It takes a while and then some

Submitted by Guest (United States), Jun 9, 2015 at 00:40

I would tend to agree with the Canadian poster about "hard to judge a book..."

I lived and worked in various countries for years. I found it took a minimum of one year to start to get a realistic picture of what was going on. And a precondition for this one year was fluency in the local language. In Japan, I worked for people who had been there much longer than I--but because they couldn't speak Japanese well (or read it at all) their experience was totally different. And in some countries (Japan being one) if the observer is male or female also makes an enormous difference.

While in grad school, I took many courses on Brazil from experts in the field--people who were flown back to DC for consultations every time the USG needed to know what to do in Brazil. Later, when I went to Brazil to work, within a week I had discovered that almost everything these experts had taught me had little or nothing to do with real life--the life of the vast majority of people--in Brazil. I called it "the Yacht Club syndrome": young American at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc. meets Brazilians from the Yacht Club set who are getting degrees in the US. Later, now scholar-American goes to Brazil to do research. Naturally, he looks up his contacts--his pals from Harvard, etc. He spends his time doing research and hanging out with them at the Yacht Club and in their homes and clubs. He experiences their world, and absorbs their ideas and attitudes. He knows nothing of the life of the streets or in the countryside. And then he goes home and writes and teaches and consults and tells policy-makers what to do.

Within three blocks of the US Embassy in Seoul is an area filled with tea houses (tabang) and small restaurants. While living and working in Seoul, I ate there on a regular basis and never saw another foreigner. Koreans would often register amazement when I came in, and I was told that I was the first foreigner ever. Yet just a couple of blocks away, there were over 200 US Embassy officials and staff, plus branches of many foreign companies, managed by expatriates. They all frequented their enclaves and hangouts, never the neighborhood spots. Impossible, I think, to get much of a feeling for the local reality on that basis.

And this is one reason the US is always caught by surprise, from the rise of Islamist Iran or the collapse of entire states.

Friends who live in France tell me that if present trends in immigration and one-way tolerance continue, Europe is finished. The mass of people get it, but the elites don't. (And this is coming from people ranging from working class to a French millionaire!)

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