The map and the territory

A trench line near my house.

These days, as I take my morning walk with the dog and traverse hills criss-crossed by trench lines and defended with bunkers and gun emplacements, my thoughts inevitably go to similar but much more deadly defenses that now exist in eastern Ukraine. The ones I pass have never seen active service, unless they have been maintained since the Korean War. 

Along with this sobering thought comes into my mind the Latin maxim I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion: Si vis pacem, para bellum – ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ I used to think this argument was too cynical, but now I don’t. Living near the DMZ and reading about Ukraine makes being a pacifist  seem much too dangerous. Then again, I can see we need pacifists to temper the bellicosity of human society, just as long as these pacifists recognize that its the people who are preparing to defend their country against belligerent neighbors who are giving them the peaceful luxury of being pacifists.

I’ve also been thinking about lying. One of the obvious differences between a democracy and a totalitarian regime is the power of the lie. In the latter, lying is perennial and efficacious,, while in the former, it is also perennial but will quite quickly be exposed. This is because in a democracy no one can monopolize the flow of information.

I’m thinking about lying because it seems the Russian people are, on the whole, behind or as least agnostic about the ‘Special Military Operation’. This seems remarkable, doesn’t it?  On the other hand, armed with the intellectual rigour provided by my readings in modern thought, and my copious experiences of mendacity in public and private life, I can counter that, actually, those in support of Ukraine are just as much buying into  propaganda – the stuff spun by the United States. As George Orwell wrote: ‘Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

In other words, it is tempting to demonstrate one’s intellectual robustness and worldliness by claiming there is basically equivalence between the two sides, that ethical relativism means both sides are constructing narratives.

But this is not at all what Orwell means, and to think it is is a terrible mistake. It is true that the ‘map’ is not the ‘territory’, that the language we use is not a reflection of reality but a sign-system we fabricate in order to make sense of the world. But there is a huge difference between recognizing that the map (language) is not the territory (the world) and claiming there is no access to the latter, which is what some influential contemporary thinkers seem to believe. 

There are objective facts, that is, what can be proved true or false, or can be known to have happened. A fact is the result of consensus, of  cooperation with others. Facts are the hard won consequences of moulding language so it points to  what has been  cooperatively ascertained as constitutive of the world.

This is why, as Sam Harris, perhaps the sanest man on the Internet , in his book Lying writes:, “Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.” The act of lying makes it clear that although language does not correlate exactly with what it refers to, that there is a significant bridge between the two, that the map isn’t a complete fabrication but can serve as a workable - that is to say, fulfilling - guide to the world. But that is precisely why lies are necessary.

Harris, again : “People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.”  

Lying  is official state policy in places like North Korea and China, and, as it now seems obvious, in Russia. These regimes are not interested in cooperation amongst its citizens to create a useable map. Far from it.   Their top-down models of governance require that only a small cadre are involved in making the map, and as a result, what they produce is not factual but blatantly sectarian. You could call a totalitarian regime’s relationship to fact as based on ‘performative truth’, in the sense that any information’s value lies not in being factual but in being useful to the regime.  It is based on the illusion of total control, that the ruling cabal is in charge.

Lying is necessary if a state believes that it can produce a map in which everything  about the territory is knowable, reachable, manageable, and useful. But that’s impossible.  China’s chaotic and dangerous  volte face concerning its  ‘zero-Covid’ policy, in the present context, can be seen as founded on the failure to recognize that uncontrollability is the nature of the ‘territory’, and that therefore, adaptive transformations in relation to these changes while making the ‘map’ are essential. But the Chinese Communist Party’s map to the social control of Covid was laughably at odds with the territory.

A liar believes that they can control the world through their fabrications, manipulating people so they satisfy their own needs and desires. But the desires of those they seek to hoodwink cannot be controlled, and events always run out of control. This is why big lies will always eventually be exposed. Sooner or later, people begin to notice that the diagrammatic  representation of the world they inhabit is misleading, that the wide straight highway they see on the only map they have access to is leading them - or, more likely, has already led them - over a precipice.  

The inevitability of change means a lie has a short shelf life, and once it is exposed, it will quickly undermine the rest of the epistemological edifice within which it has been nested because people will come to suspect more lies everywhere, even where there aren’t any. This is why totalitarian regime  desperately hold onto their big lies. They have to insist that their ‘map is the only map.

