Fragmenta Philosophica

Horticulture, not architecture

Lately I've been reading Michael Mandelbaum's The Case for Goliath: How America acts as the world's Government in the 21st Century. I've been struck by Mandelbaum's ability to offer a simple simile or metaphor to complement his argument. A case in point is his likening of "state-building" to organic generation, rather than it being an exertion of sheer artifice (a similitude which the best educators have realized applies to their enterprise as well).

"The term 'state-bulding' implies a similarity to architecture, in which the builder can control every part of the process: drawing up the plans, gathering the building materials, hiring the workers, and supervising the construction. State-building, however, more closely resembles horticulture. It is a collaboration between human agents and forces beyond short-term human control. In the case of horticulture, the independent collaborator is nature. The equivalent for state building is culture - the values, attitudes, and beliefs of the society in which the effort to build a state take place.

"Some cultures lend themselves to the construction of effective, decent states more readily than others. Where the cultural soil for such states is fertile, they probably already exist, which means that the American efforts at state-building [since the 1990's - Ed.] almost by definition are undertaken in the least promising places ... Cultures can and do change, but they change relatively slowly. The relevant unit of time is not the month, the year, or the life of a particular government. It is the generation.

"... While careful planning and appropriate management can help to promote the flowering of the garden or the growth of a forest, neither can occur according to a man-made schedule."

Having considered the dissimilarities between American experience with Germany and Japan at the end of World War II and more recent efforts with de facto "failed states," Mandelbaum contends

"... the German and Japanese cases suggest that there is an inverse relationship between the ease with which a country can be defeated militarily and the ease with which a new and better government can be established after its defeat."
(pp. 79-81)

The latter is a provocative assertion, which may hold true in at least a rough/ready way .
(If the Cold War had turned hot - and assuming such didn't entail nuclear annihilation - what kind of fight would the Soviets have put up, and, assuming an American victory, what would a post-Soviet reconstruction have been like?).

Interpretation and Projection

As an addendum to the previous, and as an illustration of a tendency which is still very much with us, consider the following excerpt from Schumpeter's sketch of Syndicalism in France in the latter 19th/early 20th centuries:

'The men who organized and led the Confédération Générale du Travail during its syndicalist stage (1895-1914) were mostly genuine proletarians or trade-union officers, or both. They were brimming over with resentment and with the will to fight. They did not bother about what they would do with the wreckage in case of success. Is that not enough? Why should we refuse to recognize the truth which life teaches us every day - that there is such a thing as pugnacity in the abstract that neither needs nor heeds any argument and cares for nothing except for victory as such? But any intellectual can fill the void behind that brute violence in the way that suits his taste.'
(p. 340)

The Scribbling Set

Though bloggers evidently hail from all walks of life, and blog for all manner of motives, there's a certain breed which, perhaps, is a spirtual descendant of the "intellectual" Schumpeter considers unsparingly in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy:

'Intellectuals are in fact people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs. This touch in general accounts for another - the absence of that first-hand knowledge of them which only actual experience can give. The critical attitude, arising no less from the intellectual's situation as onlooker - in most cases also as an outsider - than from the fact that his main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value, should add a third touch. The profession of the unprofessional? Professional dilettantism? The people who talk about everything because they understand nothing? Bernard Shaw's journalist in The Doctor's Dilemma? No, no. I have not said that and I do  not mean that. That sort of thing would be still more untrue than it would be offensive. Let us give up trying to define by words and instead define "epideiktically": in the Greek museum we can see the object, nicely labeled. The sophists, philosophers, and rhetors - however strongly they objected to being thrown together, they were all of the same genus - of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. illustrate ideally what I mean.'
(p. 147)

Wake Up

I claim no expertise in augury nor haruspicy, nor the more modest art of taking the correct measure of the political landscape. Still I wonder how anyone can doubt that war with Iran is a matter of when - not if. I certainly don't welcome it, and would be glad to hear a plausible scenario in which such is averted - but to convince me, the following phainomena will have to be accounted for.

