Afghanistan and Frederick Jackson Turner

So, the war in Afghanistan is going to be wound down as quickly as possible.  I don’t know anything about military strategy or what the best answer is here, but two things keep rolling around in my mind.  First, the more I read and see about Afghanistan the more I am disillusioned with their outlook on the world.  I can not find a single, pivotal, shared point of humanity with a culture that treats their women and children the way the people of Afghanistan do.  I simply do not believe that they are worth a single American life. 

            Second, I would like to think that we can bring civil behavior and the benefits of representative government and free market economies to the world, but I don’t believe it is possible.  History is against us.  The people of these marginal, flawed and fractured Middle Eastern countries are against us.  And an American historian once widely read and respected has shown us why.  We simply failed to heed his sober judgments. 

Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861 – March 14, 1932) was an influential American historian in the early 20th century.  This Pulitzer Prize winning historian was widely respected and routinely taught until the 1960’s.  Turner’s two best known ideas were his, “Frontier Thesis” and the more important but less known, “Sectionalism Thesis.”  The Frontier Thesis states that our Westward expansion was so unique and so pervasive in all aspects of our culture that it shaped a specific American character.  Our concepts of grass roots democracy, individualism and a pragmatic approach to problem solving that allowed us to keep or discard the practices of the past as they merited became part of a new, “American” persona.

 

The Sectionalism Theses is a bit more complicated.  Turner argued that different ethno-cultural groups had distinct settlement patterns which were reflected in their politics, economic structures and social norms.  A good example of these differences was illustrated by Stephen Ambrose in Undaunted Courage.  In describing the difference between the southern and Pennsylvanian farmers, Ambrose compares the Southern English gentry who assumed hired men would work their land with the Pennsylvanian German immigrant who thought his land so precious that he would never trust its handling to anyone but himself.  How you are raised influences how you see things.  Because of the influence of these ethnic differences, Turner believed that you can never give democracy to people who have no mental construct that supports it.  Democracy, capitalism, even typical American civility simply can not be given; they have to be developed by each society on its own. 

Frederick Jackson Turner’s scholarship was prized, taught and studied until the politically motivated historians of the 1960’s decided that any idea that saw the good in John Wayne’s west had to be wrong.  Turner's careful studies were derided because he refused to make the pioneers victims of race, gender or class bias.   In a current twist of fate, Turner, who was a strong believer in empirical evidence and quantitative study of data, has been recently vindicated in modern statistical analysis of much of his historical information.

 I believe that Turner has much to teach us about our past, present and future attempts to bring better lives to the people of Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern countries.  If he is right, and people have to create their own democracies from their own experiences, than Afghanistan needs more help than we can provide.  I think we need to look at what those cultures are ready to accept and how we can help those who deserve help without putting our military at risk.  But that is the subject for tomorrow’s blog.