Why We Love Conferences And How Thomas Friedman Will Make A Lot Of Money

Apparently Thomas Friedman has gotten into the act with his own, New York Times-sponsored conference on – you guessed it – everything.  As Lydia Depillis reports in The New Republic (4.25.13):

The New York Times Global Forum: Thomas L. Friedman’s The Next New World, scheduled for June 20, promises to “explore the complex dynamics of new-world infrastructure, especially the transformative electronic, digital and mobile environment,” impart “invaluable insights into strategies for success in today’s new world order,” and answer the question: “What World Are You Living In?” Invitees can attend the one-day forum for the early-bird price of $995.

Friedman is but one of a long line of hucksters selling their wares.  Evangelists have been cramming the faithful into revival tents for years, Southern pastors preach to thousands in mega-churches every Sunday, and self-help gurus earn millions in inspirational talks about self-confidence or making money in real estate. Why should Friedman come under such attack, especially by a fellow journalist?

Friedman proposes to answer [questions about the state of the world] by chatting with a set of white men on subjects including “Threats or Possibilities,” “What Happened to Power?” “What You Don’t Know Is Coming,” and “What Energy Is Going to Be.” If that weren’t enough, the website promises the presence of droves of C-Suite executives, venture capitalists, “content providers,” “hardware manufacturers,” and “service providers.” But it’s still exclusive: You have to “request an invitation” before they’ll let you pay your money.

It all sounds pretty awful, tacky in fact, and not something a reputable New York Times columnist should be up to.  After all, conferences are not for those who really want to learn anything, but who want to shmooze with like-minded people and to have their prejudices confirmed.  If you are a Friedman addict and New York Times reader, you are concerned about an ever increasingly complex world fraught with danger – environmental degradation, invasion of privacy, jihad, junk food, and epidemics; and you know that Friedman, with his avuncular manner and easy, conversational way will never scare you, but reassure you.  Yes, there are perils in the world, he says, but if we act reasonably and in time, we can eliminate them.

The list of Friedman’s topics suggest that he will be preaching to the converted.  Who, for example, especially New York Times readers, has not reflected on the impact of the Internet?  Is there anyone out there who has not caught a glimpse of its power and universality? Anyone who has not surfed the net, worked at home, engaged in social networking, or bought something on Amazon?

Not only have Times readers contemplated our connected world, they have subdivided themselves by issue.  There are the privacy freaks who worry about Big Brother and his satanic acolyte Big Business.  There are the nannies who worry about cyber-bullying and sexting; neo-Thoreauvians who worry about virtual reality and the irretrievable loss of the prelapsarian world of Walden Pond; liberals who see ‘progressive’ values lost in the commercialization of the world. They all convene their own conferences, chat groups, and seminars to talk to themselves.

In other words, the conference is about promoting Friedman and the Times, making people feel good, and strengthening the solidarity of the community of world citizens for whom a peaceful, harmonious, and sharing world is still a luminous ideal.

I hate conferences, and have gone to them only under duress. I have had to sit through treacly polite introductions and thank-you tributes; achingly boring plenary sessions; mind-numbing, useless break-out sessions followed by perfunctory, aimless, report-out sessions; and ducked out of one self-serving paper presentation after another.

Seminars are less painful only because they are smaller and because both presenters and participants are selective.  A seminar on quantitative easing would be attended by economists; one on drug-resistant TB by doctors, etc.

Workshops are the very worst, designed to gin up support for the boss’ new program or to improve sagging office morale; and especially to increase respect for diversity – and usually all three. In some companies these torture sessions are routine and frequent and do more to fragment a naturally cohering group than consolidating it.

Conferences are a huge waste of money.  The United Nations, never known for its efficiency and financial acumen, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on conferences on every possible socially ‘progressive’ subject.  One of the most well-known and revered is the Cairo Conference on Population and Development (1994).  Untold amounts were spent to fly delegates to and from Egypt for long debates on everything from family planning to spatial redistribution of the population. Results? Platitudes, consensus on what everyone already knew, and goals that were idealistic, unreachable, and politically tone-deaf.  The conclusions were no more than a ‘progressive’ manifesto for universal education, abortion, and women’s rights.

Similar conferences have been held on Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and these, too, ended with similarly unreachable, idealistic objectives which satisfied the incestuous international community more than it did provide any real guidance to individual countries.  What it did do was to provide easy political cover for donors to contribute without serious reflection to the eradication of all the ills of the Third World.

