New Haven, Conn.
Ziad al-Saad is an archaeologist at Yarmouk University in Irbid. The Jordanian city is near the site of ancient Gadara, where the biblical swine went over the cliff. It is also near the border with Syria and the United Nations-run Za’atari camp for Syrian refugees. “We’re under a great deal of pressure,” Saad says, “but this is also giving us the strength to fight back.” Ancient Gadara was a cosmopolitan Roman city, and Saad, the erstwhile director general of Jordan’s Department of Antiquities and now his university’s vice president, wants to preserve the complexity of our common heritage. “Culture and identity are vital to the fight against extremism and the dark forces that are trying to take us backwards.”
We were talking after Saad’s lecture at the eighth Global Colloquium of University Presidents (GCUP), which met last week at Yale University. The GCUP is part of the United Nations’ Global Compact program, an initiative for furthering U.N. goals through collaboration with businesses and institutions. Peter Salovey, Yale’s president, chose as this year’s GCUP theme the preservation of cultural heritage, “challenges and strategies.”
“We are witnessing the destruction of cultural treasures on a vast scale,” U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon declared in his keynote address at Yale’s Sprague Hall. The “common assets of humanity” are the “hallmarks of our human existence.” Echoing the NATO charter, Ban said, “An attack on cultural heritage in one part of the world is an attack on us all.”
The U.N. likes to set global standards, and Ban sets the global
standard in platitudes. He has ingested the regnant pieties of the U.N. so deeply that he can regurgitate them at will. He is infuriatingly charming in person, and diplomatic in speech to the point of nihilism. At Sprague Hall, he sketched out a “geopolitical” context for the destruction of priceless antiquities while avoiding the dread words “Islamism” and “ISIS.” Listening to Ban’s fairy tales of “watershed declarations” and anti-extremism summits in Geneva, you wonder if his real plan is to lull the dictators and kleptocrats of Turtle Bay into a hundred-year sleep, from which they shall awake refreshed and democratically accountable.
Worse, everything Ban said was true. The world really does seem to be at a “critical juncture,” with half its population under the age of 25, extreme disparities of wealth and development, and chaotic flows of people across cultures and oceans. Who could not be revolted by the barbarous demolition of other peoples’ histories? Who could approve of the illegal trade in antiquities, a “cycle of theft and profit” that enriches terrorists? Closer to home, who could disagree with his gentle chiding of the zealots among Yale’s student body, who should “listen to each other, and each other’s ideas”?
Still, Ban’s speech at Yale was about as useful as a degree from Trump University. As that morning’s academic presentation had made clear, there has never been a better time for strategies of cultural preservation and statements of shared purpose among the “international community.” But there has rarely been a worse set of challenges or a more dangerous abdication of leadership by the United States. Technical advances in mapping, preservation, and prevention contend with the Four Horsemen of the modern apocalypse, described by Salovey as “human activity, war, natural disaster, and climate change.” We might add a fifth: the indispensable nation dispensing with its international responsibilities.
The key strategy for preservation, says Alark Saxena of the Yale Himalaya Initiative, is “managing for uncertainty.” Where there is danger, there can be “risk mitigation” and “hazard mapping.” After the Nepal earthquake of 2015, the initiative created a Yale Himalaya Hazard Mapping Team, to identify which monuments and historic structures lie in high-risk areas and to aid preemptive strategies. Perhaps the Obama administration should have done some hazard mapping before leaving Iraq.
The earthquake that hit eastern Japan in 2011 was a thousand times stronger than the 2010 Haiti earthquake and was complicated by the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Yet pre-emptive design saved many of the artifacts in Fukushima’s art museum. Small measures, like watertight doors in low-lying areas and shock-proof pedestals for sculptures, are cheaper to implement than expensive fixes after the event, like cleaning books with ultrasonic waves and freeze-drying, or vacuuming and scrubbing radioactive dust from a Buddha statue.
“You need to be proactive, not only scientifically, but also at the policy level,” says Tor Broström of Sweden’s Uppsala University. Broström contributed to the EU’s Noah’s Ark project, which created a “vulnerability atlas” of Europe’s cultural heritage. His speciality is protecting Sweden’s stone churches and wood-framed buildings against climate change. He offers some advice to the owners of historical American properties. If temperatures and humidity rise, look out for new kinds of insects and mold, which, as Broström discovered in Sweden’s medieval churches, will eat up your frescoes. Try to stabilize the situation by integrating your heat, ventilation, and dehumidification policies.
In the stabilized environment of Sprague Hall, Ban Ki-moon described how UNESCO restored the 14 mausoleums in Timbuktu, Mali, that were vandalized by Islamists in 2012. “A UNESCO team stands ready to travel to Palmyra,” Ban announced. Then he admitted that UNESCO cannot safely go to Palmyra. This is the gap between strategies and challenges, hope and reality. Ban is a global leader for our times: He talks about lowering the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere while emitting a lot of hot air.
Professor Saad listened intently in the back row. Earlier, I had asked him how an American university conference could save priceless artifacts half a world away, when political will seems so weak.
“If we have a common heritage, we have a common responsibility,” Saad replied. “International cooperation and establishing links with American universities are very important. The U.S.A. has a major responsibility in this, because it is a superpower. It has the resources and the know-how that can preserve culture for all humanity.”
Dominic Green, the author of Three Empires on the Nile, teaches politics at Boston College.
