We just had a debate on culture, and we seem to itch for
triggering another one on offshoring. Before I return to this point, let me
state what I came out with from the debate on culture. My general observation
has been that most of the debaters lacked the basic knowledge they needed to
have before getting into the debate. They may or may not have done the
research; and if they did, they missed capturing the most salient points
because they must have also lacked the training or the innate brain power to
recognize a nugget when they saw one.
I came across something like a dozen articles on the
subject, and I reacted in writing to about half of them. To get a sense as to
how I felt, imagine a teacher assembling a dozen students into one classroom
where they see on the blackboard an essay he wrote for them. He tells them to
read it after which he erases it. He now tells the students to write, in their
own words, what they remember of it. Well, you can imagine how each of the
dozen essays will read.
Let us now go a step further and imagine that before writing
his essay, the teacher had at his disposal a super duper search engine that was
plugged into everything written since the beginning of recorded history. Now
assume, for the sake of this discussion, that this volume of writing would fill
one hundred million books, each containing fifty thousand words on average.
Doing the multiplication, you find that the total number of words ever written
comes to five trillion.
Suppose that from all of these words, the teacher lifts one
sentence made of five words: “Culture is different from Civilization.” This
would amount to one trillionth the volume that was written since the beginning
of time. The teacher repeats that sentence several times in his own essay to
make it the dominant idea. Now guess what will happen. Yes, the students will
write essays around that notion. They will be different essays, to be sure, but
they will all echo the same idea.
The teacher now surprises the students by giving each of
them a copy of an essay that is titled: “Culture Is a Fundamental Building
Block of Civilization” written by some author. The essay makes the point that a
culture is a method of life (modus vivendi as it is called) pioneered by a
group of people no larger than a tribe, to live in harmony as much as they can
with their prevailing circumstances. The cumulative effect of many similar
groups, all facing analogous circumstances, produces a more complex and more
enduring modus vivendi called Civilization. The teacher now tells the students
to take the essay home, read it several times, understand it well then write
their own essays to answer this question: Is the Protestant Ethic a Culture or
a Civilization?
To come back to the articles that were written on culture,
we need to remember that they came in response to the remark that was made by
Mitt Romney on culture, and to the Palestinian reaction to that remark. Yes,
culture makes all the difference said the pundits, and they all quoted the same
two original sources: a book written by David Landes and a report written by a
group of Arab intellectuals. Because the pundits were not all kept in one
classroom at the same time, they wrote and published at different times -- not
by looking at the same original sources but by looking at the work of one
another – each copying from the pundits that preceded him.
But what did these people accomplish in the end? To put it
in a nutshell, the following is the only point they managed to make: Someone wrote
long ago that America
is an economic success because it adopted the Protestant Ethic -- which goes to
prove that the Jewish culture is superior to the Palestinian culture. Okay,
whatever turns you on, my boy, whatever turns you on. But tell me this: Is the
Protestant Ethic a temporary culture that was adopted by the Americans then
dropped by them to be adopted by the Asians? Or is the Protestant Ethic a more
permanent civilization that is now dormant in America but is expected to wake up
again and rise to new heights? And what will then happen to the Asians? And the
Arabs? And the Africans? And the South Americans?
I suspect that neither Mitt Romney who spoke the fateful
words nor the Jewish pundits who rose up and copied from each other to defend
his remark and justify his motives, ever thought of such matters. All they had
was a little material to work with -- and so they took turns swallowing the
thing and regurgitating it to be swallow by the next guy and regurgitate for
use by the one after that, and so it went from one pundit to the next.
To have a visual model of what happened here, imagine the
following fictitious story. Something happens to Earth, and by some mysterious
process, all life forms on it vanish. What remains are the inventions we came
up with, but they too undergo a process by which they are disassembled into the
various components they were made of. The result is that not a single machine,
appliance or electronic gadget is left in its final form. What happens next is
that alien travelers from another galaxy come to Earth and try to make sense of
what they see. They scour the Earth, pick up one component of every type they
encounter, and bring it to a field. Like working the parts of a thousand jigsaw
puzzles, they match the components that seem to fit together as they try to
assemble them into the machine, the appliance or the gadget they used to be.
At first, the alien travelers create monstrosities such as
what you get when you attach the pedal of a bicycle to the fuselage of an aircraft,
or when you attach the steering wheel of a car to the screen of a television
set. Nothing works but after a while, they would have learned to read some of
our languages. However, instead of stumbling on a “how to” book, they stumble
on a book of poems that was written for fun by a comedian. And they read the
following in it: Life is like a car with wheels but no steering wheel. It takes
you where it wants to go but lets you not steer it there. Aha! One of them says
to himself, this is how you put together this machine. And so he attaches four
wheels to the television screen that is already equipped with a steering wheel.
He adds to the monstrosity, you see.
The other aliens read the same book and create as many
monstrosities as do the Jewish pundits who take to the airwaves and print media
where they talk culture, politics and economics. Put them all together, and you
get the sum total of what the Jewish culture stands for – sheer monstrosity.
Well, to avoid repeating a similarly nauseating experience while debating the
idea of offshoring, let us admit and accept that even if the concept is not as
large as culture or civilization, we cannot hang on to something that someone
said recently or long ago, and use it as proof that offshoring will do this to
us or do that for them.
Like the components of a thousand possibilities, we must
choose the parts that fit with each other, put the parts together into
something that will stand solidly on its own, and demonstrate its utilitarian
use. And we must do all this without quoting someone who wrote this or that
because we know that five trillion words have already been written, and you can
find any combination of them you want – so does everyone else.
There was a time when it was erudite and impressive to show
how well you can quote someone dead or alive, but in this age when a search
engine can find you any quote that will fit your need in a nanosecond, you
cannot impress people anymore by quoting someone else.
What the audiences want from us is that we choose the
correct pieces and synthesize them into a story that will make sense to them.