Magical Thinking

I'm still in the early phases of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but there is a piece of the story that painful personal resonance for me. Joseph Kavalier, a young talented artist, manages a daring escape - under the tutelage of his escape artist mentor - from Prague in the late 1930s as the anti-Semitic grip is tightening around the Jews of Europe. In America, in collaboration with his cousin Sammy Clay, he begins  a promising career as  a comic book artist. Joseph, however, worries constantly about the fate of his parents and younger brother Thomas left behind in Prague, yet he is regularly blocked in his efforts to free them. His frustration and anger mount both at the Nazis and at America's tepid response to the horrors unfolding throughout Europe. Joseph channels his feelings into his work, particularly into one edition in which Hitler himself is socked in the puss, the German war machine is crushed, and peace reigns. Joseph completes the piece in great excitement; he has destroyed the Nazis. Maybe, he thinks, this comic book will reach Hitler himself. But the moment of triumph quickly passes. Joseph senses how trivial this accomplishment is. Nothing will come of it; Hitler will not be stopped; his parents will not be saved. The comic book was the futile product of magical thinking.

I don't yet know where else Joseph's adventures will take him, but I too know what it is to be in the grips of magical thinking. When I wrote "The Terrible Dance of Power" I felt that this was it. Once we all recognized how leaders from the beginning of time have drawn us into endless cycles of death and destruction always in the name of some great a noble vision - a new world order, democracy, Christianity, the Caliphate, the Reich that will last for a thousands years, the new Roman Empire, the expanded Asian empire, our superior race, our manifest destiny - once we see how vulnerable we are to such appeals, once we recognize how ready we are to see ourselves as noble and others as lessers standing in the way of these righteous causes then the dance would end; we would resist and peace would reign for ever and ever.

It won't happen through magical thinking.

The Universal Appeal of War

Gunter Grass has set off a fire storm of protest with the publication of his memoir Peeling the Onion in which he confesses to having volunteered for the German submarine corps at age 15 and then drafted into the Waffen SS at age 17, the same Waffen SS that was convicted en masse of war crimes by the Nuremberg tribunal. How could the author of such anti-war books as The Tin Drum have kept this fact hidden so long? Such Hypocrisy!  Shouldn't his Nobel Prize (awarded in 1999) be rescinded? Grass writes of the shame of his involvement in so evil an enterprise, a shame that until now he has kept at a distance expressing it not for himself but in his writings.

Grass has in fact done us a great service. He describes how an intelligent, energetic young man, striving to be honorable, to serve his country, while enlisting in what he believes to be a noble cause can be lured into evil. "It was the newsreels," Grass says, "I was a pushover for the prettified black-and-white 'truth' they served up."

Wars may be created by those with evil intentions but they are fought and sustained by those who are naively drawn in by lofty visions, emotional appeals, patriotic songs, slogans, cardboard cutout enemies. Do it for Justice! Do it for God...for Allah...for Democracy...for Glory...for Christianity. So off we have marched throughout history, killing and being killed in great and noble causes. And then, when it is done, and the ugliness and pointlessness is revealed, we are, like Gunter Grass, left with shame. We do the best we can to hide our complicity from others and from ourselves.

We seem to be impervious to learning. We learn that we were deceitfully drawn into the Vietnam War; well, that will never happen again. Except that it does. We spend considerable time and money educating our children, but we fail to educate (inoculate) them against this universal siren song that lures them into the next deadly honorable mission. One humble beginning could be The Universal Civics Course.

Raising Workers from Slavery to Unemployment

New worker protection laws are being enacted in China. (New York Times, June 30). That's the good news...so far. It is however just the latest step in the Dance of Globalization. Start up the music.

Step 1. Global manufacturer, seeking to decrease costs and increase profitability, finds a good business environment in China: cheap labor, few restrictions, horrible working conditions, in some cases slavery. Climate: Terrible for workers, positive for business.

Step 2. Intolerable working conditions lead to social unrest and riots.

Step 3. Chinese government, fearing chaos, makes slight improvements in working conditions. Climate: Improving for workers, declining for business as costs and restrictions increase.

Step 4. Repeat Step 1. Global manufacturer, seeking to decrease costs and increase profitability, finds a new cheaper-than-China labor force. Climate: Good for business, unemployment for Chinese workers.

And so the dance spins on.

Globalization has destabilized the older dance between individuation (unrestrained business) and integration (controls on business) that characterized the ebb and flow within the U.S. economy. Unrestrained individuation (free markets) in the 1920s led to social unrest, riots, and eventually economic collapse. The economy was salvaged and social chaos averted with integration (government controls, labor legislation, banking regulations and so forth.) Despite the politicizing of integration (socialism or worse) and individuation (greed), internal stability has been maintained by balancing these two forces.

Globalization, by taking the process out of any given country, has destabilized the process. Individuation - the freedom of businesses to go wherever they choose - has the upper hand. Integration at a global level is much more difficult to achieve. Climate: for business, healthy; for workers, vulnerability.

The common wisdom is that globalization once unleashed is unstoppable. That may be, and then challenge would be how to find a global balance between individuation and integration.