Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)

Why Learn History (When It's Already on Your Phone)

by Sam Wineburg, 2018

I’m a history geek. I like learning about history for its own sake. But I don't expect everyone to share my geekery and there’s always going to be some student asking their teacher “When am I ever going to use this stuff in real life?” So let’s start with the title of the book. “Why should I learn history? I can look it up on my phone!” Does Wineburg provide a snappy, meme-worthy response?

Well, no, he doesn’t, and that’s fine. Instead, he gives us a book.

I first heard of Wineburg last September, when I came across his critique of Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Wineburg is careful to note that he is not critiquing Zinn’s political stance. Rather, Wineburg’s point is that Zinn’s book should not occupy the central place it has in many American history curricula, because it is a polemic that doesn’t invite the reader to weigh historical evidence or really consider any interpretation besides Zinn’s own. That, Wineburg says, is not how to train students to think historically.

Now, I’m not going to weigh in here on whether this is a fair critique. I read Zinn’s book more than a decade ago, and I don’t want to evaluate what Wineburg wrote based on my spotty memory. But I liked the way Wineburg wrote about historical thinking enough that his book Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) went straight on my Christmas list.

I read the book in under two days. It’s smart, and engagingly written, although I'm not fit to comment on large swathes of it, specifically the parts dealing with American education. My own high school experience ended long before the advent of today’s classroom guidelines that Wineburg critiques. Come to think of it, I don't think I've even set foot in an American public school in well over a decade.

Despite my lack of familiarity with the current state of American education, I enjoyed this book because I'm convinced that history is worth studying. I might be an American by citizenship but I live abroad, in a country with a very peculiar history that one really must understand in order to grasp the local culture or politics in any substantial way. (But maybe every country is like that?) And, not just here but everywhere, so many of the political appeals we hear are grounded in a particular interpretation of history. One can’t properly evaluate an a Facebook political meme referencing something Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933 without thinking like a historian.

Why learn history when it’s already on your phone? So you can know how much credence to give to political memes that reference history, for one thing.

What do we mean by thinking like a historian? Wineburg gives one example where high school students were given President Harrison’s 1892 proclamation declaring Columbus Day a national holiday. Asked to analyze the document historically, students did a fine job seizing on, for example, the fact that Harrison’s proclamation made much of Divine Providence and “the devout faith of the discoverer”, which certainly contrasts with the fact that by our standards Columbus’s actions were hardly those of a good Christian. This fulfilled school guidelines that the students engage with the material critically.

But as Wineburg explains, this isn’t historical thinking. A historian would focus more on the document’s cultural and political milieu, and Harrison’s motivations in proclaiming this national holiday in 1892, which most likely involved pressure by Catholic immigrant groups who were interested in seeing this symbolic bit of Catholic cultural heritage integrated into the fabric of American life. More specifically, 1892 was an election year and Harrison must have hoped Columbus Day would please Catholic voters, particularly the important Italian vote.

In the next chapter, Wineburg considers George Washington’s 1789 proclamation establishing a national day of Thanksgiving. He showed it to a range of historians and non-historians, and the non-historians all thought the tone of the proclamation was strikingly religious. Depending on their own views on religion in public life, this met with varying degrees of approval, but all of them interpreted Washington's words through 21st-century lenses.

But the historians -- and only the historians -- recognized that Washington’s contemporaries would have had a very different reaction. At first glance, we moderns seize on the document’s religious tone, but note that Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found. There’s nothing specifically Christian here. Historians contextualize Washington’s proclamation as a Deist document, giving thanks to a remote Creator while avoiding sectarian language, and it is peppered with references to science and technology that mark it as a product of the Enlightenment.

Why learn history when it’s already on your phone? So we can better understand what people in the past were thinking. That’s awfully important when the past is constantly being invoked in order to justify modern-day views.

