Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

My last book, Far from the Tree, deals with the nature of difference within families: how parents learn to cherish children who aren’t what they had in mind when they set out to have kids. This book is in some measure about a similar process: embracing alien points of view and ways of doing things. I wouldn’t undersell the effort involved. If accepting unlike children is tough, this is tougher. Natural instincts propel parents toward their children; natural instincts propel us away from strangers who are different from ourselves. But that doesn’t mean that we have to go down the rabbit hole of affinity groups and “safe spaces,” where people who already share opinions “protect” one another from the intrusion of other points of view. In forestalling intimacy with the vast and bewildering world, we disenfranchise ourselves, no matter how our might proliferates.

Diplomacy is more often a skill than an instinct. We both engage with other countries because they are our allies and make them our allies through engagement. A capitalist society often defines that engagement in terms of money and military prowess, but those are inadequate models. Like all engagements, internationalism must be a rendezvous of human beings. The import of Japanese technology and Italian fashion has been gratifying; the ubiquity of Coca-Cola speaks on our behalf; and boots on the ground have increased American sway in some beleaguered nations. Yet it is in transnational civilian-to-civilian interactions that we find solutions to our disaffection. “If one does not understand a person,” Carl Jung wrote in his Mysterium Coniunctionis, “one tends to regard him as a fool.” Both parties lose in that scenario. In national as in personal relationships, it is easier to resolve tensions when you can figure out what the other is thinking. The art and culture and even the cuisines and monuments of other places can help us to do so; the people of those places help us most of all. America uses such soft power for suasion abroad, but often we do not allow ourselves the luxury of being persuaded by others. Travel is not merely a pleasant diversion for the well-to-do, but the necessary remedy to our perilously frightened times. At a moment when many politicians are stoking anxiety, telling people that it’s too perilous even to leave the house, there is new urgency to the arguments for going out and recognizing that we are all in the game together. The quest for freedom and adventure reflects the imperative of internationalism in these paranoiac times.

I am not suggesting that we can or should eliminate borders or nations, nor that we will one day crossbreed into a single, encompassing citizenry, nor that some Rosetta stone of cultural values will quell innate antipathies. Enemies often come from abroad, and both early and recent history are marked by plunder and conquest. Belligerence is wired into us, and utopian idylls of nonviolence have never brokered sustainable harmony on a grand scale. Equanimity is not a default trait from which we deviate only by circumstance. Having spent considerable time on the ground with members of the US military, I am grateful to the people who have developed armaments and the people who wield them on our behalf. More than that, I have seen how violence mediates compassion. Peace is most often achieved through intervention, not through ennobled passivity. Concord exists in contrast to aggression, but seldom obviates it.

How, then, to balance these contrary needs: to define an other, to recognize the threat that other might pose, to learn about that other as deeply as possible, and then to welcome that other as much as we safely can? People flee even when they have nowhere to go. As Justin Trudeau in Canada and Angela Merkel in Germany extend a hand of friendship to refugees, we are reminded how foolish it is to presume that those who come from a land full of enemies are themselves necessarily enemies. Having nowhere to go can be fatal; having somewhere to go is a precondition of dignity; providing somewhere to go is often a canny generosity that benefits both sides.