An Oversimplified Model of Recent World History

I just read some news item that said that tourists who went to Beijing for the Olympics were "dazzled and daunted" by the event, and that this was an unprecedented exercise in increasing the maturity of a country in such a short time span. Last night, the NBC commentators marveled during their retransmission of the closing ceremonies (bits of pageantry shown during the infrequent gaps left between commercials and the incessant replays of the achievements of almost only U.S. athletes) that Beijing had spent about $40 billion and mobilized up to one million volunteers for the games, and that one was unlikely to see an effort of this size any time soon, "or perhaps ever."

The description of the advances made in Beijing for these games may well be true. But what the media, and U.S. media in particular, do not seem to grasp, is that we're talking about the durable emergence of China as a pre-eminent economic, political and social power, not about a temporary flash of brilliance. And for that matter, I can look in my crystal ball and tell you exactly when the Olympics will cost more and mobilize more people than the 2008 games did: this will happen the next time the games are hosted by China, and I am pretty sure that this will happen again some time in the next 30 years (OK, make that 32), because China is in the front seat for good now.

So here's my oversimplified geo-politico-historical model: the 18th century was French (the Enlightenment, French spoken in the palaces of Europe, the Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen). The 19th century was British (Waterloo, Queen Victoria, the building of the Empire, international maritime commerce). The 20th century was American (the U.S. conclusively intervenes in two world conflicts, rules the economy, develops the atom bomb, puts a man on the moon, and ends up as the sole superpower in the last decade of the century). And the 21st century will belong to China: 1.3 billion people, a 9% annual growth rate in GDP, the world's largest manufacturer and soon the world's largest consumer.

Americans still think that they are God's chosen people: this hubris will only delay the inevitable realization of China's preeminence. The U.S. still has the best universities in the world... but students are increasingly dropping scientific subjects in order to choose careers in Finance, Business, and the law. Can you build an economy solely on that basis? No, you can't. The modern world isn't just virtual: someone needs to grow our food, make our clothes, build our homes and our cars. Increasingly, all these things come from elsewhere. And that elsewhere more and more takes the form of this little label that reads "Made in China." OK, food is a little different, because the cost and duration of transportation already make it expensive and/or inconvenient, and will make it increasingly so, to import foods from afar (we still cherish our Chilean strawberries in winter, but for how long?). Crude oil at $120/bbl is actually increasing the interest in local/regional food production. But will it cause a resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S. (and other Western countries)? Only when the cycle completes and our countries' economies sag so low that we will be the "new poor," and our ill-educated work forces, aided by a dollar worth 50 euro-cents or less, will make it cheaper for an American consumer to buy goods made in Mississippi than made in China (you can name the equivalent "bottom of the barrel" regions in your own countries).

The two questions that remain in my mind, because I believe the above scenario to be almost ineluctable, are: what accidents can happen in the meantime to delay or modify it? and what happens after that? Is this is a one-way street, or will the "decline of the American empire" and of other Western countries result in some sort of compensating pendulum swing, where China will find itself, by the dawn of the 22nd century, in a similar situation that the U.S. is finding itself now, unable to prolong its fading grandeur, and sobered-up countries with significant natural resources (the US, Brazil, Nigeria, Canada, etc.) will restore a different balance?

It will help China extend its domination if the Chinese government at the time does not repeat the errors of the most recent U.S. politicians, which caused the sudden and profound moral bankruptcy of this country on the international scene. Assuming that China grows out of the current climate of quasi-dictatorship and human rights violations, let's fast forward. If anything similar to the U.S. 2000-2008 political catastrophe happens in China in 50 or a hundred years, will the Chinese people have the political education, the will, and the ability to change things before it damages their country's standing in a similar way to what Bush & Co. have just done to the U.S.? Of course, today, it is clear that they probably wouldn't be able to. But as the country continues its rapid progress, a time will come when they will probably have that power. So the last question is whether the Chinese people in a few decades will have the knowledge needed to make the right decisions (as opposed to, say, Americans who can't locate Iraq on a globe, or still believe that there were WMDs in Iraq because Fox "News" tells them so). The future of the world may well depend on this more than on anything else.