Orwell said: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ Unfortunately, it is also evident that people often want to hear only what brings comfort and a sense of security, and above all, what does not risk puncturing their convictions about themselves. A friend of mine spent the Christmas/New Year period in Thailand, and for a few days she was staying in a hotel next door to a young Russian woman. When my friend broached the Ukraine crisis, the Russian replied that it wasn’t her ‘fault.’

That’s true. But then, no one would want to claim that she, personally, is in any way directly responsible for the brutal invasion. However, we can justifiably argue that her unwillingness to hear what she doesn’t want to hear, to remain within a bubble of self-esteem, should certainly be criticized. Actually, I suspect she probably doesn’t believe Putin’s lies, but rather easily assimilates this recognition because she believes that the ‘West’ is also lying.

It is. But the lies are of a whole different order of magnitude.

 NOTES

Sam Harris, Lying (Four Elephants Press, 2013)

George Orwell, Orwell on Truth (Penguin Books, 2017)

 

 

The Bully (Part 1)

A still from the movie Class of 1984.

In my previous post I discussed what makes one person stand up to a leader or a tyrannical system, and other people – most - just try to stay out of harms way, or even to become facilitators and accomplices. In this post I want to think about the person who’s causing all the sorrow. It’s probably fear of the bully.

We all remember being bullied at school. I had the misfortune of going to all-boys grammar school in a small provincial seaside town in England in the 1970s that was founded on what might be called the Bully Principle, or maybe just ‘traditional educational values’. It was all about discipline enforced through playing endlessly, and often ingenuously in a sadist sort of way, on us children’s vulnerabilities. Eastbourne Grammar school in the early 1970s was intimidation and bullying from top to bottom.  The teachers (or many of them) did it, the Prefects did it, the Sub-Prefects did it, the older boys did it to the younger boys, and the bigger boys did it to the smaller boys of the same age. As a result, my school life from age 11 to sixteen was full of dread.

A bully must remind people on a regular basis that that’s what they are, which, as a typical dictionary definition has it, is ‘a person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.’ But what exactly did these bullies at school want?  Power?  Prestige? Glamour? Status? Love? Attention? Revenge? I suppose, all of the above, which means they wanted what we all want to a greater or lesser extent but are willing to share with others, or to leave unobtained. The bully, by contrast, thinks there’s only one person who can have these things, and so they must make sure that the others don’t. And the best way to do that is by keeping them down and keeping them fearful.  Vulnerability is therefore perceived by a bully as a sign that someone is inherently weak and  inferior, and if they are shown to be weak and inferior, they cannot be a threat.

Most people – let’s say the Russian populace who are not either part of the state’s organs of repression nor active protesters, like Marina Ovsyannikova whom I discussed in my previous post, the tv news editor who ‘invaded’ the news programme she worked for recently, and held up a banner saying the Russian people should not believe the propaganda – are basically OK with the limited power they can obtain by conforming with the status quo, keeping out of trouble, cooperating with others, and having a secure and good enough time. Some are OK with colluding with the bullies so that they won’t get bullied themselves, or with doing some minor bullying themselves. But a few hard cases think they can only have enough power if others don’t have any. This is because they think there just isn’t enough to go round. In other words, bullying is a zero-sum game. It’s winner takes all.

Which explains Putin, to some extent.

***

George Orwell, 1917. shortly after leaving St. Cyprian’s in Eastbourne.

I went to school in the same town as George Orwell, who was at a Prep School named St. Cyprians before going on to Wellington and Eton. This school had ceased to exist by the 1970s, but when I was recently back in my hometown I noticed for the first time a plaque marking the place where it once was.  At St. Cyprians, Orwell said he was often bullied. As a young adult, between 1922 and 1927, he was a member of the Imperial Police in Burma.  There, he had plenty more chances to witness officially sanctioned bullying, and to resist the temptation to do it himself.  

