The Indifferent Planet

...hell is notoriously paved with good intentions...

...Then there is the problem of humanitarian interventions morphing into global adventurism...

...Friedman concedes that a flat world makes it easier for extremists to transmit their terror, and that the Internet is as useful in disseminating hostile propaganda, conspiracy theories and plain old lies as it is in providing information helpful to our enemies: "Hell hath no fury like a terrorist with a satellite dish and an interactive Web site...

...Dooley...

...Twill civilize thim stiff," said Mr...

...Eugen Weber is a frequent NL contributor whose books include The Western Tradition and A Modern History of Europe...

...A cyclical view of history holds that societies, nations, civilizations, rise and fall...

...Maybe...

...should play a major role in the world, but only on behalf of our national interests and the interests of Western civilization...

...Merry associates Friedman's idea of progress with Eurocentrism, Western hubris and American foreign policy...

...Admirers beware...

...Note the hint of decline in that last sentence...

...Round the decay Ofthat colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away...

...The keepers of our conscience multiply, sedquis custodiet ipsos custodes...

...Excited, exciting, crowded with colorful anecdotes, partial and pleonastic, the latter book is a follow-up to the New York Times columnist's equally engrossing The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), where he glorified globalization, global markets, Americanization, homogenization, and the World Wide Web "which unites everyone"-as in a crowded elevator where Muzak competes with intrusive cell phone exhibitionism...

...In the end, though, the best intentions somehow generate a determination to be and go on being top dog, the better to achieve our beneficent purposes...

...Dooley opined in 1899, '"Tis hands across the sea an' into some wan's pocket an take up th' white man's burden and hand it to th' coons...

...The notion of progress makes little allowance for this, treating threats to linear betterment as hiccups to be surmounted...

...Merry quotes his explanation that the West's problem is not Islamic fundamentalism: "It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and obsessed with the inferiority of their power...

...In addition, such reports corroborate Huntington's contrast of the United States ' efforts to promote a universal Western culture and its diminishing ability to do so...

...Merry, following Huntington, reminds us that the national motto epluribus unum from the start asserted unity and rejected diversity...

...that the deterioration of aging follows the freshness and florescence of youth...

...The title of Sands of Empire comes from Shelley's 1817 sonnet about the broken pieces of an ancient statue whose visage, with its "sneer of cold command," lies shattered on the desert sand: "My name is Ozymiandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair...

...Friedman does point out that global competition shrinks the chances of the worker with middling talents...

...How often do we hear that computers are down...

...In another important sense, unless we mend our ways, the outlook is dicey...

...Nothing beside remains...

...Twill civilize th' Chinnymen," said Mr...

...Wall Street firms using highly motivated but modestly compensated Asian analysts to conduct investment research...

...Yet given the multitude of illiterates and functional illiterates our system tolerates, there is reason to wonder how long it will be before we are overtaken by competitors less fat, less arrogant, less averse to delayed gratification, and less dumbed down by injunctions to consume, to spend rather than save, to relax rather than work harder...

...Computer fraud, glitches, hackers, identity theft, spam, bugs, viruses-these contribute to our infinite capacity to discomfort our fellows...

...Others" are those cranky, obstreperous or baffled individuals who still do not use computers...

...Similarly, he pays little heed to the fact that our electronic abilities carry disabilities...

...Fair enough...

...Computers, e-mail, the Internet, digitalization, satellite communication, microprocessors, and other electronic wonders connect ever more people and places and mobilize them to collaborate or compete, delivering ever more goods and services, comforts, threats, and banalities...

...Too many Americans, though, heartlessly insensitive to humanitarian appeals, consider human rights simply rights some humans concede to others...

...so with the Muslim civilization we know best today for the violent fanatics it breeds...

...They may also blossom into civilizations, like that of Egypt or Europe, China or Islam, with peculiar distinctions that make it hard, if not impossible, for outsiders to assimilate...

...Or, perhaps, pride goes before a fall...

...As Finley Peter Dunne's Mr...

...Of course, it is easier to envision Americans being laid off than foreigners being hired...

