Karachi, population about 14 million (because of the prevailing anarchy, no census has been taken since 1980), is the port city in southern Pakistan through which most of the country's foreign trade must transit. In March 1995 I met a young employee at a local magazine there who had been assigned the task of combing through back issues of Pakistan's dailies and adding up the deaths by violence reported. Covering Karachi (briefly on the world's front pages at the time, following the deaths of two American diplomats) had become a matter of toting up figures, doing a body count.

Like our world at large, Karachi is a victim of its history; the complexity of its present plight aptly reflects all the past crises and migrations that have contributed to it. One can ask what Karachi would be like today if any of several recent Pakistani governments had been more attentive to its obvious problems; or if the Mohajir Qaumi Movement had thrown up a leader less demagogic and unprincipled than Altaf Hussain; or if refugees from the 1971 Bangladesh war and the long-festering Afghan war had not swollen the city out of all proportion; or above all, if the wrenching Partition of 1947 had never happened. But such questions are excruciatingly rhetorical.

Karachi gets about as much coverage in the Western press as does, say, Liberia, which is in the news as I write. By the time you read this, doubtless the American attention span will be glancing at one or another "new" crisis elsewhere. But that will not mean things have improved or been settled in Liberia. As Robert Kaplan told an interviewer in 1993: "The hard-news media does not cover the world; it covers the foreign extensions of America's domestic obsessions." Liberia, it so happens, comes up very early in The Ends of the Earth. "I tell you, it's a tribal war," a local man says to Kaplan. "There are no ideas, no politics, just tribe." Shades of Bosnia, of course, and of Karachi.

The Ends of the Earth is less a "travel book" than a guided tour, an eyewitness depiction of our world at the moment just before the coming time of huge upheavals. The tendency of journalism is to chop up the world into discrete "stories" and dole them out severally. Here, as in Balkan Ghosts (1993) and his February 1994 Atlantic Monthly cover article, "The Coming Anarchy," Kaplan resists this: "While traveling in the Near East," he says, "I could think more clearly about Africa." Writing about particular places and situations, then making the intellectual effort to articulate connections among them, Kaplan displays an impressive command of history and a preparedness to shoulder an author's authority reminiscent of V. S. Naipaul, albeit without quite matching Naipaul's gift for language. In Kaplan's case as in Naipaul's, the authority is hard-won and earns respect. Where Naipaul's prose is autobiographical, Kaplan's is more often pedagogical; but the insistence on trying to see clearly, whatever the cost in lost illusions, is the same.

Thus, in a fascinating chapter Kaplan breaks down the American illusion of a monolithic Iran, simply by showing us the place as he sees it: an ancient and complex civilization where "an austere Islamic exterior concealed a pleasure-loving Persian core" and a country that, fortunately for itself and unlike Egypt and Saudi Arabia, has already experienced and survived its revolution. "What continually struck me about Iranian society was how mundane and normal it was," he writes. And:

While U.S. policymakers were still obsessed with Iranian-sponsored terrorism, I sensed that the outlaw behavior of Iran's current regime was one of those problems that would soon be submerged-under the pressure of greater, tectonic forces gathering at the turn of the twenty-first century, forces driven by the ability, and inability, of various cultures to manage dwindling resources.

If any place proves Kaplan's assertion that local cultures must bear their share of the blame (or credit; he is impressed with the "muscle tone" of Turkish culture), it is frenetically "developed," loathsomely polluted Bangkok, which is among the places he visits. Thais know all too well how telling is the contrast between their capital and rich, serene, unfree Singapore, but for better and worse their culture puts a premium on sanuk, or fun. Recently a Thai friend told me her country needed better leaders. "Like Lee Kuan Yew?" I ventured, naming the Singaporean dictator. "Yeah, Thai need that," replied my friend. "No obedient. No discipline!"

But American culture too is a local culture. Though the Western Hemisphere is not part of Kaplan's self-assigned brief-he travels from West Africa to Egypt, Turkey, and Iran, and on to Central Asia, the subcontinent and Southeast Asia-Americans will do well when debating immigration to consider Kaplan's musings on the artificiality of borders and the demographic factors that drive political and social change. Is a straight line on a map more arbitrary in Africa or the Middle East than when drawn between San Diego and Tijuana?

It is true Kaplan's perspective is rather "Eurocentric," and he gives short shrift to the role of Western-dominated institutions such as the World Bank in bringing the world to its present pass. "My impressions might be the 'wrong' ones to have, but they would be based on what I saw," he writes. "And what I saw turned out to be consistent with what the statistics reveal." The second assertion undermines somewhat his valid claim to authority. Do "the" statistics, mere numbers, possess greater authority than the human author? Any baseball fan knows the pliability of statistics. The World Bank bashers have their own statistics, which deserve a hearing. 1 Still, Kaplan asks all the right questions, and to criticize him on ideological grounds is willfully to miss the point. 2

Which point is made elegantly by the absence of borders on the world map printed on the book's endpapers. Every map is a metaphor, as Kaplan knows. At the end of his first chapter he reproduces a map of Africa-before it was carved up by European colonialists-that hangs in the entrance hall at Thomas Jefferson's home and asks: "Would that 1802 map at Monticello someday turn out to be more useful than the present ones?" Kaplan's disdain for the cluster of categories-nationhood; inviolability of borders; "Left" versus "Right"-that have served us rather ill during this century (and which are the cause of the eerie feeling of untruth evoked by most of what you read in the newspaper) is supremely timely, and his conditional phrasing is polite; Jefferson's map already is more useful than the present ones.

We ought to be more imaginative in our use of verb tenses. The coming anarchy is upon us. The end is near. The day of judgment is at hand. Neither technology nor "democracy" is a panacea. In other words, all is vanity.

"The more I saw of the world, the less I felt I could fit it into a pattern," concludes Kaplan. "No one can foresee the precise direction of history, and no nation or people is safe from its wrath." Kaplan tells it like it is, but what to make of it? A meaning Christians and others might find is suggested by Jim Wallis's use of "The Coming Anarchy" in The Soul of Politics (1994). Wallis cites Kaplan's image (borrowed in turn from Thomas Homer-Dixon of the University of Toronto) of a stretch limousine in, say, New York City. A few people are inside the car. A great many more are outside it. Wallis, who writes elsewhere about the two Washingtons-the one that calls itself our nation's capital, and the one he lives in-writes: "It was precisely when such polarities of extravagant wealth and crushing poverty became institutionalized and rationalized that the prophets of the Bible would thunder the judgment and justice of God, calling the people to repentance."

It is past time those few of us inside the limousine rolled down the tinted windows. We need to face the fact, vividly demonstrated by Kaplan, that our plight has no instrumental solution. Comfortingly, the questions now facing us-all 5.7 billion of us as of September 1994, and counting-are anything but new: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we headed? What, if anything, does the mess we have made mean? In the absence of any hope of rectification, can there yet be grace?

The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the 21st Century

By Robert D. Kaplan

Random House

476 pp.; $27.50

Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine

September/October 1996, Page 16

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