President Harry Truman’s 1949 Inaugural Address was one of the most amazing speeches in modern history. In it, he laid out the substance of the next 50 years of world affairs with just four points: he said, in short, we must repair a broken Europe (Marshall Plan), we must protect Europe from the East (NATO and the Cold War), we must support the United Nations (We have been its biggest supporter), and fourthly, we must help those countries less fortunate than we; we have the technology and it is in our best interests to do so.
Truman’s fourth point became known during the ‘50s as America’s Point Four Program, and today, after some iterations, is called USAID, the US Agency for International Development.
I met Point Four workers building schools in Iran in 1956. They were using local materials (mud bricks, e.g.) and did not stand out in any way. These workers were very civil engineers working for a pittance who imparted much value to poor people in countries we assisted; they expected nothing by way of thanks, and certainly shunned the limelight. They had no political agenda, and to me, represented the best of America ideals. From what I saw, they assimilated well culturally, even though few, if any, spoke the local language.
After a few decades of foreign development experience in the latter part of the last century, I became increasingly convinced that it was foolish to provide foreign assistance without the US being substantially more conscious of the local culture. Of those things that make up a nation’s culture, language and religion go without saying, but sometimes the more critical items are attitudes toward law and order and even the quality and fairness of local laws to begin with, the degree to which courts are independent, attitudes toward paying taxes, honesty in contracts, attitudes toward Americans, attitudes toward criminal behavior, attitudes toward women, and so on.
Without an understanding of such matters, foreign assistance may accomplish precisely the opposite of what is intended. The good people for whom assistance is intended may never receive it, or receive no more than is needed to provide evidence to donor countries that their wishes were observed. We may simply line the pockets of local potentates, and in various ways, the pockets of our own potentates.
The importance of culture was driven home to some of us during a seminar at a small college in Berlin of which I was the head at the time. The seminar was held in the evening, and was optional. Twelve students from ten countries attended, as did I. The seminar was led by Dr. Jens Reich, a colleague and friend who had been a biological scientist for East Germany and the Soviet Union, though an early dissident and thorn in the side of the German Democratic Republic.
In September, 1989, Dr. Reich was a co-author of the paper, “Fresh Start 89 – New Forum”. A couple of months later this paper went viral (before the word had even been invented) throughout East Germany, resulting in great confusion and hesitation among the authorities who lost control of the situation, and could no longer make local decisions to fire on protesters. On November 9, 1989, the order was given to East Berliners that they could now move freely throughout Berlin, which then led to the crumbling of the Berlin Wall.
Professor Reich’s seminar focused on a single poem, “Wanderer’s Nightsong”, written in 1780 by Johann Wolfgang Goethe.
Reich never stated a purpose or goal of his seminar. He simply handed out copies, in 32 languages, of this immortal poem comprised of a mere 24 words. In the translation of the poem into English by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the poem grew to 30 words:
Wanderer’s Nightsong
Over all the mountaintops
Is calmness,
In all the tree peaks
Sensest thou
Scarcely a breath;
The little birds remain silent in the woods,
Just wait, soon
Restest thou too.
Jens, the Green Party’s candidate for President of Germany in 1992, described the poem’s free rhythm, its perfect rounds, ABABCDDC (in the original German, of course … even this poetic form did not translate into other languages, however). In German, the poem is suspenseful and there is tension as the birds “hold back” their song, an active verb in German for which there is no counterpart in English.
Each student was invited to read the poem in his or her own language (of which eleven were represented, counting German), and then describe what the poem said. Of course, the rhythm, the sound, and the feeling …. among other aspects, were different in each case. Sabina Amanbaeva from Kazakhstan read the 1892 translation by the poet laureate of Kazakhstan, Abai Kunanbai-uli, as tears rolled down her cheeks. It was apparently a moving poem, but when she described the story of the poem in English to the class, it differed in many ways from Goethe’s original. Someone asked if the Kazakh poet had translated it from the German: “Oh, no”, she said. He had translated it from Russian into Kazakh from the 1840 translation from German into Russian by the famous Russian poet, Mikhail Lermontov.
Jens had made his unstated point: culture matters.
I marvel at the simple perfection of Truman’s Inaugural address in 1948. However, if he had made a fifth point, it might have read:
“Point number five: the vastly different cultures in our world today will make it difficult for Americans, who are so isolated from the rest of the world, to participate in the new and complex environment of the future. We must be prepared to communicate our values, principles, ideals and policies in such a way as to not offend foreign cultures, but nonetheless to get our points across with the utmost effectiveness. Furthermore, we should understand foreign cultures sufficiently to engage with them in such productive activities as trade, treaties and cultural exchanges. We should especially understand their attitudes toward us. We should therefore .........”. I am not smart enough to conceive what Truman might have said at this point....possibly something to do with educating college students about other cultures. Thirteen years later, we did get the Peace Corps, however (the first head of which was my late cousin, Sargent Shriver).
Had Truman made the fifth point in 1948, would US policy-makers have attacked Vietnam? Probably. Would the Cold War have ended sooner? Doubtful. Would anti-Americanism be the powerful force it is today in so many parts of the world, however? I think not. Furthermore, with Truman’s fifth point implemented for more than 60 years by now, would we have invaded Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya? My guess is we would not be at war against all three, certainly not at the same time, and may even have avoided at least one war altogether through greater knowledge and less clumsiness in foreign affairs and cultural matters on our part.
Importantly, we might have found a means, other than war, to liberate Iran by now.
We would absolutely have seen Islamic fundamentalist terrorism coming our way decades before 9/11.
Finally, USAID would, today, be run very differently by very different people … and perform vastly better in terms of both foreign and American interests abroad.
Sometimes it's fun to just ruminate.
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