In 2003, President Bush declared : "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

President Ahmadinejad has just said: ""The [Iranian] government will not back down one iota on defending people's rights" - namely, continuing with 'low-level' uranium enrichment.

Picture the scene: 150,000-odd US troops, 10,000-odd British troops (and sundry others), in Iraq,  with a hostile, newly nuclear theocracy right next door. Forget about whether the invasion/occupation of Iraq was a defensible and wise course originally. Especially - though not only - if the policy will be to "stay the course," how can a nuclear-armed Iran (as currently ruled) not be a direct, existential threat to the entire enterprise?

The UNSC debacle over Iraq ought to disabuse anyone of the notion that "Diplomacy" has much hope, since, then as now, the main parties required to speak univocally have, in actual fact, wildly divergent interests. Here I feel a small measure of sympathy for Iranian theocrats, who protest that they are suffering "colonial" treatment. When Clausewitz famously declared that (paraphrasing)  war continues policy according to other means, some wit might have affirmed the truth of the converse: diplomatic policy is war by other means. For "the West" to get its way in this situation, "diplomacy" can only be tantamount to a kind of aggressive intimidation, sweetened with various bribes.  The threat of force always lurks in the background - a sort of malign potentia. Thus, to cajole the Iranian government into abandoning its nuclear ambitions can hardly but be an act of de facto domination, that is, overlordship. They know it - and hence they resist it.  To a certain mentality, this shows the moral bankruptcy of "our side"; to me that judgement bespeaks the wrongheadedness of the mentality, which cannot or will not see the "Hobbesian" nature of the world scene, entailing hard choices.

Occasional rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding,  the so-called International Community is not a fellowship of free and equal states, neither morally, nor in terms of power and strength; behind the facade of order roils a barely containable anarchy. Alas, "might makes Right" - emphatically not in the sense that naked, destructive force is its own justification, but rather that "Right" is ineffectual without the capacity to coerce compliance.

The clearest minds have seen that war is ineradicable without a true world government - which would also likely mean global despotism. Nice choice, huh? - perennial war-making or the "peace" of a cosmopolitan pactum subjectionis. (Perhaps in a future post I'll consider the notion of "Christendom," as well as it modern-secular descendant, "neo-Liberalism," as candidates for world conversion and pacification).

Update: Read Niall Ferguson in the Telegraph.

Visual Aid: Evolution

A (happily) discontinuous series.

Notes: Logic, Evolution, Intelligent Design

In taking a stand on the merits of the Theory of Evolution, one's options are not limited to either Evolution or Intelligent Design. Rather, the fundamental option is Evolution or non-Evolution. The latter is the negation of the former, and, as such, lacks determinate content; we only know what it's not. (Note, e.g., that the opposite of "happy" is not "sad," but, rather, "non-happy" - which subsumes, but is wider than, "sad").

Evolution of/within determinate species - "intra-specific" evolution - seems to me beyond dispute (note Darwin's copious examples taken from animal husbandry). However I happen to be skeptical about Evolution-with-a-capital-E or "inter-specific" evolution, viz., the alleged coming-to-be of prosaic, specific-determinate kinds from past entities from which they differed specifically (viz., in species). My doubts - which, a fortiori, extend to the naturalistic origin of life -  are not informed by any religious or theistic convictions, as I have none. And the latter entails, of course, that I am skeptical about "Design." What's left, then?

It's crucial to distinguish between the possibilities which, as function of time and place, we can plausibly imagine and posit, versus possibilities which are exhausted, logically. Draw up a simple Venn diagram and note the indeterminacy of the extensions of the categories of both "Non-designed" and "Not according to Inter-specific evolution." The former contains/subsumes the opposite of the latter as much as the latter contains/subsumes the opposite of the former. But logically there's no warrant to claim that either "the intelligently designed" is coterminous with "not according to inter-specific evolution"; nor that "according to inter-specific evolution" is logically identical to "not intelligently designed."

