someone should have done something, and I’m not saying who, but Bush was president.  His great policy initiative, however, his passion and achievement, was to cut taxes for the wealthiest Americans by a trillion-plus dollars.   The argument was: leaving more money in the pockets of the rich would lead them to create jobs and grow the economy. But that only works when there is an economy to grow.  The Bush tax breaks arrived just when the rich had run out of anything of actual value to invest in, so the additional money they suddenly had ended up parked somewhere,  mostly in real estate. What else were they goin to put it into? Smell.com?  The failing auto industry? And when the price of high-end real estate climbed, the price of the next level went up, and the next, and the next. At the lowest end, real estate became the thing  you could buy without money and sell for a profit. Everybody was feeding at the trough of illusion.Trouble was coming. Someone should have done something. 

And it was right in the middle of all this that 23 terrorists hijacked  three planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center.  Just as the American economy was losing its legs, just after the Bush Administration had undercut the ability of the U.S. government to take on any expensive projects, or even dotheones it was already committed to,  George Bush started two really expensive wars.  There is one thing, however, that an empire with hidden weaknesses can’t afford to do and that is to start a war it can’t win.  And “win”, in this context,  doesn’t mean forcing the other side to say “uncle.”   That’s trivial.  “Win” means  improving some problematic situation the empire confronts. A war is a win for an empire when the result is greater order, more stability.  (I’m not saying “stability” is always a good thing; I’m just saying, an empire is winning when it’s creating and expanding the realm of stability.)  By this definition, the United States lost the war in Iraq.  The violence has wound down there, but Iraq is a shattered mess simmering with hostility, both interfactional and anti-American.  As for Afghanistan, the United States will probably pull out of that place over the next two years but when it does, Afghanistan may well see another eruption of bloody disorder, with possibly permanent damage to U.S. interests in the region. That’s not a win. 

But as soon as an empire looks ineffectual, it loses prestige and influence;  its rivals gain heart; its allies lose faith;  its currency begins to weaken (because currency is belief); its own internal contradictions turn into conflicts; and its social cohesion begins to erode. And in the end, social cohesion is the basis of imperial strength–not weapons, not economic might, but social cohesion.

As a crime,  measured against other crimes,  9/11 was virtually unparalleled.  As an act of war, measured against other wars,  it was a blip.  Imagine if, instead of committing a trillion dollars to launching a war, Bush had responded to 9/11 by committing a billion dollars to conducting the biggest man hunt in history. Imagine if Bin Laden and his cohorts had been arrested a month after 9/11 and put on trial. Imagine if diplomatic pressure had forced Pakistan to end its support for the Taliban; Afghans would have driven that regime out by themselves. Imagine if the United Nations had then convened a conference amongst all the warring factions of Afghanistan and helped them create an actual government of national unity.  Imagine if the Muslim world had seen a Muslim country restored to health and sanity with American help, but with no strings attached, no pressure on Afghans to remake their culture in the American image. 

Well, I know. It’s all woulda’-coulda’-shoulda’ at this point. The question is, where do we go from here?

And the answer is–

Oops I’ve run out of time.

Disguises, Weddings, and Escapes

Osama’s death and the beginning of the American withdrawal are not the only news from Afghanistan. Here is a sampler of striking stories from April of this year–odd new items that deserve a somewhat extended account. 

The Great Escape

It reads like a Steve McQueen/Vin Diesal movie featuring the Keystone Kops (or perhaps Klink and Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes) as prison guards.

Here’s what happened: on April 25, 488 prisoners escaped from the main prison in the city of Kandahar, through a tunnel that ran to a nearby private compound. It took the prisoners five months to dig the 1000-foot tunnel from the compound, under a highway, and into one cell in the prison. That end, the prisoners used car jacks to break a hole in the conrete floor so as to access the hole. After they had made that access hole, they allegedly covered the opening with a carpet so the guards wouldn’t notice it, until the night for the Great Escape arrived. And since the hole was just big enough for one man to fit through at a time, it took those 488 men four and a half hours to stream out–during which time no one noticed anything.

Well, it was the dead of night, to be sure, but still!

Once the escapees came out of the tunnel in that compound across the highway, cars were waiting to trasnport some of them to places a few blocks away from the prison. There, they hailed taxis to finish their getaway. Others, it seems, walked out the front door of the compound and strolled away whistling. (Actually, I don’t know if they were whistling; that part is speculation.)

Within the prison, of course, the hole came up in only one cell. The prisoners were all supposed to be locked away in separate cells, but on the night of the escape, 488 of them were somehow able to leave their cells and get to the room with the tunnel opening. Somehow, the story goes, they acquired keys.

Provincial governor Tooryalai Wesa blamed the prison break on the “negligence” of the jail’s security guards, but others, including President Karzai, conceded that prison insiders must have facilitated the plot—the guards, the prison administrators, someone. Fewer than 20 of the escapees were from the criminal section. The rest were security detainees and included several governors and district governors of the Taliban’s “shadow government,” which is now said to be nearly nation-wide.

The prison break dramatized the power of the insurgency and suggested that it must enjoy a great deal of local support. “Thousands of truckloads of earth must have been coming out of that hole, and yet nobody said anything,” mused a man who lives across the road (One cannot help but speculate this man was himself among those who saw something and said nothing.)

But wait, there’s more. This is the same prison from which 1,000 inmates escaped in 2008. That time they did it by blowing open the front gates with explosives and running out. Days after that escape, Taliban fighters seized several nearby villages and threatened to capture the city of Kandahar itself. Authorities are assuring city residents that nothing of the sort will happen this time. In fact, 72 of the escapees were recaptured within the first 24 hours of the event.

The day after this latest prison break, NATO said its forces killed “the second most wanted insurgent” in the country, a Saudi Arabian known to Afghans as Abdul Ghani, although his real name was Abu Hafs al-Najdi, except in Saudi Arabia where his real real name was Saleh Naiv Almakhlvi Day. Ghani/al-Najdi./whatever was allegedly a senior member of al Qaeda and directed a network of insurgents throughout Kunar Province, the remote area in southeastern Afghanistan that borders Pakistan’s Swat region. He was certainly killed the day after the prison break, but was he really the “second most wanted insurgent” in the country? That, to me, sounds like a moniker added to make his death so dramatic it would push the prison story to page two. In this it failed, but oh, well, Osama bin Laden has now been killed, which finally makes the prison break story old news.

Government (In)Security Forces

A second story that I’ve been following has no comic overtones. This one is simply ominous–in itself and in its implications.

On April 15, the Afghan Ministry of Defense announced that it was taking strict steps to stop militants from infiltrating Afghan security forces. What prompted them to issue this reassurance, I don’t know. Apparently there were rumors.

Sadly for the Ministry of Defense publicity department, on the very day of that announcement, a suicide bomber passing himself off a a new recruit got onto an Afghan army bus near Kabul and blew himself up, wounding ten. The following day, a suicide bomber disguised in an Afghan army uniform infiltrated an army base and killed five NATO members and four Afghan soldiers. On April 17, a suicide murderer killed a police chief in Kandahar. And a few days after that, a Talibanist insurgent wearing an Afghan army uniform made his way into Afghanistan’s Defense Ministry and opened fire, killing two soldiers and wounding seven before he himself was killed.

