Reviewing Marshall’s exhaustively detailed symposium handout, he suggests that the basic ethical values upon which civility and professionalism rely are trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. With the exception of citizenship, Marshall delineates the many aspects of each of his ethical pillars. For example, caring includes charity, benevolence, consideration, empathy and generosity.

It is compelling in a presentation so carefully detailed – whose subject matter is, in fact, civility – that citizenship should appear acceptably uncertain. Civility is civilized conduct. Citizenship is a most basic element of civilization. It defines how an individual is a member of society, thereby determining what counts as civilized conduct.

Indeed, understanding civility by way of citizenship invites some measure of moral relativism. One civilization’s rules of membership may be anathema to another’s (think the cannibalism of the Aztecs or any tenet of National Socialism). In an attempt to avoid this problem, we might claim that Marshall’s five other more ample ethical flash points mean more to civility than citizenship. But, it stands to reason that the way a society understands such terms as trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, and caring inevitably depends on that society’s understanding of citizenship.

After a summer of tea parties and a fall of political fatigue, healthcare-related bartering seems to be coming to a close. As was immanent from the start, the bill will be some hodgepodge of compromises that won’t affect the day-to-day lives of citizens for many years to come. To reflect on the debate in detail would be a tedious task without the promise of enlightenment. Contemplated in the abstract, the late morass of healthcare reform does reveal how Americans are essentially at odds over issues of civility and citizenship.

For those opposed to a public option, fairness, responsibility, etc means making sure the government gets out of the way of capital so that individuals may benefit – however unevenly – from competition. For those in favor of a public option, fairness, responsibility, etc means making sure the government follows through on its promise to treat all citizens equitably, respecting the inalienable rights of all. These two opposing views can be boiled down to opposing notions of citizenship. The former implicitly regards the relationship between individuals and society to be a calibrated and flexible exchange between sacrificed freedom and anticipated benefits. The latter regards the relationship between individuals and society as more than ad hoc, based on a philosophical understanding of the fundamental and equal rights of human beings.

The healthcare debate is essentially a clash between those Americans who – consciously or not – advocate for a quid pro quo view of citizenship and those Americans who see citizenship as a part of a social contract. As our founding fathers envisioned and our founding documents enshrine, American citizenship is based on non-negotiable rights and individual equality. Choosing civility in America means standing up for the American brand of social contract citizenship.

Then there were the Americans Phillip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates. These two, like the rest old hands on the likely Nobel lit nomination ship, surged to the fore after the head of the literature prize jury, Peter Englund, told the AP that the prize had grown too “eurocentric”; 9 of the 10 most recent laureates held European citizenships (that is, assuming one counts Turkey as a European country, a fraught matter in and of itself). The year before, Englund’s predecessor had said that Americans rarely won the prize because American literature was too insular and not sufficiently engaged with the world’s broader issues and themes. Many read Englund’s assertion as a hint. This year, we’d see something new. Maybe Vargas Llosa or, if we were really lucky, Roth. We were wrong.

The 2009 Nobel laureate in literature is a woman named Herta Müller. Müller, like last year’s laureate, JMG Le Clézio, isn’t exactly a household name, even in literary circles. I’ve never read her, nor had I heard of her before the announcement this afternoon. Born and raised in a German-speaking Romanian enclave, her story is a familiar one. She spoke out against the brutal dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu; she published books her government banned (no samadzat in Romania, evidently); the government stripped her of ever more privileges and rights; she had her books, which have always been written in German, smuggled abroad; her books became a big hit abroad (in Germany); she fled to Germany. The Swedish Academy said in its citation that “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose,” Müller “depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.”

That may well be true of her writing, but it’s kind of a boring pick. I admire the Academy’s willingness to pick obscure writers, but my excitement deflates when I find out it’s just another random European writing in an existential tradition of dispossession. An American would have been nice, and Vargas Llosa wouldn’t have been bad either.

But I’m getting off topic. Englund’s at issue here. What did he mean by yesterday’s comment? Was it a red-herring? An intentional psych out?

“If you are European [it is] easier to relate to European literature. It’s the result of psychological bias that we really try to be aware of. It’s not the result of any program,” he said, after the AP asked him for clarification.