In the absence of a compelling new theory, one might focus on the respective merits of the two current contenders. But since they aren't true opposites, to discount one can at best only increase the probabilities of the other. To suppose otherwise would entail some variant on the ad ignorantiam fallacy.

If there are logical difficulties with both, the etiology of complex organic forms, not to mention life itself, might yet be a mystery, requiring further "skepticism" in the original sense, viz., inquiry  - for, coherence is a "pre-scientific" requirement of any putative theory, scientific or otherwise.

The Boys' Crusade

On my flight over to the UK, I tore through a short book which I commend to your attention, The Boys' Crusade: The American Infantry in Northwestern Europe, 1944-1945, by Paul Fussell.

There are apparently timeless tendencies - which I encourage you to correlate to political affiliation - which can be expressed as, respectively, "to love uncritically" and "to criticize unlovingly." An alternative ideal which would, in quasi-Hegelian fashion, absorb and supersede them both could be expressed as "to love critically/to criticize lovingly." It's precisely this ethos which comes through in The Boys' Crusade.

The title evidently plays off of the legendary "Children's Crusade" of the 13th century, that quintessential mixture of the high-minded, the horrifying, and the flat-out absurd which (to varying degrees) surely characterizes every war, however noble in aim and necessary in fact.

In a series of very readable vignettes, one gets a feel for some of the major combat operations in the western European theater, leading from Omaha, to Hurtgen Forest, to the shocked arrival of Patton's boys at Ohrdruf-Nord. Each of them vividly suggests the smells, sights, sounds, and raw terror - the viscera - which assailed the typical dogface. Only the hard of heart can remain unmoved by the terrifying lot of these young conscripts.

Fussell's aim is clearly to de-mythologize the allegedly "Good War" - to show the endemic mistakes, misfortunes, internecine conflicts, rivalries, and (to say the least) questionable morality which animated various allied operations and tactics. (As an instance of the latter, Fussell alleges intentional allied bombing of "collateral" targets at Calais as a diversion for the impending landing at Omaha Beach; it's my understanding that there's a real question about that particular allegation, though certainly there are many other undisputed Allied misdeeds which could be cited). Thankfully, Fussell has nothing of the Village Leftist about him, for whom only one's own side is imprecated. He clearly recognizes that there's wrong - and there's (much greater) wrong; the Yanks and the Brits were the force, however flawed, for good. At the same time, Fussell's narrative tacitly leads the reader to empathize with the enemy, such as the Nazi's fried in the conflagration at Falaise. The reader himself feels battered upon emerging from a chapter, and is tempted to conclude that life is essentially absurd; that apparent lack of ultimate intelligibility seems embodied - or underscored - in war, which certainly qualifies as a "holocaust" in the original sense of the term.

There's a convergence between Fussell's narrative and, say, Tolstoy's asides in War and Peace concerning the essential chaos and unpredictability - uncontrollability - of war; "military planning" is much closer to an oxymoron than is "military intelligence." I assume that there must, somehow, be such as thing as "military genius," but I'm hard-pressed to articulate in what it consists. Inspiring a certain enduring ethos of fortitude and self-belief in one's troops may come closest. In any event, there's little doubt that combat affords the expression of valor and heroism, alongside the more shameful human qualities - and Fussell does not stint on recording the former either.

Though a short work, The Boys' Crusade is rich in lessons for assessing recent and current wars; by implication, those lessons cast in an unflattering light much of the current 'cant-and-rant' concerning "war crimes," "incompetence," "lack of planning," etc. One sociological note which I found of interest - and relevance, since I was reading the book on my way to England - was how functionally "perennial" are the tensions between Brit and Yank, in terms of both style and substance; embodied, e.g., in the ongoing conflict between Bernard Law Montgomery ("Monty") and Ike. It's easy to overlook the fact that there's an element of realpolitik even between the closest of allies. Don't tell that to the Manicheans, though.