Here were four deadly security breaches in one week and three of them involved insurgents successfully impersonating members of the Afghan army and police force. Clearly, the Talibanists were out to prove that they permeate the indigenous security apparatus the U.S. and NATO are trying to create in Afghanistan, and also that they are capable of striking anywhere, at any time—right inside the Ministry of Defense, right inside an army base, right inside the police headquarters of a major city.

Pile this on top of the prison break and the picture looks pretty disturbing. What does it matter how many soldiers are in the central government’s Afghan National Army if you don’t know which of your recruits are on you side? That, of course, is the doubt the insurgents hoped to plant. And they succeeded.

In response to the deadly impersonations of Afghan national security personnel, Kabul police clamped down on markets selling police and army uniforms. Selling such clothes is now illegal. Tailors have been forbidden to make outfits resembling uniforms. One tailor was arrested for this crime, but he pleaded that he wasn’t sewing new uniforms, only repairing old ones.

The Afghan senate has called for the resignation of Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak over the security breaches—but he’s already on the chopping block because of the prison break and because, according to Karzai, he and the Minister of Finance are too close to the Americans.

Ban on Big Weddings

The government is considering banning big, fat Afghan weddings because these extravagant ceremonies are ruining families. The big weddings are potlatch-like competitions among upper-class families to show off their wealth. Those who win such competitions end up garnering status and power, provided that can come out the other side still solvent.

The competitive-wedding phenomenon reflects the emergence of “power-brokers” as the new elite of Afghan urban society, replacing “warlords,” who formed the upper crust in the period that followed the Soviet withdrawal. Warlords emerged because Afghanistan was in a state of violent, nationwide anarchy, and the men who prospered in that environment were all the guys who were good with guns and could accrue the largest following of other guys who were good with guns.

This new elite, the power brokers, have emerged because, in the cities at least, what counts now is not how good you are with guns but how good you are at dipping you fingers into the river of “reconstruction money” that has been pouring into the country—a by-product of the American intervention and the Western attempt to restore, stabilize, and democratize Afghanistan. Those who prosper now are the men (and women) who understand the politics of reconstruction aid and have the necessary skills and moxie to worm their way into the bones of the new West-engendered bureaucracy. Having prospered, however, these folks still need to win status in Afghan society. There, traditionally, “lavish hospitality,” or even “reckless largesse” is the mark of a truly worthy lord. And that’s why the thousand-guest weddings have become all the rave.

As with all such trends, however, the competition at the top percolates down to competition at lower levels (just as, for example, competition for high-priced New York commercial real estate drives up the price of skyscrapers which eventually drags upward up the price of all real estate, even a one-bedroom fixer-upper in Hoboken. )

That is to say, the richest and most powerful of power-brokers have a vested interest in proving themselves against other richest -most-powerful-powerbrokers. Their competitive weddings are epic galas meant to keep tongues wagging in wonder for generations. But the next tier down of rich-and-powerful-powerbrokers have rivals in their tier; and they too therefore come under pressure to throw the most extravagant weddings they can manage, to shame their rivals and gain status against them. And so it goes, filtering down, until it affects all the social layers of urban Afghan society.

As a result, young men have to risk financial ruin in order to get married, and some end up endlessly postponing their marriage, even after they have gotten engage, so they can save enough to cushion their wallets against the sticker shock of lobe.

The bill to tame the big-fat-wedding craziness would restrict weddings to 300 guests and limit spending to 250 afghanis per guest (around $5). By setting such limits, the bill would of course help promote social egalitarianism, at least until the rich- and less-rich find another way to square off in recklessly lavish hospitality contests. On that score, then, the bill seems like a good thing. The ban would, however, put a dent in the wedding industry, which is a big business in Afghanistan. (Kabul alone has more than 70 wedding halls.) In fact, it is one of the few industries not related to drugs or “development” that is really on the rises. What’s more, this is an industry from which women have been able to benefit—since beauty shops, high-end gown stores, and the like make most of their profits catering to wedding guests

Big news: U.S. commandos have killed Osama bin Laden. He’s certifiably dead. Never mind the adage that goes:  ”Don’t believe anything until it has been officially denied.”  I belive this news, in part because even Al Qaeda has conceded that it’s true.

Frankly, I thought he died long ago in the caves of Tora Bora, in 2002, and yet I still think his killing now is important news. I think it’s big news even though I have long been saying, it doesn’t matter if he’s alive or dead becuase he’s been irrelevant for years. I never bought the Bush Administration theory that Osama bin Laden was a terrorist mastermind with sleeper cells in every American city and terrorist tentacles in every corner of the globe. I did (and do) believe he was a ruthless, cold-blooded bastard, who was out to spawn a war and succeeded. I did (and do still) fear the violence, chaos, and hatred he helped to set in motion. But I never lost any sleep worrying about Osama bin Laden per se. As a personal threat to me or my loved ones, he ranked somewhere south of lightning.

And yet, I do predict that his death will mark a dramatic change–even though I doubt bin Laden has been directing much of the violence that has been plaguing the world in these last ten years. I don’t even think it’s even al Qaeda stoking the violence anymore. It’s not even radical Islamists. In fact, in the years since 9/11, the proliferating warfare has been driven far more by Western aggression in the Islamic world as by Islamist aggression in or against the West.

But here’s the thing: many American leaders have wanted to extricate the country from this quagmire, but they couldn’t. Domestic politics tied their hands. In the feverish aftermath of 9/11, Bush recklessly declared a shapeless, undefined war against a shapeless, undefined enemy. He then cast himself as the decision-making, mission-accomplishing, butt-kicking cowboy. He soon found he had backed the country into a terrible corner, but by then it was too late. Having whipped the nation into a frenzy, he and his cohorts could not withdraw from war-making until they could say “We’ve won.” And the nature of the war they had declared meant that the “We’ve won” moment could never come. It could not come because there was no specifiable goal, no way to identify victory, no one over whom to triumph.

If you’re fighting another country, you’ve won when you take their capital. If you’re fighting a criminal organization, you’ve won when you’ve captured their leaders and/or shut down their operations.

But in the war-on-terror declared by Bush, the other side was never going to say “We surrender” because there was no “we”. The “other side” was not a state or syndicate or even a fixed entity. It was a condition: a potent brew of poverty, impotence, resentment, humiliation, and anger cooked into a movement by a socially created ideology that had accumulated over time and had come to permeate the Islamic world. No command headquarters were needed to preach it or promote it. Anyone with a grievance could dip into this common store of rancor and take from it what they needed to excite a few cadre into a “mission.”

That being the case, anything the United States did to break the insurgency could only add to the humiliation and resentment fueling the fire on the Muslim side. Fighting the war was causing the war. Fighting it harder was making it burn hotter.

What’s worse, over these last few years, local grievances with a long local history have overtaken the “Jihadist” character of the violence. In Afghanistan, for example, the supposed Taliban have fragmented into a myriad groups driven more by xenophobic localism than be any narrative of apocalyptic struggle. And this is an old drama in Afghanistan, a drama that the United States and NATO cannot solve in the short term. In fact, the growing number of foreign troops in Afghanistan has correlated alarmingly to a growing and spreading insurgency. It’s a quagmire. Everyone knows it.

And yet any U.S. President who simply stopped the war and brought the troops home knew his rivals would say he was accepting a defeat for America and drive him from office. Even those who thought the war should be stopped and troops brought home would say it becuase it would be way to drive this guy from office and take his seat. And then, having driven a president from office for being a quitter, his successor could not do anything but keep fighting.

