I’ve been feeling somewhat overqualified the past couple of weeks at my first internship of the fellowship year. I’m at a place that basically organizes events, so a lot of my work involves things like creating guest lists, figuring out who should sit where at dinners, and even checking guests in (clipboard and all). I did my fair share of mundane work as a corporate lawyer, too, but at least I got paid for it.
Anyway, I was feeling typically sorry for myself tonight while listening to Kenneth Pollack — an expert* on national security, military affairs and the Persian Gulf formerly in the Clinton Administration and now with the Brookings Institution — give a speech proposing a new “grand strategy” for the Middle East. Pollack argued that, in his view, one of the main causes of radicalism in the Middle East is that millions of young men throughout the region are being denied the “pleasures of adulthood” because they live in countries with failed economic systems characterized by high inflation, unemployment, and underemployment. As an example of the latter, he spoke of men who had earned Ph.D.s driving taxicabs in Middle Eastern cities, and other men who had just graduated from law school making money doing embroidery.
Pollack explained that because of these economic conditions, young men cannot get steady jobs, and therefore cannot get married and settle down, leaving them without sex, without family and without the self-respect that comes from being independent. Instead, they think of themselves as burdens on their families, and often see their lives as meaningless. This anger and frustration can lead to hatred of their own governments, of the secularism and materialism they see creeping in from the West, and, of course, of the West itself.
Bottom line: Clearly, I should be more thankful for what I have!
* I have to put an asterisk next to “expert” since Pollack argued strenuously in favor of the American invasion of Iraq, even claiming in an influential book that America had “no choice” but to invade Iraq. What does one have to do to lose the moniker “expert”?
15 October 2008 at 12:13 am
It’s only people who grow up in rich countries who have the luxury to toss it all away to build houses in the rainforest for six months… or do unpaid internships in a foreign country for a year.
When I was in northern Tajikistan earlier this year, I was at an internet cafe checking email when some 20something guy sat down next to me and started talking. He asked me what I was doing there, and I said work.
“60% of our country is unemployed, and you come here for work?” He laughed, and it sounded a little bitter.