What participants in all these conferences came away with was an invigorated commitment to their mission.  International Development is not a job but an ordained duty to help others; and proclamations of universal education or health care are banners to be carried back to the rabbit warrens and rat mazes of the bureaucracy.  Conferences are legitimizing events.  They are symbols of higher purpose and meaning; they are rallying points for the faithful; and they are mating grounds for the professionally ambitious.

It is no surprise, then, that Thomas Friedman has decided to cash in on this phenomenon.  He knows that mass-market conferences like his are not serious teaching enterprises; that each topic will be raised, discussed, and debated not to educate but to motivate – motivate to buy his books, read the NYT, and gain adherents to his worldview.  If he were interested in seriously raising the level of intellectual discourse on any one of the subjects he talks about, he would get off television, discard the pseudo-intellectual mantle placed on his shoulders by the media, and continue writing – or better yet teach higher-level courses at the War College, West Point, or Harvard Law School.  Of course he is not ready for that, but few are; so we should be a bit more gentle in our criticisms of him.

There is a great scene in the movie Quiz Show where the young, ambitious lawyer pursuing Charles Van Doren for cheating on ‘Twenty-One’ asks, “Why did you do it, Charlie?”.  Why would a respected college professor at a prestigious university, son of a scion of the literary world and an old-line aristocratic family go on a tacky quiz show to show off his knowledge, and then cheat by getting the answers?

“Wouldn’t you?”, replied Van Doren. Wouldn’t you take the fame, glory, and fortune of Quiz Show?  Wouldn’t you be tempted by adulating groupies, seduced by the new, special attention of young, female students? Wouldn’t you jump at the chance to be catapulted into the national spotlight after years spent in dusty library carrels? 

“No”, says the lawyer. “I would not”.

So is it then with Thomas Friedman.  Everybody does it these days.  Everyone knows that Jesus Christ is Our Savior, but we need to hear it again and again from the pulpit.  We need to hug our neighbor in the pew next to us and rejoice together in our salvation. Everyone knows that climate change is upon us and the world will soon turn into an infernal hell; but we want to hear the harangues of the doomsayers, the more fire-breathing, the better.  We want to see dark, gloomy films of corn crisping in the burning sun; smokestacks billowing black, noxious smoke; nuclear cooling towers, and rivers lined with belly-up fish and pools of cobalt blue and copper green.

Friedman is particularly smart because he confections his offering to a subset of this impassioned crowed of doomsday groupies.  His audiences feel themselves above exaggerated rhetoric, bombast, and fulmination; and respond warmly to his reasonability.  He is asking them to think, they say, even though they already know the message before it comes out of his mouth.

So, good luck, Mr. Friedman.  I think The New Republic picked on you a bit unfairly.  Yes, your enterprise does smack of Elmer Gantry hucksterism, and intellectual rabble-rousing; but so what?  Billy Graham never hurt anybody in his well-meaning and well-financed appearances, and there were probably more committed Christians coming out of the tent than entered it.

Moving On From Boston–Very American Or Very Shallow?

Leon Wieseltier has written an interesting article in The New Republic (4.24.13) about our sense of ‘moving on’ – getting over it; letting bygones be bygones; what’s past is past.  The sentiment is quintessentially American, he says, because it embodies the optimism, belief in progress and perfectibility, and our eternal faith that the future will always be better than the past.

Moving on, however, is also an expression of our shallowness, Wieseltier says, for in our desire to erase the unpleasant or forget the lessons of the past; and in our hurry and impatience to hurdle obstacles and get on with things, we have lost any sense of the meaning of events.  We are loathe to reflect, consider, and remember. 

Almost as soon as the bombs exploded on Boylston Street the calls were heard to move on. “Repair the sidewalk immediately,” exhorted one commentator, “fix the windows, fill the holes, and leave no trace—no shrines, no flowers, no statues, no plaques—and return life to normal there as fast as possible.” Anything less would be a victory for the terrorists, who should not be allowed, as if it is within our power to disallow it, to leave “even the smallest scar” on our cities and our psyches.

Between shallowness and optimism is a third way, perhaps the most American of all, and one overlooked by Wieseltier – our adaptability.  It is not so much that we wish to sweep all unpleasantness under the rug or even to ignore the consequences and implications of bad things; but that we have the ability to quickly adjust to new realities.

