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“To see clearly is poetry, prophecy,
and religion all in one.”
– John Ruskin
“There is none so blind as they that would not see.”
– Jonathan Swift
ESCAPING PLATO’S CAVE:
How America’s Blindness
to the Rest of the World
is Threatening Our Future
by MORT ROSENBLUM
An Excerpt from Chapter One: The Cave Wall
Plato, who was never
much of a populist, believed most of his fellow humans were blind to reality.
He imagined prisoners in a cave who could see events outside only as firelight
reflections on a wall. These shadows, cropped by the cave’s opening,
were distorted in size, their details blurred. They loomed suddenly and
then vanished. Twenty-three centuries later, these images appear on backlit
screens with words like Sony or Dell stamped beneath them. Otherwise,
Plato’s simile still seems squarely on the mark.
Back then, musing over philosopher kings and a utopian Republic was an
affordable luxury in a Mediterranean universe at one corner of the little-known
world. Now, blindness to reality is killing us.
Today, a widening abyss between the rich and the desperate erupts regularly
into violence. Our planet is dying around us. Lies carry the weight of
truth, just as George Orwell and Aldous Huxley foresaw. In practice, we
are not neither as free nor as democratic as we proclaim. And the world
no longer trusts the only superpower it has.
This book is a cri de coeur from an American foreign correspondent who
spent 40 years in the wilderness watching soluble situations in remote
backwaters escalate into world-class calamity. Unlike captives in a parable,
we are not chained with our backs to reality. To save our world, we need
only turn around, take notice, and do what matters.
In the 1960s, as a cub reporter wading into the blood-spattered intrigue
of Mobutu’s Congo, I was sure my intrepid colleagues and I could
right what was wrong. We would report reality; my ennobled countrymen
would inspire a “world community” to do the rest. Not exactly.
You can almost bank on it: When a crisis looms, Americans somehow manage,
with the best intentions, to make things worse. Challenges we face demand
sustained deliberation. Yet we approach them with the attention of hummingbirds
in heat.
Foreign correspondents who could help us do better are endangered as a
species. For all the words and images we call “media,” precious
few trained eyes see distant reality up close, and these grow fewer by
the year. When reporters do warn us of a crisis, we pay scant attention.
We react to effect and ignore the causes. And then, overwhelmed, we cite
that old saw as a path of least resistance: You can’t worry about
what you can’t change. We must turn this around: You can’t
change what you don’t worry about.
Not long after Plato, Christian prophets sized up their mysterious world.
The Book of Luke assures: “And when you hear of wars and revolts,
do not be alarmed by it; such things must happen, but the end is not soon
. . . Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there
will be great earthquakes in this region or that, and plagues and famines;
and sights of terror and great portents from heaven.”
But back then plunder was limited to the speed that any particular horde
could gallop. Plagues spread no faster than the patter of rat feet or
the swarming of locusts. These days, a match lit in any corner of the
world can set fires just about anywhere. Electronic-savvy zealots whip
up deadly riots over no more than, say, a cartoonist’s caricatures.
Ignorance, whether in Arabia or America, is a weapon of mass destruction.
We are past blaming anyone for America’s collective blindness to
a world we cohabit with 6,700,000,000 others. We can no longer assume
we automatically come first. Of course, we love our nation. Other people
love theirs, too. At a recent conclave of thinkers, Eric Schmidt of Google
noted a simple truth we often forget: nothing in the human genome says
that Americans have a lock on brains. Charity or sympathy does not help
“underdevelopment.” People in trouble need help in confronting
the causes of poverty.
Journalism frequently fails us. Yet it also offers clarity and wisdom
we ignore. Now the stakes are too high for this hit-and-miss approach.
It is up to us – citizens, not journalists – to take notice,
and to take action.
A nation of 300 million individuals with the right to vote, the freedom
to direct their eyes and spend their paychecks however they choose, has
ample means to do better. Big government and corporations we let shape
our lives depend totally upon our collective free choices.
We can fit comfortably into a wider, safer world of allies who respect
us and enemies who have fewer grounds to resent us. The crises we face
are essentially manmade; we can undo much of the damage. First, however,
we have to understand what is out there.
