Question Twelve
The statement made in the above question is a large one, and I will only endeavor to answer a part of it. The piece I would like to draw out is the assumption that one's home country can become foreign to them, which Todorov references on page 249 when he says: "without becoming an Indian, Cabeza de Vaca was no longer quite a Spaniard." I do not believe this statement is true because I do not think we can ever become as distant from our home culture/country as we can be from other cultures/countries. Hence, I disagree with Todorov's statement overall. I would begin by pointing out that the idea of a foreign/home country dichotomy does not capture the breadth of our connection with where we are from. What does it mean to be foreign relative to your home country? At the most basic level, it presumably means you are no longer a member of that country/culture, which can either be based on other people no longer considering you a member or feeling isolated from it yourself. With regard to what other people consider you, I struggle to find examples where the majority of people feel someone has "left" their culture. Generally, this is because we judge membership in countries/cultures based on where people spent their childhood/young adult years, such that if you grew up to become, at some point, a fully fledged adult within a society you are always considered to have been a member. Regardless of your situation in the moment, the history you possess makes it impossible for you to be entirely foreign in the eyes of others in your culture. With regard to what you identify with yourself, I think it is possible to feel alienated from your home culture, or occupy a marginal place within it, and still retain the foundational, subconscious elements of your perspective that originated there. It is common to make statements about how your country's government/popular culture/present-day values have changed for the worse, and no longer fit with what you feel individually. Yet this sort of examination, where someone is essentially evaluating their place within a society, operates on the presumption that they have a place there, and no matter how negative their conclusions about that society, they are not extricated from their role within it. An example is the oft-portrayed old man who complains he does not recognize his own country anymore, because this stereotype has always been a role within American culture, and each generation as they age may earnestly feel that present-day society no longer fits them, while still being contained within it. All of this goes without mentioning the improbability of leaving behind every artifact of your upbringing or culture that rests in your subconscious, outside of losing all of your long-term memory and language processing abilities. Thus, neither other people nor ourselves can truly judge us to be a foreigner from our home country or culture, which means I disagree with Todorov's statement.
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In class and online, I have learned a lot from listening to/reading what my classmates have to say about Thanksgiving (i.e. Miranda's post). Like many others, my education on the full impacts of colonialism was inadequate until later in my life (Although how can education ever be entirely adequate? Since there is always more to learn, it seems hard to tell when a school has done a good job impressing on its students either the truth or the tragedy of episodes like the trans-Atlantic slave, the Holocaust, or the genocide of Native Americans). Obviously, the mythos surrounding Thanksgiving is a fertile place to look for the ways European exploration of the Americas has been romanticized, but in this blog I want to look a little past the subject matter in question.
Few moments in the American cultural tradition evoke the self and the other like Thanksgiving. One's entire family is (for better or worse) supposed to gather around the same table. The family is an important unit of identity in American society, and Thanksgiving provides us the opportunity to see the entirety of this aspect of our identity in one place. At the same time, where the self is reinforced the other may be as well, and Thanksgiving can often be the place where "the weird uncle" feels it is appropriate to voice a repugnant, prejudiced ideology. Moreover, some radical right-wing ideas in today's political landscape, like the threat of a White Genocide or the degeneracy of legally accepting gay marriage or gay customers, are based around a presumed "White family unit," in some form or another. In a broader sense, the imagery of a Thanksgiving dinner is one of the most foundational tools used to construct the idea of the White family unit, losing out only to a July 4th BBQ and Christmas dinner. This image of a supposedly ideal family is often used on outlets like Fox News as an unattainable example that minority groups can never reach, which is then in turn used to explain why minorities can't achieve the same level of success as White Americans. I remember Bill O'Reilly's favorite method was always to point out that "Blacks," his term, had children out of wedlock too often, and he would go on to explain why a single parent household is inferior to a dual parent one. Ultimately, he was comparing the White American family Self to the Black American family Other. This observation brings us back to Todorov, particularly a point that stuck with me about the way Columbus viewed the Tainos and other natives as part of nature. I bring up this point because I believe we still conceptualize the arenas of child-rearing and familial structure as a concerns of nature. How often does someone objecting to gay marriage call it "unnatural," or someone claiming single parenting is inferior mention the "biological" difficulty of the task. Hence, I recognize a bit of what Todorov described in Columbus' understanding of the Other in people today, where they are denied humanity in favor of being considered parts of nature. When my classes have, over the years, touched on the beginnings of the conquest of the Americas, I am always struck by the incommensurability of the experience. It is hard to even begin to find the ways the Spanish and Aztecs lacked understanding of each other. The Aztecs would never see Europe or learn about its history or customs; it might as well have been the realm of the gods for all the reality it held for them. Similarly, the Spanish were confronting another world of people, empires built on thousands of years of history they could not understand. Different ways of looking at the world collided on the levels of understanding time and forming social meaning. As a way of understanding what this initial phase of confronting the Other might have felt like, let us consider the next time it is likely to happen -- artificial intelligence.