Arts and Politics (or Why I Love Carl Orff, But...)

I went to the Symphony last night. Well, the Houston Symphony, but it's still the symphony (please don't shoot me for saying that; the symphony is still one of the ways in which Houston is a wannabe big city: it wants to play with the grownups but hasn't quite gotten the hang of it yet).

I was actually pleasantly surprised. The program was awkwardly chosen, in the sense that it consisted of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, followed by Orff's Carmina Burana. Why put two contemporary choral works in the same program? If you have a limited tolerance for this, then you obviously won't go at all -- as opposed to coming to a mixed concert that contains one piece outside of the mainstream, and therefore getting a chance to stretch your experience a bit. And if you love these pieces, the fact that they are both choral works may result in some sensory overlap, with the second piece obliterating your memory of the first one.

This is definitely what happened to me. I remember loving the Chichester Psalms, which I don't think I had ever heard before. But after Carmina Burana, I don't remember much about them.

Now, the program notes for Orff's piece are completely devoid of the usual biographical sketch. Instead, they totally focus on the work itself: its origin, the history of the manuscript (lost, found, and almost forgotten again), the orchestration. I have heard Carmina Burana in concert several times (including an impressive performance by the San Francisco Symphony, at Davies Hall, with two full choirs combined -- the "O Fortuna" almost blew me out of my seat -- and I don't remember which program was a bit more explicit about Orff's life, but it made the point that Carmina Burana was largely overlooked for many years because Orff had been associated, in somewhat disputed ways, with the Nazis (see the Wikipedia article for more information).

At minimum, Orff "collaborated" with the government by responding to a call for alternate music to the Midsummer Night Dream, to replace the famous version by Felix Mendelssohn, whose music was banned because he was a Jew. Surely, he could have simply abstained from responding to this request without incurring much risk. The omission of this controversy in last night's program bothered me. For one thing, the same program talks about Tchaikovsky in the notes for another concert, and clearly mention his homosexuality, which was long ignored in such publications. So if it's now become all right to acknowledge this aspect of the Russian composer's life, which may or may not have a relationship with his work, then why the silence over Orff's controversial relationship with Hitler's minions?

Then I remembered another instance of controversy over the relationship with art and politics: the cinema industry was active in Paris in 1940-44, during the German occupation. It is claimed that the Germans encouraged it because it served their propaganda purposes (the book "Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the German Occupation" by Evelyn Ehrlich seems to provide particularly in-depth treatment of the subject).

Is it fair to expect artists to essentially "go on strike," emigrate, change jobs, or otherwise abandon either their environment or their families, or their profession, rather than work under the regime of the moment? Why do we tend to expect this from artists, and not from butchers or postal workers? I think there are two reasons: we assign morality to art, and art has a different ratio of "appearances vs. necessity." What I mean by the second point is that the butcher's work is necessary if people are to eat meat, and that work doesn't really make the regime look good (although in some places and times this point could be debated); the artist's work can be stopped as a form of passive resistance without damaging anyone's immediate well-being (other than the artists') and if the work goes on, the regime can, as was perhaps the case in Paris during WWII, use this as a way to project normalcy: "see those happy Parisians going to the movies, clearly we're not what the evil American propaganda is trying to tell you."

I tend not to provide answers in these pages -- I'm content enough to raise what I think are important questions. In fact, I don't know what to think about this, other than what I wrote above about Orff's options. Similarly, should Marcel Carné have put his camera away and waited until after the war to film his masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis? The inspiration might have been gone by then. Was he complicit in the Nazi propaganda machine -- or, as has been claimed, did he help shelter resistance fighters by providing them with jobs on the set, knowing that his work enjoyed some level of protection from the authorities?

The work itself was beautiful, the Houston Symphony was actually pretty good at it... I just had this nagging feeling all evening that something needed to be discussed, and that the program author had missed a chance to make people reflect about a moral issue of great importance.