The Tripe of Tom Friedman: The World Isn't the Only Thing That's Flat

New York Times Foreign Affairs Columnist Tom Friedman is a maddening writer: easy to dismiss until he comes up with something good, which makes his past 10 columns all the more frustrating. He is nowhere as awful as many of his detractors insist (and I am often in that group), but much further away from the guru his legions of fans imagine he is (and in this group I include the Pulitzer committee- Friedman's multiple wins don't sully Joseph Pulitzer's reputation on the same level as Arafat-Winning-The-Nobel did, but it does make one wonder just how many papers the judges actually read).

Friedman was a good reporter and has always been a skilled writer. His From Beirut to Jerusalem is still an excellent read, though not without its faults (Edward Said titled a review of it "The Orientalist Express"). But even in that, the burgeoning Tom Friedman, Ace Columnist, was peeking out. You could see it lurking- but it wasn't until he actually became a columnist that all his irritating tendencies came to fruition.

There is a passage in the Bible that reads something like "When I was a child, I talked like a child, spoke like a child, did other things like a child, but now that I am an adult it is all different. I mean, really different." I'm paraphrasing here (slightly), but the same pattern is true with Tom Friedman, Journalist, and Tom Friedman, Columnist, only the juvenile nature is reversed.

Now, I am not saying that he is a dumb guy, or a puerile name-slinger or anything like that. He isn't juvenile personally, but he tries to explain everything in the most simple terms, to dumb it down into a series of bite-sized info-nuggets, all with helpful titles that serve as a guide to Understanding The World.

This reached it's seeming apex with his The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization. The title refers to a symbol of wealth, prestige and globalization (the Lexus) and of ancient longing, superstition and hatred (the olive tree). The second part of the title detailed what the book would not help you do, though it weirdly failed to make that clear (you may have got the opposite impression). This was a whirlwind tour between diametrically opposite poles, rushing back and forth so fast you didn't really have time to stop anywhere in between.

And the people we heard from! Rich, powerful, eloquent, excellent at three-pointers (Steve Kerr, which makes this the second time he has been referenced on this site): the whole gamut between powerful and really powerful presented their panoply of opinions, all of which pretty much dovetailed with Friedman's own thesis.

Which doesn't make them wrong- it just makes them incomplete. Friedman even admitted as much as a speech at the American University of Cairo, where he mentioned that he was a slave to his own paradigm (I was there at the time). Perhaps the best example of this came in a little anecdote in his speech, which later became the forward to the paperback. He mentioned riding a train from Alexandria in the north to Cairo, and all throughout the car there was the constant ring of cell phones. This is probably true- a lot of people in the Arab world have cells.

However, I've been lucky (?)enough to ride in Egyptian trains, and in the cars I could afford there were no cell phones. Chickens were more common. This isn't to say what Friedman said was untrue- just wildly incomplete.

It seemed he got out of that a little bit after September 11th. Friedman realized that the war was taking place in the Muslim world, and it wasn't just an attack on America because America loves freedom or because America is an evil country or any of the trite views espoused by left or right wing commentators. His stuff wasn't excellent- it is still stunning he won another Pulitzer for it- but it was more grown-up than "The Lexus...", by far.

I found his writing on the war in Iraq to be the height of his career. He managed to both support the war and make clear that he was very wary of George Bush and company. He didn't support the President, but he was willing to get on board with something he believed was right. I think he made this distinction, a brave one in the zero-sum world of political commentary, as well as anyone beside Michael Ignatieff, who isn't widely read anyway. He wasn't as eloquent in the defense of his opinions as was, say, Christopher Hitchens, but Hitchens somewhat sullied himself and disappointed his supporters by cutting off all criticism of the Bush Administration, a silence he maintained until recently. Friedman has actually been even more eloquent in the run-up to the election in Iraq, writing what I thought were some of his finest columns. I'm going to quote three paragraphs from a Jan. 6th column that I think are possibly the finest and sharpest he has ever written.

"In short, we need these elections in Iraq to see if there really is a self-governing community there ready, and willing, to liberate itself- both from Iraq's old regime and from us. The answer to this question is not self-evident. This was always a shot in the dark - but one that I would argue was morally and strategically worth trying.

Because if it is impossible for the peoples of even one Arab state to voluntarily organize themselves around a social contract for democratic life, then we are looking at dictators and kings ruling this region as far as the eye can see. And that will guarantee that this region will be a cauldron of oil-financed pathologies and terrorism for the rest of our lives.

What is inexcusable is thinking that such an experiment would be easy, that it could be done on the cheap, that it could be done with any old army and any old coalition and any old fiscal policy and any old energy policy. That is the foolishness of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. My foolishness was thinking they could never be so foolish."

Granted, even in his good days, there was still too many "Friedmanisms," a cute little word that he himself might write to describe what his columns were littered with. He frequently talked about making a decision from his gut- "my gut says"- in an attempt to sound tough. I think this longing to sound like a tough clear-headed thinker affects more than just his prose- his need for clear and simple prose affects his thinking, which is why he reduces everything to little infonuggets and "mini-theses" (a phrase lent by BMK). And there is also a large amount of narcissism- his documentary on Israel's security wall could have easily been called "Tom Friedman's Deep and Meaningful Adventure in The Holy Land"- there were as many shots of him walking around and looking contemplative as there were of the wall, and several shots of him cracking wise as he walked up the stairs (and an unfortunate number of shots from down low of him walking away- Mr. Friedman's posterior will never be described as his "moneymaker").