At least he admits it, and doesn’t blame another culture for the Academy’s eurocentric tendencies. And his position is understandable, if a little frustrating. I find it easier to enjoy American literature because I’m an American. I enjoy other kinds of literature too, but I’ll always have a particular fondness for the literary work of Americans—and a depth of understanding I miss when reading many non-American authors. (I also secretly hope Englund’s comment of yesterday was a psych out. It’d be good to know a guy like him has got a sense of humor.)

Still, it seems like the Academy ought to get over it. If the Nobel Prize in Literature is an international prize—and it is—its arbiters ought to widen their scope. After all, so much of the good writing done on other continents has explicit ties to European literature. We have colonialism, and a lot of really good European writers, to thank for that. As for being thankful, there’s one more thing to be happy about this year: at least we got an excuse to use an umlaut.

“We tend to relate more easily to literature written in Europe and in the European tradition,” Englund said.

That, in Englund’s formulation, was “a problem.”

“In most language areas…there are authors that really deserve and could get the Nobel Prize and that goes for the United States and the Americas, as well,” he said.

Last year, Englund’s predecessor, Horace Engdahl, took a totally different stance. As if fighting windmills, Engdahl insisted that “Europe still is the center of the literary world” and that American literature is “too insular and ignorant to challenge Europe” and too “sensitive to trends in [its] own mass culture” to “participate in the big dialogue of literature.” (The last American to receive the award was Toni Morrison, who was the 1993 laureate.) Across the Atlantic, the literati dropped their pens and took up their swords.

In light of Engdahl’s comments, Englund’s stance this year is a welcome one. But it’s also a surprise, and it may have serious consequences for the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee in the coming years.

The Nobel committees are fiercely secretive, and they insist that they make their decision in a vacuum where advancing voices of influence spontaneously dematerialize and become one with the void. So, it’s odd that Englund would be so eager to correct the record. Until yesterday, the consensus was that it would be several years before the Swedish Academy even considered an American. If they did–or so the thinking went–they’d give something of their secrecy away. The world would know that foreign air can breach the vacuum, that the hue and cry that went up after Engdahl’s anti-American lit remarks last year managed to seep in.

Moreover, what Englund offered yesterday was more than a tacit admission that external forces can influence the committee; it verged on apology. That’s unusual. Nobel committees never apologize.

Engdahl’s acknowledgment of the Nobel committee’s eurocentricism–and all that it connotes–is at once good and bad.

On the one hand, it’s good, because it suggests that the committee is willing to redirect its ideological trajectory when it recognizes that it’s erred. Maybe the Swedish Academy will start to give literatures from beyond Europe’s narrow borders a serious look. And it’s about time. Since 1994, only two laureates have held non-European citizenship, and I disagree with Engdahl’s statement of last year: Europe is hardly the seat of the contemporary world’s greatest literature. That mantle–the right to call oneself the great seat of literature–shriveled with modernism. Today, America–or Latin America for that matter–has just as much claim to its withered remains as any other geographical region.

On the other hand, if the committee starts to show that it’s willing to engage publicly in these schoolyard shouting matches over who has the best literature–”We do”; “No, we do”; “No, we do”; ad infinitum, ad nauseum–it will cheapen the Nobel Prize in Literature, tearing it from the world of letters more completely than it ever has before and handing over the prize to the world of politics.

I admire Englund’s bold counterclaim this year. It takes guts to disavow openly your predecessor’s claims. However, he would have been better off keeping his mouth shut and letting the committee’s decisions do the talking. Engaging in further public discussion the committee may only be making things worse for itself, and for the world’s most respected and highly regarded literary prize. The last thing literature needs is a kick when it’s down.

I’ll be watching with interest to see who ultimately wins the thing this year. Some proffered non-European names are the Israeli novelist Amos Oz, the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, the Syrian poet Adonis, and American novelists Phillip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates. A few Europeans have been tossed around too, including Italians novelist Umberto Eco and translator Antonio Tabucchi.

Whatever happens tomorrow, Englund’s now insured that the Academy’s decision will get more analysis than it probably warrants.