And Wineburg takes aim at the way schools are teaching this stuff, notably the idea, inspired by Bloom’s taxonomy, that children have to first be fed a large amount of factual information, then learn to think critically about it. Wineburg says this approach “distorts why we study history in the first place”, as it “implies the world of ideas is fully known and that critical thinking means gathering accepted facts in order to render judgement” (p.92). Later on, he criticizes the notion, apparently common in American history classrooms nowadays, that students should be taught to engage in “close reading” of historical texts, while the context these texts emerged from is downplayed (p. 99-100). This notion leads to people sizing up George Washington’s thanksgiving proclamation ahistorically, and reading its religious content in a very different way then was originally intended.

Wineburg gives us glimpses of history classes, taught to pre-teens and teens, that do encourage historical thinking related to topics such as Jamestown and the story of Pocahontas, and Rosa Parks’ act of civil disobedience. My own classroom teaching at the moment does not include much history, but it’s not impossible I’ll find myself teaching history at some future point, and Wineburg’s descriptions of of teaching methodology -- and references to the useful work he and his colleagues have done at the Stanford History Education Group -- are something I shall keep around for future use.

Finally, Wineburg brings up the ability to critically evaluate online sources of information, a skill that’s important to more than just history. Wineburg has written about this topic at length -- most recently, he’s written in The Pacific Standard on the importance of media literacy, and how we should be teaching young people to approach the Web in the same way as professional fact checkers.

In the book, Wineburg takes, as an example, the websites of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Pediatricians. Both organizations have professional-looking websites. Both publish very similar-looking content. But they are very different. The former is “the world’s largest professional organization of pediatricians”. The latter is “a splinter group that broke away from the main group in 2002 over the issue of adoption by same-sex couples”. The former has a paid staff of 450 and “offers continuing education on everything from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) to the importance of wearing bicycle helmets during adolescence”. The latter has one full-time employee, offers no continuing education, and has “come under withering criticism for its virulently anti-gay stance” (p. 146).

Yet they both maintain very professional-looking websites, and to a student doing online research, they both appear to be established, reputable organizations. A professional fact-checker can quickly suss out the differences between the two; a high school student might not have been taught to.

A high school student might be taught not to trust Wikipedia as a source of information, but this is far too simplistic; a professional fact checker will look up both of these organizations on Wikipedia, and focus on the references section and the “Talk” page, sometimes barely even skimming the main body of the article.

(To Google's credit, when I searched for both organizations, it brought the true nature of the American College of Pediatricians prominently to my attention. But, of course, we can't trust Google to consistently do this.)

Needless to say, on any politically contentious issue, who runs a website is particularly important information if you want to know whether to trust it, and many websites do not make that information particularly clear. To properly judge these sites, a well-trained student will look up the organization purportedly behind it, probably opening up several new browser tabs in order to compare different takes. And yet, apparently many high school students are still taught to look for spelling mistakes, banner ads, and the like as “telltale signs of digital dubiousness”, based on an article, amazingly, from 1998 (p. 156). This is utterly disconnected from the reality of the contemporary Web, where untrustworthy sources of information are just as slickly produced as any.

Now to end my post with my own bit of ill-organized ranting.

In our current media landscape, we’ve got people getting airtime on cable news and creating social media memes saying things like: “The Nazis were actually National Socialists, you know” or “Did you know the Democrats used to be the party of slavery and then segregation?”. These people clearly do not have an audience of history buffs in mind -- their whole schtick assumes we’re not history buffs. (If you're feeling irritated that in this paragraph I'm picking stuff that American right-wingers tend to say, rest assured I have no doubt you can think of examples of liberals and leftists doing the same thing. I'm not trying to play a silly game of Liberals v Conservatives here.)

Incidentally, in my high school American history class (which wasn’t even AP or Honors history), our textbook went into great detail about how the platforms of the major parties have changed and evolved between the mid-1800s and the present. You can imagine how ridiculous it looks to me now when some clown tells me something I regurgitated on a quiz in 10th grade and acts like it's something I didn't know because it's been deliberately suppressed. But I recognize that some people will be more susceptible to this sort of thing.

It’s not that people aren’t taught enough facts about history at school. It’s that they’re taught plenty about history, and then it all goes the way of the quadratic formula, the basics of molecular chemistry, the conjugations of French verbs, and everything else that gets memorized for a test and then is never needed again. Lost in the recesses of the brain.

