Let the whole
world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of Andalusia
would be repeated in Palestine. We cannot accept that Palestine
will become Jewish.
— Osama bin Laden, October 7th
 ndalusia is the
southernmost bit of Spain, which remained Moslem until Ferdinand
of Aragon reduced it in 1492. Our bearded adversary is whining about
something that happened 509 years ago! This is tough for Americans
to grasp, I know. With the exception of a small number of southerners
still fretting over Abraham Lincoln's "War of Northern Aggression,"
and of course the race-resentment cliques banging tiresomely on
about slavery reparations and the Battle of Wounded Knee, Americans
are a forward-looking people not much inclined to froth and fume
over injustices done to their ancestors, preferring instead to use
their energies in building a secure and prosperous life for their
descendants. Elsewhere, as bin Laden's little rant reminds us, things
are different.
Bin Laden's
comment about Andalusia brought to mind an incident that happened
to me 20 years ago. I was working on contract in Tallaght, a suburb
of Dublin. A few months previously there had been a meeting at Dublin
Castle between Margaret Thatcher, then of course the Prime Minister
of the U.K., and Charles Haughey, her opposite number in the Republic
of Ireland. This meeting had enraged the fiercer kind of Irish Republicans.
Well, there I was, sitting in a pub in Tallaght with some Irish
friends, in the summer of 1981. A song came on the jukebox, and
I gathered, listening to the words, that it was a protest ballad
against the Dublin Castle meeting. The protest was aimed at Haughey,
who was referred to in every chorus as: "Our Dermot MacMurrough
of Eighty-One." (Which has a pleasant dactylic lilt to it.
You can depend on the Irish for a good tune.)
I knew very
little about Irish history at that point, and inquired innocently
of my Irish friends: "Who is this Dermot MacMurrough he's singing
about?" Ah, they instructed me, he was the fellow who first
opened the door to let the English into Ireland. And that would
be when? I asked. Back came the answer: A.D. 1167 — over 800
years ago. An awful long time to be nursing a grievance, I thought
quietly to myself.
The next time
I encountered this phenomenon was a year later, when I was living
in China. Naturally curious to know what image Chinese people had
of my own country, I was surprised to find that the only thing universally
known about Britain was that we had burned the emperor's summer
palace in 1860. Chinese people, I found, were generally too polite
to mention this to one's face, but in their government's propaganda
materials — a category of literature that, in China, includes
things like school textbooks and TV documentaries — it loomed
large, forming almost the sole image of British character and policy
that most Chinese people were acquainted with. Magna Carta? The
Glorious Revolution? Ending of the slave trade? The Factory Acts?
Churchill standing alone against Fascism? Fuhgeddaboutem —
you burned our Summer Palace!
This harping
on ancient grievances is, I think, characteristic of people who
feel the sting of some national or collective humiliation —
people who feel, I mean, that their culture, their way of life,
has been elbowed off the sidewalk by one that is bigger, richer,
stronger, more potent. Irish people felt that way in 1981, though
with the rise of the "Celtic Tiger" and the immigration
of unskilled English laborers to work on Irish construction sites,
the feeling has much diminished recently. Chinese people, who cannot
understand why the glories of their ancient civilization have cratered
into the ugliness, cruelty, and squalor of a "People's Republic"
in which the actual people have no voice, also feel that way. And
of course, thoughtful Moslems surveying the complete failure of
the House of Islam to come to terms with the modern world, are likewise
humiliated, and salve their hurt pride by picking at 500-year-old
wounds.
Nations that
have modernized successfully do not feel like this. The Moslems
were kicked out of Spain? Poor things! For heaven's sake: We British
have been kicked out of far better places than that in our history,
but you don't hear us whining about it. Matter of fact, at the time
of "the tragedy of Andalusia," England was still holding
on to the city of Calais, the last remnant of the Plantagenet empire
in continental Europe. (Those of you who thought the Victorian empire
was a one-time fluke, go to the back of the class. There have actually
been three British empires. At the moment we are taking a
rest from empire building.) Calais was not lost until 66 years later
when, on January 7th 1558, the French seized it after launching
a sneak attack. Our monarch at the time was Mary Tudor, who died
a few months later wailing that: "When I am dead and opened,
you will find 'Calais' lying in my heart." Very few English
people nowadays would understand a reference to "the tragedy
of Calais," and even fewer — none at all, in fact, I am
willing to guarantee — would take it as a call to action to
restore our national greatness.
