Thomas Jefferson goes East: Thailand shows that Jeffersonian self-government works

National Review, March 30, 1992 by Charles Murray

FIRST arrived in Thailand in September 1965, a skinny 22-year-old, and stayed for six years. I married there. My first child was born there. In many of the most important ways, I grew up there.

I went to Thailand from Harvard as I had gone to Harvard from Newton, Iowa. Both were about as far as I could get from where I was, and in those days I had what the Peace Corps psychologist told me was a "high need for change." I was talking to a Peace Corps psychologist because I had joined up. I was a Volunteer attached to the Village Health and Sanitation Project.

Joining the Peace Corps wasn't any kind of personal homage to JFK, nor was I much of an idealist (well, neither was Jack, it turns out). I was out to see the world and have adventures. I had idolized Kennedy, however, and, like everyone I knew in college, I took for granted that Kennedy was smarter than Eisenhower and his ideas were better. Indeed, the lesson of history seemed to be that the people in one generation always were successfully debunked by the people who followed them, and that to cling to an old idea when a new one had become available was foolish. I have an especially sharp memory of reading Bill Buckley's line about standing athwart the tide of history yelling "Stop!" and wondering how a man of his intelligence (which I conceded reluctantly) could say such a thing.

Thailand changed all that. It happened slowly over the six years, only two of which were spent in the Peace Corps, but I can remember precisely when it began. I had been assigned to an office in a northern town called Lampang, and I was sitting at my desk killing time. So was everyone else in the office. The name of the place was impressive-The Regional Center of the Village Health and Sanitation Project-and we were supposedly doing something that was important in the grand scheme of rural development. My Thai co-workers were nice fellows, and I was at least smart enough to recognize that they knew more about sanitation and Thai villages than I did. But the business of the office, privy-building and well-drilling, proceeded at a pace so desultory that you needed time-lapse photography to realize anything was happening. Sitting there daydreaming, I had a vision of thousands and thousands of such program offices all over the world, with people just sitting there. It was an epiphany of sorts. At the time, I thought it applied only to developing countries. When I began working with American social programs a decade later, it didn't take long to realize it applied just as much to the United States. There are exceptions. Drop in on almost any kind of free curative health-care program, and you'll probably find a busy waiting room. But drop in unannounced on all sorts of other fine-sounding government programs-to help pregnant teenagers or drug addicts or youthful offenders or the chronically unemployed-and, whether it is in Thailand or Kenya or Cleveland, chances are you'll find some pleasant people sitting around not doing much of anything.

That epiphany was the first of many. Rural Thailand, where there was no clutter to get in the way, was a wonderful place to see how the world works. It became both a touchstone and a prism for identifying and thinking about what is important. Just about everything I have ever written is grounded in the experiences of those six years. And I came to love the place. Now, more than a quarter of a century after I first arrived, I am back. There have been some visits in the interim. But this time I am going to go back to villages I haven't seen for twenty years and more.

In the Villages

I AM IN Ban Bunnak in the far north, and it is my first day in the villages. I feel shy and middle-aged and out of place, and also a little shaky from a bout with stomach flu that came on me during the two-day drive north from Bangkok.

Every visit to a village runs its own random course if you give it a chance. You just park the car and start to walk. Most of the houses are empty during the day this time of year (late August), because most of the adults and teenagers are out in the paddies transplanting rice from the seedbeds, but there are always a few people sitting on porches, or shopkeepers outside their stores, or a group of villagers shooting the breeze. You walk, and people peer at you, wondering who the farang is. You smile and say hello, and it goes from there.

That's how it used to work, and today I find that it still does. After half an hour ambling through village streets, I head up a lane toward the school; a motorcycle passes me, and the driver stops to inquire who I am. He turns out to be the assistant headmaster, and an hour later I am invited to his home for lunch.

His home is a two-story house, white plaster over masonry, with wood-framed, glassed-in windows. Wrought-iron lamps flank the driveway. The doors of the house are made of heavy teak, elaborately carved. Objectively, it is about the size of an ordinary house in a working-class American neighborhood. But looking through my eyes, this was like going back to my Iowa home town and finding that someone had built a Newport mansion next door to my parents. Thai villages simply did not have any houses like this twenty years ago. Prosperous villagers built wooden houses and the poor built mat houses. Being rich by village standards meant that a person might have a wood house that was a little larger than the average and had wooden shutters for the windows. But nothing like this. What's more, Ban Bunnak has many houses like this-brick houses with gables and balconies, gaily decorated homes with expensive touches. There are cars and small trucks parked in many of the compounds, and a motorcycle in just about all of them. Television aerials are everywhere. In other words, the first village I happen to revisit, a village that I remember as being a run-of-the-mill northern village, is orders of magnitude richer than any village I have ever seen.