David Brooks and the Great Decisions lecture series

Every now and then I like to get out and have an educational experience, to, you know, keep the post-collegiate mind fresh. When I'm really lucky, I have multiple in a single day. (Oof, that sounds like a 'that's what she said' joke.) Anyway...what I'm trying to say is, yesterday I was fortunate to go to not one but two interesting lectures that at first glance seemed unrelated but after some inspection, worked together nicely.


The first was David Brooks, the NYT columnist, at the Econ Club. He was very interesting, and funnier than I expected, based on his usually dry, sometimes dense columns. He spoke at length about early childhood development, and its importance in a child's future, in terms of high school graduation, college completion and income levels as an adult. Humans are born with an innate ability to mimic, and also with kind of a blank slate, which makes their influences and surroundings during their first years of life so crucial. Growing up in a single parent home, or unsupervised, or not pressured to succeed, can have adverse effects on a child's early development. Learning conscious things can seem natural and easy, but the unconscious things, he mentioned, like being comfortable in social situations, and even things as simple as making eye contact have to be learned and mimicked, and if there's no one there to teach you or show you, you might not figure it all out. This makes teachers, and school quality, and subsequently education funding, very important, but unfortunately, things like guns and banks are more fun for politicians to focus on and unsexy things like early education get kicked to the DC curb.

The second was at the World Affairs Council weekly Great Decisions lecture. The first one of the winter series was last week and featured an NPR reporter whose name escapes me droning on about the financial crisis. (It frankly wasn't worth recapping, because the subject matter would have fascinated me in, say, fall 2007, when everything was happening. After keeping pretty good tabs on things the past 2+ years, I wanted a little more depth than a reporter answering each question with a disclaimer about his 'lack of expertise'. Whatever.) This week's lecture was given by a Columbia University political science professor on the humanitarian crisis in the Congo, and on a more macro level, why over 50% of wars that have negotiated, international peace settlements slip back into conflict within 5 years. Now, I've fallen asleep in more poli sci lectures than I care to admit. But this was very good, and important; more people have died in the Congo in the last 15 years (the current conflict has been on and off since, I believe, 1996) than in any other war since WWII, over 5 million.

The conventional wisdom in resolving international conflicts, specifically civil wars like the one happening in the Congo, has been to go at it with a top-down approach. That is, try to achieve peace using macro tools; UN peacekeeping troops, internationally negotiated treaties, and maybe a US sanction or two. But the professor convincingly argued for a different approach. She advocates the opposite, a bottom-up approach to achieving peace. This includes sending in local peacemakers to individual villages to try and understand, on a micro level, what the reasons for the conflict were in the first place. This makes total sense. Many African countries are an amalgam of different tribes, cultures, even languages. Before Africa was colonized and exploited for its vast natural resources, there was no such thing as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So the reality that such vicious conflicts persist today should not be a surprise. Combine trillions of dollars in accessible natural resources with a weak, ineffectual, often corrupt government that provides little security to its citizens and it comes as no surprise that chaos and martial law rule.

This 'peacebuilding', as opposed to 'peacekeeping', has been a proven success in Africa and around the world. Hopefully the UN and US and other involved countries will make it a priority, because it creates a better chance for a sustained, lasting peace. And who doesn't want that?