More Notes on Collectives

I noted the other day: “Human collectives behave quite unlike rational individuals.” This, for me, is perhaps the most valuable lesson of history. If the lesson is not internalized, temptations arise to make mistakes in other realms of reality. One is the belief that inorganic matter can yield life or that collectives of conscious beings are in some way superior to individuals.

I think it is wise to view public events as if they were natural events, thus to ignore the fact that rational individuals make decisions and thus shape history. Those are invariably collective decisions, thus a fusion of contradictions. The individuals who make them almost never have adequate knowledge to foresee or the power to shape the outcomes, and the greater the scope of the events, thus the more “collective” they are, the less predictable.

Here Secretary Gates’ muted remark the other day about the differences between wars of necessity and wars of choice is a good illustration. Wars of necessity may be defined as wars imposed on us as organized, large-scale physical attacks on our territories intended minimally to seize them, maximally to take control of the entire collective that we represent. If the aggressor is not a state, with a definable territory of its own, going to war makes no sense. After the 9/11 attacks, a full-scale war on Afghanistan was an overreaction. Afghanistan was the hiding place of a terrorist group—not the attacker. And once the Taliban government had been replaced by another, that over-reaction should have ended—in 2004. Indeed Al Qaida had intended neither to seize our territory nor to replace our government when it destroyed the towers and damaged the Pentagon. The War on Terror that mushroomed out of this was thus irrational, a natural event, in other words—although its raw materials were the collective emotions of a public that, at election time, might have displaced the Bush administration if that administration had merely reacted to 9/11 as it should have—by narrowly-shaped raids on Al Qaida’s camp. It was precisely such raids that President Clinton had staged in 1998, using cruise missiles, when he retaliated for embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Writing this, and remembering Clinton’s limited actions, it occurs to me that irrationality in public life is not necessary. Not necessary but certainly likely—and likely roughly in proportion to the emotional turmoil an event produces in the public as a whole. Now, let us note, irrational impulses in the public can be exploited or tamped down by the administration in power. And the temptation to exploit them will in some way be stimulated by the needs and ambitions of those in power.

Once irrationality takes over—once the horse has the bit in its teeth—it is difficult to bring it under control again. In an open society, rational reasons must be trotted out to explain and justify actions that were, on second thought, altogether wrong. The new product, the new narrative, will then be, again, an incoherent fusion of contradictions, producing yet other irrational decisions.

Yesterday’s presidential announcement to the effect that we’ve now pretty much accomplished our goals in Afghanistan is a consequence of an irrational process, introducing further irrationalities. In wars of necessity, things are simple. In World War II Germany invaded France; Germany had to be pushed out of France. The “goal” was simple, measurable. The German government had to be removed. It was removed. No ambiguities. What our “goals” in Afghanistan might be is as much of a mystery as the location of the territorial lines of “Terror,” whatever terror is. It has no place, it has no organization, no reality, as such—no tangible, visible reality at a scale any great Collective can see. Sad business, listening to the President. He too is reacting to collective emotion; this time the collective emotion is disgust with war. And so he is cooking up a brew of contradictory confusions. He means well. He is a rational being—caught in a kind of storm produced decades ago, because the TV screens in 2001 brought us clouds of smoke surrounding two towers in New York. We barely noted the deaths of 224 people in the embassy bombings of 1998; and only 12 of them had been Americans…

Seen from the Future

We have been listening today to the hearings of what the British call an Inquiry, sometimes the Chilcot Inquiry (after its chair, Sir John Chilcot), a body that here we would call a commission; here is the Inquiry’s web site. Prime Minister Gordon Brown established The Iraq Inquiry on June 15 of last year. Its mission, as articulated by Sir Chilcot: “We will … be considering the UK’s involvement in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned.” The way the yellow press would rephrase that is by saying: “Why did Britain get into the war? Was it dragged kicking and screaming by the Americans? Was Blair really Bush’s poodle?” The portion of the hearings broadcast today by CSPAN featured the testimony of Alastair Campbell, Director of Communications and Strategy to Prime Minister Tony Blair in the 2001-2003 period.

It was fascinating—in part because these Brits are so very eloquent, commissioners and witnesses both—because the tone is so much more conversational than in Congressional committee hearings where everybody seems to be posturing all the time—and because, in today’s instance, they got into the most awesome details on behind the scenes maneuvers, minute matters relating to the development and even the phrasing of dossiers on matter of intelligence, relating to personalities, to political, international, and bureaucratic relations, the tensions between the Americans and the Brits—and all this in what sounded to us as extraordinarily candid tones unimaginable in the United States.

One part of me—the glib intellectual surface—was enjoying this about like Brigitte enjoys watching Olympic skating events. Another, lower, more brutal part of me, in the process of trying to snatch a nap out of this daytime televiewing (lunch having just been had), began to grouse under the covers. As the fractal images became ever more complex at every enlargement —while sort of staying the same— my lower self wandered off into the future and wondered what they would say about all this in a time say about four hundred years out. By then this microscopic detail should have been compressed to the absolute basics. And the rude self came up with this:

America went to war because Baby Bush decided to take out Saddam if he had a chance, and he did have his chance with 911—his reason being that Papa Bush had gone wobbly in the same enterprise and drawn back from doing the job right. And Tony Blair had gone to war because he was not about to be the first British Prime Minister to part from the Americans and never mind that his public was massively against anything of the sort. As for secondary reasons, the future (four centuries out), still dreaming of the oil that had been, would also say that oil had played a role, on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bush clan, after all, came out of oil, not hard liquor, like the Kennedys. And Blair, a kind of continental born-again, had a bit of the crusader about him and Saddam enough of Satan to fit the bill.

Whoa, whoa! I cried (mentally) hearing this diatribe. What do you mean the future? What you’re unrolling here is the not-too-distant past. These were your very thoughts when the Iraq war was building. And don’t you remember my urging you to grow up and become a little more measured and analytical?

My lower self suffers being silenced, but not without a parting shot or two. He reminded me that we both had an uncle who, echoing millions in Europe, was sure that World War II was entirely due to arms manufacturers who wanted to have higher sales. And, he adds, before trying for a nap again, Eisenhower knew that—and called for the curbing of the Military-Industrial Complex after the war was over and he’d gotten what he wanted.

Not easy to live with my lower self. No it isn’t.