In an article Orwell wrote for Tribune, published on November 29, 1946, he reflected on the topic of bullying, which, in a sense, is his fundamental theme:

It is commonly assumed that what human beings want is to be comfortable.  Well, we now have it in our power to be comfortable, as our ancestors had not.  Nature may occasionally hit back with an earthquake or a cyclone, but by and large she is beaten.  And yet exactly at the moment when there is, or could be, plenty of everything for everybody, nearly our whole energies have to be taken up in trying to grab territories, markets and raw materials from one another.  Exactly at the moment when wealth might be so generally diffused that no government need fear serious opposition, political liberty is declared to be impossible and half the world is ruled by secret police forces.  Exactly at the moment when superstition crumbles and a rational attitude towards the universe becomes feasible, the right to think one’s own thoughts is denied as never before.  The fact is that human beings only started fighting one another in earnest when there was no longer anything to fight about.

He concluded:

The desire for pure power seems to be much more dominant than the desire for wealth.  This has often been pointed out, but curiously enough the desire for power seems to be taken for granted as a natural instinct, equally prevalent in all ages, like the desire for food.  Actually it is no more natural, in the sense of being biologically necessary, than drunkenness or gambling.  And if it has reached new levels of lunacy in our own age, as I think it has, then the question becomes:  What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others?  If we could answer that question—seldom asked, never followed up—there might occasionally be a bit of good news on the front page of your morning paper.

This is an excellent question to ask. “What is the special quality in modern life that makes a major human motive out of the impulse to bully others?”  Why is “pure power” so appealing? Is modern life really especially prone to idolizing ‘pure power’, thereby also idolizing those who achieve and maintain it? Is Nietzsche’s vision of the master/slave relationship, and his admiration for the master (which the Nazis found especially appealing) a prognosis of human nature in general, or was he diagnosing the symptoms of a specifically modern sickness, as Orwell suggests? Are we talking about a fundamental human weakness for power, and of a weakness of the weak for the powerful who oppress them, or some modern perversion?  

Of course, as Nietzsche knew very well, it’s misleading to talk about ‘human nature’ as if it’s  something fixed and essential. We are socially constructed. The raw material of our biological nature places limits on the range of this construction, but it doesn’t fully determine what we end up being. There’s a kind of feedback loop in which a society reinforces certain preferential traits, and often these are very far removed from what Evolution has in mind. Think of religion and ideology. These do not simply mirror the apparently pristine state of human nature. They are social constructions that feed on themselves, and this leads to weird and grotesque versions of what ‘human nature’ is. Take the God of the Old Testament, for instance. He’s certainly not something that Evolutionary theory would expect to appear.  Or, take Kimilsungism-kimjongilism, the reigning creed in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea…….

So, is Orwell correct in thinking that modern society is especially prone to idolizing the bully? It must have looked like that in 1946. But surely less so in 1946 than in 1940. After all, the Allies had just defeated Hitler, the ace bully on the Western block. True, Stalin was very much still there. In fact, the Cold War was just getting under way, and China was about to get its very own super-bully. But shouldn’t the fact that an alliance of liberal democracies thoroughly defeated totalitarian Germany and Japan - with, it has to be added, quite a lot of help from Stalinist Russia - suggest that things were not as bleak as Orwell thought, certainly not as bleak as the novel he was soon to write, Nineteen Eighty-Four, makes out: a dystopian vision captured by the harrowing words of O’Brian: “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”? If this is really true, then there is surely no hope at all that we can successfully oppose the Bully Principle, or at least minimize the damage done.  

There are plenty of examples from the present day to suggest Orwell is correct. Russia, for instance.

And yet…..

History shows that humans have always grudgingly admired might. After all, in less civilized times, ‘might was right,’ and you’d have been dumb not to respect it. And old habits die slowly. Very slowly. Over millennia.

The point Orwell is making, however, it that this behaviour, or more significantly, people’s respect for it, may have made sound if regrettable sense in the past, but in modern times had become much less essential, and therefore a seeming anomaly. Orwell couldn’t understand why it is that a society that has managed to gain such secure levels of comfort and control over nature would still wants to idolize the archaic bully.

Maybe the cult of the bully is a negative consequence of the Enlightenment’s declaration that everyone is born free and equal. Ideally, this is a wonderful vision of social justice in the future. But it could also be a recipe for social injustice. It could make someone think that life really is a zero-sum game. If there are no traditional hierarchies serving as entrenched checks and balances, then it really is a case of if you don’t stop others having the pie there won’t be any left. The individual within a competitive meritocratic system  sees a level playing field in which the most ruthless are the winners.

