Thoughts by the Fire

"...and so we beat on, boats against the current,

borne ceaselessly back into the past..."

--F.S. Fitzgerald

After the welcome reception, a group of the academic insomniacs at the Seminar gathered near the fireplace in the Great Hall. A welcome break from the usual grind which mostly takes place in front of a computer, this chat, which turned into a four-hour demi-debate mostly about international politics. I wish I had a more exact means of recording the content so that my review of the event would have some context, but burying my face in a computer or a moleskin would have sort of an effect opposite from the one I was glad to have achieved.

For the majority of the night, I was the only recent undergraduate student; a few of my colleagues are currently pursuing masters degrees in Europe, so their extended insight stood as a pleasant supplement to my own. Others, who had been or are currently professors, have such a comprehensive knowledge of world events and global political stressors that they seem to speak in a unique language. Interestingly, I heard a great deal of recollection and criticism of historical circumstance, which was often mitigated by an analysis of the way in which those events--and even people, mirrored, and in some cases--foreshadowed, ones that we currently face.

One idea, presented originally by my direct boss and brilliantly creative thinker David Goldman, kept resurfacing. It sounded Orwellian to me, but the scrutiny that the ardent student historian provided proved the archetype to be historically tenable, and hardly just a literary device. Whereas in the past the United States (and to some extent, Europe) had an enemy with a illuminable visage--that is, that it has generally been the case that we could point to a picture of who our enemy is, what he looks like, those issues which he holds to be important and true--the current administration and indeed world now face several respective enemies which are either intangible or or undefinable. An attempt to describe exactly which sorts of things we are fighting politically, for example, seems to be like trying to capture a morning fog with a butterfly net. This is to say nothing of our often maligned military pursuits, our confusing--and for me, virtually incomprehensible!--economic peril, and more broadly, our philosophical positions as ethical agents who must lead as well as apologize.

Another of the men in our group, Reinhold Wagnleitner, who is a perennial ISP faculty, American studies scholar, prime historian, and native Austrian, talked a great deal about the difference between the culture in the United States regarding voting for an issues or a candidate versus the idea that "the Europeans" have of how Americans actually think about those things. For example, he recalled, that even in a conservative Austria, there was a great deal of shock--followed closely by terror, I would imagine--in 2004 when Bush was re-elected. Reinhold outlined that the European electorate would never imagine that an American electorate would consider issues such as abortion rights, gay rights, and so-called "family values" when voting for a commander-in-chief. These are, conversely, the exact issues on which Bush ran his moderately successful platform for re-election; unimportant were his failure in Iraq and largely with any international government relations, his ignorance regarding climate control and environmental concerns, and his confounding stubbornness around the area of rational intellectual process versus stark religious adherence.

Another of the men and perhaps one of my chief mentors academically was Jochen Fried, a scholar whose repute exceeds even my aspiration. The words that the man chooses to use seem to be selected without effort but with great exactitude, and one of these words was "boldness". Jochen used the term to describe a hypothetical strategy which he and I, lone vocal islands in a group of eight, believed Obama may pursue: drop the wars in the Middle East, adopt a bit of an conscious isolationist strategy, and effectively declare to those unsettled and restless nations, "Fine, then: you deal with it, and consider us now left out". In my thinking, our interest in the countries with which we do not currently enjoy very diplomatic relations would now be fundamentally reactionary, in terms of foreign policy: we are willing when they are, any aggression will be addressed post hoc, and otherwise, we are now otherwise occupied with issues which are more likely to benefit from our concern with them (considering further that our isolation is also an acknowledgement that we are not wanted, and that we should therefore refrain from interference where we are not welcome).

I followed with a speculation that was categorized as radical, a term which is generally a good check that I've made a comment worth making. Jochen, I saw, smiled at several points during offerings such as these. In considering the breadth of challenges that face us, I suggested that we might have fallen victim to an iteration of the logical fallacy of false dilemma. In other words, whereas a traditional false dilemma fallacy posits that there are only two solutions to a problem which has many, and then condemns one of the solutions so that the speaker's alternative is portrayed as the only favorable course, this manifestation of the pesky fallacy creates the illusion that there are two alternatives which are pursuable and result-bearing, when in fact there is only one: to address one of the many impending issues that affects human beings categorically. These, which I suggested we might think of as meta-issues, would have a greater potential to yield results, or, conceived differently, absolutely must yield a result lest some sort of drastic and devastating change come about. Upon pursuing a solution to one of these meta-issues, we might, through our posture or our rhetoric, demonstrate: do you see the way in which we, the superpowers in this small world, are working on your behalf as well as ours? And we may challenge: now, what is it that you are protesting? Against whom do you now fight, and should you? It is this sort of realignment of the nexus of goals and ideology that will necessarily undermine any Nietzschean slave mentality aimed at tearing down the nations which control world processes, and similarly, will embolden any country or people whatsoever to achieve something which has not before been conceived: to fight alongside one another out of need, to imagine self-defense as confederacy with present enemies, because the goal has been changed.