By artificial intelligence I don't mean the Hollywood robots that fall in love or rewrite Shakespeare, but rather the ever-advancing algorithms that are being pursued at a breakneck pace around the world. One example I would use is Alexa (Amazon's robot assistant). It was recently revealed that Amazon has 10,000 employees working on Alexa, a massive number that has doubled in the last year, and the company's CTO talks on his blog about his desire to create more "human" interactions with Alexa, with a near-term goal of the program being: "a socialbot that can engage coherently for 20 minutes in a fun, high-quality conversation on popular topics such as entertainment, sports, technology, and fashion. " (source). At first this seems like a fun gimmick, as do proposals like Google's to have its AI assistant navigate booking appointments. Yet the concept of a program replacing a human in social interaction quickly becomes troubling. What if Google's assistant learns that being mean to restaurant staff is more likely to yield a reservation, or Alexa learns to talk politics by telling people what they want to hear? Yet these are only the most immanent scenarios, and the real comparison to Cortes and the Aztecs comes when these programs can converse indefinitely and without constraints. As we have seen when AI reaches the top levels of human skill in chess, poker, go, or even video games, more than simply replicating human tactics, it creates its own. What will that look like in the field of language and communication? AI might become inhumanely good at reconstructing our psychological profiles from minutes of conversation, finding new logical fallacies or biases within the human brain. Talking to a sophisticated AI might become as asymmetrical as the Aztecs, who always tell the truth, talking to Cortes and having no concept of falsehoods. Are these two experiences meaningfully similar? Perhaps not, but the comparison illuminates the emotional reactions we might have when speaking to something completely outside our usual systems of understanding. All of this begs the question of how people should respond to such circumstances, Particularly in a context such as the one the Aztecs faced where confronting the Other was not a choice, but an inevitability. Would we expect ourselves to be able to access new forms of understanding in order to confront an adversarial AI? The thought gives me more sympathy for the Aztecs, as such a response would require highly abnormal self-determination in an individualist society, let alone a more collectivist one. Certainly, the challenges Todorov points to in the book do not seem easy to overcome, particularly when we imagine ourselves in a similar situation. Some assorted thoughts on security.
1. Great power war - While the reading we did for class came from eras where great power war was a primary concern, our class discussion focused far more on terrorism and immigration than border disputes and arms control treaties. I can certainly tell in my own thinking that I have trouble understanding a fear of war between major powers. Not because it wouldn't be bad but because: A) It seems very, very unlikely in this day and age. The US literally killed 200 Russian contractors fighting for the Kremlin's interests in Syria, and neither side felt the need to escalate at all. B) War between powers would be apocalyptic. The scope of forces that can be brought to a major conflict today almost defies comprehension, even without considering nuclear annihilation. Worrying about the US and China fighting a direct war seems like worrying about an asteroid. It might be really bad, but there isn't much we can do to mitigate it's impact. 2. I visited the holocaust museum today for the first time, and it made me think about a different kind of fear than what we discussed in class, namely the fear of harm coming to others. If you asked the average American why it was important for their country to intervene in Kuwait, invade Afghanistan, or try and disassemble the North Korean regime today, chances are the words "Hitler" or "holocaust" would come up within minutes. Generally, I will credit people and say this is because they don't want to sit by while oppressive regimes slaughter innocent people. Is this because Americans believe repressive regimes will eventually threaten the free world? Or because they are concerned for the safety of people suffering under oppressive governments? Regardless of the logic, it is interesting to consider that the well-being of people in other countries is a security issue for the US. 3. Some of the most interesting facets of security may well be within national lines. As much focus as I have seen authors give to the way governments "construct threats" that are not part of their own country, I would be curious to see these same concepts applied to threats constructed within national borders. Consider the ongoing dilemma of mass shootings in the US, which are an omnipresent concern in today's life, whether through active shooter drills at schools, offices, or nightclubs. The specter of gun violence (at least in mass-shooting form) certainly exceeds the reality, and many aspects of security theater are visible in the way drills are conducted, as well as the way politicians use shootings to secure public support (by reveling in each tragedy's media coverage, endlessly describing a problem of apocalyptic proportions facing the country, and then pretending their initiatives such as banning bump stocks or silencers or increasing age limits will solve the problem, when in reality such measures are only ever intended to achieve a fractional improvement). This week's blog question immediately called two recent articles to mind, each of which represents a prominent viewpoint on this topic.
