Seldom has it been more important for Americans to form a realistic assessment of the world scene. But our current governing, college-educated class suffers one glaring blind spot.
Modern American culture produces highly individualistic career and identity paths for upper- and middle-class males and females. Power couples abound, often sporting different last names. But deeply held religious identities and military loyalties are less common. Few educated Americans have any direct experience with large groups of men gathered in intense prayer or battle. Like other citizens of the globalized corporate/consumer culture, educated Americans are often widely traveled but not deeply rooted in obligation to a particular physical place, a faith or a kinship.
Most of the 7 billion people on Earth today are not such modern atoms. As in the past, they live in territorial ethnic groups and language communities — …show more content…
American and European educated elites may be outgrowing the “superstition” of religion, the “chauvinism” of nations. But armed men elsewhere navigate by a different compass.
Let us enter their world for a moment, in the name of realism.
For modern individualists, nothing is so enlightened as our present era. So it was considered a major insult in the West to tell Russia’s president that “you just don’t, in the 21st century, behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country.” But Vladimir Putin sees the 19th century not as an inferior age but as the time before his Orthodox nation was seized by an atheist movement from the West that poisoned the soul of a Christian people. He knows that the battle for Sevastopol in the Crimean War (1857) was lost by Russians at the hands of an unholy alliance of Muslim Turks and nominally Christian British and French
Modern American culture produces highly individualistic career and identity paths for upper- and middle-class males and females. Power couples abound, often sporting different last names. But deeply held religious identities and military loyalties are less common. Few educated Americans have any direct experience with large groups of men gathered in intense prayer or battle. Like other citizens of the globalized corporate/consumer culture, educated Americans are often widely traveled but not deeply rooted in obligation to a particular physical place, a faith or a kinship.
Most of the 7 billion people on Earth today are not such modern atoms. As in the past, they live in territorial ethnic groups and language communities — …show more content…
American and European educated elites may be outgrowing the “superstition” of religion, the “chauvinism” of nations. But armed men elsewhere navigate by a different compass.
Let us enter their world for a moment, in the name of realism.
For modern individualists, nothing is so enlightened as our present era. So it was considered a major insult in the West to tell Russia’s president that “you just don’t, in the 21st century, behave in 19th-century fashion by invading another country.” But Vladimir Putin sees the 19th century not as an inferior age but as the time before his Orthodox nation was seized by an atheist movement from the West that poisoned the soul of a Christian people. He knows that the battle for Sevastopol in the Crimean War (1857) was lost by Russians at the hands of an unholy alliance of Muslim Turks and nominally Christian British and French