I was in Washington on 9/11, and my wife saw the Pentagon burning from her office window.  We headed home in the confusion of the big exodus, watched the fall of the Twin Towers played over and over again on television, and were incredulous, shocked, and in tears. Within a week, most downtown offices had developed contingency plans in the event something like this ever happened again.  My office stocked canned food, established safe rooms, and and set up automatic lock-down procedures.  Of course most of the plans were totally cockamamie.  If there was a chemical or biological attack, would we be protected in the 5th floor conference room? Would the hundred cans of tuna and Chef Boyardee suffice for the nuclear cooling down period?  As might be expected, all this nonsense ended within a few months, and everything returned to normal.

The Government didn’t sit still.  Afghanistan, Iraq, The War on Terror, the Patriot Act, surveillance cameras, and beefed up security everywhere showed America’s official resolve; but for most of us, we just moved on.  We rationalized the invasiveness of video surveillance, snooping around our cookies, and metal detectors as part of this national response.  We got used to more helicopters thudding up and down the Potomac from the Pentagon to the CIA and over to the White House; more police sirens, and SWAT teams. 

Few people I know are freaked out by all this; and most, while never anxious, knew that something like Boston would happen at some point.  Moreover the feeling was that it was not The Big One.  Two kids with pressure cookers full of nails simply did not measure up.  We had simply incorporated terrorism within our routines, assessed risk and probability, and had gone on with our lives.

This is not shallowness.  It is resilience, human nature, and reflects a certain indomitability.  If one were to look philosophically, as Wieseltier does, Americans’ reaction to 9/11, terrorism, and Boston has been stoic and pragmatic.  Life is full of surprises, happy and unhappy.  Wars have happened since one caveman clan decided to invade another’s hunting ground, tyrants have come and gone; plagues, famines, droughts, and brutal storms have and still do devastate large swaths of the planet each year.  Yet we all take this with equanimity.  This by no means is a nihilistic retreat into ignorance; but an awareness of the ways of the world, the need to adapt quickly to survive; and definitely not to wallow in the miseries of the past. Wieseltier does not agree:

Moving on is of course one of the quintessential expressions of the American spirit, and of the American shallowness. Our religion is the religion of movement; stillness offends our sense of possibility. We dodge the darker emotions by making ourselves into a moving target for them. We feel, but swiftly. This emotional efficiency, this cost-benefit calculus of the heart, is at once a strength and a weakness: you cannot be damaged by what cannot sink in. And so we acquire resilience through transience, and stoicism through speed. We cling desperately to the illusion of our immunity, even after it has just been disproved by experience, and to the fiction of the pastness of the past: we call it “closure,” which is just a decision not to care anymore, and not to let experience intrude any further.

Wieseltier suggests that traumatic experiences don’t ‘sink in’ because we move too fast to let them.  We are too ‘efficient’ in our trajectory forward. On the contrary, we all in Washington did indeed let 9/11 sink in.  We incorporated it and the changes that occurred around us easily and well.  We don’t need to recall or remember that day and revive suspect nationalistic and patriotic feelings.  The most that will be said of us by future social historians is that we belonged to the first Post-9/11 Society and that we are characterized differently than the pre-9/11 crowd, or the Fifties, or the Roaring Twenties.

I say ‘suspect’ nationalistic and patriotic feelings because prominent memorials are more often than not designed not to provide philosophical aide-memoirs or to be shrines for us to reflect on our humanity or our destiny.  They are political statements:

The Hiroshima Memorial is many things.  It is statement of Japan’s durability, history, and cultural longevity (if not superiority).  It is a defiant statement to America that it still has a lot to atone for, and that it is as powerful a symbol as the gates of Auschwitz.

Vietnam has wanted to preserve the symbol of its victory over America and, like Hiroshima and Auschwitz wanted to create a ‘Never Forget’ cultural and political symbol

There is something very powerful about the Hiroshima and Hanoi memorials because of the long history of each country.  The Vietnamese endured hundred of years of conflict with China.  Japan evolved over more than two millennia into a powerful, if expansionist country.  The history of the Jews is even longer, and the symbol of Auschwitz, recalling the Holocaust, is one of an ancient history of oppression, hatred, and discrimination as well as current events.

America is different.  We are young and still ambitious, forward-looking, and optimistic. The 9/11 Memorial is unlikely to have the same iconic impact; and, like most things American, may simply be progressively incorporated into our lives – a beautiful park by the river, a nice place to take the family.

I don’t mean this cynically at all, just that we Americans are always, as Wieseltier says, on the move.  While there is no doubt that while 9/11 will be remembered by those who were alive when it happened, future generations, having moved on, will unlikely be moved by the same emotional patriotism of their recent ancestors.