The first article ("Liberal World" by Daniel Deudney and G. John Ikenberry in Foreign Affairs, July/August 2018) argues the current challenges to the liberal world order are not without historical comparison. Moreover, the order is resilient enough to survive the shifts the world is experiencing today, because the most powerful countries have adopted liberal methods of interaction that will reaffirm the liberal world order. In other words, the current shift should be read as norm-governed change.
I think the best answer is yielded by mixing these points together. Regarding Walt's argument, great power politics can remain a primary concern ordering the thoughts of US and Chinese policymakers, without being entirely unaffected by the norms of a liberal world order. I would argue there are examples where liberal institutions seem to have affected great power politics. Take the example of the WTO. While many commentators point to Chinese intellectual property theft and state-owned enterprises as unresolved examples of trade disputes, it is important to note that the WTO's dispute settlement body has successfully handled trade cases pitting the US and China against each other on everything from frozen chicken to steel. Moreover, both the US and China have complied with these rulings, and since its accession to the WTO in 2003 China has increasingly adopted the multilateral body as a tool of its economic policy. This example is important because it also contains one of the chief challenges to the embedded liberal order: the consolidation of China's state-owned enterprises. Yet even in this case, the institution has made sure that other countries unfairly affected by the favoritism ingrained in these policies can seek recourse (it should be noted the same goes for cases where the US has tried to strong arm the global economy). Other areas that could be of note are the UN security council's role in shaping conflict between the US and Russia over chemical weapons in Syria, and the cooperation of the security council on Obama's JCPOA. I would also point out that, as my argument predicts, a chief challenge to the postwar economic world order, Trump's use of the "national security exception" in the GATT to justify his tariffs, has been met by fierce opposition on the part of other countries... through the WTO's dispute settlement body. See, for instance, DS564, a complaint regarding US measures on steel and aluminum imports headed by Turkey and requested to be joined by the EU, Russia, Canada, China, Mexico, and Thailand. Thus, the norms shared by the world's most powerful states seem to persist on some level despite the changes in the world order brought on by Trump's policies, and liberal institutions continue to structure some aspects of great power relations. Similarly, the institutions and practices of "embedded liberalism" can live on without being sufficient to guarantee a norm-governed change. Deudney and Ikenberry's argument centers on the idea that the liberal world order can survive some of its members being, well, illiberal. Yet this resilience is not because these rival forces can not erode the liberal world order, but rather because the institutions which provide the foundation for liberalism are not, in themselves, liberal. Thus, even illiberal politicians may make use of these institutions and keep them alive, leaving them to be used to maintain the liberal order in the future. Does this suggest norm-governed change? I don't think so. Consider the ascendancy of illiberalism in major states such as China, Russia, Turkey, and, speculatively, Brazil. What if these states displace the core values of the liberal world order, such as democracy and human rights, but continue to use the UN and the WTO. The end result might not be drastically different from that yielded by norm-governed change, but it would seem more like a case of "partial-norm-governed change," wherein states simultaneously treated some aspects of the world order as though they shared the norms that justified them, while other aspects were discarded as though the order was changing. I believe this term better approximates the way change actually occurs. World orders are rarely completely discarded, and any non-totalizing progression between orders will inevitably involve keeping some norms and discarding others. How does one tell the difference between when an order is changing and when it is ending? I'm not sure this question can be entirely answered. In class we discussed the example of TSA checkpoints, and what occurred to me was the idea that many of the actions governments take in the name of security don't just make us feel safe, they make us afraid.
Take, for example, the DEFCON signs that were placed along the security line in my home airport for most of my childhood. The signs warned of the current level of DEFCON (4 or something I think) and explained briefly what the level meant. My parents told me that the signs were because of 9/11 and the threat of terrorism. The signs sent a clear message: you are being threatened. In class we touched on the idea of security theater, where the government tries to make you feel safe with the appearance rather than the actuality of security. At the same time, I believe a possible counter interpretation is that TSA checkpoints and other similar measures evoke rather than assuage our fears. Security theater is not just reassuring the populace, it is also reminding them what they should be afraid of. What would be the goal of the government in making its own people afraid? One answer drawing from Miranda's post is that security is part of national identity, and, thus, shaping security is part of shaping national identity, which can be an extremely important tool for the people in power (an example of this would be the quote "American blood on American soil," which was used often after 9/11 to explain why it could not be allowed to happen again, drawing on the historical analogy of the Mexican-American war which, interestingly, also led to aggressive American military action). Controlling the way people see themselves, by controlling the narrative that surrounds what should make them feel safe, and what they should be safe from, is enough to, say, begin 2 wars on the other side of the planet in the name of national security, without much opposition to either. Another explanation for why attempts to securitize often magnify the threat they aim to defeat is voiced by one of my all-time favorite articles:
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AuthorAmerican University Class of 2021. Interested in state-building and economic governance. Archives
December 2018
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