These traits come to the forefront and the skill he showed recently drops away as we enter his new role- explainer of the new wave of globalization, with a new theory that he coined: flatism. His new book "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century" was the basis of a long article in Sunday's New York Times magazine, which, if his history is any guide, is an easy way to understand fully the depth of his argument without missing anything but padding from the long form.

The thesis is simple- Columbus thought he discovered the world is round, and announced it to the queen. Friedman discovers it is actually flat, a revolutionary bit of knowledge he tells us, tenderly, that he announced only in a whisper to his wife (how modest! I'm sure he never intended to write a book!).

Of course, he doesn't mean the world is geographically flat- he is referring to "a tale of technology and geoeconomics that is fundamentally reshaping our lives...", and something that Americans need to be aware of or we will be lapsed by the Indians, the Chinese and, weirdly, even the Russians. The nut of it is this: undersea fiber-optic cables have flattened the world so much that, combined with giant advances these countries (India especially) have made in their own technology sectors, any job can basically be done anywhere, and these countries are more hungry.

The drecht starts early. A Banglore CEO told him that the playing field was being leveled. Here is Tom at his most Friedman-esque: "'What Nadan is saying,' I thought, 'is that the playing field is being flattened. Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!'"

Well, no- he was saying the playing field is level. It is essentially the same thing, but Friedman has to twist it to come up with a cute phrase that may sell some books and give himself a hook on which to hang his thesis. That bit alone tells you everything you need to know about the man- the self-indulgence, the need to simplify, the desire to show you how deep a thinker he is. This is supposed to be personable, I suppose, to level the towering giant that is the Times foreign affairs columnist in the same way that deep-sea cables leveled (flattened? flattened!) the world, but it comes across as narcissistic pap.

He goes on to explain different eras of globalization, which he cannot but resist in calling "Globalization 1.0", "Globalization 2.0" and so on. Not a terrible thing, but just obnoxious and unneeded and little more than a trick to sound catchy. This version of globalization (3.0) is about individuals, not countries or companies, becoming globalized. He quotes Marc Andreesen, co-founder of Netscape. "'Today, (Andreesen says) the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want."

The parochial and self-serving nature of this statement almost makes one want to wretch (ignoring the fact that he made a present-tense reference to the Soviet Union). It reminds me of a few years ago at a conference of computer moguls, at a session on philanthropy. They wanted to give computers to Africans, to plug them in, until Bill Gates, who has really done excellent work, stood up and said (appx), "You can't download a loaf of bread. You can't Google clean-water." Meaning: first things first.

That is the problem here. Yes, there may be a few 14-years-old Romanians who have all the information, software and tools they need, but they won't radically change their economies or pull their countries out of penury. But Friedman gets sucked in when someone important talks to him, even though he should be used to it by now. These important people usually fail to see beyond their narrow scope, and for some reason Friedman narrows his own. Nowhere in the article is anything mentioned about politics, ethnic and religious tensions in India, the medieval poverty that exists elsewhere in the country, the Middle East, anything. It is if there are many Tom Friedmans, and the one responsible for writing about politics wasn't around when the book and the article was being written.

A good example of this is AIDS- according to a 2002 Nicholas Eberstadt article in Foreign Affairs, India China and Russia are all on the verge of a major AIDS epidemic, which Eberstadt says "will alter the economic potential of the region's major states and the global balance of power." Now, that those countries are AIDS' next stalking ground is pretty widely accepted. Eberstadt may be wrong about the scope of its impact (though I tend to think he is at least mostly right, certainly in Russia, with its horrid health infrastructure), but it illustrates that Friedman has once again willfully blinded himself to anything that doesn't fit his thesis.

And that is his problem- his hooks and lines preclude nuance and depth. He is a slave to his own ideas, a Friedman Fundamentalist. Things have to fit his catchy ideas. The article keeps repeating three cities in succession: Boston, Bangalore and Beijing. Why Boston? It begins with a B. Alliteration trumps relevance; Friedman's success is the triumph of the soundbite.
The problem is, Friedman is earnest and really wants to explain things and help people understand, but in the end he does them a disservice on multiple levels. One, he presents a fraction, a sliver of the world as the key to understanding it. "Flatism," as he nauseatingly calls it, may be true, but it is not the whole picture: it is a single piece, and not as big a deal as many other things, which go unmentioned. And, even were he to say he was just writing a book on one piece, not going for the brass ring, he does a disservice to "flatism" by bending it into a form he can spell out in catchy bullet-point highlights.

This seems to be a lot of words spent on one man, but Tom Friedman is very popular and his style helps a lot of people think they understand things, when in reality he is giving them a very simplified, dangerously reduced version of his worldview. In some ways this is the limits of a columnist, but his longer work tends to be his worst, because he has all the space he needs to make up torturous phrases and painful analogies and have reality conform to them. In his books, he is boxed in only by his self-limitations. He may want to understand the world, he may in some ways have deep and true concern, but his ultimate concern is for the world to understand him. I suppose that is Pulitzer-worthy, but in the end that doesn't make it respectable.