This is why, as Wineburg argues, teaching students to think like a historian is so important -- rather than teaching history by filling students’ brains with loads of facts, then checking knowledge via multiple-choice tests. Wineburg is right that multiple-choice tests are easy to assess by machine, but I suspect there might be another factor at work.

Any teacher who seeks to give their students a worthwhile lesson on, say, the Emancipation Proclamation could potentially offend parents who might object to their child’s teacher “bringing politics into the classroom”. But it’s impossible to separate history from politics, and to argue otherwise is to misunderstand the nature of history, or of politics, or both. So how do you teach kids about history without leaving yourself open to charges of bringing politics into the classroom? Well, you teach a bunch of facts that no one can reasonably dispute and then you give a multiple choice quiz:

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in: a. 1861, b. 1862, c. 1863, d. 1864

See, no one’s going to be offended by the political slant of THAT question! I genuinely suspect this is a factor behind a lot of boring history teaching.

How do you really teach kids about history without leaving yourself open to charges of bringing politics into the classroom? I think the answer is: you can't. And how to deal with that reality is a whole different discussion.

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts

Before I read the book, I wrote this:

I like living in an industrial civilization. I like living indoors and not having to gather, harvest, or hunt my own food. I like having electronic devices and the Internet. I like the fact that air travel to almost anywhere in the world is at least moderately affordable. I like all these things, and I would like them to continue indefinitely into the future.

And that is why we need to minimize the effects of climate change on human civilization and make every effort to keep our planet’s ecosystems vibrant and healthy, and we must allow every human to have a meaningful stake in our civilization, and not have a permanent underclass of exploited workers anywhere in the world.

I really hope environmental calamity, together with social inequality and instability, doesn’t ruin everything I selfishly want!

Now, is this relevant to the book I just read?

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts

by Leigh Phillips, 2015

As it turns out, yes, Leigh Phillips’ book is relevant to what I wrote above. Through occasionally angry, often colorful prose, Phillips tears into environmental rhetoric and solutions that he calls “a series of romantic proposals from the green left that at best to very little to deal with the issue and at worst are counterproductive -- climate change is too grave a crisis to leave it to the greens” (p. 5).

Phillips is a left-wing socialist who likes living in an industrial civilization, does not want climate change to undo all of the progress humanity has made, and thus is deeply frustrated with the current state of lefty rhetoric when it comes to environmentalism and technology. He criticizes many (not all!) modern-day leftists for embracing an anti-technology and anti-growth ideology, which he sees as actively harmful to the pro-human-being values that left-wing politics ought to hold paramount.  

“Collapse porn” is how Phillips characterizes material catering to the idea that we’d be better off if industrial civilization just fell apart and we all went back to living on the land. Granted, people have been grumbling down this road ever since the first stirrings of industrialization, but Phillips is concerned that this way of thinking is becoming way too prevalent today, when in fact we need technology and economic development to avert (or deal with) the most catastrophic effects of climate change.

I’m personally unfamiliar with the books and ideology that he characterizes as “collapse porn”, so I was forced to take his evaluation largely on trust, but the rhetorical points he makes against this way of thinking are striking. Economic “degrowth”, he writes, cannot be differentiated from the economic austerity that leftists correctly despise -- they are the same thing. In response to Naomi Klein (a frequent target of his throughout the book), he says her “degrowth arguments stand opposed to the interests of working people, and are a barrier to labour’s advance” (p. 28). Comparing the proposals of various “collapse porn” fans, he asks if we need to scale ourselves back to the 1970s? The seventeenth century? The stone age? The answer “appears more to be based on aesthetic affinity rather than any evidence of resource equilibrium” (p. 21). And towards the end of the book, he reminds us that anti-modern rhetoric can also be a tool of right-wing authoritarian governments.

He also attacks what he sees as the left’s fetishization of the local and the small-scale. When it comes to food supply, localism is often more damaging to the environment, not less. For one thing, it results in less efficient use of land than more intensive agriculture; for another, the production of food has a much larger energy appetite than the transportation of it, so localism has limited benefits. His conclusion is that “localism is ultimately presenting the instant gratification and easy option of ethical consumerism as a solution rather than the hard, years-long slog of society-wide organization for structural change” (p. 128).