Perhaps, the answer lies in repairing and enhancing certain programs that already exist. Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) is the process by which ex-combatants are disbanded and rejoined with society. Well known as an operational model employed by UN missions across Africa, DDR programs are essential to security sector reform in particular and successful peacekeeping in general.

DDR began in Afghanistan in 2003 under the auspices of Afghanistan’s New Beginning Program (ANBP) initiated by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The ANBP’s DDR project was very conventionally designed. First, an operational group within Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense selected the individuals and units to be decommissioned and disarmed. Then, ex-combatants were referred to one of eight Regional Verification Committees. Finally, those who complete DDR joined the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police, enrolled in school or college as civilians, or received civilian job training.

The ANBP’s disarmament phase was slow to begin, ineffectively implemented, and hastily finished. Only 56% of previously registered – i.e. ‘legal’ – weapons were collected and, of the weapons collected, 36% were useless. The reintegration process was even more flawed. Job training was actually conducted in the houses of former militia commanders, extending the warlord patronage system new legitimacy. Providing hyperbolic example of the missteps and lack of information that haunted this first attempt at DDR, fifteen new tailors were trained to cater to one small village.

In June 2005, hoping for a fresh start, the UNDP began another DDR-type program called the Disbandment of Illegal Armed Groups (DIAG). Designed as the Taliban insurgency coalesced and intensified, the scope of DIAG and its goals are far less ambitious than that of ANBP’s DDR.

DIAG’s tasks include licensing private security companies, registering legally obtained weapons, estimating the size and location of illegal armed groups, identifying government officials linked to illegal armed groups, and spreading public awareness about corruption, insecurity, opportunities, etc.

However, in the coming months, DIAG will accept more bold responsibilities. In a DIAG progress report released by UNDP this summer, one of the program’s new strategic components is to assist the Afghanistan National Program for Peace and Reintegration.

“Through detailed provincial and district analysis on the causes of instability, DIAG will provide instrumental project management support in post-negotiations by collecting weapons, facilitating the insurgents, IAGs, and other destabilizing elements’ reintegration back to civil society, and delivering development projects.”

As efforts at DDR are (once again) beginning again, the Obama administration should emphasize the importance of the taks currently assigned to DIAG in any revamped Afghanistan strategy. Reintegration programs are crucial to neutralizing the threats to US national security. Our timely withdrawal is contingent on timely and effective reintegration programs.

We should be sure to study the failures of ANBP’s original DDR projects that operated without much oversight out of regional verification offices not armed with the information  – in the form of rural livelihood analysis and feasibility studies – or the tactics requisite to ensure job training programs were successful, not undermined by persistent warlord oligarchies.

About $11 billion was allocated for Afghanistan in the US budget for fiscal year 2009. $14 billion has been allocated for fiscal year 2010. DIAG’s annual operating budget is only $117 million, or about 1% of USA’s Expenditure on Operation Enduring Freedom last year. Also, DIAG receives funding from many other donor countries, Japan outstanding among them. If DDR is to be a success this time around, then the US needs to play a larger financial and managerial role in DIAG.

While the report notes that our historical presidential election is one of the main drivers of current rightwing sentiment, the economic downturn and the complexity of our international engagement also account for the categorical opinions of those in the far right and in a way reminiscent of the early 1990s. Under the Clinton and Obama administrations, economic hardship is interpreted as an eschatological harbinger, motivating the right’s extremists to prepare for ‘end times’ by stockpiling ammunition, food, etc.

In light of the G-20 Summit in Pittsburgh to take place next week, the report’s comparisons between the international climate of the 1990s and that of the present-day may prove even more prescient. The assessment suggests that current rightwing extremism might well exhibit ‘New World Order’ conspiracy theories similar to those that surfaced in the 1990s. The report notes:

“The dissolution of Communist countries in Eastern Europe and the end of the Soviet Union in the 1990s led some rightwing extremists to believe that a ‘New World Order’ would bring about a world government that would usurp the sovereignty of the United States and its Constitution, thus infringing upon their liberty. The dynamics in 2009 are somewhat similar, as other countries, including China, India, and Russia, as well as some smaller, oil-producing states, are experiencing a rise in economic power and influence…. Rightwing extremist views bemoan the decline of US stature and have recently focused on themes such as the loss of US manufacturing capability to China and India, Russia’s control of energy resources and use of these to pressure other countries, and China’s investment in US real estate corporations as part of subversion strategy.”

