Smoke Gets in Your Mind
by Peterson F. Whalley, dean of Grantchester College, Cambridge,
and member of the NETWork Interested In Telling-it-like-it-is
The story so far: On January 17, 2003, our blog broke the following exclusive news story:Washington -- At a press conference early today, US President Bush announced that although no smoking gun had been found in Iraq, several smoking jackets had been. In the event that Saddam Hussein refuses to hand over all smoking materials, the US Surgeon General will consider a pre-emptive nuclear strike to protect the Iraqi people from secondhand smoke.
In reply to this article, Peterson F. Whalley of NETWIT submitted the following essay which incisively and compelling examines the implications of our story. We are pleased to be able to offer it to YOU, our readers. Now read on.
As usual NIH broke the real story on the Iraq issue by suggesting that rather than search for a "smoking gun" the UN should be looking for a smoking jacket. Let's suppose that the UN takes NIH's advice and, further, the US were able to furnish photographs and videos of Saddam wearing a smoking jacket. What might this do to the "debate"?
France, for example, might say that in the light of the movie Wag the Dog it would be all too easy for Hollywood to have manufactured the evidence. Or Germany may concede that one or more photographs are likely to be authentic and agree that Saddam is wearing a jacket, but wonder whether we can be sure it is a smoking jacket and not some other kind of jacket, which although very similar to all appearances to a smoking jacket, is, nevertheless, not a smoking jacket. Nice try, Dubya, but we won't join you in bombing Baghdad.
What our hypothetical vignette illustrates is that evidence, like truth and beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder. Moreover, we bring to bear upon our judgment about evidence all that we know or think that we know. Which, in turn, is highly conditioned by the kind of culture in which we have lived.
What about Science? Surely Science can rescue us from this nasty relativism? What we call "science" is no different from any other human endeavour except in two respects: (1) the subject matter; and, (2) there does exist a separate, truly international, peer culture of people who think of themselves as "scientists". Subject matter really does matter. Ideas about physics refer to objects of knowledge that are different in kind than ideas about art, sport, human society, etc.
It would be too great a digression to elaborate this point here but let me suggest, provocatively, that the safest immediate assumption that we should make about someone who invokes "Science" with regard to any subjects other than physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy and related hybrid disciplines (e.g. biochemistry) is that he is simply a propagandist. You will be right far more often than wrong by following this simple rule.
Unfortunately, the converse is not true: it is not safe to assume that physicists speaking about physics, wrapped in the arms of "scientific method", are not propagandists. Right now, in theoretical physics, there are "string theory" propagandists, "standard model" propagandists, "multiverse" propagandists, to name a few. There is hope, however; a thin reed but it is all we have.
Karl Popper is the person most associated with diagnosing this hope and he gave it a name, viz., "falsification". Eventually, the history of physics gives us reason to suppose that some or all of these will be shown to be incorrect as result of various kinds of experimental evidence. Ah, so, "expellimental evidence" you say. What is this "expellimental evidence, honourable sir?"
This brings us back to the smoking jacket.
In effect, the peer group of experimental physicists have established a very tight convention for what a smoking jacket is and is not. And for agreeing that photographs of smoking jackets are not rigged. Substitute "subatomic particle" for "smoking jacket" and "output of photoelectric detectors from particle accelerators" for "photographs" and you have the picture, as it were. Unless you have been inducted into this peer community you simply cannot make a judgment on any of this "evidence".You need to have either understood or "bought into" or "tacitly assumed", depending on the degree of skepticism you have about not just science but epistemology, the intricate web of assumptions and evidence that allow physicists to conclude that the aforementioned outputs correspond to a Higgs Boson or an electron neutrino, assumed to be actual constituents of the universe and not mere abstract fictions conjured up by collective human consciousness.
Back to Iraq. What are we mere citizens to make of the evidence or not of a smoking jacket? Well, first things first. Who is the relevant "peer community"? At the UN it is a set of entities we call "nation states". We are not going to get very far unless we have some kind of clear and shared understanding about what we think a "nation state" is.