Phillips criticizes the common claim that we humans have overshot the Earth’s carrying capacity, as it’s not the vague group “humans” who are to blame -- by doing so, you ignore class differences. Phrases such as “per capita consumption” contain absolutely no useful information and obscure the differences between rich and poor. This rhetoric can inadvertently hide the true causes of environmental damage. For instance, he opines that it’s misleading to characterize the 2010 BP oil spill as the result of an exploding human population’s insatiable demand for oil; rather, it was the result of irresponsible decisions made in BP executive offices, and blame should be assigned accordingly.

Calling the left’s obsession with collapse “a politics of despair” (p. 131), he feels we are at risk of succumbing to the sense that building a better future just won’t work. (This echoes very similar sentiments in Rutger Bregman’s Utopia for Realists.) If we celebrate the collapse of industrial civilization, it’s because we can’t imagine any realistic alternative. We’re still submitting to the dominant paradigm.

Phillips argues that some level of alteration of Earth’s environment is inevitable -- we simply cannot go back to some imagined state of nature without bringing widespread misery and death to literally billions of people. So we must develop technological solutions to minimize the effects of climate change and provide the people of Earth with the means to live meaningful lives.

He is unabashedly pro-technology, and slams left-wing activists who reflexively shun nuclear power and GMOs. He points out that it’s long been a common position on the left that “technologies used in the context of colonialism and exploitation in another political and economic context could be liberatory” (p. 156), and says the left must embrace scientific and technological innovation again.

I find it difficult to evaluate Phillips’ economic arguments, as I don’t have the requisite knowledge. He argues for a democratically planned economy, without going into the details of exactly what that would look like. I get the feeling that he’d say it’s on me to educate myself -- which is fair enough.

As for his environmental stance: “to put it bluntly, the goal can only be to maximize human flourishing”. Environmentalism shouldn’t be about saving the Earth (whatever that means), it should be about saving ourselves. If you were to dip into this book at random, you might come away with the mistaken impression that Phillips thinks we shouldn’t worry so much about the environment -- but this would be a terrible misunderstanding. His stance reminds me of the following cartoon:

From Humon Comics

Click on the comic to read the fine print.

It also reminded me of Charles C. Mann's recent book The Wizard and the Prophet -- well OK, I haven't read the book yet, but here's Mann's 12-minute TED talk, which is basically a trailer for the book.

To tell the truth, there are several areas, from economics to science, where I feel my lack of knowledge very keenly and I don't feel qualified to comment on Phillips' ideas. But I can definitely reiterate what I said in the beginning, that I like industrial civilization and I want it to continue. What I don't want, in the words of cartoon Gaia above, is for humans to fuck themselves over big-time.

Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World

Rutger Bregman, 2017

Rutger Bregman is a young Dutch writer (uncomfortably younger than me!) who has become prominent in recent years for his proposals for how developed nations can significantly improve living standards for both their citizens and, in fact, all of humanity.

Does he have a TED Talk you can watch? Of course he does.

In his book Utopia for Realists, Bregman advocates:

• Universal basic income (UBI). Wealthy countries should have implemented this years ago to alleviate poverty; in the future, as more and more of our jobs are automated, it will become even more important. 
• Shorter workweeks. You can’t make workers more productive by making them work longer, as you hit a point of severely diminishing returns. Additionally, less overworked people make better citizens, more engaged in the life of the community.
• Dramatically liberalized immigration. Open borders would be ideal, but if wealthy countries admit even a modestly higher number of immigrants from poor nations, it could pay impressive dividends in economic growth and poverty reduction.

This book is written to convince the layperson and does not presume any specialist knowledge, although that means many people will find it regurgitates the basics. I’ve already read a fair bit on UBI -- I think the best overall introduction is Dylan Matthews’ 2017 article on Vox. And as it happens, I was midway through reading Bregman’s book when Rose Eveleth put out an episode of her “Flash Forward” podcast also exploring the topic of UBI. It’s definitely in the zeitgeist these days.

So why read Bregman’s book when one could cobble together the same material from online articles?

