Chronicles Of The Return

My buddy—we’ll call him ‘A’—and I are sitting on his back porch. His dog is spinning around wildly in circles, chewing on an old, smelly, dog-slobbered rag. The dog likes to set the rag in my lap, as some kind of canine-human bonding trick. “A” and I have both had far too much to drink.¹

“Dude, have you seen those new thingeys?” he asks.

“What-huh?”

“It’s one of those doo-dads you see on TV, man!”

I look up from the computer in my lap. We’ve been chatting across the porch to each other via instant messenger, checking our emails and generally acting like the GenX slackers we are. We call it ‘compunicating.’

“Are you high?” I ask. I punch the key board, shooting a quick, “you’re a freak’” IM back to him across the internets.

“No,” he says. “But pass the Scotch.”

“At least you know what that is,” I tease.

“C’mon man, you know what I’m talking about, they were advertised during the last Superbowl. They sell ‘em at, um, uh, whosamawhatsit!”

“What on God’s green earth are you talking about?” I sigh. I grab the bottle of scotch and pour him another drink. And one for me. He smiles. He’s having a hard time focusing his eyes. The dog starts barking.

“Eh, freak, you know what I’m talking about. Those thingamabobs!”

“Yeah, thanks. That helps. . . ” And before I can finish he says, “They’re about yay-high and about half the size of my, umm, uh, left foot.” He holds it up for good measure.

“You need help.”

“No, I don’t,” he says and coughs, lights up another smoke. “Ack, it’s on the tip of my tongue. I can’t get it out. It’s like one of those damn gahooters we had a few weeks ago.”

“Huh?”

“You’ve seen ‘em. We had one for a while in our whosamajiggy.”

“Whydontwejustaskyergirlfriend,” I IM him and then say, “She’ll know what you’re talking about you ingrate. Hey! ‘E’, ‘A’ has a question for you.”

“Honey,” he yells, “you know that whomagutchey we saw last night. What’re they called?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says, “those thingamajigs that hang from the doo-hickey on the whatchamadoodle?”

“Guys,” I say, “I’d hate to listen to one of your lover’s spats.”
———
¹ Dialogue inspired by Schott’s Weekend Vocab.

This is an exceptional review not necessarily about the exhibition but some of the current thinking emerging about the role of the Silk Road on Western History. I suggest reading it. Here’s the clincher:

[T]he critical intellectual shortcoming of the exhibition is that with Baghdad, the Silk Road seems to come to a prematurely celebratory end. Why, instead of dealing with the development of Arab shipping in a final gallery, didn’t the show follow a narrative, visible on one of its maps, leading past Baghdad and to the port of Venice? By extending the history another few centuries, we would have seen how the Silk Road led to a fertilization of Western thinking, not just with the discoveries of Islamic scientists but also with a variety of philosophical and religious perspectives that proved influential over the course of centuries. We know how deeply affected Marco Polo was by the Silk Road in the 13th century: he passed that enthusiasm on.

This would have helped the exhibition make a more cogent contribution to Western cultural self-understanding. It would have also helped explain why, once European shipping and exploration took off in the late Renaissance, the overland Silk Road route became more and more a commercial backwater, leading to centuries of cultural and political decline, whose effects are still being felt.

After my first trip across the Silk Road in 2003 I began to devour, wholesale, as much scholarship on it as I possibly could. And one thing that became very clear early on was that the official narrative of the Silk Road wasn’t anything close to the reality. Sadly, it has been extremely slow going. (I now have an extensive library–at least two hundred books and countless scholarly articles relating to the subject. And growing.) Most of the scholarship is either at least a century old, or in Russian, German and French–of which I only speak one. (The Russian scholarship suffers from the Marxist dialectic, as well.) And yet I found a lot of truth in the old saw, ‘read an old book and learn something new.’ Even before I read Beckwith’s book my ideas had shifted drastically towards his own. His book was a much appreciated validation of my own ill-formed ideas.