It turns out that this is one of the relatively few areas in which the so-called "social sciences" have contributed a genuinely useful concept, which explains why it is rarely taught at Universities and never discussed clearly in the media. Max Weber proposed a simple definition of a "state" (we'll get back to "nation") that has stood up very well; "that entity which has a monopoly on violence in a geographical area".
This is also a definition with a pedigree. Weber really just put in crisp German the principle enunciated by Plato in the founding work of Western politics (among other things), The Republic. Plato, through Socrates, asks (paraphrased), "why do people join and stay members of a society?" While acknowledging that ideas, especially the idea of "justice", play a role, the foundation of a society is a shared equality with respect to the relative impotence of the members in the face of the ability of the rulers to employ violent coercion. The idea of "democracy" is that this equality of fear is replaced by an equality in respect of various shared abstract ideas, such as, justice, fairness, prosperity, etc..
What, then, does the peer community of states, sitting in judgment on Iraq, have as a shared basis for concluding anything? This motley collection includes several states that barely meet Weber's minimum definition - most of the African states fall into this category - and not a few that are what political theorists call "liberal democracies". I submit that there is only one common denominator. As unpalatable as this may be to the citizens of the latter group, the common denominator is self-interest. Each state interacts at the UN and outside the UN as a purely amoral actor. The self-interests in each case vary but our understanding of the behaviour of states in general and with respect to Iraq in particular will never be clear as long as we insist on using moral categories.
Is this just an argument for moral relativism, for a free-for-all? No. It is an argument for making moral judgments about the actions of the states of which we are citizens on the basis of clear thinking. This is clouded further by the issue I glossed over earlier, the "nation" part of "nation-state".
Most states rely on, besides brute fear, some collective notion of "nation". Most of the problems of the aforementioned African states are traceable to colonial border-setting, which in many instances were designed to prevent national consciousness, by mixing a variety of languages and cultures.
In the liberal democracies, national identitity has been centred on language. This should not be surprising, since the political legitimacy of these states depends on a broadly shared understanding of abstract ideas, a consensus on which is difficult enough when everyone speaks the same language, and all the more so when the concepts have to be translated.
Specifically, liberal democracies rest on shared assumptions about the meaning of "freedom", "equality" and "brotherhood" (does this ring a bell?) as well as "the rule of law", "prosperity" and "democracy" itself. The stances of the leaders of these states on the smoking jacket issue should be expected to reflect their reading of their citizens' views (or, more precisely, the views of a constituency of citizens large enough to vote the leaders into office) on these concepts.
The "peer community" within each (liberal-democratic) state varies. Different groups, differentiated by language, socio-economic status, gender, hair colour, education, support for different sports teams, among thousands of other characteristics, hold different normative views about the political cultures of which they are a part and about the specific evidence on such matters as Saddam's smoking jacket. As indicated, the leaders of each state assign different weights to these views according to their judgments of who is more important in maintaining electoral support.
Of course, the information about the "evidence" that exists is mediated by "the media", a capsule term for corporate conglomerates that provide print and electronic information, non-information, misinformation, an disinfirmation, and which are themselves among the groups whose normative views must be considered by political leaders.
So, we may as well be looking for a jacket as a gun. We will act according to our preconceptions. The drama of "the second Bush Iraq war" is not being played out in terms of moral posturing or even the secondary and tertiary tactical discussions beloved of the talking heads on CNN and the like but along two dimensions: the interplay of actual states' interests with regard to power and economics (insofar as the two can still be separated); and, the pandering of leaders to the domestic constituencies that they think are the most important to their remaining in power. What are the US's long-run strategic aims not only with respect to the Middle East but also Europe and the Far East?
Reciprocally, what advantages do states in these blocks see in opposing or supporting the US? To whom are Chirac, Bush, Blair, Schroeder, etc. pandering? Which "peer community" pees highest? These, rather than the existence or otherwise of smoking, are topics that concerned citizens might discuss productively.
Smoke Gets in Your Mind © Peterson F. Whalley, 2003
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