Put simply, Bregman knows how to frame an issue, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he chose the title Utopia for Realists. Bregman feels that we have lost our ability to think big, to dream that the world could be better and to believe that we have the ability to make it so.

Frankly, I think his first chapter makes a few tone-deaf statements that could turn off some readers; writing of today’s politics, he says “what now separates right from left is a percentage point or two on the income tax rate” (p. 15), and I’m sure many of us would dearly love to live in a place where that’s true.

But he means well; his point is that policies that could dramatically improve our lives and forestall misery are out there, but just beyond the reach of the Overton window, a concept that he defines in the final chapter, and frankly should be in more people’s mental lexicons anyway.

He repeatedly makes the point that the policies he would like to see implemented are less radical than many of us imagine. Richard Nixon, no one’s idea of a leftist radical, would have liked to see some form of UBI implemented in the 1970s, and Bregman devotes a chapter to the idea’s slow death.

He blames the failure of basic income on our cultural reservations about giving poor people money, which he says are not based on any empirical foundation. We have this prejudice that people shouldn’t get money they haven’t worked for, but this is counterproductive if we want a society that functions for everyone.

In short, he thinks that we’re being held back by irrational prejudices and distrust of ideas that feel different from what we’re used to. This is, essentially, his core argument, which he also applies to some other issues that don’t fit neatly into the three biggies that I laid out above: the growth of the financial sector (he’s not such a fan), and foreign aid to developing countries (let’s do what’s been empirically shown to work, he says).

In the end, he calls on us to follow in the footsteps of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman -- not in terms of their ideas, but rather the confidence and willingness that these prominent economists had to reshape the world in the 20th century. As he writes, “ideas, however outrageous, have changed the world, and they will again” (p. 250).

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Taiwan's Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia

Taiwan's Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia

by Richard C. Kagan, 2007

This slim book (just 163 pages, not counting appendices) is an overview of the life and career of Lee Teng-hui, the man who was president of Taiwan from 1988 to 2000.

The man who climbed to the top of an authoritarian government, and retired as president of a democracy.

The man who headed the Republic of China, a political entity that he had no love for and would just as soon have seen abolished.

Lee Teng-hui is an immensely important figure in Taiwanese political history. It’s not too much to say that he is the most important and influential political figure ever to have been born and raised in Taiwan.

What is more, he is a fascinating personality to study. Either he dramatically shifted his political views and allegiances late in his career, or (as is more likely, and as Kagan believes) he concealed his fundamental beliefs for decades in order to rise to prominence in the ROC. Either way, I absolutely expect that for decades to come, historians for decades will study what made the man tick.

Richard C. Kagan, who interviewed Lee in person while researching this book, has done an excellent job explaining Lee’s importance to the reader. He has also clearly expressed his own great admiration for Lee. Unfortunately, I fear that this admiration has affected his ability to give a balanced portrayal of his subject. I learned a lot from Taiwan’s Statesman, but I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that I wasn’t getting the whole picture, and I wondered if there was material that could have been included but wasn’t because it showed Lee in a less flattering light.

Kagan’s book is a tough one to summarize. So I take a blank piece of paper and I draw two perpendicular lines on it, dividing it into quarters. I label the upper left quadrant “Small things I liked”, and then I label the other quadrants “Small things I didn’t like so much”, “Big things I wasn’t sure about”, and “Big things I liked”.

My review of Richard C. Kagan’s Taiwan’s Statesman: Lee Teng-hui and Democracy in Asia will follow this pattern. That means I’m going annoy everybody by burying the important stuff down in the second half of this post.

To begin with small things I liked, I learned many things about 20th century Taiwanese history that I had not known before.

But there’s one in particular that I’d like to mention here -- it’s not exactly a small thing, but it’s not directly connected to Lee Teng-hui, and it was news to me.

Apparently in 1971, amid the departure of the ROC from the United Nations, Vice Foreign Minister Yang Hsi-kun made a proposal to Chiang Kai-shek to rebrand the country as the “Chinese Republic of Taiwan”, with “Chinese” specifically said to be an ethnic/cultural term rather than a political one. Chiang was said to be receptive to this idea. Judging by a US State Department telegram by Ambassador Walter McConaughy (printed as Appendix A), the key obstacles were Chiang’s need for more assurances that US support would be forthcoming -- and the opposition of his wife and his wife’s family.