Only a stupid society would come away from the events in Boston with its sense of its security unshaken. Only a stupid society would refuse to acknowledge that its safety, and its peace of mind, may be affected by resentments and metaphysics that come from far away—from what Fouad Ajami recently described, in connection with the Tsarnaev brothers, as “the seam between countries and cultures.”

Of course we are affected by the events in Boston, but why should we be ‘shaken’? We have come to live with the threat and the possibility of terrorism for the last twelve years.  We have incorporated it into our lives, our psyche, and our mentality.  Only the most naïve of us will be shaken.

Vigilance, increased and intense, is not a victory for the terrorists. Mourning, and the time it takes, is not a victory for the terrorists. Reflection on all the meanings and the implications—on the fragility of our lives—on terrorism and theodicy—is not a victory for the terrorists. A less than wholly sunny and pragmatic view of the world is not a victory for the terrorists. What happened on Boylston Street was not a common event, but it was not a singular event. There is a scar. Taking terrorism seriously is not a victory for terrorism.

These sentiments are off-kilter. There are plenty of things in very ordinary lives which make us think of the ‘fragility of our lives’.  All of us have experienced disease, death, and struggle within our own families and sooner or later we begin to reflect on our own mortality.  It doesn’t take Boston or 9/11 to do that.

In our moving on we are not sending a message to terrorists; but just adapting and perhaps re-writing – as we always do – our optimistic screenplay.  There is no need to scrap it – just rework a few scenes – for our vision of life’s drama is intact regardless of Boston.

The End Of Magical Realism–Finally!

Isabel Allende has recently published a new novel in which she abandons her decades-long stay in the world of ‘Magical Realism’, and comes down to earth.  The result is disastrous as noted by The New Republic’s Maggie Shipstead:

Readers, confronted by fiction set in remote places and eras, are likely to suspend more disbelief than usual; the mingled facts and mysteries of the past make good fertilizer for fantasy. Add a dash of the supernatural and an avalanche of detail, and suddenly the whole enterprise is so heightened that soap opera plots and overwrought prose seem like purposeful stylistic choices. But when those plots and that prose are grafted onto the here and now, as in Maya’s Notebook, and subjected to the accountability of realism, they fail to provide either truth or pleasure.

Many have struggled through 100 Years of Solitude, and have put down every Isabel Allende book  after 50 pages feeling cheated.  They neither get insights into human nature and behavior – the essential value of literature – nor get any meaningful or historical context.  When fantasy and reality are mixed in a romantic, folkloric hymn to otherworldliness, one is left unsatisfied and impatient. 

What are Magical Realists saying to us about human ambition, desire, or disappointment when the characters are influenced by djinns, spirits, and phantasms.  How can place, setting, and historical context provide clues to motive and reaction when they are dreamland fantasies? How can one appreciate, follow, and understand a writer’s literary purpose or personal convictions if each novel is set in a half-real, have fantastical world?

I wonder if, in Allende’s work in general, exaggerated elements that might be read as magical realism aren’t sometimes just examples of unsubtle characterization and the kind of fuzzy wish-fulfillment that runs rampant in romantic fiction, powered by a yearning for a world full of spunky, crime-solving grandmothers and lovers who are endlessly patient, generous, and tender—and possess perfect bodies. Allende includes “emotion” on a list of forces accommodated by magical realism, but if an excess of emotion isn’t accompanied by elements of unreality, what distinguishes the work from standard-issue melodrama? (Shipstead)

It has always been a surprise that Magical Realism, but especially the Latin American version of it has been so highly-regarded.  Many critics have suggested that this literary love affair had more to do with multi-culturalism and ‘progressives’ search for non-white, non-European authors.  Magical Realism satisfied that search for cultural diversity in many ways:

South America was and is continually fractured by regional wars, border conflicts, internal disputes, regimes of various political persuasions; a vast tropical continent in constant turmoil, and on top of that, the South American Indian heritage seemingly co-existing at the same time. It is a land where dualities and dichotomies are the rule, not the exception; the urbane and the Indian, the spiritual and the superstitious, the civilized and the rustic, the city and the jungle, the mundane and the exotic. (Bruce Taylor, margin.com)

Perhaps more relevant is the adoption of Magical Realism by Postmodernists and Deconstructionists as their own step-child:

A list has been compiled of characteristics one might typically attribute to postmodernism, but which also could describe literary magic realism: "self-reflexiveness, metafiction, eclecticism, redundancy, multiplicity, discontinuity, intertextuality, parody, the dissolution of character and narrative instance, the erasure of boundaries, and the destabilization of the reader." To further connect the two, magical realism and postmodernism share the themes of post-colonial discourse, in which jumps in time and focus cannot really be explained with scientific but rather with magical reasoning; textualization (of the reader); and metafiction (Wikipedia)

Magical Realism was coined in Germany in the 1920s in response to Weimar Republic painting which tried to explore the reality behind surface appearances:



This philosophical spirit animated artists like Braque, Picasso, Dali, and many others who dissembled ‘reality’ into component parts for better understanding of the whole; and who distorted it to show that the perception of reality was always subjective, if not feverish.