That’s why the death of Osama bin Laden is such big news. It doesn’t change much of anything on the ground. Al Qaeda had already fragmented and had been superseded by many other groups, and yet the war raged on, hotter than ever. The death of Osama bin Laden has only symbolic importance. But the symbolism is huge. The death of Osama makes Barack the Osama-killer. He can claim credit for achieving the single definable goal of the war on terror which gives him, for the moment at least, political maneuvering room that neither he nor Bush ever had. It gives him the opportunity to say “We won, we can bring the troops home.”

Of course, it’s not as if the world will be filled with peace and light the moment America withdraws its troops from Afghanistan. But that’s another question for another time.

Canyonlands

Forty-five years ago, I went to Canyonlands, a place in southern Utah. I was a student at Colorado Rocky Mountain School then, and the school traditionally took us kids on two camping trips a year, one in the fall, and one in the spring. Fall Trip was only three days long, we went to places near campus; but Spring Trip lasted for a week and we went to places far away and hard to get to. Each year, there were eight or nine trips to choose from, and we signed up for the one we wanted. That year, my senior year of high school, my second year in America, I wanted to go rafting down the Green River, but everyone wanted to go rafting on the Green, and by the time I got to the sign-up sheet, it was filled. So I signed up for Canyonlands, my second choice. I remember the big covered trucks the school used to transport us to the park, one long day’s ride away. I remember my (relatively) new American comrades playing guitars in the truck as we hurled along, and singing “folk songs”  such as Kumbaya (I still don’t know what a kumbaya is) and Blowing in the Wind. And I remember how the ride was flavored with subtle romantic excitement because we were boys and girls together, a dozen or more of us in the close quarters of that truck, in the sexual flush of late adolescence, riding through Western landscapes, headed toward adventure.

And I remember where we camped: a large cave-like hollow under an overhanging sandstone cliff and how, in the distance, from the campsite, we could see the Needles–spires of red sandstone, a virtual forest of them, thrusting up from the desert floor, each one a hundred or two hundred feet tall.

The next day, a group of us guys headed for those spires. The Needles were a maze of labyrinthine cracks and passageways among towers of red sandstone, full of chimneys that a climber could shimmy up inside of, and vertical faults that a guy could climb up by using layback techniques, and ledges that a fellow could inch along to perilous and thrilling heights, and cliff-like faces studded with toe- and fingerholds that were all the more exciting to cling to when you knew that you’d be falling fifty feet to your death if you lost your grip.

Rock climbing was the only sport I was ever really good at, because I had grown up in the mother of all rocky places, the Hindu Kush mountains, I had no fear of heights, and I was a skinny stick of a guy, not strong but strong for my weight, strong enough to lift twice my own weight. We had a climbing rope along, but it wasn’t that useful because none of us was at the top of any of the places we were climbing, in a position to belay the others. So the rope was mostly just a heavy coil of awkward extra weight to carry and maneuver.

I don’t remember how many of us were in the group at the start, maybe five or six, but it thinned out one by one as guys got cowed by one challenge or another and turned back. After a couple of hours, it was down to two of us, Burr Overstreet and me. And we went on climbing around in that magnificent maze for hours. The next day, I should have been sore, but limbering up took no time, and I soon felt vigorous enough to embark on a hike along a dry stream bed, through canyons of red rock twisted by erosion. There were only three of us that day: Mary Janss, a gorgeous superstar athlete (she had a plausible shot at going to the Olympics as a downhill racer) Lyman Allen, our English and creative-writing teacher, and me. We hiked twenty miles that day; and that’s how I know that twenty miles was the absolute maximum distance I could walk in a day at my peak physical condition. (Mary, I think, could have gone another twenty.)

A few days later, when we left Canyonlands, I looked back at the Needles receding toward the horizon and said to myself, “I am going to come back to this place before I die.”

Forty-five years passed and “go-to-Canyonlands” was always on my to-do list, but it was down near the bottom among the items I never get around to, like “achieve perfection” and “clean out the basement.” And every time it seemed like it would be a viable option, something came up, or it seemed just too far away. This year, Debby and I considered going camping on Vancouver Island but someone said it would be raining in May, so we decided to go to Yellowstone instead, because neither of us had ever been there, but someone said, “Yellowstone in May? Are you insane? Snow!” Then it hit me–Canyonlands. The Needles. May is the perfect time to go, before it gets hot. And 62 is the perfect age, if you want to go before you die. It was a 2600 mile drive, and gas had just climbed to $4.40 a gallon, but the distance would never be less, the gas would probably never be much cheaper, and neither of us would ever be younger.

Well, it turned out as I remembered: this is a landscape like nothing else anywhere. And for me (just as I remembered) there is something mystically thrilling about rock itself, great hunks of it carved into strange shapes by natural forces: the imposing solidity of it all, especially in that desert atmosphere, the aroma of desert scrub, under that huge desert sky.

But things are different there now. And no doubt they should be. No doubt it’s for the best. Canyonlands (I discovered) was first declared a national park in 1965, just one year before I was there the first time. In 1966, I’m guessing, regulations and limitations had not yet been promulgated. Boys like Burr and me could just take off across the desert and roam wherever we wanted. Today, the park is laced with paved paths that take one to “viewpoints”. Signs warn visitors not to step off the paths because the desert is a delicate environment in which each human footstep can crush a fragile crust of bio-soil that took centuries to mature. The actual Needles are a three-mile hike from the nearest place one can drive to–more than I could manage, considering that it would be another three-mile hike to get back. Therefore, I never got in amongst the rocks I remembered from long ago.

What’s more, today, only proven climbers with special permits are allowed go right into places like the Needles, and climb around there. And they have to climb only particular routes that have been identified as official rock climbs, not just anywhere that looks interesting.

In other words, the experience I had of Needles forty-five years ago is one that I can never have again–that nobody can have. And frankly, when I think about it, I’m amazed the school let Burr and me tool off into that forest of rocks without supervision. We could have been hurt or killed. No one even knew where we had gone. No one asked when we would be back. No school would allow such a thing today. It would be unthinkable–a lawsuit waiting to happen.

So I feel all the more fortunate that I was there in that fleeting moment when the experience existed–not just the place, but the experience! All of which is not to say the place is trivial. What we just did at Canyonlands, and at nearby Arches, and at Zion Canyon further south was like going to a museum. We moved from viewpoint to viewpoint and gaped at a jaw-dropping sight. Occasionally we had to hike a mile or two to see something. And seeing was good enough for me now. I can cross this one item off my master list. I said I would go back there and I’ve done it. And I’m here to recommend: this is a pilgrimage everyone should make at least once in their lifetime if they are able.

The Trouble with Basketball

So I’ve been sort of watching the NBA playoffs and I have something to say; and I warn you, don’t read this unless you’re such a basketball junkie, you could spend hours discussing the most minute technical details of the game.

Here’s what I want to say.

A couple of weeks ago, San Francisco Chronicle sportswriter Bruce Jenkins said the playoffs had taken a definitive turn because of two “monster-dunks” by Kobe Bryant. Those two dunks, he said, changed the whole course of the playoffs. Those dunks, he implied, announced that the Lakers were going to win it all.

