And Just What Are They Smoking?
by Wentworth Sutton,assistant vice-principal, Mitchell Hepburn Collegiate Institute, Don Mills, and president emeritus, Semiologico-Hermeneutic Institute of Toronto.
In his recent article, Peterson F. Whalley wrote:
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.Since Peterson's article is about international politics, we may safely assume, by applying his own principles, that he himself is a propagandist. And what is his propaganda? It is that the actions of states are determined by interest (I am subsuming "pandering to...domestic constituencies" under this head)..Certainly interest – or, to be more precise, the beliefs of important people about what their interests are – plays a role in international affairs. However, whether one may take a scientific approach to the study of human events or not, anyone who looks at the conduct of international affairs may easily see that interest is not the sole determinant of a state's actions.
Why, for example, is the United States the only major industrialized country without socialized medicine? Certainly socialized medicine threatens the interests of powerful insurance companies, but the countries with socialized medicine have powerful insurance companies, too. Why do they have socialized medicine while America doesn't?
The answer is ideology. Americans subscribe to a set of values which tells them that individuals should be responsible for taking care of themselves and that government programs are restrictions on their freedom. Socialized medicine is resisted because it is an extension of the sphere of government influence. In other industrialized countries the dominant ideologies favour equality and abhor the privileges of wealth (we do not find in these countries, for example, heavily armed groups holed up in the woods refusing to acknowledge the authority of government). Consequently those nations make a greater effort to provide equality of condition.
Of course, no ideology, American or non-American, is true. As Roland Barthes noted, a myth is a system of values which is taken for a system of facts. The idea that as conformist and authoritarian a people as the American should espouse an ideology of self-reliance and individuality is almost as comical as the idea that a people as disinclined as the Canadian people is to obey any law which is personally inconvenient should have come up with the idea of the co-operative commonwealth.
But what does an analysis of ideology and myth tell us about the United States and Iraq? Certainly it does not rule out the function of interest. Certainly the statuses of Iraq as a major producer of oil and of the United States as a major consumer of oil and home to major dealers in it play important roles in the dispute between these two countries. However, it is unlikely that the interests of either country are best served by their actions so far. The United States in particular has squandered the enormous fund of goodwill which other nations had for it after the atrocities of September 11, 2001 and is playing into the hands of the terrorists it is supposed to be fighting.
I am reminded of Vietnam. The United States thought it had an interest in fighting there, but obviously it was mistaken. After a huge expenditure of American money and lives, Vietnam became communist and remanins communist to this day. As the likelihood of Vietnam becoming communist became greater and greater, though, so did the dedication of the United States to the policies and actions which were making communist victory more likely. That is not self-interested action.
In a recent article, Neville E. Hanover described the United States as "the world's crazy neighbour, peering out from behind his (or, of course, her) curtains at the strange people whom the voices have revealed are plotting against him and longing for a chance to sort the evil conspirators out with a selection from his own carefully tended cache of weapons of mass destruction." While this analysis has some appealing aspects, I believe a fairer description of the myth driving not only the American initiative against Iraq but also earlier efforts to regulate foreign politics by force is that Americans believe the world should be their harem.
Americans see the proper role of other countries to be either servicing America or helping it to get service. The countries providing service are the wives and concubines, while the countries helping the United States to get service (these days, notably the United Kingdom) are the eunuchs. When a harem inmate steps out of line, what does the proprietor do? He slaps the offending woman around, or gets one of the eunuchs to. America is strong, other countries are weak, may they never forget it.
In fact, since the second world war the world has become much like a harem full of abused wives. The United States suspects that all the members of its harem (even loyal old Canada) are disloyal, and erupts periodically in fits of rage designed to bring them back into line. The United States has felt the need in recent years to chastise Yugoslavia, Panama, Nicaragua, Sudan, Libya, Iraq, Grenada, and more. While these actions are often justified as antiterrorist or anticommunist, the fact is that other measures would counteract terrorism and communism more effectively. The recent actions of the United States against terrorism have been so effective that the United States has been reduced to advising its citizens to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting in anticipation of terrorist attack.
America believes other countries should be subservient to it and that they can be made subservient through violence. Certainly a subservient nation will help satisfy America's interests, but it is not always possible to force a nation to be subservient. There are other more effective ways for interest to be satisfied. If, for example, the United States had chosen after the Cuban revolution to make Fidel Castro dependent on American advice and aid, it would not have seen its businesses expropriated and its Cuban markets closed. But it punished Cuba instead for its act of wilful disobedience.
One might argue that America's abusive treatment of the world satisfies psychological needs, and that therefore American action is self-interested. This analysis, however, runs up against a problem which Peterson so ably limned. The problem is that psychological needs cannot be conceived of in any way which allows us to determine whether or not they exist. That is, we cannot define these needs in any way which would enable us to disprove their existence. It was, in fact, this deficiency of Freudian and Adlerian conceptions of psychological need which inspired Popper's criterion of falsifiability. Psychological needs we cannot know, twaddle masquerading as policy and analysis we can.
The whole idea of interest as motive has a problem in this regard. We often do not know what our interests are, only what we think they are. Our inability to appreciate our interests is often due to psychological obstacles – an inability to admit that we may be wrong, for example. "Interest," then, is often just another mythical or ideological concept.
The interest explanation has the advantage of being reassuring. If interest rules our actions, then surely we will not do anything stupid. Unfortunately, both people and nations (and especially nations) do stupid things every day. American policy towards the middle east of course is powerfully affected by considerations of interest, but it is also powerfully affected by adherence to a state religion which glorifies the exercise of violence and power. This religion is so powerful now that Americans are unperturbed by President Bush's contravention of President Ford's executive order banning political assassination.
Also important are the mythologies of protest. The protesters who swarmed the streets of many cities over the weekend did so for a number of reasons, perhaps the least of which was a dispassionate analysis of self-interest. Many were trying to Do Good, many others were defying a powerful father figure, many others were carrying out the imperatives of the salvation fantasy of some religion or other, and so on. The role these people will play in the development of this issue will be determined in part by the values associated with these myths and ideologies.
None of this is meant to imply that the questions Peterson said we should ask last week are irrelevant. Certainly asking those questions can help to reveal things the powerful would like to keep hidden. What we have to guard against, though, is the tendency to believe that there must be a rational explanation founded on interest. The behaviour of states is as likely as the behaviour of individual human beings to be guided by the untrue, the irrational, and the random.
Believing that there must always be a rational explanation is the foundation of paranoia. Often states act foolishly. States with competing centres of power (the United States, for example) are less often foolish than those without (Iraq, for example), but nevertheless all states act foolishly at some time. Many of the escapades of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War are good examples of great powers acting like ninnies.
So in the end I recommend that we supplement Peterson's causal analysis – that is, an analysis based on pre-existing conditions – with a functional one, one based on the consequences of actions. In short, what are the likely results of the actions of the players in this sad drama? Of course, Sir Karl added a wrinkle to the functional analysis – the law of unintended consequences. The consequences of actions include consequences which were not intended and which often have an effect opposite to that of the intended consequences. For example, Brian Mulroney's courting of Quebec wasn't intended to destroy the Progressive Conservative party. Even if the United States does not carry through on its threat to Iraq, its actions so far have probably had effects which no one could predict and which may well come back to haunt us – the re-election of George W. Bush, for example.
Posted February 20, 2003
And Just What Are They Smoking? © John FitzGerald, 2003
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