However, Christopher Beckwith’s book, which I reviewed in brief a few weeks ago, goes a long way toward rectifying this. The pollination between East and West is much more tremendous than we think. The sheer amount of ideas and innovations which moved from East to West are enough to give one pause: paper, the divine right of kings from China via Persia, Islamic motifs in Western sacred architecture, religious iconography including halos, paper currency, the stirrup–this one alone had a massive impact on Europe. The list is long. But the most profound idea that emerged from the littoral states of the West’s contact with the great Asian hinterland is the millenia-old dialogue between ‘the other’ and the settled states. And then there is the troublesome political problem of those pesky Indo-Europeans, who migrated from the Pontic Steppe sometime around 3,000BC and took with them a cultural complex that would literally change the world: the domestication of the horse, the wheel and the chariot. And the concomitant spread of the linguistics that forms the basis of existing languages from the Indian sub-continent, to Iran to Western Europe. And dead languages whose echoes can still be heard in the Tarim Basin.

While I don’t have much truck with ‘world system ‘ theorists the sheer amount of evidence behind the idea that the West could not have arisen without pollination from the East is inescapable. But it’s a very complicated story and sadly one that doesn’t fit into a snap narrative. Too much energy is spent on Central Asian studies now that focus on only the last hundred or so years. It simply has to go much, much further back in time than that. It’s also a subject that is endless fascinating. For me, the conquest of Central Asia by the Russians is much less interesting that the role of trade between China and the Steppe Nomads hundreds of years before Christ. The Chinese, who adopted much of the cultural complex of the Indo-Europeans, needed horses. What did they do? They slowly encroached on the lands of the Steppe Nomads to feed their war machine. (One Chinese emperor nearly lost everything, surrounded by a horde of horseman in the dead of a Chinese winter, as he was. By the way, our word for horde comes from a region of China called the Ordos Loop. Google it.) When the nomads fought back the Chinese decided to trade. The Chinese bartered silk and the nomads’ horses. A revolution began. (And no, I am not oversimplifying.) The old world, although tenuously linked, was linked forever after this. Silk soon began appearing in great amounts in Western markets–and with it so much more.

The genius of Beckwith’s book isn’t the reinterpretation of Central Asian history, although it is quite an achievement. The genius is in the questions he raises. One question he brought up was this: how is it that between the Seventh and Eighth Centuries AD the great states of the world at the time underwent wholesale and violent religious revolutions? What, for lack of a better turn of phrase, was in the wind? Big, and new meta-questions such as this one pepper his book.

Regardless, if you are in New York City and have a chance to see the exhibit please do. I would love to hear more.

Every year on this date I am reminded of how lucky I was to meet Cpl. Ed Neidemier. It was my junior year at the University of Houston. I’d been assigned a project by my American Military History professor to interview an American veteran. Many people found veterans of the Second World War, Vietnam, Korea and one or two from Desert Storm. I’d always had a fascination for World War One, and wanted to meet an American veteran of that conflict. So, an early fall day, a day not unlike today, when the air had a nip of cold in it and only a wisp of high cirrus clouds I drove from Houston to Dallas to meet Cpl. Ed. He was in his early nineties at the time but his eyes were still a crystal blue and while his hands were soft with the years his handshake was firm.

Sadly, I lost my notes from the interview several years ago. But I still remember much. He was a supply clerk. He drove a horse drawn wagon from a supply depot to the front lines, which were moving up when he arrived in France. He spoke of the sounds of artillery in the night, “like Zeus’ own thunderstorm,” he called it. He spoke of the time when he stole a pair of boots for an African-American soldier who’s shoes had deteriorated ‘in the muck of mud and rotting flesh.’ He spoke of how afraid he was before the war, being a German farm boy from Iowa–who’s first language was German–and how he enlisted as a 17 year old. A year before he was legally allowed to. He spoke of how moved and saddened he was when he shipped out of New York City, looking out at the Statue of Liberty wondering if he would ever see home again.

He spoke of the days after the Armistice Day when he ‘puttered around the trenches’ and traded a German soldier a few dollars for his Mauser. He showed me the gun. As I held it in my hands I wondered how many men it had killed. He told me what it was like to return home in or around 1919-1920. The parades, the euphoria, the joy. But through it all, he always said, “it was the greatest time of my life. Both bad and good. Horrible and awesome.”

