The Curtain Falls

I have watched and participated in the same play for a life-time. It is time to burn the script.

The curtain falls on an era. 

I came of age at the height of American power and American hubris.  It seemed that there was little we couldn’t do to contribute to human betterment.  Read again Kennedy’s inaugural address.  It is long on promises, confident of victories, certain in our resolve to right wrongs and change the world. 

I was then in Africa, part of a US government program, Teachers for East Africa, that predated the Peace Corp by a year or so. Two summers before I had participated in Crossroads Africa in Nigeria. 

What world did I see?  What accomplishments did I foresee?  I am reminded now of an American saying of that period, “the improbable we do now; the impossible takes a little longer.”

There has always been a bright missionary streak in American aspiration.  We ran toward the fight, for justice for progress, for science, modernity and democracy. 

And let me emphasize that this has been essentially bipartisan.  Klein in a brilliant piece of commentary today (Opinion | Let’s Not Pretend That the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem - The New York Times (nytimes.com) makes this point. And blames both parties.

“But what our ignominious exit really reflects is the failure of America’s foreign policy establishment at both prediction and policymaking in Afghanistan. “

He focuses on our lack of understanding and our failure to learn this lesson, over and over again.  We place too much reliance on rationality (flawed to the extent it is based on questionable premises).  We place too much reliance on a social science that claims all individuals, everywhere, can be understood by a common psychology and a universal hierarchy of needs and values. 

My own life, my actions, my teaching, my religion has been thoroughly grounded on these “truths”—that I knew I knew. 

As Klein writes, “We do not understand other countries well enough to remake them according to our ideals. We don’t even understand our own country well enough to achieve our ideals.”

Hubris comes so easily to the mind of Americans, whose futures were so often made on new ground, on virgin soil.  The reality of our struggles to settle new land, to resettle in a new country, to battle our way toward dignity and justice on inhospitable terrain, calls forth the imaginings of success.  This is how cognitive dissonance works.  We conjure certainties of knowing to counter the realities of experience. 

I hope we have truly drawn the curtain.  I hope that we will leave the theater.  The play is over.  The lights are out. 

However, as Klein, again, pleas.  We must return to this stage with a new script and with less hubris, because we can make a difference, say by placing vaccines in the arms of children around the world, instead of bullets