The naïve observer might ask: how many points is a dunk worth? The answer: two. How many points for a clumsy off-balance shot that clunks off the rim and teeters in by pure chance? Two.

Too many dunks

I used to watch basketball avidly. It was the first spectator sport I got into when I got into spectator sports (which wasn’t until I moved to San Francisco in 1977) What I loved about the game at first was the grace of the athletes. But I quickly came to realize that there is nothing to the game unless there is more it than acrobatic grace. Ballet dancers are graceful too, but I personally don’t find ballet all that riveting. Why not? Because there is only one team on the floor. No one is trying to stop those dancers from performing their beautiful acrobatic moves. When they go up for spinning soars, they don’t have to worry that a seven-foot behemoth might crash into them at the top of their arc and send them writhing to the floor. It isn’t just balletic grace that makes basketball (or any sport) interesting: it’s the competition.

By now we know that Bruce Jenkins was wrong: Kobe’s two monster-dunks didn’t foretell how the playoffs would go. The Lakers were swept by the Dallas Mavericks in their next series. Why did Jenkins think two dunks by Kobe spelled doom for all of the Lakers’ upcoming opponents? Because Jenkins thinks intimidating acrobatic dunks are what basketball is all about. And for him, maybe it is. And he’s not alone.

But look: if a game evolves into one that only 14-foot guys able to leap twice their own height can play, you’re going to see a lot of dunks. I began to lose interest in basketball when I had seen my quota of acrobatic dunks. At some point, each new dunk looked like one I saw Dr. J. do 50 years ago, or Michael Jordan a few years later, or Wilt the Stilt a few years earlier, or a parade of others along the way.

All of them can dunk. Big deal.

Telepathy vs Telepathy

The real game is the competition that unfolds between two teams. What’s really riveting is the telepathy of five guys working together pitted against the telepathy of five other guys working together, all ten operating at lightning speed and making split-second decisions based on what they think all the other nine are doing or about to do, with one team trying to put the ball in the hoop and the other trying to stop the ball from going through the hoop.

My interest in basketball faded a bit over the years, because the game isn’t set up to spotlight the competition between two teams. It’s set up to spotlight superhuman individual acrobats soaring gracefully to the basket. That’s why Bruce Jenkins could announce confidently that the playoffs were over the moment he saw Kobe Bryant make two dunks.

The crux of the matter is fouls. Basketball is supposed to be a no contact sport. The players can’t just bump and shove and push and hit one another. That would be a different game. Might be a good game, but it would be a different one. In this game, defensive players have to stop offensive players by herding them off course, obstructing their path to the basket, slapping the ball out of their hands, blocking the ball once it’s in the air, forcing them to take bad shots, all without touching them. If two guys crash together, someone has committed a foul.

Level Playing Field

But which of the two has committed the foul?  That’s the question. If the rules were properly set up, scoring would be just exactly as difficult as stopping someone from scoring. The rules would establish an exactly level playing field. If they did, you would see, on average, about 50 percent of the fouls called on the defense and about 50 percent on the offence. Any deviation from the average would derive from one side playing better than the other. That would be real competition.

Instead, offensive fouls are rarely called. I don’t know the exact statistics, but the ratio seems to be in the range of 90 to 10. In other words, the rules make it almost impossible for the defense to stop the offence. What fun is that?

The game generated by those rules predictably consists of one team racing up the floor and scoring; and then the other team racing up the floor and scoring. If you only want to see acrobatic dunks, you’re in hog heaven. But if you want to see competition, you’re waiting and waiting for those rare occasions when one team or the other fails to score—that is, when someone makes a stop on defense.

What Replays Show

The other day, watching a playoff game, I noticed something irritating. Replays rarely show the play that just ended, which was almost always a play in which someone failed to score. Instead, they always go back to the last spectacular, successful offensive play. They show someone driving to the hoop for a lay-up or pulling up for a twenty-foot jumpshot that drops through the hoop clean.

Here’s my problem with that. When you watch basketball you instinctively watch the ball. Therefore, you’re almost always following the guy who has the ball. Therefore, when he scores, you see him score—and you see exactly how it happens. You don’t need a replay. You saw the play.

But when there’s a defensive stop, it’s always because of a bunch of stuff that happened away from the ball. It happened because the defense was anticipating brilliantly, because guys were moving into strategic positions, setting picks, herding ball handlers to untenable spots, cutting off lanes, boxing out, switching off. All of this defensive brilliance ends in someone failing to score, but we rarely see quite how the stop was achieved. We were watching the ball.

The Answer

There is one simple fix basketball could adopt. It wouldn’t fix the whole problem, but it would help. The refs could call fouls based strictly on what happens at the moment of contact between two players. It shouldn’t matter who the players are, who got whom in the air, or who committed to what lane at what point. The player who initiates contact commits a foul: period. Crash into someone–your bad. End of story. That’s simple, clear-cut and unambiguous. To judge who fouled whom, you need only see the two players involved at the moment of contact.

Instead, in basketball, almost every foul call is a judgment call. It could go either way, and it’s almost impossible to keep feelings out of judgments. (That’s more or less true in life, as well.) I myself can say quite sincerely that the team I favor never commits a foul. I just don’t see any. It’s always the other guys. So obvious! If I happen to be with someone who’s rooting for the other team, they see my team commit every foul. It’s astounding. It’s like they’re blind or something.

That ambiguity—the fact that every foul call is a judgment call—gives the referees too much power to influence the outcomes of games. I’m not saying they’re taking payoffs. (I wouldn’t know.) I’m saying there are always irresistible emotional reasons to favor one team over another, and I don’t just mean the home-town boosterism found in all sports. I’m thinking about the dramatic story that develops around each crucial game, especially in the playoffs.

The refs see and feel those stories in the same way as the general basketball-viewing public. In the playoffs especially, there is almost always some match-up everyone wants to see in the next series. That desire almost always reflects the widespread obsession with acrobatic scoring machines.

The Magic vs. Jordan Syndrome

I’m remembering, for example, the 1991 semi-finals. The Lakers were facing the Blazers in the west. Chicago was playing the Pistons in the east. If the Lakers and Bulls when, we would see Magic Johnson versus Michael Jordan in the finals. Magic was nearing the end of his career but he was still awesome on the court. Michael Jordan was rising to greatness in Chicago and finally coming into his own. The Pistons had won the championship twice in recent years. People were tried of them. And they were a cadre of bruising bullies known as The Bad Boys: they were not popular with the fans at large. The Blazers had Clyde Drexler who was good but not as good as Magic, not as good as Jordan. I know how everyone felt. I felt it too. I was hungry to see Magic and Michael Jordan go head to head. Were the referees exempt from feeling what all the rest of us felt? I don’t think so. Did the Blazers and Pistons really have a chance that year?

Hey, I was rooting for the Lakers and Bulls but I’ll be the first to admit:  I saw the better team go down in each of those series, and it left a bad taste. The losers lost because of the way the games were called. I’m not saying the referees threw the games. It wasn’t that they called fouls inconsistently. It’s just that a referee has so much discretion.  And there are whole styles of refereeing, each of which favors one style of play over another.  The ref can, for example, blow the whistle the instant any contact occurs; or he can, as the cliché goes, “let them play,” calling a foul only when the banging gets severe. Some teams thrive on speed and outside shooting. Their game won’t be affected much if the referee calls fouls closely. Some teams win by driving to the hoop and banging under the basket for rebounds: they’re at a disadvantage when the referee blows the whistle as soon as lots of bodies are crowded together pushing and jostling. Even when the referees call fouls the same way for both team, they’re favoring one team. The ambiguity of the rules guarantees it.