I believe there is only a handful of World War One veterans left in the world, and the few that are left are French. All the American soldiers of World War One have died. So have the British soldiers. I don’t know about the Germans or the Russians or any of the other nations which fought in the war. The war fades, the hundredth anniversary of its beginning is right around the corner. Memories fade.

But my image of Cpl. Ed doesn’t. Perhaps some small part of the cataclysm, or suicide of Western Civilization, as it has often been called, remains within me. Cpl. Ed’s blue eyes certainly do.

It’s obvious by what I’ve written in the past (here and here as well.) that I don’t think highly of India’s economic prowess, writ large and I don’t believe any of the hype when it comes to India’s economic miracle. But Quax makes a point about Kerala that deserves further comment.

Quax discusses matrifocal ethnicity in Southern India, namely the state of Kerala. And he’s right: Kerala is different from the rest of India. I’m not sure what makes Kerala different: the prevalence of Christianity, the relative freedom of women in the state, years of Communist rule, and the forward looking and commercial character of Muslims there? Perhaps it’s a combination of all four. Needless to say, Kerala was the cleanest, least intimidating and most upwardly mobile of Indian states, even more so than the miracle city of Bangalore. And I found the Muslims in Calicut to be the most forward looking of any Muslims I’ve ever encountered, outside of pockets in Turkey and those in North Tehran.

Their daughters were educated, free to pursue a love match–not an arranged marriage and not relegated to a very real purdah extant in many places in India. It’s the sort of place where a young Indian woman can have lunch with a strange foreign man and no one raises an eyebrow. I’m not sure how much of this is due to the fact that the area around Calicut has been integral to the global economy for two thousand years–ships have plied the monsoons from East Africa to the Malabar Coast since very early Roman times, bringing pepper an other spices to the West in exchange for gold, or how much of it is due to the tolerance between Hindus, Christians and Muslims. There is much more history to this area than meets the eye.

The Communist party has also run the state off and on since the fifties. Literacy rates are the highest in India. And basic health services deliverables are the highest in India, as well. When the state assumes the risk of healthcare and provides a very good basic education people are free to pursue other productive endeavors instead of grinding away in subsistence poverty and farming. The Dalits in the state, as well, have it better than anywhere in India. This makes a huge difference in upward mobility.

But even Kerala is beset by all the huge problems that India has. The infrastructure is crumbling. The rail system is overwhelmed, although thetrains in Kerala were the best in India outside of the Delhi-Agra tourist trains. And the pollution wasn’t nearly as pervasive as the rest of India. Overpopulation is a serious issue and so is gendercide. And as impressive as the quality of life is for women in the state is, it’s still a man’s state, run by men, for men. All that being said, were I ever to return to India–which is doubtful–the only place I would visit is Kerala.

Yes, I was a tourist in India. I’ve never claimed to be anything other than that. But the eyes don’t lie. What I saw was a very poor, under-devoloped and socially backwards country–moreso than even Cambodia and in many places as backwards as Africa. What makes it worse is this: it’s a horribly underdeveloped country with a very well-educated elite. An elite that sits atop a millenia old social structure. An elite that literally lives off the backs of those below it. And it’s the elite that buys the very minimal goods and services that India imports. One of the reasons India weathered the most recent economic crisis is that it’s imports are negligible. It relies on an internal market that deals in goods and services at a level of quality from the 50s, if not earlier in some cases.

If that’s a choice the Indians want to make, I’m all for it. I’m all about tEh noninterference. There is a queer element of genius to India’s social structure–institutionalizing as deviance any form of societal innovation. But let’s not build up a fantasy around the country. India has some emergent technology. But it’s at the elite level. There are few things that resemble a mall in India, something we Westerners take for granted. And the malls have security guards that prevent lower classes from entering. Seriously, I’ve seen it with my own eyes. That’s not economic freedom for the masses.

India has a problem-set of gargantuan proportions and is one of the most militarized countries I’ve ever seen–all the Gandhiesque posturing notwithstanding. That’s just reality.

If the rest of India could learn from Kerala it would be a vastly more impressive country than it now is. But I don’t see that happening any time soon.