Authors like Joyce and Faulkner are inheritors of this artistic/intellectual movement.  In their long interior monologues characters like Rosa Coldfield and Molly Bloom are purely subjective, recounting history and personal events in their own way.

Magical Realism as it evolved into the popular, melodramatic, romantic Latin American version lost all of its intellectual vigor; and authors were less interested – like Faulkner and Joyce – in defining character, illustrating human sensibilities, and integrating the subjective and objective worlds of reality – than in simply creating a fantastical universe.  Reading Marquez or Allende is like going to a circus.  You don’t care about the meaning of clowns, or the weird and twisted side shows.  You just want to suspend your disbelief for an hour, be titillated, and go home.

Louis Proyect quotes Theo Tait from his LRB review in 2005:

With time and overuse, artistic style degenerates into mannerism. This is especially true of magic realism. Following the success of Gabriel García Márquez, a flood of semi-supernatural sagas was released all over the world – full of omens, prodigies, legendary feats, hallucinatory exaggerations, fairytale motifs, strange coincidences and overdeveloped sense-organs (all accepted placidly by their characters as part of the everyday run of things). Wonder and novelty were always an important part of its appeal, so the style had a built-in obsolescence: the decline into artificial gesture and cheap exoticism was inevitable.

The other problem with the style is its tendency to degenerate into a cozy and narrowly illustrative form of fiction, full of operatic clichés: passionate lovers, wise old women, tyrannical patriarchs – a sort of politically correct fairytale.

To be fair, Shakespeare was no stranger to mystical reality.  The ghosts of Banquo and Hamlet’s father, and The Weird Sisters are just a few:



Shakespeare, however, never confused reality and the supernatural. There was no doubt that Hamlet and Macbeth saw ghosts; but these were simply real characters with an extended life.  They had unfinished business with the real characters of the play, business which involved only them. We, the audience, are not asked to abandon our sense of reality.  In fact, the ‘ghosts’ of wronged people are staples of modern psychoanalysis.  The images of a mother we hurt, a friend whom we betrayed, a child we ignored are permanently in our minds.  They pop up at unexpected times.  They have a life of their own; but they are part of our very real past.  Whether the ghost of Banquo was a real supernatural appearance or merely the projection of a guilt-ridden brain is insignificant.  Whatever its form, it illustrates a very dramatic and essential feature of Macbeth.

A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream is pure fantasy.  Once again, Shakespeare does not ask us to figure out what is reality and what is fantasy because the difference is obvious. The work is a pure, unadulterated, magical world into which real people enter.  They do not themselves become spirits, like characters in 100 Years of Solitude, but interact with them. The Tempest is similar.

I am an adherent of The Canon, and believe that not all works of literature are the same.  There are some which stand out far above the rest because of their enduring insights. King Lear is not just a text to be deconstructed like a User’s Manual or slave journals, but a masterpiece of insight, humanity, philosophy, and history.  Absalom, Absalom is perhaps the most important American novel ever written because of Faulkner’s uncanny understanding of culture, ambition, family, and human nature. 

Tennessee Williams is a significant playwright because he understands how the world of personal fantasy, illusion, and longing is as important and as real as the gritty, threatening, and imposing one around us.  Hundreds of writers from Aeschylus to Richard Ford have demanded much from us, and asked us to experience mortality, moral failing, cowardice, love, responsibility, and indifference. 
Isabel Allende, Marquez, and other Latin Magical Realists demand nothing more than a lazy and uncritical acceptance of the authors’ creation.  Who cares if what we are seeing is real or unreal, they ask? Life is just a mishmash of shamans, witch doctors, spiritualists, and seers along with the rest of us. 

Allende’s disastrous turn to realism gives the like to her Magical Realism.  When required to create a dramatic world with real people and events; real crises, accidents, and confrontations, she cannot.  Any slavishly loyal critic who continues to insist that Allende had any more to say than children’s fantasies is dead wrong.