The Final Four

Of the four remaining teams in the 2010 World Cup:

• Germany has won the cup three times (as West Germany in 1954, 1974, and 1990). Uruguay has won it twice (in 1934 and 1950), while the Netherlands and Spain have both never won the cup.
• Germany has played in the most finals (7), while Spain has played in the fewest (0). Also, Germany has reached the final four the most times (this time being their 12th), while Spain has done so the fewest (this time being their 2nd).
• Spain is currently the highest ranked team by Fifa (2nd), while Uruguay is the lowest ranked (16th). The Netherlands and Germany are ranked 4th and 6th, respectively.
• In the current World Cup:
• Germany has the youngest 23-player line-up (average age: 24.96), while the Netherlands have the oldest (average age: 27.65).
• The Netherlands are the only team to have won all of their games so far. Uruguay drew against France; Germany and Spain lost to Serbia and Switzerland, respectively.
• Germany has scored the most goals (13), while Spain has scored the fewest (6).
• Germany, Spain, and Uruguay have each conceded only 2 goals, while the Netherlands have conceded 3.
• The Netherlands have received the most yellow cards (12), while Spain has received the fewest (3)
• Uruguay has received the most red cards (2). Germany has received 1, and the Netherlands and Spain have both received none.

One more fact, not specific to these final four: no European team has ever won the World Cup outside of Europe. If ever there were a year for that to change ...

Because One Good Speech Deserves Another ...

In thankful response to Noha for posting JK Rowling's 2008 commencement speech at Harvard University, I'd like to offer the late David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. I post it with a language warning, as there are a couple of words in there that I wouldn't use myself, but which I haven't edited out.

(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think”. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master”.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Nuclear Countdown (The Good Kind)

Good news:

The U.S. and Russia agreed to a historic deal Wednesday to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the former Cold War rivals, the most significant pact in a generation and an important milestone in the decades-long quest to lower the risk of global nuclear war.

The New York Times reports on some of the details:

The new 10-year pact would replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty of 1991, or Start, which expired in December, and further extend cuts negotiated in 2002 by Mr. Bush in the Treaty of Moscow. Under the new pact, according to people briefed on it in Washington and Moscow, within seven years each side would have to cut its deployed strategic warheads to 1,550 from the 2,200 now allowed. Each side would cut the total number of launchers to 800 from 1,600 now permitted. The number of nuclear-armed missiles and heavy bombers would be capped at 700 each.

Neither the White House nor the Kremlin formally announced the agreement on Wednesday, pending the final telephone call between the presidents. A Kremlin official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was an agreement on the text of the pact, although not all the wording had been given final approval. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said, “We’re very close.”

On the one hand, a world in which the USA and Russia still have over 1500 active nuclear weapons each will still be a somewhat frightening place. On the other hand, a 25% reduction over 7 years is an impressive move in the right direction.

The reduction of its nuclear stockpiles will not hurt America militarily (for all practical purposes, 1550 nuclear warheads are just as deadly as 2200), but it will help it strategically. When America shows the world that it is fulfilling its reduction obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, it gains the credibility to lead the diplomatic effort against further proliferation in places like Iran.

Moreover, a world in which nuclear stockpiles are being reduced is one where non-nuclear states all over the world would be less inclined to develop nuclear weapons at all. When America and Russia reduce their stockpiles, China feels less threatened by both, and so doesn't expand its own arsenal. So neighbouring India doesn't feel threatened by China, and doesn't expand its arsenal either, which means that rival Pakistan doesn't have to worry as much, and so on.

In fact, if the two leading nuclear powers were to go far enough with their cuts, they could conceivably convince others to begin to reduce their own arsenals as well. But it's not clear that we'll get there anytime soon, and the arms reduction negotiations will certainly be a lot more complicated when all the nuclear powers are at the table together. "Global Zero" is still a distant and unlikely hope, but it's getting a little bit closer today.

The Books That Brought Me Here

Up in the higher echelons of the blogosphere, many of the big-name bloggers are posting lists of the top ten books that influenced them. The idea was triggered by Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, and was taken up by some of my blogging favourites like Matthew Yglesias and Ta-Nehisi Coates. They've all listed some very smart books, the vast majority of which I haven't read and many of which I hadn't even heard of before now.

My own list is nowhere near as sophisticated. I agree with Red Dave that "most influential" refers to the list of books that had the greatest effect on my life, which does not necessarily coincide with books that were written by ancient and modern luminaries. The latter would belong on a generic list of "greatest" or "most important" books I've ever read.

So here, in chronological order of when I first read them, are the books that I believe contributed the most to who I am today (Am I really writing this down and publishing it?):

The Qur'an. This one is obvious. Central to my upbringing and essential to my faith, I can't even remember when I first started reading it (although I didn't actually read it cover to cover until my teens).