I know there are people who don’t like professional basketball. The standard joke is: each team should start with a hundred points and the game should be one minute long—because only close games are interesting and only the last minute of those. That criticism would not apply if the game were reformed to put defense and offense on an equal footing and spotlight the competition between two teams instead of the acrobatics of playground stars.

We live in the Age of the Constitution. Ninety-four of the world’s country constitutions—almost half of them, in short—have been written since 1990. And many of those have already been seriously altered or amended since their adoption!       

Bahrain got its first constitution ever in 2002. Finland got a brand new one in 2000. Bhutan began writing its first constitution in 2001 (the completed draft has yet to be ratified.) The Central African Republic got a constitution in the nineties, scrapped it, and ratified a new one in 2004. Sudan, Angola, and many others have gone through similar patterns.       

The first medicine prescribed for every failed state is now a constitution. Afghanistan and Iraq are probably the best-known examples, but others abound. The new constitutions keep coming and keep failing.       

And failing.       

What’s so hard?       

With 214 models available, why does any country even have to write a new constitution? Why not just adopt the U.S. constitution, for example, especially if a country wants to be a democracy? This constitution is the oldest one still in use in the world. It’s road tested. It certifiably works: it has never been suspended, and its core structure has never needed alteration. It has been amended 27 times, but always in accordance with procedures set forth in the constitution itself. The amendments therefore prove the strength of the original document, not its shortcomings.       

Aye, but here’s the rub. In the real world, every constitution has two aspects. It is a how-to manual for operating a country. But it’s also a treaty among all the factions, parties, and interests competing for advantage at the moment the constitution is written. “Operating manual” and “treaty” are not the same thing. In many ways, they’re at odds.       

As an operating manual, the ideal constitution focuses purely on mechanisms and procedures. It doesn’t say who gets how much water, or how much oil, or what ethnic group gets how many seats in what government body—nothing like that. It rises above today’s concrete questions to set forth the methods by which all questions should be addressed throughout time. Only thus can a constitution keep a country sailing through the unpredictable tides and storms of history.       

A treaty, however, must address concrete questions. It must settle immediate crises. If people are fighting over water, it must specify who gets how much of it. Otherwise, what good is it? A treaty that doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty isn’t a treaty. But any concrete answer to any specific question is bound to become irrelevant or incorrect if enough times goes by. So any constitution preoccupied with the nitty-gritty will eventually have to be replaced.       

A rare case       

We in the United States are lucky: our constitution is almost entirely an operating manual. But it took this shape because of the rare circumstances in which it was born. Its authors had the luxury of creating a country from scratch. The British weren’t at the table, and so their interests didn’t have to be accommodated. And amongst themselves, the Americans had only a short history together as a people: no thousand-year-old grudges to expiate or untangle.       

Therefore, at that constitutional convention of 1787, the delegates were able to argue out the problems of governance in the abstract and draw up a plan for the ages. They could weigh, for example, individual rights against collective needs. They could ponder how to give leaders enough power to act decisively without giving them the power to tyrannize. They could work out a framework firm enough to support a country yet flexible enough to accommodate its changes.       

The circumstances they enjoyed might never occur again. Who gets a blank slate anymore? In today’s clamorously crowded world, every new constitution is a case of fresh rules being written for a game already in progress, rules that immediately affect who’s winning and losing. People writing a constitution in such a context are jockeying for position, and they argue over the exact wording of each article as if their very lives were at stake—because their very lives are at stake.       

Afghanistan and Iraq       

I’ve read the new Afghan constitution pretty thoroughly. Adopted in 2003, it’s suspiciously replete with specifics. It gives particular languages official status. It confirms the primacy of Islam again and again. It cites one man by name: Zahir Shah, a former king, is here enshrined as the country’s “Father.” A hundred years from now, this will probably seem absurd.       

Women, in this constitution, are allotted a set percentage of seats in a parliamentary body appointed by the president. It’s a high percentage in the current context. But if women’s status advances in Afghanistan, it will eventually seem insultingly low. A set-aside designed to advance women’s rights today might very well be invoked someday as constitutional justification for impeding them.       

I asked an Afghan friend of mine if he thought this new constitution would give the country permanent stability. He said, “Ten years—that’s all I ask.”       

Ten years! That doesn’t seem like a high standard for a constitution!       

But it’s not so bad for a treaty. And in real-life constitution-making, the treaty aspect comes first.       

Take Iraq.       

Is this really a country? It has a single name, and its inhabitants are all called Iraqis, but they’re actually a concatenation of contending and embattled minorities. One main group, the Kurds, overlaps into two neighboring countries, Syria and Turkey. Kurds share a common language, culture, history, and religion, and they inhabit a single contiguous territory. This has led them to imagine a Kurdish nation-state, which does not exist. In order for the constitution of Iraq to work, its Kurds must come to see Iraqi Arabs as their fellows and Syrian or Turkish Kurds as distant others. Tough sell.       

Meanwhile, the Sunni Arabs, who make up 20 percent of Iraq’s population, have ruled this roost for centuries. But their dominance came to a bloody climax under Saddam Hussein. Consequently, most other groups within these borders now have scores to settle with the Sunni Arabs. No one lets go of ancient privileges easily, but Iraq’s Sunni Arabs have an extra incentive to cling to power. They’re afraid they’ll be slaughtered if they don’t.       

The other groups have similarly urgent claims and fears. Before Iraq’s constitution can function as an enduring operating manual for the ages, it must enable Iraqis to live through next year, the next two years, the next five. If it fails, a civil war may split Iraq into three countries—one of which won’t be viable, for it won’t have petroleum (or any other resource to speak of.)       

Consensus Is the Key       

Even the best constitution can’t prevent a civil war. The U.S. constitution was drafted under nearly ideal circumstances, but it papered over the ugly fact that nearly twenty percent of the population was enslaved. It took a bloody Civil War to change that fact. Only after that could “normal” constitutional processes kick in and produce the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, which outlawed slavery officially.       

“A constitution is just a piece of paper, no better than the underlying consensus – or lack thereof – that it memorializes,” says Noah Feldman, a professor of constitutional law at NYU.       

In other words, a constitution cannot create consensus by fiat. It can only formalize agreements that already exist. If, however, it can just provide a period of peace, or even a long enough ceasefire, a society might be able to forge some necessary agreements without bloodshed.       

That’s why a constitution must work as a treaty before all else. If the treaty fails, the rest doesn’t matter. If it succeeds, the country can go through healthy changes that render the original constitution obsolete. At that point a new constitution will have to be written. Failure like that is a kind of success.       

Leapfrogging to Nationhood       

One constitution taking shape today provides an intriguing counterexample. The constitution of the European Union is being written outside the pressure cooker of urgent historical crisis. A first draft of this document has already been rejected by two members of the Union, but that doesn’t kill it. The EU has a great advantage, you see: it doesn’t need a constitution. It isn’t a country. Without a constitution, it just goes on as before.       

Meanwhile, committees will keep modifying the draft until some version of it passes. Whatever that framework turns out to be, it might let member nations move toward greater unity. As a supra-national entity congeals, that entity may eventually find its first constitution inadequate and forge a new charter, giving its federal government more power.       