In other words, in 1971 Chiang Kai-shek was open to the idea of declaring an independent Taiwan. This was the first I’d heard about this incredibly interesting “what-if” scenario, and while it doesn’t make me re-think my impression of Chiang as a nasty dictator, it does suggest he may have had pragmatic depths that I hadn’t given him credit for.

Next, the small things I didn’t like so much. This is going to be nitpicky. Hold on tight.

Chapter 1 starts by describing the 1996 Presidential election, and on page three we have the remarkable sentence “It was the first democratic election in Taiwan since the country’s establishment in 1911”. I can think of two different ways that sentence could have been edited so as not to make readers familiar with Taiwan stop and stare for several seconds, then shake their heads and move on. An editor should have caught this.

In Chapter 2, Kagan gives a quick overview of Taiwan’s ethnic mix, and when discussing the Hakka, he says they are not Han Chinese, which is a questionable assertion but I’ll let it slide because “Han” is hardly a rigorously defined term. But then he says “their language was not related to the Sinitic language group”, which as far as I know is just plain incorrect -- Hakka is indisputably a Sinitic language just as much as, say, Spanish is a Romance language. (Note that I’m hardly an authority here -- if I’m clearly wrong, somebody say so please.)

Finally, I’m used to, shall we say, creative Romanization when it comes to Taiwanese names, but Kagan’s book still made me stumble. On page 61, he writes of Ng Yu-jin, apparently a very prominent Taiwanese emigre and critic of the regime in the 1960s. I think this is the same person as Ng Chiau-tong, but putting “Ng Yu-jin” into Google gets me nowhere, Kagan never gives us the Chinese characters for anyone’s name, and I’m frustrated that I’m still not sure one way or another.

Okay, now let’s get to the meat of this review. Here are the big things I wasn’t sure about. Let’s just put it this way: Kagan’s book inspired me to look up the pronunciation of “hagiography”, a word I had never had to say out loud before.

Look, my overall impression of Lee Teng-hui is generally positive. The man inherited an authoritarian government that, although it was becoming more free, still curtailed basic freedoms that we take for granted today. Twelve years later, he retired as leader of a free democracy. This is very impressive and I do not deny that Lee’s accomplishments are admirable.

But that doesn’t mean Lee should be treated as a saintly figure above any criticism. I found two points where Kagan makes tentative criticisms of Lee Teng-hui. On pages 78-79, he criticizes Lee’s keeping detailed dossiers on city council members when he was Mayor of Taipei from 1978 to 1981, and on page 112, he says Lee’s failure to hold the military and secret service accountable for attacks on dissidents “hampered reform efforts and policy innovations throughout his presidency”.

I found literally no other place this book is critical of him. Otherwise Lee is held up as this brilliant man who navigated his way through the ROC government, first as governor and then as vice president, because he saw that doing this was the best way to help his beloved country of Taiwan.

Unfortunately, I’m not knowledgeable enough to point out many ways in which Kagan should have treated Lee more critically. Someone better-informed about the period might be able to do a better job. But I do have one specific observation.

Cheng Nan-jung (also romanized as Nylon Deng, among several other ways) dramatically committed suicide on April 7, 1989, when facing imminent arrest for publishing banned political commentary. It’s easy to forget this now, but when Cheng killed himself, Lee Teng-hui had already been President for more than one year and two months.

There is no mention of this incident in Kagan’s book, even though it is very well-known and Cheng has become a widely recognized martyr for Taiwanese democracy. There are mentions of government repression and state-sponsored assassinations during the presidency of Chiang Ching-kuo, but not after Chiang’s death on January 13, 1988. But we do hear about Lee being magnanimous towards protestors in March 1990 (heavily contrasted with the Tiananmen Square protests of the previous year).