Although on hiatus this summer, the fear mongering about the ‘New World Order’ that a global currency would initiate began during the G-20 Summit in London this past spring. In an interview with Sean Hannity in late March, Dick Morris – once a Clinton adviser, now a Fox News regular – claimed that allowing the IMF to add to the amount of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) available in the global market would be “to put our Fed and our SEC under control, in effect, of the IMF…putting the American economy under international regulation.”

International financial institutions began using SDRs more than 20 years ago as an international financial instrument based on the combined value of strong currencies – now an aggregation of the Yen, Pound, Euro, and Dollar – to assess debt, calculate asset value, and estimate the relative strength of other currencies. I am not going to pretend to understand SDRs, but insofar as this metric cannot exist without the independent currencies on which it is based, it hardly constitutes a ‘global currency’.

Yet, next week we are sure to witness the resurgence of such prevarication about the threats of a global currency to the autonomy and dominance of the US. And that Obama has announced his vision of effective US financial regulation less than two weeks before the G-20 Summit will surely serve to nurture budding financial conspiracy theories.

This summer, rightwing extremists have stifled real debate about the US healthcare crisis by claiming that proposed healthcare reform has revealed Obama’s intention to transform American into a socialist nation, hoping to erase all that is admirable about our country and its regard for individual can-do and know-how. This fall, I wager that rightwing extremists – and the republican politicians that kowtow to their base – will suppress legitimate discussion about how to prevent the next financial crisis by declaring that changing the way the US government regulates our nation’s financial system is a plot to usher in a ‘New World Order’ of IMF hegemony.

As 9/12 protesters marked the 8th anniversary of 9/11 with more signs visualizing the myth that our President is in the company of some of history’s most devious and radical actors, I am reminded of an article, ‘Twilight of the Books’, that Caleb Crain wrote for a late December 2007 issue of the New Yorker.

Crain reports that pleasure reading might no longer be considered a traditional American pastime and notes that this fact has quite wide-ranging implications. A National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) survey shows that in 2002 less than 50% of Americans had read a work of creative literature in the past 12 months. And, as we are now more than ever painfully aware, newspaper sales and readership have plummeted in recent years.  Those of us who love the world of books may romantically lament this sad state of affairs. However, these statistics are more than nominally disheartening.

Before we learned to read and write humans understood the world by talking and listening. And, as it turns out, reading and writing enable us to view the world in shades of gray, while talking and listening keep the facts in black and white. Crain quotes Walter Ong on the difference between those who are literate and those who are not: “Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories… In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued as accumulation of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon for putting those accumulations at risk.”

Brain scans corroborate Ong’s distinction. Crain writes, “Brain Scans show that when a child first starts to read she has to use more of her brain than adults do. Broad regions light up in both hemispheres. As a child’s neurons specialize in recognizing letters and become more efficient, the regions activated become smaller. At some point as a child progresses from decoding to fluent reading the route of signals though her brain shifts… With the gain in time and the freed-up brainpower, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience… When reading goes well, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. It makes you smarter because it leaves more of your brain alone.” In contrast, watching TV takes up more of the brain’s attention, so an individual is less critical of the information he or she receives.

When a person achieves true literacy that person may be critical of what she reads as she reads it. However, the majority of our population does not enjoy the benefits of literacy – either because they choose not to glean information about the world by reading or because their reading skills are too deficient to do so. Thus, our citizenry’s knowledge is constituted by talking and listening, not by reading and writing, substantiating Walter Ong vision of the dawning era of secondary orality.

When I first read Crain’s piece, I found it astonishing that reading was easier on the brain than watching TV. Of course, that is a dilettante’s way of stating the point. Nonetheless, the discrepancy between reading and TV viewing – that the former allows our critical capacities to run concurrent with our capacity to absorb to new facts and that the latter does not – holds incredible explanatory power, and, I wager, may help us understand why Americans increasingly self-select and wield social facts so dogmatically. If we are in an era of secondary orality, then the extent to which political parties rely on, defend and generate cliché and stereotype makes perfect sense.