Politics and Policy Archive
Welcome to Politics and Policy where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the important political and public policy questions facing us as Jews and as Americans. Every other week you will find a new article on this page.
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Looking Fearlessly into an Uncertain Future
By Shari Cohen
Even as the war in Afghanistan
seems to be drawing to a close, the challenges September 11 has thrust into public
attention—in particular, “nation-building” in failed states—are as
pressing as ever. To its credit, the Bush administration has come to understand that there
is a long-term systemic dimension to the current international crisis. Eradicating Osama
bin Laden will not end terrorism. And even if
we overcome the day-to-day encounter with terror that has so shaken our lives in the last
months, the larger political, economic and social contexts that perpetuate the despair
that supports fundamentalist and anti-western ideologies will persist. The problems of the developing world cannot be
separated from our domestic sense of security. But
we face this difficult international challenge in an atmosphere of fear and crisis at
home: fear for our lives, fear about an uncertain future and fear that the world as we
knew it is gone.
The failed states
that have been the location of the humanitarian disasters of the last ten years, from
Somalia to Bosnia to Russia, pose unprecedented challenges to the advanced industrialized
societies, most of which are liberal democracies. Even if we had billions more in
resources for international development, and even if we had the political will to deploy
those resources, we would still face the question—mostly intellectual, but also
political—of how to build sustainable societies in these places. Particularly thorny problems include corrupt
regimes, mafias, anti-imperialist ideologies that see western involvement as violations of
sovereignty and the reluctance on the part of most westerners to spend time in the
developing world. Cultural settings
antithetical to western liberal democracy and years of festering hatreds bred in refugee
camps, schools and media contribute to the morass.
Nation-building (if that is even
the correct terminology) is not a straightforward policy- making task and it would be a
mistake to treat it as one. The seeming international problem of “failed states”
has spilled over into our lives. Addressing
this problem might well force us to alter our approaches to consumption, to sovereignty,
to property rights, to education. In light of
this, at least as important as addressing immediate policy concerns is creating settings
that would help us identify the longer term questions that are not being asked by either
left or right, by either academics or policy makers, from either a religious or secular
perspective. This is not a small issue. And it is difficult to reorient our
resources—both intellectual and monetary—when a focus on the immediate crisis
makes the argument for taking the long view unpopular.
A parable from a very different
period of history offers lessons about the trade-offs between addressing the immediate and
seemingly obvious policy concerns of the moment, on the one hand, and deploying resources
to consider difficult questions about the future—even though such an effort seems
disturbingly open-ended—on the other.
Around 70 AD, Jews
were engaged in a battle with the Romans over Jerusalem.
The Temple, the focal point of Jewish worship, would be destroyed within two
years. As Jerusalem burned around him, the
Jewish leader Yohanan ben Zakkai approached the Roman general to make a request. He did not talk about the survival of Jerusalem or
the Temple. Instead, he asked to be granted a
small city outside Jerusalem called Yavneh, with its cadre of Jewish sages. He understood that the era of the Temple was over. He asked for a space, or a forum, for conversation
about how the Jewish people would live in a post-Temple period: a period that would look
fundamentally different from the past.
Yohanan ben Zakkai
understood the need, at that time, to move beyond the most obvious options of life or
death. While everyone else was focusing on
survival and hunkering down, he said that survival itself depended on looking fearlessly
into an uncertain future, tolerating enormous psychic uncertainty and having the
confidence to deploy precious intellectual resources toward generating new kinds of
questions. He didn't expect to find the right
answers anytime soon.
Even defining the
right questions regarding “nation-building” in failed states requires putting
the people who are struggling with this issue – and some who are not -- into serious
dialogue with one another. Diplomats, who are
thinking about different ways of conceptualizing security, should be talking to
anthropologists who understand tribal practices. Economists,
who are thinking about building small businesses, should be talking to people who
understand religion. A university president,
who is thinking about developing new international programming, should be talking to
people in the military who are thinking about strategies.
Members of Congress, who are thinking about allocating governmental
resources, should be talking to scientists, or poets, or rabbis – people who might
frame the issues in surprising ways. Together
they might understand how important the power of religion, or tribal affiliations, is to
intelligence gathering or traditional military strategies.
They might think differently about the relative importance of ethical and
economic questions.
One fundamental
problem is that such people are not generally talking to one another. There are neither monetary nor institutional
incentives for these conversations in the places one might hope to find them: academia,
politics, the media or business settings. In spite of noble efforts to encourage
interdisciplinary work in universities, for instance, academic discourse remains
fragmented. It is difficult to set aside time
for broader interdisciplinary collaborations that are not usually rewarded in tenure
decisions or in publishing opportunities. Limited funding opportunities as well as heavy
teaching loads also make interdisciplinary exploration difficult. The same limitations apply for academics who might
want to become politically or publicly engaged.
While a recent
spate of articles has called attention to the decline in emphasis in universities on
international relations and the study of important regions of the world, even those
academics who have expertise in relevant areas are not well utilized by media and
government. It is also possible that the range of intellectual resources that universities
currently offer is actually not wide enough. We
need to figure out how to extend our understanding of radically different cultures and
realities by deep immersion in other societies where we can begin to experience, not just
understand, very different modes of approaching the world.
One could similarly
analyze the institutional and other barriers in the media, politics and religious
institutions. Recent revelations about incompatible information sharing systems in
important government agencies are an instructive institutional parallel to the
intellectual challenge I am highlighting. The fact is that cross-boundary communication is
extremely difficult even when the will is there—we are only beginning to develop
conversational methods that allow people from disparate professional languages and areas
of expertise to productively benefit from one another’s insights while working on
joint problems.
Of course, the
Yohanan ben Zakkai story is told from the point of view of history's winners—the
forms of Judaism that developed out of the conversations at Yavneh did, in the end, become
the Judaism that we have inherited. Those who
fought to preserve the Temple disappeared. But
it took generations for the new forms to emerge. Clearly,
policy makers do have to respond to immediate demands and responsibilities. They lack the luxury to convene the necessary
forums that would help imagine the difficult questions of the future.
I would argue that
Americans, and by extension other advanced industrialized societies, have been facing our
metaphorical equivalent of the battle for Jerusalem for several years now. This is not as sudden or dramatic as an armed
fight. But, nevertheless, our familiar way of
life has been assaulted by a changing world: the homogenization of culture and the erasure
of borders caused by globalization, the worldwide reach of media, the end of colonialism
and the Cold War, and the dominance of western culture.
September 11 just accentuated the challenges; it has made the battle seem to
be one with life or death implications and with a particular enemy.
We need to learn
from Yohanan ben Zakkai to think carefully about putting in place the forums, the
networks, the processes and the ideas that will allow us to consider broad and still
unaddressed challenges such as nation-building in failed states. We must embrace the necessary psychic uncertainty
that will come from looking at approaches that might well challenge the core of how we
currently approach the world. If we do so, we
will, as he did, maintain our basic values and principles in a radically altered world.
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