ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: Asians embrace change, unconcerned with distant noises

I returned to SA last week, concluding an almost two-year voyage back and forth and across central, east and southeast Asia. My visits were in part as a “visiting professor,” one of those glorified titles that contributes little or nothing to food on the table, and in part as a traveller.

While I have visited countries in the region many times over four decades, I needed to get some sense of the state of the region today, amid all the historical changes that are taking place.

One of the main objectives of my travels was to ignore everything that is said, written and published in the European world, and get a granular, more grounded, understanding of what many Asians believe about the world today. It is, of course, absurd to believe one could ever fully achieve that — there are at least 4.5-billion people across 48 countries in Asia.

However, with that as caveat, one of the outstanding things about being among communities and families, policymakers and intellectuals in general, is just how forward-thinking people in the region are, and how little they care about the noises that reach them from afar.

Optimism has its limits, of course, but few if anyone I met over the past two years seems to be overly concerned about any “axis of evil”, nor fixated on ideologically exhausted beliefs and values or intellectually embarrassing concepts about the “end of this” or “end of that”.

One should not traduce emerging problems in the South China Sea. As one Vietnamese intellectual said, people in the region believe they can solve their problems “without US guns”. The people in most countries across east and southeast Asia are not obsessed with preserving the status quo. They see change and transformation all the time, and march in step.

Intriguingly, though unsurprisingly, the people of Asia generally do not resort to wilfully demonising China or Russia, just because it is China (the communists) and Russia (the old communists) who some perceive to be a threat to the liberal, capitalist West. This is not to say that people are naive or ignorant. Again, I am not for a minute suggesting that there are no regional problems, such as the dispute over the Kepulauan Spratly, or China’s military expansion in anticipation of global leadership.

In the current context, almost everywhere I visited across the region I reflected on the US, which leads the world in academic institutions, and has (at least since Albert Einstein) attracted some of the best minds from around the globe. It’s worth reminding ourselves, as did Richard Hofstadter in his seminal work Anti-intellectualism in American Life, that we should avoid the mistake of confusing access to education with excellence in education.

It is quite startling when one compares the general thirst for knowledge and new ideas among people in the East with so much of what comes from the West. The ignorance, marked by inward-looking talk about anti-globalism, America first or Christian nationalism, is typified by supporters of Donald Trump. It is also apparent in large majorities in Poland and Hungary, and is spreading in the UK, where former prime minister Liz Truss recently insisted that the world felt safer during Trump’s presidency.

I am not alone in realising that the US is home to shockingly ignorant masses. That may sound like hyperbole, but there is an enormous body of scholarship on anti-intellectualism (a veritable virus, as leading US intellectuals have suggested) in the US, and of people who “make a virtue of ignorance” and go on to make political decisions based on that ignorance.

Joseph Schumpeter eloquently described this general trend in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, when he wrote: “The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyses in a way which he would readily recognise as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. He becomes a primitive again.”

There is also actual empirical evidence supporting the notion that the historical anti-intellectualism has started to show up on report cards. Studies by the National Centre for Education Statistics in the US have shown that “foreign” students are far more successful, and more intellectually curious, than Americans.

What is difficult to explain is how or why this ignorance is so pervasive in the US, and less so in the East. One possible answer lies in liberal capitalist consumer culture. Another is a constant fear or anxiety on the part of US policymakers and legislators. Some of the claims and statements made by legislators are dismissed by many Asians as comical and not worthy of consideration.

Consider, for instance, a remark by Mike Gallagher, a former defence contractor who became a legislator, in response to the flood of the deadly drug fentanyl into the US, for which he blamed China. The Chinese Communist Party, Gallagher said, “wants more dead Americans”.

Something that has particular resonance is that the US has been an international player for less than 100 years. Asians, on the other hand, have the benefit of a depth of knowledge that once stretched across a vast expanse of numerous multi-ethnic and multilingual empires. Is it any wonder, then, that Asians are confident about the future, and the rest of us continue to obsess over worthless ideas?

• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.