...Islam's problem, meanwhile, "is the West, a different civilization whose people are obsessed with the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that power throughout the world...

...Only fragments of his 57' statue at Thebes survive...

...the vainglory of intervening to feed the hungry, protect the weak and encourage good causes all over the world, as we salve our consciences, and irrigate some pockets...

...Much of his book reads like a refutation of Friedman's triumphalist thesis of American-led progress, and of Francis Fukuyama 's argument for an end (or the endability) of history-culminating in the sort of democratic utopia heralded by President George W. Bush...

...But the U. S., and more generally the West, face the challenge of "immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and propagate the values, customs and cultures of their home societies...

...Even so, who will define our national interests, let alone those of Western civilization...

...Shelley's poem is the book's epigraph: a morality tale about the transitory nature of political regimes, forms of government, baubles of culture, and the inevitable end of grandiose ambitions...

...A great warrior, builder, administrator, Ramses had a flair for publicity...

...Electronics expand our neighborhood, not our neighborliness...

...It makes no difference to the global economy if Asian technology thrives as American technology goes gray...

...The potential for internal disunion and strife is evident...

...Indifferent to past history or current geopolitical realities, our foreign policy has been hijacked by good intentions, self-satisfaction and facile moralism...

...is a place, not a person, and Western culture is a cluster or constellation of memories, records, inven tions, and traditions...

...He prefers the cyclical view of history taken by Arnold Toynbee and Samuel P. Huntington, in which rival cultures-each a product of different conditions, evolutions, experiences-vie for supremacy...

...Sands of Empire etches a world less flat than snarled, lurching from one confusion to the next Moral and material progress, says Merry, do not necessarily go hand in hand...

...may soon fall behind other countries in scientific discovery, technological innovation and economic development The sooner because Congress, ever dedicated to pork-laden budgets, is busy cutting support for science, engineering, and the National Science Foundation, while the State Department and Homeland Security discourage foreign students and scientists ("fewer are coming, fewer are staying...

...The real problem, though, is elsewhere...

...Or, indeed, to Americans whose lives are enriched and ruled by civility, like those of the longshoremen's union...

...That, at least, is what Robert W. Merry suggests in Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $26.00...

...the smugness of wealth...

...Cultures may wither or decay without leaving a significant mark on historical memory...

...Dooley again: "Th' fav'rite pastime iv civilized man is croolty to other civilized man...

...Summer Books The Indifferent Planet By Eugen Weber Globalization is shrinking the world, leveling the universal playing field, flattening our planet by abolishing hitherto unavoidable barriers of space and time...

...Merry's pessimism finds a triumphal rejoinder in Thomas L. Friedman's The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century (Farrar Straus Giroux, 488 pp., $27.50...

...Denouncing our propensity to advance solutions for other nations' problems, Merry quotes from Warren Zimmermann 's Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its Destroyers (1996...

...A sportsman who expects to train lobsters to fly is dismissed as a lunatic...

...This is what mired us murderously in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and other Serbonian bogs...

...That seems to be the gist of the "missionary zeal" and the "global ambition" of Merry's subtitle, and of his aversion to them...

...The Chinese, for instance, may adopt and enjoy the trappings and equipment of material modernity but will retain cultural distinctions, customs, outlooks that others do not share...

...Friedman evokes U.S...

...Since this, presumably, will not last long, Friedman ignores it...

...Friedman elegantly disposes of criticism based on mere economic morality...

...Friedman sees a "steady erosion of America's science and engineering base, which has always been the source of American innovation and our rising standard of living...

...Tell that to the Iraqis...

...But his reign marks the last peak ofthat civilization's imperial power...

...Merry, who takes issue with wishful Wilsonian visions of global peace attained through the spread of Western liberal ideas, devotes a chapter to the clash of civilizations between the West and Islam: the one fascinated by the opportunities that trade, employment, material satisfactions could extend to angry Arabs...

...For Huntington, the two cultures are engaged in an "mtercivilizational quasi war...

...Or to those who were once Yugoslavs...

...Our own posture can generate trouble, too: the complacencies of power...

...Ozymandias" is probably a corruption of Usermare, the forename of Ramses II of Egypt (1304-1237 BCE...