Spacetrail Guide by the London Planetarium. When I was ten years old, my family visited the London Planetarium in England. I can't remember the planetarium itself, but I remember the 32-page booklet they gave out there. By the end of that summer, I knew all the basic facts about every planet in our solar system (size, distance from the Sun, period of its orbit, average temperature, etc.) and had memorized the blurbs on Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, among others. It may well be that my love of space and science started before that year, but that booklet marks my earliest memory of being in awe of the universe.

ملف المستقبل (The Future File) by Nabil Farouk. As a kid studying at a British school in Kuwait, I was inspired to keep reading and writing in Arabic because of this sci-fi series. These short stories fired up my scientific imagination, and introduced me to my favourite childhood heroes: Noor, Salwa, Ramzy, and Mahmoud. Whether chasing a time-travelling villain through the ages, leading a resistance movement against alien invaders, travelling to alternate dimensions, or befriending the last surviving android from Atlantis, Noor and his team exemplified nobility, honesty, courage, and intelligence.

Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I met Anne when I was 13, and was thrilled to find a literary character who saw the world as I did. Montgomery's classic book is why I admired the beauty of the East Coast before ever setting foot in Canada. At my age at the time, it was also fascinating to read a book that was not about Christianity per se, but in which the characters' faith came up naturally in their day-to-day lives. That was definitely when I began to understand how different faiths actually have much in common.

A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I'm a nuclear scientist/engineer, and I still understand this book only marginally better today than when I first read it in high school, which was the point when my choice of becoming a scientist/engineer was pretty much sealed.

Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. In this novel, which I was assigned in high school, each major philosopher from Western history is discussed in a different chapter. This is the book that made me really start to read philosophy, and also indirectly helped fuel my life-long love of history.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read this book in the first semester of undergrad, and then, over the course of about a year or so, read the vast majority of Rand's fiction and non-fiction works. The forceful logic of Atlas Shrugged challenged me to check pretty much all of my premises, and Rand's critique of society remains very instructive both for what she got right and what she got very wrong.

حياة محمد (The Life of Muhammad) by Muhammad Hussein Heikal. Anyone who went to school in a Muslim country can summarize the life of the prophet of Islam. But of everything that I've read about Muhammad, it was this particular biography that brought home the idea that he can only be fully understood as a very real person whose life existed in a very real set of social and historical circumstances.

Western Muslims and the Future of Islam by Tariq Ramadan. This book, like the rest of Ramadan's writings and speeches, is less about his specific issue-by-issue opinions and more about understanding how literalism and intellectual rigidity weaken faith rather than strengthening it. Of Ramadan's many writings, I've listed Western Muslims simply because it was the first that I read.

That's only nine books, I know, and while I thought of adding one more to complete ten, I couldn't think of any others that influenced me as strongly as the ones above. But, for the record, my list of runners-up would include Matilda by Roald Dahl, My Teacher is an Alien (and the rest of that four-book series) by Bruce Coville, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Orientalism by Edward Said, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley.

Feel free to list any of your most influential books in comments.

The Problem With Settlements

Let's pretend for a moment that we live in a world where all other issues preventing Israeli-Palestinian peace (holy sites, refugees, security, and resources) have been resolved, and all that remains is to decide on the borders dividing the states of Israel and Palestine. In such a world, would a two-state solution be possible? Consider the following map of the West Bank (from Wikipedia, seen more clearly here):

The dark purple areas represent Israeli settlements, the light purple areas represent areas closed off by the Israeli military, the green line represents the pre-1967 line (aka the 'Armistice Line' or the 'Green Line') separating Israel and the West Bank, and the black line represents the completed and projected route of Israel's "separation wall" or "security barrier".

Let's assume that the final borders agreed upon between the Israelis and Palestinians are to lie somewhere between the green and black lines, and that the agreement on those borders were to be signed and implemented today. If both sides agree to the green line, then that leaves 450,000 Israeli settlers on Palestinian land. If they agree to the black line, then most Israeli settlers remain part of Israel, but that still leaves 70,000 in the newly-formed Palestinian state, ten times as many as the number removed from the Gaza Strip by Ariel Sharon's government in 2005.

Anyone serious about a two-state solution ought to ask themselves: what will happen to the tens to hundreds of thousands of Israelis who currently occupy the future state of Palestine?

Considering the religious-nationalist fervour that drives the settler movement and the decades of Israeli-Palestinian hostility, it is hard to imagine the settlers leaving the West Bank voluntarily, or accepting Palestinian sovereignty, just as it is hard to imagine the Palestinians accepting them as citizens. And considering the difficulty the Israeli government and military faced in removing 7000 settlers from the geographically tiny Gaza Strip, it is hard to imagine them successfully repeating that process tens of times over the larger West Bank.