***

The majority of people do not “habitually seek to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable.” After all, it’s hard work, and likely to end in tears – the bully’s own, as well as the vulnerable’s  – because if bullying is a zero-sum game, then logically speaking, it’s only a matter of time before someone else grabs your pie.

There are many ways to theorize or explain why some people think life is just winners and losers. Psychologists point to the childhood of a bully, and argue that a cruel father or mother, or cruel siblings or relatives, or the wrong choice of friend, or sadistic teachers, set in train the compulsion to repeat the traumatic experience of being powerless and dealing with it in the same way that you were once dealt with. Sociologists refer to environmental  conditions of deprivation or alienation, or conditions that in one way or another encourage bullying. But there is no overarching explanation for why bullies are bullies in general, or of why a few people perceive powerlessness as caused by a finite amount of  a resource that is non-shareable.

But with a Russian arch bully currently grabbing headlines, one might feel like asking if there is something specifically about Russians - or certain peoples - that makes them prone to idolize bully-types? It’s a risky question, as it suggests there’s an essential ‘Russian-ness’ to be analyzed. But there isn’t. Peoples’ societies evolve. For example, none of the liberal democracies have always been liberal democracies, of course. The places where they are now more or less well established were previously ruled by fairly freely-operating bullies: absolute monarchs, for instance.

Sources:

George Orwell, ‘The Impulse to Bully Others’, Tribune, 29 November 1946. http://alexpeak.com/twr/titbo/

‘Class of 1984’ photo: https://reelrundown.com/movies/The-Top-10-Best-High-School-Gang-Films

Orwell photo: https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/engelsineastbourne/2020/11/16/george-orwell-and-st-cyprians-school/

War and Peace

Driving past the DMZ on the Ja-yuro - the Freedom Highway. Along a stretch of about 3 miles, one can actually look across the estuary toward North Korea itself.

In a previous post (September 28, 2020) I discussed the Roman General Flavius Vegetius Renatus dictum, ‘Si vis pacem, parabellum” -  “If you want peace, prepare for war. “ My home, a few miles from the DMZ,  provides exemplary evidence that this is sound but sad advice. War between the two Koreas has so far been avoided, and peace has reigned precariously here for almost seventy years largely thanks to military deterrence.

Now, suddenly, thanks to the war in Ukraine, the awful truth of the General’s dictum has been brutally rammed home once again. 

“War is the father of all things” (Heraclitus). “Only the dead have seen the end of war” (Plato).  For the people of the ancient world - actually, for pretty much the whole of human history - war was a fact of life, even a glorious fact of life, insofar as the ideal of the warrior is so important for patriarchal societies. But for us, it is not. By ‘us’, I mean the amazingly privileged people living in those societies an parts of the world that have not experienced warfare for decades. As a boy growing up in England, I spent a huge amount of time and energy on what, in retrospect, I understand was getting acquainted with the ‘warrior’ archetype so as to define myself as a ‘male.’ I played with toy guns, read war comics. One day, I recall I went to visit my best friend, a girl named Mary. I must have been about seven years old, and it had recently dawned on me that boys weren’t supposed to have girl best friends. So, I took my toy revolver along with me, and pulling it out in front of Mary, said ‘You don’t want to play with this, do you?” OK, Freudians, laugh at my infant self. What more obvious evidence could there be of the link between being a ‘warrior’ and having a penis. But as a British baby-boomer, I have never had to put on a military uniform and learn how to fire a weapon.  The ‘warrior’ isn’t exactly a suitable role-model for people like me – a fact that people like Jordan Peterson are grappling with, and which is a major reason why he is so popular amongst young men. The ‘warrior’ archetype just doesn’t resonate. But it is still unclear what positive archetype for a young male can take its place.

I recall a few years ago talking to a German who at the time was in his mid-sixties and so  born not long after the end of the Second World War, and sharing with him my militaristic upbringing. He surprised me by saying he’d never ever played at war as a kid. War was taboo in Germany for obvious reasons. But now, because of Russian aggression, Germany has announced a huge increase in its military budget. But as several commentators have noted, including the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQqthbvYE8M&t=3s) this is good news. The Germans are no longer afraid that everyone thinks they’re closet Nazis, and they realize they must play their role in trying  stabilize  the new situation.  Prepare for war if you want peace.

