But unfortunately, he's not kidding. Mr. Badger's orientalizings would probably be more reliable if he stayed away from politics, an area of human events he views from a peculiar hot-house point of view of his own. Consider the end of this morning's sermonette, where "they" begins by meaning M. Bin Sa‘úd and his uncles and nephews and nieces and cousins, but the burden of it is about us miserable Yanks:
| They are what they are, and the problem for institutional America is that there isn't the cultural or linguistic underpinning to understand, not only what they are, but even (it sometimes seems) that there is such a thing as fully human aspirations and motivations in other cultures, at least not in a depth that would be able to withstand the cartoon-oriented propaganda. And the more the shock-a- minute thriller narrative takes hold, the less it seems to matter, and the more it actually does matter. Because the thinness of understanding creates volatility in public opinion just the same as thin markets foster volatility in financial trading markets, and it is a far more dangerous thing, because central banks cannot clean up after violence. |
What do you make of that thunderation, Mr. Bones? If you were collecting Pictures from an Institutional America in the path of Randall Jarell, would you hang that portrait of US front and center in the main salon? Would you let it in the door at all?
Forget the incidental and almost GOP-worthy self-esteeming, and just concentrate on Volatility Theory, please. Is "volatility" a recognizable general truth of statesmanship in this low democratic age? If not a truth about "the international community" in general, then at least about Uncle Sam? If not true about most of what our Sam does in the world at large, then specifically about his behavior in the Levant since 1945? Or at very least, about the Palestine Puzzle? Have ugly Americans like thee and me, Mr. Bones, really been "volatile"? Are we especially "volatile" at the moment -- apart from the very special exception that a withdrawal from the militant GOP's neo-Iraq would constitute, to which might perhaps be added a pernicious GOP habit of invading Lebanon once in a while and then giving the game up after six weeks or so.
Not being essentialist badgerians, we have not the right to claim "Uncle Sam is what Uncle Sam is," so let us weaken the hypothesis accordingly. Regardless of our objective innate deficiencies, have we frequently been accused by other folks' statespersons of being "volatile"?
In that form, a qualified Yes becomes possible, I suppose. It is undoubtedly the case that we can "make" treaties that never get ratified, as with the Paris settlements of 1919-1920, and more recently the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court. M. Bin Sa‘úd is doubtless not faithfulness-challenged in that fashion, but by this date most states are. In a pinch, even Prince Bismarck might have convicted of that sort of parliamentary volatility, so this deficiency is neither new nor specially Yankee. Unfortunately, it also is not what Mr. Badger wants to preach about this morning. It is "public opinion," not Congress, that causes Sam to err in his eyes.
Now the obvious difficulty is that public opinion does not make American foreign policy. This commonplace is blatantly the case at the moment, but it has constitutionally been the case at all moments. Gen. Washington warned us to avoid passionate attachments to particular foreign states, but he was certainly not worried about "public opinion" declining to ratify, or subsequently to comply with, our self-imposed obligations. Presumably Congress would go volatile only after, and perhaps only because, public opinion has done so already. We have had a number of scares and hysterias in two centuries -- we are in the waning days, one hopes, of yet another such--, but none of them, from 1812 to 2003, seem to have worked to anything like Mr. Badger's specifications. The characteristic fault of "public opinion" as regards the lesser breeds without is not "volatility," fickleness, but mere blank indifference. Perhaps that is as bad a vice, or even worse, than "volatility" is, and profoundly merits being thundered against, but it is not the same thing at all.
The disease diagnosed is imaginary. The cure prescribed might in theory engender the disease, but I daresay we are tolerably safe from enough millions of Americans ever taking to Area Studies and zealous informed partisanship about foreigners' domestic and regional affairs to the point of producing a public-opinion-based volatility. It is fun to imagine a badgerized America where hordes of pro-Sunnites, for example, clamor against opposing hordes of pro-Shiites, with very few on either team ever actually converting to the views of the out-of- town team that they have chosen to root for, yet extremely well informed about their preferred pets, as many sports fans tend to be, and all of them quite sound on "fully human aspirations and motivations in other cultures," at any rate as regards certain selected alien subcultures, and none of them in the slightest danger of being swayed by hostile cartoonists.
'Tis a radiant vision, Mr. Bones, for those of us who are far more interested in invasions and occupations and diplomacy and politics than in baseball and football, but of course it is also pure Cloudcuckooland. The only thing madder still to expect would be mass participation in some scrupulously neutral or social-scientistic form of Area Studies, or some subjectively supposed facsimile thereof. That arrangement would be all school and never any recess! By and large, flesh and blood simply could not endure it, not only ugly Americans but beautiful Euros (or whoever counts as less ugly than we) as well. A small number of us genuinely happen to find school more entertaining than recess, but we are not to "impose our values" on that account, or even account such eccentric values imposable. Still less, of course, are we, if democrats, to expect to have more than exactly one (1.00) vote per capita at elections. (Mr. Badger may be an antidemocrat personally, to be sure. We should not rush to judgment, though, Mr. Bones. The nature of his ideological stance is such that one can hardly avoid suspecting that he might be guilty of Elitismus, yet antecedent grounds for suspicion are not the same as positive evidence.)