...Worse in the long-term perspective, Friedman fails to consider that if God commanded us to love our neighbor, it may have been because such affection does not come naturally...

...Preemptive aggression in a good cause will clear the path of progress, and usher in the Brave New World of Western democratic capitalism expected to spread prosperity, content and global harmony...

...Specific identity of this sort is confronted nowadays by voguish multiculturalism...

...One wishes the media, the White House, Congress, and academic faculties would take note...

...Offensive, I know, but that was in the unenlightened long ago...

...Full of heart and compassion, our brightest and best are eager for "'a muscular defense of human rights" wherever these are at risk...

...Mediocrity no longer finds secure employment because the contemporaryjob market calls for a higher degree of adaptability: not just learning a craft, but constantly upgrading skills, instruction, education, and research at every level...

...the other whose basic values-quest for honor, dread of shame-stimulate bitter resentment of existing handicaps and long-lost repute...

...Of course, the U.S...

...In the new global order, "we" communicate digitally from one far-flung continent to another...

...Not a political establishment trusted by few, or an intelligence arm akin to the Keystone Kops, or an academy at odds with itself, or media prone to pursuing the latest wild goose...

...in particular think of themselves as distinctive entities, with sui generis traits that differ, say, from those of China or Islam...

...Hennessy...

...A politician who thinks a shambles can be turned into a democracy is deemed well-intentioned and remains at large...

...And what about the everyday irritations of fallible machines replacing humans who are no more fallible but sometimes more helpful...

...In 1900, when the Boxer Rebellion threatened Western legations in Peking, European powers welcomed the chance for military intervention in a country whose opportunities had them slavering...

...still leads the global economy, Friedman says...

...Yet, as I write, the Business section of the New York Times stirs doubts about the economic destiny supposed to sustain our imperial aspirations: "New global rivals undercut American technology companies on price and increasingly wrest the lead from the U.S...

...Free market capitalism and democratic liberties do not always coincide and, if they did, their conjunction would hold out no sure hope of improving human nature...

...But the West in general and the U.S...

...The author's model accommodates material advancement as long as we do not insist that human relations are primarily economic, and change is not automatically equated with melioration-as in the toe-curling formula "new and improved...

...As with China, so with Iraq...

...O brave new world/ That has such people in it...

...Thus he warns that the U.S...

...A fanatic is a man who does what he thinks the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case, and fanatics flourish everywhere...

...We stand for the simple proposition," writes America's last ambassador to that bygone land, "that people of all ethnic strains can live together, not without tensions, but with tolerance, civility, and even mutual enrichment...

...Now, six years later, he returns to rejoice that "a global fiberoptic network has made us all next-door neighbors...

...radiologists outsourcing the reading of CAT scans to doctors in India and Australia...

...So intervention is best rationalized in Huntingtonian terms as pre-empting threats to national security or to necessities like the oil supply...

...Reuters shipping low-value-added functions to Indian journalists...

...Indians and other outsourced workers are not exploited: They earn less than Americans, but more than their countrymen, and with some of that money they buy American goods-a win-win situation...

...And regardless of how you define it, American national identity is linked to a Western civilization multiculturalists want to discard or dilute...

...In this race the U.S...

...They shrink the world all right, but not the worldlings' tendency to harm one another...

...Boeing and Airbus employing Russian aeronautical engineers at one third the domestic cost, while the Russians in turn outsource elements of their work to Hindustan Aeronautics in Bangalore...

...Training in the sciences and engineering is more exacting than in the humanities and social sciences, and Friedman reminds us that ever fewer young men and women-especially compared to our global competitors-choose the demanding science majors: Graduate enrollment in those fields peaked in 1993...

...Merry maintains that the U.S...

...ROBERT Merry brandishes this cautionary agenda with more brio than Friedman...

...in innovation...

...Electronic devices, like guns, can be used by both believers and unbelievers alike...

...But it is crucial to American illusions ofhegemony...

...witness the statues and inscriptions-not least the great figures at Abu Simbel-that have done much to preserve his memory...

...His successors had to manage a long decline blemished by external wilt and internal decay...