Angry talk
about "lost territories" that must be "recovered"
is, in fact, a sure symptom of a major national or cultural inferiority
complex. Who has not felt, talking to an Arab, a Chinese person,
or an ardent Irish Republican, that the rage they nurse about Israel,
Taiwan, and Ulster respectively is wildly out of proportion to the
actual issues involved in sovereignty over those tiny territories?
"How would Americans feel if Hawaii broke away from the U.S.A.
and declared independence?" my Chinese friends ask triumphantly,
as if this were a decisive argument for the subjugation of Taiwan.
Well, how would you feel? I think that if Americans were
convinced that the secession was genuinely the desire of most Hawaiians,
they would accept it in a spirit of democratic self-determination.
(That the Union did not take this view towards the Confederate States
was an entirely different matter, in a very different time.)
Most to the
point, the issue is anyway moot, since Hawaii is going to do no
such thing. The advantages of being part of the United States —
a constitutional republic, with liberty and justice for all under
fair laws, and abundant prosperity for all those willing to exert
a minimum of effort — are simply too great. There is the rub.
Those "lost territories" don't want to be part
of the "motherland" because the "motherland"
is not a fit place for human beings to live. This is true of the
entire Arab world, with its rickety gangster-regimes run by corrupt
thugs; it is true of China, where peasants starve and workers go
unpaid while the self-elected leaders of the People's Democratic
Dictatorship shovel the national wealth into their Swiss bank accounts;
it was true until recently of the Irish Republic, for the first
few decades of its existence a stagnant rustic theocracy with little
appeal to anyone whose aspirations rose to anything higher than
sitting around a peat fire discussing the Council of Trent in Gaelic.
Zero immigration, or actual net emigration, is one of the
distinguishing marks of an aggrieved "motherland" fuming
about some "lost territory." Nobody wants to live there.
It used to be a regular feature of opinion polls in Northern Ireland
— I have not see one recently — to turn up a solid proportion
of Northern Catholics who had no desire to be ruled from
Dublin (the Protestant majority is, of course, 100 percent against
the idea). One wonders how many Israeli Arabs would actually prefer
to be brought under the tender mercies of Yasser Arafat's "Palestinian
Authority." Certainly very few inhabitants of Taiwan relish
the thought of becoming citizens of the People's Republic.
Instead of
taking these "lost territories" claims seriously, we should
understand them for what they are: irrational and undemocratic responses
to a sense of cultural humiliation, coming under the scope not of
political science but of psychopathology.
Plea
for Help
A kind but
foolhardy publisher has just engaged me to write a book about mathematics,
one that will have broad popular appeal. This is not quite a contradiction
in terms: there have been several pop-math
bestsellers in recent years. To pull it off, though, I need
to have some feel for how much math a non-mathematical reader is
willing to put up with, and how much math such readers actually
know. I myself was originally trained as a mathematician. This has
obvious advantages for the task in hand, but it makes it hard for
me to see things the way a non-mathematician will see them. So here
is a plea for help to readers: Please e-mail in with whatever mathematical
point you find most puzzling. For example, I know that "infinity"
is a sticking point for a lot of non-mathematicians. Is it true
that if I divide by zero I get "infinity"? What happens
if I divide zero by zero? I know these are the sorts of things that
baffle a lot of people. What other things baffle you? Not deep issues,
please ("I am baffled to know why there is no algebraic solution
for the general quintic...") just basic points of math that
you have never mastered, or find vexing. I can't promise answers
— at the rate I am getting e-mail, I can't even promise individual
thanks, though I'll do my best — but points I find particularly
helpful will get the sender a mention in the book's "Acknowledgments"
and a free copy when it comes out, sometime in 2003.
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