“You’ve got to scare people,” a veteran editor I admire
said recently when we talked about public apathy. “Most people pay
no attention until they see it is ten minutes to midnight. Then they panic
and do something.”
It is now ten minutes to midnight.
A Personal Message from Mort Rosenblum
For those who don’t know me, I reported for the Associated Press
since 1967 in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, South America, and Europe,
covering a lot of peaceful stuff but also several dozen wars starting
with Congo and Vietnam. I left AP in 2004; that’s a long story told
briefly in the book, but writing on the wall was clear when I tried to
quote warnings from wise old Saigon sources as U.S. troops amassed to
invade Iraq under their own flag. My Washington-focused editor told me:
“We believe it’s too early to talk about Vietnam.”
Freed of a day job, I’ve resolved to put my experience to work.
My first priority is to help a fresh generation to see the world with
an open mind. Societies are far more similar than they are different.
Hardware varies, but human software is the same. All people want dignity,
safety for their kids, enough to eat, the most basic of health care, water.
Few of these goals can be delivered at gunpoint. We need to understand
this.
Why do they hate us? Most people don’t. But many of them
no longer respect us; they seek leadership elsewhere. Too many of those
who once admired Americans now see us as self-deluded, self-indulgent
bullies who refuse to realize they share an imperiled planet with 6.7
billion other people. Of course, America is not responsible for all the
world’s problems. But, whether we like it not, we are the best-placed
nation to rally others towards workable solutions.
I am no expert in any particular field. Like any lifelong reporter, however,
I’m an expert in experts. I’ve spent three years talking to
people to frame the vital questions. It is up to all of us, urgently and
collectively, to find the answers.
Bedrock news organizations are more vital to our security than armed forces
and as crucial to democracy as fair elections. Yet they are being bought
up, dumbed down, and stripped of the ability to see reality beyond our
borders.
The Web is a terrific delivery system but without actual up-close reporting
by professionals whose credibility we can assess, its “coverage”
is no more than guesswork based on flawed assumptions. Rather than attack
a “mainstream media,” we need to fix its weaknesses while
finding other ways to see reality.
Iraq is only one example of how we go wrong. We commit terracide on a
planet that is fast growing uninhabitable. We won’t see that reducing
poverty and killer diseases are not charity but rather our own self-interest.
We outsource not only jobs but also basic principles. Corporations we
own and patronize by free choice are making us obsolete as individuals.
We do not teach our kids to think critically, and we elect people who
protect contributors over constituents.
After the book launches at the Overseas Press Club in New York on Oct.
10, I’ll to go Tufts University where I’ve helped run workshops
for the noble Institute for Global Leadership in Kosovo, Argentina, and
Kashmir. I’ll speak to universities and public-interest groups.
We are organizing open Save the World Forums to collect ideas to be posted
on www.escapingplatoscave.com.
(For starters, the Mercury Café in Denver on Oct. 28; Zingerman’s
in Ann Arbor on Nov. 1; Janos Restaurant in Tucson on Nov. 3).
Some early readers have been kind. James Hoge, editor of Foreign Affairs,
wrote: "A great foreign correspondent draws on forty years of travels
and experiences to paint a vivid picture of how America is falling short
of its highest values and crippling its global leadership." Paul
Theroux called it “passionate, timely, and original, a book every
American should read.”
Others, doubtless, will be less enthusiastic. ESCAPING PLATO’S CAVE
is a screed. Names are named, and events are recounted from old notebooks
with much of the heat that accompanied the moment.
With your help, we can do a lot. I’ll be in Tucson this winter where
I teach international reporting at the University of Arizona, and I’ll
travel from there for presentations. I will soon co-edit DISPATCHES, a
quarterly (eventually a monthly) to cover crucial issues in telling detail
but also broader context.
Should PLATO earn royalties, I will contribute half of them to programs
that teach young reporters the skills, and responsibilities, of covering
the world.
If you have any comments, or want to join our circle of amateur world-savers,
we’d appreciate it. Write to mort@mortrosenblum.net
or amber.maitland@gmail.com.
Please start by forwarding this memo to whoever might be interested (no
bad luck will befall you if you don’t).
With many thanks,
Mort Rosenblum
[B]
MORT ROSENBLUM
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