I don't think Lee is personally to blame for Cheng’s death, and this incident is not the moral equivalent to the government-approved killings that went on under the Chiang Ching-kuo regime. But it shows that the ROC government continued to act as a repressive authoritarian regime well into Lee’s presidency, and here Kagan’s book is largely silent, apart from the brief criticism (p 112) that I mentioned above.

This kind of whitewashing is a serious flaw in Kagan’s book. It’s not so much about omitting Cheng specifically, but rather the impression that we’re getting a very one-sided portrayal of Lee, where inconvenient facts and narratives are sidelined.

I understand that Kagan strongly respected Lee, whom he interviewed in person several times. But I don’t want to read about only the good things. Denny Roy’s 2003 book Taiwan: A Political History takes a much more cynical view of Lee’s time in power, but it isn’t even necessarily cynicism that I want; I would just like to see more balance.

The hagiographic treatment of Lee, the frequent mentions of Lee’s Christianity and the occasional comparisons of Taiwan to Israel, which, he writes, “also faces a dogmatic enemy that claims rights to the soil and lives of its population” (p. 16) made me wonder if Kagan’s target audience was politically conservative Americans (and those of similar political sympathies) with the intent to build up Lee Teng-hui as a great man that we should all look up to and respect, and put forward his vision of a free and democratic Taiwan as something we should all support.

But despite the sanitized portrayal of Lee Teng-hui, there are still some big things I liked about the book, apart from just picking up odd facts I didn’t know.

First, hagiography it may be, but Kagan still got to know Lee Teng-hui personally during the process of researching and writing, and so even if it’s incomplete, what we’re getting here is a vivid portrait of the man -- one side of him, at least. Kagan traces the development of Lee’s political views and beliefs and stresses the intellectual influences of both Zen Buddhism and Presbyterian Christianity -- for instance, he notes that Faust is one of Lee’s favorite books and then uses Faust as a metaphor for Lee’s relationship with the KMT (p. 85-86). Even if Kagan’s repeated references to Lee’s intellectual diet are a bit over-done (I'm not sure if I think so or not), the presumably authentic look inside Lee’s mind is still interesting.

Kagan can’t help but describe Lee in such colorful prose as: “If one painted his vision, it would not hang in a picture frame. It would be splashed all over the neighborhood with expressions of creativity, chaos, unpredictability, strings of relationships, and loose threads for future connections.” (p. 133)

Second, the closing chapters give us a vivid look at Lee’s conception of nationhood.

My wife Jenna took this picture in the National Museum of Taiwan History in Tainan. It says: People from all parts of the world who once visited Taiwan used different languages to name this island and its inhabitants. But how do those who live there regard themselves? Taiwan is composed of different ethnic groups with disparate languages and cultures. Thus the term "Taiwanese" is a form of self affirmation impossible to define with a particular language or ethnicity. All those who identify with and are concerned about Taiwan, who love and accept Taiwan, and who wish to live together in this land can declare with a loud voice "I am a Taiwanese." Contrast this with the racial basis of nationhood that you see in China, in Korea, in Japan. It also fits perfectly with Lee’s ideas, at least as interpreted by Kagan.

“For Lee”, Kagan writes, “Taiwanese identity arises from a natural ecological relationship among individuals from different ethnic, language, and immigrant groups who must try to benefit each other in order to survive and create a future for their descendents.” (p. 137)

Kagan goes on to write, “Lee is an islander who views his realm . . . as a place of exile for all the immigrants who have sought their own small place in a world apart from the chaos and exploitation of outsiders. This mentality stands in contradiction to the self-consciousness of the rulers of an empire, who see outsiders as a threat and a source of physical and cultural invasion. . . . the mentality of an islander, such as Lee, is to reject constructing the nation in terms of ethnic or national identity.” (p. 138)

This is obviously an ideal to strive towards, rather than a fact that exists on the ground today. Present-day Taiwan has a long way to go when it comes to reducing discrimination against foreigners -- and I’m not talking about white folks like me, I’m talking about the Southeast Asians who come to Taiwan seeking work opportunities and a better life and are often treated horribly by their employers.

I believe that Lee’s ideal, of a pluralistic society of people engaged in mutually beneficial relationships, is one worth striving for.

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