And the challenge that the settlements pose to the two-state solution is only becoming greater. Since the peace process began in 1993, the West Bank settler population has grown from over 250,000 to over 450,000. Even Ariel Sharon's Gaza disengagement did not stop the net settler population from growing during his time as prime minister.

The problem that Israel faces is basically this: over 40 years ago, the West Bank settler movement was conceived in order to ensure that no Palestinian state would be possible. Then, about 15-20 years ago, Israel started accepting the notion that a Palestinian state was necessary to its own long-term survival. These two ideas are antithetical to one another, but no Israeli politician in power will actually make the hard choice between them.

Some Israeli politicians want a two-state peace, whereas others don't. But whatever the convictions of its leadership, every Israeli government since 1993 has simultaneously tried to balance the support of the international community and the majority of Israelis who want a two-state solution on the one hand, and the support of the influential settler movement on the other. That's what politicians do: they try to be all things to all people in order to stay in power.

Unfortunately for Israelis and Palestinians, the cost of politics as usual is much higher for them than it is for most of the world's people. And so what matters today is not how offended Joe Biden was during his visit, or how mean Hillary Clinton was over the phone, but whether the parties to this interminable conflict can produce leaders more committed to their people's well-being than their own inevitably temporary grip on power. A two-state solution would be difficult enough to implement given the best leadership. With the actors on the stage today, the difficult is becoming nearly impossible.

Remembering Sheikh Tantawi (1928-2010)

The Sheikh of Egypt's Al-Azhar University, Mohamed Sayid Tantawi, passed away on March 10th while on a trip to Saudi Arabia.

I had no intention of writing an obituary of Sheikh Tantawi, but I do feel the need to comment on the different obituaries written by various media outlets. Usually, when dealing with people of note, there is a common consensus on the things for which those people will be remembered. This is even true of controversial figures, where the disagreement is not on what issues defined the person's career, but rather whether the person will be remembered positively or negatively in light of those issues (eg: George Bush will be remembered for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and for the controversies surrounding both of those wars, the Dalai Lama will be remembered for his campaign to free Tibet and for his books promoting Buddhism, etc.).

But in the case of Tantawi, you get very different impressions of what his career was about depending on which obituary you read. Let's start by dismissing the blatantly inaccurate, in this case CNN:

He played a similar role in the Sunni Muslim world as the pope does for Catholics, involving life issues.

[...]

Although appointed by the Government, Tantawi was regarded as the spiritual leader of about one billion Sunni Muslims worldwide.

It is a gross misrepresentation to say that the Sheikh of Al-Azhar is similar to the Pope. Whereas the Pope sits atop the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, and so can speak for the Church as a whole, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar ultimately speaks for just one Sunni institution (albeit the most historically revered one) among many. Most of the "one billion Sunni Muslims worldwide" would be very surprised to be told that Tantawi was their spiritual leader.

The Egyptian state-run Al-Ahram naturally does not mention any of the controversies that surrounded Tantawi's tenure as Sheikh of Al-Azhar. The only part of his record which they emphasize is his positive relationship with the leadership of Egypt's Christian community. Needless to say, any role that Tantawi played towards nurturing religious harmony in Egypt is to be lauded, but his record is much broader than this one area.

The BBC was almost as selective in its discussion of Tantawi's record. They make a vague reference to the fact that "he was always forced to negotiate a careful path between his religious imperatives and his government position" without talking about how or why this was the case. Instead, they just run through a short list of the religious opinions which garnered the most attention in the West, almost all of which were of course on women's issues (circumcision, hijab, and niqab). All these issues are surely important, but again they only constitute one part of the picture.

The CBC also considers his positions on women's issues to be the most significant part of Tantawi's legacy, but they do a much better job in offering a more extensive account of his personality and his positions on a number of other issues. Both outlets, though, assess Tantawi through a simple moderate-vs-extremist world view.

If you read his obituary on Al-Jazeera, on the other hand, you would think that Tantawi would be remembered almost solely for being friendly to Israel over the Palestinians.

It is only by going to the non-state Egyptian media that you really begin to understand what some of the other outlets merely hinted at: the main question regarding Tantawi is not the degree of his moderation or extremism, or whose side he was really on in the conflicts of our day, but rather the extent to which he was an independent scholar. Ad-Dostoor's obituary, while comprehensive, drips anti-Tantawi bias. To their credit, though, they are the only ones who make mention of two of the Sheikh's most problematic domestic fatwas. The first of these was his call for writers who publicly discussed president Mubarak's health to be flogged (Ad-Dostoor's editor Ibrahim Isa was one such writer; the floggings never happened, though there were trials and imprisonments followed by a presidential pardon). The second was his religious interjection in the debate over the regime's referendum to change the constitution so as to weaken the viability of electoral opposition, where he publicly condemned as "sinful" those who tried to organize a boycott of the referendum.