By leapfrogging from consensus to constitution to consensus to constitution, the European Union may morph at last into an actual country. The U.S. constitution was originally written as the binding document for a collection of small entities—colonies—that thought of themselves as separate states, autonomous little countries. The constitution was going to be the formula for their cooperation on those occasion when the 13 colonies would need to act as one. The fortunate fact is that the U.S. constitution as conceived allowed itself to evolve into the framing document for a single nation-state. Those “strict constructionists” who want to strip our constitution of its history and reduce it to its literal wording are actually embarked on the project of denying that the United States is a nation-state and restore the original formulation of this country as a collection of national entities, only loosely connected as a confederation, only a little more unified and single than Europe is now       

Constitution-writing is rarely going to be a one-step process. Even the United States went through two steps—first the Articles of Confederation and then the constitution we know and love.       

That’s the positive way to look at my friend’s remark about the Afghan constitution. Ten years of relevance don’t have to end in a bloodbath. They can end in a better constitution.       

That’s why constitutions are worth writing, even ones not good enough to last.      

Kids Today: Dumb and Dumber?

Are America’s students getting dumber?

Well duh!

Read the papers, dude! Talk to teachers. Pick up on what people are saying:

• Test scores are dropping like stones in a well.
• Illiteracy is rising like a hot air balloon.
• Textbooks are being dumbed down.
• Tests are being dumbed down.
• Everything’s being dumbed down.

Ah, but. What’s the other thing you hear from stodgy old codgers like me? “I can’t set my digital watch.” “I don’t know how to program my VCR.” “I need a 4th grader to help me.”

Maybe adults are getting even dumber faster?

I decided to look into it. Let me confess: I thought I knew the answer before I started. Humans don’t get dumber, they get smarter—we’ve being doing it for millions of years. And consider how the experts gauge the intelligence of our evolutionary forebears: by their “toolkits.” Well,  look at our “toolkit,” even compared to twenty years ago. Instant replay live TV ! Dust sized surveillance cameras! How dumb could we be? Someone’s making this stuff.

What’s the Score?

“But not them kids,” you might say.  However,  let me note:

The warning bells about kids-getting-dumber started knelling in the 1960s. That’s when SAT scores really took a dive. The SAT, or Scholastic Aptitude Test, is the one taken by over a million college-bound kids every year. Average scores in both the math and verbal portions of this test peaked in 1963. They slid after that, steeply and then slowly, until they bottomed out in the early ‘80s. Math scores then began to rise, but verbal scores remained stagnant. Those low scoring kids of 1970 are almost 50 now. They are the ones designing dust-sized spy cameras.

And today? Well, here are the average scores for five recent years, as reported by the college board.

Doesn’t look too bad, really. To me those scores say “holding steady.” And the latest math scores are about the same as in glorious 1963. That should settle it, right? Numbers have no place to hide. If they’re the same, it means nothing’s changed. Right?

Not That Simple

Oh, but wait. Somewhere between 1963 and 1987, the college board “recentered” the scores. That means the whole scale shifted south. Someone who scored 507 in 1987 would have scored about 494 in 1963. If the numbers say the score is unchanged, that actually means kids are doing worse! Got that? “Same” means “worse.”

So kids are dumber?

Not that simple. Between ‘63 and ‘87, many more kids started taking the SAT, because those were the years America was opening the doors of opportunity to all. Masses of students from “disadvantaged” backgrounds entered the pool of college applicants. Considering the schools they came out of, it’s no surprise they scored lower on the tests, dragging down the overall statistics. And colleges today draw from an even broader segment of American society. So if scores haven’t changed, it must mean kids are smarter now. Got that? “Same” actually means “smarter.”

Oh-but-wait/not-that-simple. Since 1963, a booming test-prep industry has bloomed. Many kids now train for the SAT in classes that promise to raise their scores by as much as 100 points. So wow, if scores are unchanged since 1963, it must mean students are dumber now. Got that? “Same” means “dumber.”

I could give you four more oh-but-waits just on the SAT, but you get the point. The soil under every statistic is crawling with worms.

One more example—I can’t resist:

A massive study done in 1970 showed that 25 million adult Americans were illiterate. A similar study released in 1992 put the number closer to 85 million. Now can we panic?

No, not yet. Look closer. Between 1970 and 1992 the definition of “illiterate” changed. In 1975, if you could sound out the word “bus schedule,” you were literate. Today, if you can read every word in the bus schedule but you can’t use it to catch a particular bus, you’re illiterate. I’m not saying the new definition is wrong. I’m just saying you can’t tell—from these numbers—if illiteracy has gone up or down.

Lets Consult Some Experts

I called Tom Williamson, a former president of the Psychological Corporation, one of the big three of American test publishing. “Do you think kids are kids getting dumber—”

“No.” His answer was so emphatic and immediate, it almost preceded my question. “We always tend to complain about the achievements of the current generation and exaggerate the accomplishments of our own.”

True of me, certainly. Why, when I was a kid…

“I think both schools and kids are doing a better job than they ever have,” Williamson went on. “You have to take into account that classrooms are much more diverse now. With mainstreaming, you’ve got kids with physical and emotional problems in regular classroooms. Students who used to be excused from taking standardized achievement tests are no longer excused If you test a broader range of kids you’re going to get a slightly lower score.”

Williamson then brought up the “mystique of testing” question, which is: Do standardized tests really show whether kids are getting dumber? “We test what’s easy to measure, not necessarily what’s important,” said Williamson. “The tests are used to make important decisions—they have to hold up in a court of law. So anything that’s ambiguous, by its nature, is not going to be on a standardized test. There is no test for common sense. There is no test—yet—for ‘situational intelligence.’”

He’d get no argument from the Educational Testing Service, the people who created the SAT. I talked to Tom Ewing, Communications Director of ETS. What I got from him was a carefully crafted statement that sounded like boilerplate created to beat back the millions of reporters who call in every day to ask, “Are American kids getting dumber?”

His bottom line: The SAT scores can’t tell you.

Why not?

“Because,” he said, “the sample is self-selected.” In other words, students themselves decide who among them will take the SAT. There are no controls.

Suppose you go to a mall and weigh everyone who lets you. Then a month later you go back to the same mall and weigh everyone who lets you. If the numbers are higher the second time, you can’t conclude that people are getting fatter.

Ewing told me the best and most reliable statistics to look at on this question are put out by the National Assessement of Educaitonal Progress. Without getting into details, that would be The Government.

What’s so great about their numbers?

First, their mission is just to get a snapshot of how we’re doing. Second, to get the best picture, they get a representative sample of all students: all walks of life, all parts of the country, all GPAs, every ethnic group—the works.

They test every two years at 4th, 8th, and 11th grades, and they’ve been doing it since the sixties. What they forge out of all this is something they call…

The Nation’s Report Card

So I looked up their numbers. For reading (which is the subject people are hollering about the most these days) the scores look like this:

To me, we’re back where we started. Those numbers say, “Holding steady.”

So is that my conclusion? Kids are the same as ever? Actually, no. You could probably rip the lid off those numbers too, and use them to prove that kids are getting dumber. Or smarter. I am, however, prepared to set forth one conclusion without qualms:

I don’t know if kids are getting dumber.

