WQCovSp06_Sub.Final 3/27/06 12:19 PM Page 1 The Europe’s Mosque Hysteria By Martin Walker WILSON Three Presidents and Their Gods By Elizabeth Edwards Spalding The WILSON QUARTERLY SURVEYING THE WORLD OF IDEAS QUARTERLY Miracle in Mali By Robert Pringle The Resurrection of Pearl Buck By Sheila Melvin RETIREMENT The Sovereign State of RetirementEssays by W. Andrew Achenbaum Beth Shulman Sylvester J. Schieber Spring 2006, Vol. 30. No.2 Spring 2006, Vol. James Morris SPRING 2006 $6.95 ($9.95 CAN) The WILSON QUARTERLY SPRING 2006 volume xxx, number 2 The Wilson Quarterly Published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars www.wilsonquarterly.com FEATURES 14 Europe’s Mosque Hysteria | By Martin Walker Apocalyptic visions of a Europe overwhelmed by Muslim immigrants are overblown. DEPARTMENTS 24 Pearl’s Great Price | By Sheila Melvin Pearl Buck’s prize-winning books described China the way she saw 2 EDITOR’S COMMENT it, to the embarrassment of Chinese officials. So why has China just renamed a square for her? 4 LETTERS 31 Mali’s Unlikely Democracy | By Robert Pringle 11 FINDINGS It is poor, Muslim, and African. Yet Mali is a successful democracy. The Ape That Hummed What’s the secret? Room With a View Spore Lore 40 True Believers | By Elizabeth Edwards Spalding The Poetry of Numbers The critics who say George W. Bush’s religion-tinged politics have no precedent are forgetting that God has long had a place in the 69 In ESSENCE White House. Black Hat Humanitarians The Limits of Limits Health Care’s Continuing Crisis 49 THE SOVEREIGN STATE OF RETIREMENT Nepal’s Backward Trek Retirement is a stage of life we all take for granted as the due reward for decades of hard work. But it is also one of the great 91 CURRENT BOOKS unexamined ideas of our time. As the first baby boomers turn Tom Lewis on symbolic 60, there is a need for fresh thinking about what retirement is destruction and ought to be. Ann J. Loftin on 50 What Is Retirement For? | By W. Andrew Achenbaum Bernard Malamud 57 Sweating the Golden Years | By Beth Shulman David J. Garrow on the Freedom Riders 62 Paying for It | By Sylvester J. Schieber Brief Reviews: Yasmine 70 An AARPer’s Life | By James Morris Bahrani, Martha Bayles, Ann Finkbeiner, Roland Flamini, J. Peter Pham, Shari Rudavsky, Sandra Scham, and others 112 PORTRAIT ON THE COVER: Photograph by G. K. Hart/Vikki Hart, Getty Images. Design by David Herbick. Shark Shift Spring 2006 ■ Wilson Quarterly 1 The WILSON QUARTERLY EDITOR’S COMMENT EDITOR Steven Lagerfeld MANAGING EDITOR James H. Carman SENIOR EDITOR Robert K. Landers Gray Expectations LITERARY EDITOR Stephen Bates (on leave) ACTING LITERARY EDITOR Amy E. Schwartz Historians tell us that childhood as we know it was an invention of the ASSOCIATE EDITOR Sarah L. Courteau EDITORS AT LARGE Ann Hulbert, James Morris, 18th century. Someday they will write about the 20th century as the Jay Tolson era when we invented retirement as a distinct stage of life, a time of COPY EDITOR Vincent Ercolano relative ease and freedom from care. Not unlike childhood, in fact. CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Daniel Akst, Martha Bayles, Linda Colley, Denis Donoghue, Max We’re almost as sentimental about retirement as we are about Holland, Stephen Miller, Walter Reich, Alan Ryan, Edward Tenner, Charles Townshend, Alan Wolfe, childhood, though for different reasons. Retirement comes with old Bertram Wyatt-Brown age, and, sooner or later, diminishing capacities, illness, and death, RESEARCHER Flora Lindsay-Herrera BOARD OF EDITORIAL ADVISERS earning the gray-haired their carte blanche. The thought that K. Anthony Appiah, Cynthia Arnson, Amy Chua, anything more could be asked of America’s seasoned citizens is heresy. Robert Darnton, Nathan Glazer, Harry Harding, Robert Hathaway, Elizabeth Johns, Jackson Yet with earlier retirements and longer, healthier life spans, retire- Lears, Seymour Martin Lipset, Robert Litwak, Wilfred M. McClay, Richard Rorty, Blair Ruble, ment and old age are often no longer quite the same thing. While Martin Sletzinger, S. Frederick Starr, Philippa Strum, Martin Walker working Americans complain of vanishing leisure time, for example, FOUNDING EDITOR Peter Braestrup (1929–1997) nobody points out that one group celebrates its growing freedom to BUSINESS DIRECTOR Suzanne Napper putter about and play. In a sense, we have redistributed leisure. CIRCULATION Cary Zel, ProCirc, Miami, Fla. The