While they do not mention these two problematic edicts, The Daily News Egypt and Al Masry Al Youm have the best overall obituaries, discussing Tantawi's biography, the role and significance of the institute he headed, his relationship to Egypt's political leadership as a presidential appointee, and the broad range of domestic and international issues on which he generated controversy. Tantawi's history should be remembered fully. It is only by avoiding the temptation to reduce people to one "camp" or another (whether that camp is "moderate vs extremist", "pro-Arab vs pro-West", etc) that we can begin to understand and discuss the complex interplay of power, politics, bureaucracy, culture, and religion in the Middle East.

Finally, however the Sheikh's legacy is judged, may he rest in peace, and may the family who survived him find patience after his passing.

Olympic Recount (Winter Edition)

During the last Summer Olympics in Beijing, I suggested that the Olympic rankings could be improved using a point system. In the Summer Olympics, rankings were determined in order of the most gold medals, followed by the most silver, then the most bronze, such that a team with only one gold medal overall would have outranked a team with seven silvers. The alternative I suggested at the time would have ranked teams by total points, where teams would have gotten 4 points for every gold medal, 2 for every silver, and 1 for every bronze.

In the just completed Vancouver Winter Olympics, the countries were ranked according to total number of medals. This is arguably fairer than the Summer Olympic system, but can still produce unfair situations where a country with, say, six bronze medals would outrank a country with five gold.

So, if we take the rankings of the Olympic teams as they are now:

United States 37 medals total (9 gold, 15 silver, 13 bronze)

Germany 30 (10, 13, 7)

Canada 26 (14, 7, 5)

Norway 23 (9, 8, 6)

Austria 16 (4, 6, 6)

Russia 15 (3, 5, 7)

South Korea 14 (6, 6, 2)

China 11 (5, 2, 4)

Sweden 11 (5, 2, 4)

France 11 (2, 3, 6)

Switzerland 9 (6, 0, 3)

Netherlands 8 (4, 1, 3)

Czech Republic 6 (2, 0, 4)

Poland 6 (1, 3, 2)

Italy 5 (1, 1, 3)

Japan 5 (0, 3, 2)

Finland 5 (0, 1, 4)

Australia 3 (2, 1, 0)

Belarus 3 (1, 1, 1)

Slovakia 3 (1, 1, 1)

Croatia 3 (0, 2, 1)

Slovenia 3 (0, 2, 1)

Latvia 2 (0, 2, 0)

Great Britain 1 (1, 0, 0)

Estonia 1 (0, 1, 0)

Kazakhstan 1 (0, 1, 0)

And apply that same 4-2-1 point system, we'd get the following results (teams that climb from their original rankings are highlighted in green, teams that drop are highlighted in red):

United States 79 points

Canada 75

Germany 73

Norway 58

South Korea 38

Austria 32

Russia 29

China 28

Sweden 28

Switzerland 27

Netherlands 21

France 20

Czech Republic 12

Poland 12

Australia 10

Italy 9

Japan 8

Belarus 7

Slovakia 7

Finland 6

Croatia 5

Slovenia 5

Latvia 4

Great Britain 4

Estonia 2

Kazakhstan 2

There are basically five changes going on here: (1) Canada passes Germany, (2) South Korea jumps ahead of both Austria and Russia, (3) Switzerland and the Netherlands both jump ahead of France, (4) Australia leaps ahead of Italy, Japan, and Finland, which is also (5) passed by Belarus and Slovakia.

Of course, the idea that these alternate rankings are "fairer" presupposes that a gold medal is worth twice as much as a silver, which is worth twice as much as a bronze. Intuitively, it seems fair to say that there should be a premium for winning. Then again, in some races, the difference between first, second, and third can be less than a second. Does it make sense to say that a gold is worth four times as much as a bronze under those circumstances? And once you start assigning points to results, why does it make sense to only apply them to first, second, and third place? What about fourth- and fifth-ranked competitors who come very close to winning a medal?

I would argue that these critiques of the point system say more about the arbitrariness of assigning rankings at these events in general, as opposed to the specifics of how you assign those ranks. Once you accept the idea that someone has to win gold, someone silver, and someone bronze, and that you're going to rank teams by some measure of their medal counts, I do think that a point system is fairer, even if it is still not a perfect indicator of performance.