You may not think that’s much of a conclusion. But I beg to differ. Not too many other people are publicly drawing this conclusion. Take a look at this opening sentence from an article in Headway magazine, written by Wayne Williams, a professor at George Mason University:

For decades now, we’ve known about the scandalous, broad-based decline in the academic preparation of our high school students.

Have We Really?

In the face of such certainty, I believe I’m staking a real position when I say, loud and proud: “Beats me.”

In other words, before we mount our steeds, draw our swords, and yell “Charge!” let us be sure we have an enemy. Otherwise, I say, we might thunder off in all directions, swinging at windmills and jousting with cows.

And I’m too old for that. Let the kids do it.

When I ponder the events of the last month in the Arab world, I’m reminded of Herbert Stein’s remark: “Anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.” From Morocco to Bahrain,  kings and rulers are looking at a prairie fire of popular opposition.  And the only thing a guy can say is, what took so long?

For decades, all these countries have had authoritarian regimes kept in power by foreign sponsors. All have used secret police, torture, spies, and bribes to maintain their grip.  In all these countries, the rulers have to come to look ever more like their foreign sponsors and ever less like the people they rule.  Throughout this region, development has shredded the comforting verities of ancient cultural traditions without bringing a nourishing new cultural order.  Of course, development has brought material benefits—cars, modern medicine, plumbing, paved highways,  well-lit streets,  and toys of all sorts: and people have appreciated the material fruits of development but their own elites have sucked up most of the goods and left them mired in squalor. It isn’t just that the rich have been getting richer. The rich have also growing more culturally alien.  Obviously, this could not go on forever. Sooner or later, the connection between rulers and ruled was going to snap.

The question is: why now?

Technically speaking, these countries have different sorts of regimes. Morocco and Bahrain are monarchies, Tunisia and Egypt parliamentary democracies, Libya and Algeria “socialist” states ruled by revolutionary parties. But not really. Not really.

Really, all of these countries are old-fashioned dynastic monarchies. In each case, the outward form has distorted slight in each case to accommodate whatever Great Power is the sponsoring master. Khadafi came to the throne with the Soviets as his dominus, so he adopted a gun-toting, guerilla-like swagger that was in fashion for anti-imperialist third-world revolutionaries of his day. Mubarak came to power as a client of the United States, so he donned suits, adopted a corporate executive look, and called himself a “president,” staging elections from time to time and adopting other outer decorations of democracy.

But the fact is, all these regimes had a single personality at the top, just as in an absolute monarchy. In each case, the ruler had absolute power except to the extent that he had to propitiate his immediate cohorts and family–also typical of monarchies. The fundamentally dynastic and monarchic nature of each regime began to emerge, however, when the first generation of rulers got old and their sons began grooming themselves or being groomed to take over. In Egypt and in Yemen, the sons were already operating as their fathers’ chief executives, his viziers, to use the old parlance. In Libya, Khadafi had his eight sons jockeying for position as he moved them from post to post, pitting one against another, grooming them for the succession while keeping them off-balance, so that they wouldn’t challenge the father in his lifetime—also typical of dynastic monarchies going back through time.

The thing is, though, the world has changed. The single most crucial factor in these Arab uprisings has been demographic. Half the people in these countries is under 30 years of age. In some the statistics are even more extreme. In Yemen, I think I heard, the median age is 17! For these kids, the revolutions their parents made and the turmoil they went through struggling with neo-colonialism is ancient history. Cold War? Never heard of it. The events of 9/11? Heard of it. The proliferation of the Internet and of social media here as elsewhere has promoted horizontal connections and weakened vertical ones—young people interacting more with each other and less with their parents and grandparents and through them with their ancestors, ancestral traditions, and cultural past. In this context, when Mubarak addresses a crowd of passionate Egyptian demonstrators and tells them, “I am your father, you are my children,” he just seem preposterous. Khadafi strikes me as especially fossil-like, clueless, and out of touch. That doesn’t mean he’s harmless. He’s a grumpy, terrified, and terrifying old man, he’s killing a lot of people right now, and he might end up as the Arab Revolution’s first Ceausescu—torn to pieces by his own people.

But the fact that this revolution is such a spontaneous outburst of young passion means that it doesn’t represent a program. Whose revolution is this? Nobody’s—yet. It’s just happening. Only in the future will we know whose revolution it was. This is true, of course, of pretty much all authentic revolutions. A society bursts at the scenes because its political forms no longer match its social realities. Then come disruption and disorder and everything is up for grabs and then someone manages to grab, and a new shape emerged. The question isn’t who made this revolution happen, but who is going to exploit the fact that it is happening most successfully.

In Iran, the revolution of 1988-89 was a broad-based ramshackle outpouring at first. Khomeini was a huge figure, to be sure, but the Mujahideen Khalq had been working to overthrow the Shah forever, there was a vast middle class seething at the dynastic police power that both used them and shackled them, there were the bazaar merchants sidelined by industrial development, there were leftist and liberal as well as Islamist students, and there were so many others. Once the society was in disarray, however, the group most mobilized for action, took over. And that was Khomeini and his Khomeinists. The Iranian revolution became their revolution in those first two years of turmoil.

Ditto the Bolshevik revolution The Czarist regime collapsed, Russia was teeming with anti-Czar forces. The Bolsheviks had been one of the smallest of the opposition groups, but they emerged from the chaos because they were so fearsomely well-organized, they could hit hardest and move fastest, and their only scruples were those imposed by their dogmas.

In the Arab world, who is best mobilized to exploit the chaos to come? I said “to-come” because whatever this revolution is about, it’s still in the future. What we’ve seen so far is only the swell of the ocean that indicates a tsunami is on its way. Right now, in Egypt, Mubarak is gone, but the regime is still in place. Will the Muslim Brotherhood emerge now, from the shadows. Oddly enough, I somehow think not. It’s true that only the underground movements have been able to operate in Egypt, these many decades. When political organizing is outlawed, only outlaws will be politically organized. So maybe the Brotherhood is mustered and ready to take advantage. And yet…

To me, they feel somehow dated, clunky, and out of touch, almost as much so as the rulers who are now under siege. If it’s true that youthful energy connected by Facebook and Twitter and the is driving this uprising, then the spontaneous mood is quite unlike the one that permeated Iran in 1978. At that time, there was no Islamist state. It could seem like a workable vision to some. Base a country on the shari’a–why not? But the demonstrators of today have Iran itself, not to mention the recent Taliban regime in Afghanistan, to look to as models. In the absence of an actual Islamist regime to point to, Islamist revolutionaries can evoke an imagined ideal to give direction to revolutionary energy. But now, demonstrators in the streets of Cairo or Amman or Tripoli will be asking themselves, Is Iran what I want my country to be? Is Taliban-ruled Afghanistan what I’m trying to build. I’m betting that those options are not going to look attractive to a lot of the folks out on the streets of those Arab cities right now.

The outcome of a revolution is bound up with the technology that made it possible. In Iran, circa 1978, the revolutionary instrument of the moment was the hand-held cassette tape recorder. It was light, it could go anywhere, millions of them could be sneaked across the border—but the actual message could, and did, come from one source. The instrument of revolution made the revolution centralized and driven from the top, from a single source of absolute wisdom. The ethnology keying this revolutionary moment does not and cannot have a center. Facebook is not mass media, it’s mass interconnectivity. What the whole mass is “thinking” cannot be known until it reveals itself in action, because there is no platform outside the system from which to look at all those message flying around and see what they add up to.