Wilson Quarterly Judging by the paucity of scholarship on retirement as a social (ISSN-0363-3276) is published in January (Winter), April (Spring), July (Summer), and state and the great quantities of writing on aging, few scholars and October (Autumn) by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 specialists want to explore this new territory. They are not alone. The Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004–3027. Complete article index available online at nation’s inconclusive debate over Social Security last year was domi- www.wilsonquarterly.com. Subscriptions: one year, $24; nated by discussions of money and political morality, with hardly a two years, $43. Air mail outside U.S.: one year, $39; two years, $73. 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SUBSCRIBER HOT LINE: 1-800-829-5108 published Creating Diversity Capital: Transnational Migrants in POSTMASTER: Send all address changes to The Wilson Quarterly, P.O. Box 420406, Montreal, Washington, and Kyiv last year. And Kennan senior associ- Palm Coast, FL 32142–0406. Microfilm copies are available from Bell & Howell In- ate Margaret Paxson published Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a formation and Learning, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106. U.S. newsstand distribution through BigTop Russian Village, a chapter of which appeared in the Spring ’02 WQ. Newsstand Services, a division of the IPA. For more More recently off the presses is contributing editor Stephen Miller’s information call (415) 643-0161 or fax (415) 643-2983 or e-mail: [email protected]. Conversation: A History of a Declining Art. ADVERTISING: Sandi Baker, MKTG Services, Inc. Tel.: (215) 968-5020, ext. 152, Fax: (215) 579-8053 —Steven Lagerfeld E-mail: [email protected]. 2 Wilson Quarterly ■ Spring 2006 LETTERS TALK OF THE FUTURE to produce strategic plans. While whether or not we are able to predict kudos to the wq for its 30th- many of the resulting plans are quite the future. anniversary issue, “Reading the perfunctory, the act is at least an offi- James A. Dewar Future” [WQ, Winter ’06], particu- cial acknowledgment of the impor- Director, RAND Frederick S. Pardee Center larly for David Rejeski and Robert L. tance of longer-range thinking. for Longer Range Global Policy and the Olson’s article “Has Futurism Failed?” Another tip-off that serious think- Future Human Condition Given their limited space, the authors ing about the future is alive and well Santa Monica, Calif. gave a surprisingly thorough history of is the existence of the Long Now futurism. I would only add that the Foundation, which is thinking out as “golden age” of futurism in the 1960s far as 10,000 years. (If that sounds all creatures live embedded was a phenomenon in Europe as well silly, consider the problem of how to in time, but only humans lift their heads as in the United States. During this warn people 10,000 years from now to lament the past or worry over tomor- period, noted futurist Bertrand de about the dangers of the nuclear waste row. Our unique prefrontal lobes—the Jouvenel founded the Association we are depositing today.) The Long “lamps on our brow”—peer ahead while Internationale Futuribles in France, Now Foundation is attracting a fasci- swaths of our older cortex flood with the Club of Rome was formed in Italy, nating collection of thinkers to figure memories of yesterday. Crucial to our and the first International Futures out how to educate the public about species’ success, these relatively new Research Conference took place in the importance of thinking in the organs let us probe tentative futures, Oslo, Norway. longer term. sometimes spotting errors before we can The subsequent decline in futur- Still further evidence of engage- make them. Yet the process remains ism was evident worldwide, followed ment with the future is the work that clumsy and fraught with the human by renewed interest around the turn of we at the RAND Pardee Center and inclination toward self-deception. the millennium. Whatever happens others are doing on robust decision Obsession with the past or future to futurism in the coming decades, we making. Rather than try to limn the can define a civilization. Many cultures can reliably predict that it will gain future, as was common practice in the believed in a lost golden age, when peo- popularity again at the turn of the next 1960s, we are working to develop ple were close to gods.