The almost miraculous fact that I have never been compelled to wear a military uniform, let along go to war, is impressed on me  almost every day here in South Korea, where all able-bodied males must do two years military service.  But living near the DMZ I am obviously even more acutely aware of the way in which peace is guaranteed by preparedness for war.  The other day, for example, we were obliged to wait at a nearby traffic intersection as a convoy of huge tanks rumbled by. We often hear guns being fired by soldiers training in the nearby bases. Every time we take a walk, we pass pillboxes and trench lines (see the photos below).

The view from a gun emplacement, and from a strategic hilltop. That’s North Korea in the distance.

As I wrote in my previous post: “the current state of so-called ‘peace’ on the Korean peninsula has come at a high price.  There may have been  no  armed conflict since 1953, but  the result of a situation in which ‘peace’ is guaranteed by the perpetual preparation for ‘war’ has been the creation of   militarized surveillance societies on both sides of the DMZ. This is obviously the case in North Korea, but who can deny that South Korea is also constrained in far-reaching ways  - social, economic, political, cultural - by the necessity of its perpetual preparedness for war?”

I am against war. Any sane person must be. But although we think we no longer live in the endemically belligerent world of Plato, Heraclitus, and General Flavius Vegetius Renatus, or even of our parents or grandparents, we are only a small way along the road towards guaranteed peace. Here are a couple of graphs:

The graphs clearly show that war is less deadly and less pervasive than ever before. For us in the west, with the terrible exception of the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, it has only seemed to happen just over the horizon – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria.  Well now, it’s happening rather closer to home, and on a potentially much more disastrous scale.

Our pacific existence has had enormously positive consequences, but also some intellectually negative ones for people like me.  For example, I can see now that when I wrote the above quote in my earlier post I was succumbing to an intellectual relativism  which too readily flattens opposites down to a state of moral parity so as to chastise my own culture. Of course, South Korea has suffered as a result of its need to be ever-ready for war. But the stance it has adopted is defensive, not offensive.  The Ukraine war makes this all to horribly obvious.  There is a world of difference between preparing for peace through defensive military action and using one’s army for offensive action like the Russians have done. 

Being a progressive and being critical of one’s own society’s many shortcomings has led to a dangerous loss of conviction. For example, it has made patriotism very difficult. But as Richard Rorty observed back in 1994 in an essay about the political left’s dominance of the Humanities in the American academy (which has only got stronger since then): “like every other country, ours has a lot to be proud of and a lot to be ashamed of. But a nation cannot reform itself unless it takes pride in itself – unless it has an identity, rejoices in it, reflects upon it and tries to live up to it. Such pride sometimes takes the form of arrogant, bellicose nationalism. But it often takes the form of a yearning to live up to the nation’s professed ideals.” As Rorty concludes: “A left that refuses to take pride in its country will have no impact on that country’s politics, and will eventually become an object of contempt.”

In 1941 at a low point in the war against Hitler, George Orwell penned an essay entitled ‘England, Your England’, which begins: “As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.” Orwell reflected on what it was he loved about England - what was worth dying for - and observed:

An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face. The familiar arguments to the effect that democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism never take account of this fact. All such arguments boil down to saying that half a loaf is the same as no bread. In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions. The belief in them influences conduct, national life is different because of them. In proof of which, look about you. Where are the rubber truncheons, where is the castor oil? The sword is still in the scabbard, and while it stays there corruption cannot go beyond a certain point. The English electoral system, for instance, is an all but open fraud. In a dozen obvious ways it is gerrymandered in the interest of the moneyed class. But until some deep change has occurred in the public mind, it cannot become completely corrupt. You do not arrive at the polling booth to find men with revolvers telling you which way to vote, nor are the votes miscounted, nor is there any direct bribery. Even hypocrisy is a powerful safeguard. The hanging judge, that evil old man in scarlet robe and horse-hair wig, whom nothing short of dynamite will ever teach what century he is living in, but who will at any rate interpret the law according to the books and will in no circumstances take a money bribe, is one of the symbolic figures of England. He is a symbol of the strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency, the subtle network of compromises, by which the nation keeps itself in its familiar shape.

So, let’s try to remember as we scramble to make sense of and form an opinion about what’s happening in the Ukraine that half a loaf is NOT the same as no bread.