The Complexities of Ingratitude

At the end of the Napoleonic wars, a foreign diplomat remarked to the Austrian foreign minister that Austria should be grateful for the efforts of other nations to free Austria from Napoleon. The response was, “The world will be astounded at the magnitude of Austria’s ingratitude.” We hear echoes of that in the current jaw-clinched impasse between Germany and Greece over German insistence that Greece maintain a severe austerity regimen despite 27% unemployment or have its loans revoked by German controlled banks. For Germans seem to have forgotten completely the days following WWII and the Marshall Plan.

It’s easy to do: you have to be over 65 to have been there when it was all happening.  Angela Merkel would have been just a baby. But back then was when Germany was reeling with the agonies of recovery from WWII, and those who had just defeated her not only forgave half her foreign debt, they specified repayment of the remainder only as a portion of proceeds from Germany’s exports, then proceeded through the Marshall Plan to rebuild German infrastructure and stimulate the German economy with cheap imports to gain the health it enjoys today. And Greece, just devastated itself by Germany, was one of the 20 nations who joined in doing so. Talk about magnitudes of ingratitude.

Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post wrote today of those wild and wooly times, an instructive reminder of how Germany itself, and all of post-war Europe, was saved by the opposite of austerity. He doesn’t mention, though, an equally instructive part of that tale that the Germans back then would not have been necessarily aware of. For in the U.S. itself, leading the charge to restore the German people and the German economy generated a boom which, added to the post-war baby boom, helped stimulate the American economy for a decade. To some extent the golden 50’s were a product of helping Germany. As was the European Common Market, predecessor of the EU.

Germany today is struggling with its own stagnant economy – a partial product of self-imposed austerity.  And it is struggling to save the EU, severely fractured by the bitter divide on austerity. What better way to stimulate its own economy than by funding a recovering Greece to enable purchasing imports. It doesn’t even need to be half as forgiving as Greece was to Germany. And healing the divide is at least as important.

Of course, the issues and solution apply far beyond Europe. The World Bank worries about a stagnant world economy. Some economists worry about a century of declining economies. I’ve mentioned before that third world economies are being starved of the ability to continue expanding by the reluctance of the Deutsche Banks of the world to fund them. It’s the EU austerity problem writ very large. And solutions are similar.  Not long ago the World Bank president spoke of the desirability of a Marshall Plan for the world. Think about it.

The Price of Stereotyping

A friend once, at Christmastime, commented that in Boston, Christmas lights on Protestant houses tended to be multi-colored while Catholic houses tended to have white lights. I noted that in Maryland it tended to be the opposite way, with white on Protestant houses and multi-colored on Catholic. We both of course were stereotyping. It’s so easy.  It was even easier to do so by religion rather than by location-based cultural differences, though those too would be stereotypes. It was harmless for us, since no malice was meant or perceived by either of us. But the Charlie Hebdo situation reinforces how costly such stereotyping can become.

I have emphasized my views about the strains of modernization tearing at the Middle East. A proud culture had its golden age torn apart in the 13^th century by the Crusades, the Mongol and Turkic invasions, and immediately thereafter by the Black Death, which killed a higher percentage of the population there than it did in Europe.  It was natural to blame faithlessness and foreign influences for everything – after all did not the Torah blame the Babylonian Exile on faithlessness also? -  and the Arabic culture withdrew into a shell lasting for centuries and eventually resulting in Sunni Wahhabism. Now western modernization has reached the Arabic Middle-East, and the backlash against that modernization has produced the terrorism by small Islamic minorities akin to the KKK movement in the southern U.S. after the American Civil War. For make no mistake, there is an Arab Civil War raging now, akin to Europe’s Thirty Years War, which eventually will give way to a modern Middle East. Nowhere are the dangers of religious stereotyping better illustrated than by modern Indonesia, the largest Islamic nation, whose modern Islamic culture is further removed from that of Wahhabic Saudi-Arabia than Liberal Episcopalians are from Primitive Baptists in America. Yet we, and many Muslims, persist in harboring grudges against Islam or Christianity as though each were a gigantic monolith.

Stereotyping makes us cast the Charlie Hebdo tragedy as Mohammed versus Freedom of Expression. Yet Fareed Zakaria points out that most Islamic scholars agree that there is no reference to or repudiation of blasphemy in the Koran, and that picturing Mohammed as an offensive act is a tenet of Wahhabism only, not Islam in general. And when we teach our two-year-old to use an “inside voice” or our older children not to use profanity at the dinner table or grade movies as X or PG, are we not limiting Freedom of Expression? The price of stereotyping is that it limits our awareness of the nuances of behavior and our sensitivity to the need to respect differences.

A January 14 article in the Washington Post by Yasmine Bahrani, a Journalism Professor at the American University in Dubai, and today’s comments by Pope Francis both speak to that need to respect differences. Bahrani writes of how stereotyping causes her students, who largely are “modern Muslims” who feel shame at backward practices like segregating women, to take seriously such claims as that the CIA organized fake vaccination drives in Pakistan and that the prosecution of Tsarnaev in Boston is a set-up. To them, America lacks credibility – and they are the Arabs who should be leaning toward, not away from, us.

Pope Francis speaks to the essence of the Freedom of Expression issue when he, like Giuseppe Mazzini long before him, reminds us to look not to our rights, but to our obligations to others. The killings at Charlie Hebdo were inexcusable and tragic, but the killings by a small minority of Muslims do not justify giving deliberate offense to what we believe, erroneously, are the views of all Muslims in the name of Freedom of Expression. Just as we might avoid challenging an elderly relative’s views on FDR or Reagan at the Thanksgiving dinner table both to be civil and because we love them, we need to remember our obligation to respect cultural differences. Yes, you have a right to Freedom of Expression, and yes, you have an obligation to avoid speech which you know is deliberately and unnecessarily offensive. J.S. Mill, the “Father of Modern Liberalism”, wrote that the only political speech that is truly offensive is a personally derogatory remark about an opponent. When stereotyping both on your part and on an Arab’s part causes both of you to regard picturing Mohammed to be offensive, then you have the right to do so anyway, but you have the obligation to respect cultural sensitivities. The relationships between all parts of an increasingly complex global society need to be strengthened, not attacked. We share the world together.