==
Perhaps we may be a bit more specifically Middle Eastern about all this without venturing anywhere near that simplistic "Bush is an ignorant bully" cartoon that Mr. B. dislikes so much. His most salient chunk is perhaps the following:
| Or look at it this way: Americans sometimes complain that Arabs and others don't appreciate America's motives, judging us only by our actions, which of course are full of technical errors of implementation that so often obscure our real aims and objectives. They don't "know" us. I am not belittling that. |
That is as close as our preacher comes to explaining the Levantine evaluation of Uncle Sam ab externo, Mr. Bones, and the question is, how close is that? being outside the loop ourselves, we should not dogmatize about such things, but unfortunately you'll see at once that this passage collides head on with one of our own dogmas, the one that declines all requests to judge anybody, but ourselves especially, by her motives as opposed to her consequences. "Her" is perhaps more than generically appropriate: Dr. Rice gets dragged into the previous discussion, and she has a bad case of this judge-by-motives infection. You will recall that she annoyed the blazes out of the former Rumsfeld by admitting to an audience of beautiful Old Euros that "we" -- meaning largely the SECDEF rather than herself -- had committed "thousands of tactical errors" in neo- Iraq. However , "we" -- meaning the militant Republicans en masse -- meant well, and therefore History can not possibly condemn.
That is apparently the sort of mental gymnastics that Mr. Badger refers to as "technical errors of implementation" and, substituting the now Levantines for Prince Posterity hereafter, that he hesitates to belittle. Oh, well, de gustibus . . . .
My own taste hesitates not at all, but more importantly, is there not a factual mistake around here somewhere, or at least an ambiguity of words? He speaks of his aliens "appreciating" American motives, which could mean either celebrating the probity of them (as Dr. Rice undoubtedly had in mind), but it could also refer to the mere ability to state without distortion what Uncle Sam's motives are and traditionally have been, when we muck about in the Middle East, regardless of whether applause or abuse or neutral silence is to follow subsequently. In the real Arab world, and notably in Badger's own favorite subworld, that of "pan-Arab" journalism, the evaluation is usually abuse, or sounds like it, but what is it, exactly, that they abuse? And is it, in very fact, abuse at all, and not rather hostile, but not inaccurate, description? Which brings us to another of our own dogmas, Mr. Bones, that if we are not for our own stuff even when set forth without sugar sprinkles on top, we should carefully examine whether we are really for it at all, instead of maybe for something vaguely like it.
To avoid all risk of cartoonishness, let us not specify our own view of what Sam's stuff has really been as regards its matter. As regards its form, however, I believe we may safely claim that it has been (foreign) policy. Various consequences flow from that, and we have already noticed one, namely that the Legislative and Executive branches make it, constitutionally, and that "public opinion" does not. Furthermore, to speak of policy implies some rational, or at least rationalized, attempt at generality, that more is going on than a mere announcement of one of Gen. Washington's "passionate attachments." If in practice Sam always supports Ruritania and never supports Paflagonia, there must in theory be more to the lopsidedness than arbitrarily picking which team to root for. If it is policy that leads to such an asymmetry, then Sam's stuff can never be justified by claiming "Ruritania is always right," but at most only with "Ruritania has always been right so far," accompanied by some really independent account of what "right" is that does not mention Ruritania by name.
Without being more concrete than that, we may detect two problem areas in Mr. Badger's sermonette, it seems to me:
(1) He, along with most of the journalists that he anthologizes from, do not properly "appreciate" the form of policy. This is a third level of appreciation still, different from knowing what the policy materially consists in, and also different from evaluating it. One may speculate, perhaps, that one reason for this failure to appreciate the level in question is that neither he nor they have any detectable ability to make policy. M. Bin Sa‘úd is entirely a different position, and so are the chiefs of the militant Republicans. Prof. Vico's use of verum et factum convertuntur did not originally exclude politics as a universal human science on the on the grounds that most of us can no more make a foreign policy than we can make a helicopter, and Prof. Collingwood assumed that evrybody who took an interest could have true historical knowledge, in his special idealist sense, of what Julius Caesar did, even though we are neither identical with him nor endowed with anything like his degree of power. These views are not necessarily mistaken altogether, but we might look into the possibility that they might, in accordance with their own underlying spirit, be considerably restricted in their application.
(2) To trespass into mere matter, but only very slightly, might we not loosely say that Uncle Sam's Middle Eastern stuff has rather consistently aimed at stability? Exact what has been attempted to be stabilized we need not here discuss, nor whether stabilization of it is a good idea. We may leave open the academic question of whether all policy, properly so called, and simply as such, does not involve some sort of attempted stabilization as well as some sort of generalization. Leaving all these things enshrouded in as much mist and vagueness and abstraction as possible, do we not still have some grounds for suspecting that "volatility" is not only the wrong direction to look in, but wrong by close to one hundred and eighty degrees?
==
Advanced exercises left for the student
(1) Even more materially, does not this antecedent objection to "volatility" apply quite as well in the case of a M. Bin Sa‘úd as in that of a George W. Bush?
(2) On the formal side, is not Area Studies to some extent intrinsically at odds with Policy? And with Law as well? Local colour is all very well in its way, but might not the effective statesperson to some extent be required to dispense with it and deliberately decline to concern herself with certain sorts of details?
(Naturally, Mr. Bones, you and I don't think there is anything wrong with taking an interest in matters that we cannot influence, or in other people's details and ideologies that we have not the slightest intention of adopting for ourselves. Our own practice completely rules out any such objection. Nevertheless, we do not claim to be taking a political or policy interest in such questions, and we are really saying nothing worse about Mr. Badger than that he isn't either. But God knows best.)
No comments:
Post a Comment