Peripheral Visions

of hospitality and skills shared, but this kindness evaporated when Jewish farms began to be more productive than Arab farms.
    Since this period, land has been taken in battle and been expropriated for settlement and for defense, but it is important to understand that the hostility that developed in the years leading up to Israel’s independence is explainable not in terms of details of how each particular piece of land changed hands but in terms of differing understandings. According to the theory of limited good, when the settlers prospered this could only be at the expense of their neighbors. For all the years of Arab-Israeli conflict, observers have been pointing out that the highly educated and entrepreneurial Jewish state could become a source of prosperity for the whole region, but this idea is implausible to those who are convinced that all prosperity is at someone’s expense. Good is limited. Agriculture was after all invented in the Middle East. Premises so deeply learned are confirmed by experience, for contrary evidence is simply invisible.
    Some people, on the other hand, genuinely believe that peaceful solutions to conflict will increase the total of available benefits, for peace and freedom from fear are among those goods that need not be limited. In South Africa progressive whites eventually realized that apartheid was hindering development even before the international boycott, and saw that the nation’s prosperity was an illusion based not only on an unequal division but on an extractive economy: wealth mined from the ground rather than produced by human effort and ingenuity. The positive vision that combined with fear in persuading the government to start the long, slow transition to equality was the vision of an educated workforce becoming increasingly productive and innovative in a world of high technology: more for everyone. Such a workforce can only be created with a degree of social equality. Education is one of those goods that is most clearly not limited, so white South Africans are more ready to commit themselves to raising educational levels among black South Africans than to commit themselves to land reform, looking ahead to an industrialized economy in which only a few live on the land and productivity depends on technological development. But assumptions once learned are not so easily left behind, and generations of deprivation have meant that the promise of increased prosperity—a new pie to be divided—triggered rivalries within the black community.
    In the Philippines, people often choose to mute the appearance of competition. If you comment on the success of one member of a team or one child in a classroom, the immediate explanation is that she or he succeeded by chance rather than superior skill or intelligence. There are traditional contexts of common effort, like preparations for community celebrations, that thrive on this approach, which is undermined in foreign models.
    In Iran, there is no reluctance to profit at the expense of others, but it is necessary to be circumspect, for conspicuous success immediately attracts suspicion. A friend once remarked, in a common Iranian slur, that the prime minister was undoubtedly a passive homosexual, probably because of being sodomized as a child. “How on earth could you know that?” I asked. “Look,” he explained, “the man could not possibly have gotten where he has unless he were without honor, ready to engage in any possible corruption. He must have lost his honor early on so that now he can be without shame and do anything he needs to do to get ahead.” QED. My friend, a highly educated man who had spent many years abroad, felt disabled by his own principles and was convinced, as he looked around him, that the success of others must be dishonorable. This line of thought fuels a desire to discredit and topple those in power, followed by a recurrence of suspicion of their replacements. Not only is good limited but those who succeed must have done so dishonestly, and all victors are suspected of having won by cheating. Both views conflict with the possibility that everyone benefits, basking in reflected light, when “one of our boys” makes it.
    It is hard to sort out the rights and wrongs of attitudes that are so fundamental. Landownership has often been a genuinely zero-sum game, and often the only game in town. There are some goods that are very clearly finite and others that are flexible, and we differ in the goods we