If you follow the news of any place daily, you start to see some patterns. I have been following events in Afghanistan on a daily basis since mid-August, and in that time I’ve seen stories well up, break, and vanish—although some are still simmering, and some are threatening to blow much bigger in the months ahead. Here are some of the main stories I’ve seen in Afghanistan this fall (I’m leaving out night raids, suicide bombings, kidnappings, and other such violence: that’s constant.)           

Corruption Scandals   

It’s died away now, but for a while there—in September and October—the pressure on Karzai to “do something” about corruption forced him to launch a series of initiatives. Two problems soon cropped up, however. One, Karzai’s closest associates were hip-deep in the scandals. Second—and worse– some of the key figures suspected of criminal corruption in Afghanistan were on secret payrolls working for the U.S. military or for U.S. intelligence agencies. As this came to light, the need to end the corruption seemed to lose some of its urgency. Most recently, the U.S. has decided, as a matter of policy, not to pursue cases of corruption as aggressively as in the past—reportedly because it doesn’t seem to produce any progress.           

The Kabul Bank Fiasco

The Bush Administration saw privatization as the route to reconstruction in Afghanistan and they encouraged entrepreneurs to found every sort of institution, including banks. The biggest winner was Kabul Bank, an enormous thing with several billion in assets—bigger by far than the country’s supposed national bank. The country’s payroll, including the salaries of civil servants, policemen, and soldiers came to be funneled through this bank. The trouble was, the bank was being looted by its principle officers and its directors, most of whom were closely connected to the Karzai family and other powerful political figures. they included Karzai’s brother Mahmoud and relatives of the notorious Tajik warlord Fahim, who held the post of vice-president. These guys were using huge loans from the bank to buy real estate in Dubai which they could sell within weeks for enormous profits. They were also borrowing from the bank to set up security and service companies that specialized in gaining American contracts. When the real estate market in Dubai belatedly suffered the same crash as every other part of the world, the bank looked like it might default. For a few days, it closed its doors and refused to admit depositors. At that point, the government-owned Central Bank took over and the officers of Kabul Bank were fired. No one seems to know if it then got a sudden infusion of cash from the U.S. government. In any case, the bank seems to have righted itself and remains open for business.           

The Battle for Kandahar

Last year, the United States and NATO undertook to conquer the small town of Marjah, near Lashkargah, described as the headquarters for the Talibanist insurgency in that region. They won the battle, but Western forces are still pinned down there, because the insurgency just won’t quit. This fall, the U.S. and NATO decided to take control of Kandahar, the country’s second biggest city, the birthplace of the Taliban, and the spiritual center of Talibanism. The battle last several weeks, and the U.S. and its allies won. But acts of insurgent violence keep erupting there, so Kandahar, like Marjah, may have emerged as another wound that just won’t heal.        

The Parliamentary Elections

On September 18, Afghanistan was scheduled to have its second set of parliamentary elections since the new “democratic” government was set up. This would be a good time to note that the first set of these elections four years ago went fairly well. So did the first presidential election, which ended with the expected victory of Hamid Karzai, running as the candidate for the American Puppet Party. The second set of presidential elections were much more contentious but still ended with Karzai in power. The second set of Parliamentary elections has been a brawl. It took more than two months to announce the results, thousands of complaints of fraud have been lodged, and a special five-judge panel of Afghanistan’s Supreme Court has been set up to investigate these complaints, although few expect that any court will be able to settle all the brouhaha.        

Rumors of Peace (Talks)

First, there were rumors that a number of people associated with the Taliban had come to Kabul for secret meetings with Karzai and his associates. Then the leading figure in these supposed peace talks was arrested and imprisoned in Pakistan, by Pakistan. So ended that line of possible peace talks. Then Karzai set up the High Peace Council, some fifty former warlords, clerics, and special appointees, whose assignment it has been to work out the terms for some sort of negotiation with the Taliban. This has sparked much optimistic chatter in the west about a “political solution” to the war, although few really discuss what coming to terms with the Taliban would really entail for Afghans who don’t want to live under Taliban-style rule. Then came rumors of a new round of peace feelers from the Taliban, and the news that one of the top Taliban leaders, possibly a top aide to Mullah Omar himself was in Kabul to negotiate. Then this top aide fled the capital and vanished. It turned out the wasn’t a leading member of the Taliban but an imposter—just some Pakistani shopkeeper who saw an opportunity to make some dough. His disappearance left all the various parties spluttering. U.S. officials said they suspected he was an imposter all along. Karzai said he never talked to the guy, not even once. Britain, whose secret service had flown the guy secretly into Kabul, said nothing. Talk of peace talks seem to have subsided.            

Minerals of Afghanistan

In July or so, U.S. officials broke the news that Afghanistan has over a trillion dollars worth of mineral resources, which could end up making this country a central player in the unfolding economy of the future, if the minerals are properly developed. The precious resources include gold, oil, natural gas, copper, iron, and “rare earth,” minerals such as lithium that will be crucial to the solar and electronic technologies of the future. But here’s the curious thing. Although the existence of these minerals was announced (and is still being touted) as if they had just been discovered—by U.S. geologists—people have actually known about them for a long time—at least hundreds of years in the case of the copper and iron, and since Soviet days in the case of the oil and gas. A second curious thing: while the U.S. is pouring money and lives into fighting a mounting insurgency in Afghanistan, the Chinese have secured the contract to develop the copper of Afghanistan, which is the single most precious resource of all the finds, and may be on the verge of signing up the iron too.           

Iran Pushes In

It’s hard to know what Iran is up to, or thinks it’s up to, but over the last few months it has been aggressively asserting its connections to Afghanistan and its potential power over it. Some of this assertiveness comes in the form of cultural initiatives. Iran promoted a film festival in Kabul: most of the films were Iranian, and therefore in Farsi, a language most Afghans speak. Iran promoted a trade fair this fall, featuring mostly Iranian businesses. Iran also offered to help broker peace talks, a pronouncement that brought a chilly silence from the U.S. Next, the news broke that Iran had been giving cash to Karzai personally, as much as $30 million a year, none of it acknowledged or accounted for. Both Karzai and Iran have insisted there is no quid pro quo involved here, Karzai has do absolutely nothing in exchange for the cash. Nice work if you can get! I immediately wrote to the Iranian foreign ministry to let them know that if they would only give me $30 million a year, I would promise to do absolutely nothing. Heck, no skin off my back, I’m not doing much of anything right now. Iran has not gotten back to me. And now, most recently, Iran has halted all fuel tanker truck into Afghanistan on the Iranian side of their mutual border, giving no reason for it—seemingly just to demonstrate what a chokehold it has on the country, especially given the turmoil in Pakistan that hampers normal trade across that border. In the U.S., Iran’s initiatives have been played as if this all has something to do with the Taliban. Iran has been described routinely as “an ally of the Taliban, “ and sometimes as a power that supports the Taliban. I guess the logic is that both the Taliban and Iran are enemies of the United States so they must be friends. Actually, Iran is asserting its role as a replacement for the U.S. as the Kabul government’s “chief ally” against the Taliban. American protestations about Karzai seem to stem from a feeling that he’s cheating on the U.S., as if the two countries are married and are supposed to have a monogamous relationship.