Realism and Policy

By Michael F. Duggan

“Successful imperialism wins wealth.  Yet, historically, successful empires such as Persia, Rome, Byzantium, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, have not remained rich.  Indeed, it seems to be the fate of empires to become too poor to sustain the very cost of empires.  The longer an empire holds together, the poorer and more economically backward it tends to become.” -Jane Jacobs, Cities and the Wealth of Nations                

With the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, my thoughts have turned again to the perils of empire. Last night I was reading Robert Fisk’s 2006 essay “What the Romans would have thought of Iraq,” and I was reminded of discussions I had with friends almost two decades ago about analogies of the present-day world to the classical.

One such discussion centered around a generalized comparison casting the United States as Rome and modern Europe as Greece. The U.S., like Rome, can be vulgar and heavy-handed; Europe, like Greece, is more refined. We are younger as a civilization and tend to be impulsive and non-reflective. They are older and more circumspect and philosophical. We are practical, like the Roman aqueduct builders. The Europeans are more theoretical and aesthetic. We are imperial; they are a problematic confederation. Like the Romans, we love our weapons and blood sports.

There are also comparisons to be made between notable Roman leaders and U.S. presidents. Washington was our Cincinnatus—the statesman of the Early Republic who voluntarily relinquished power to return to his farm. One could make plausible comparisons of the Roosevelts to Augustus and Julius Caesar—patricians who embraced the masses as well as massive state-funded capital projects (TR was also an imperialist). One could also argue that more recently there have been presidents who resemble Sulla and Nero. The emperor that I find most compelling and most relevant to our own time is Hadrian.

Hadrian was the second-century leader who realized that the Empire was overextended and sought to preserve Roman strength via consolidation. He was a military man who was liked by his men and as emperor traveled to the farthest reaches of the Empire to visit and talk with them. At that time, Rome was the world for those in the West, and he declared where it ended (e.g. Hadrian’s Wall). He suppressed insurgencies not of his choosing in the Middle East with impressive brutality. In spite of this, he has long resonated with me as a sensible leader trying to address the empire’s most pressing problem: its own massive scale. A number of years ago I posited a parallel grand strategy for the United States based on consolidation that I call “Neo-Hadrianism.” (https://www.georgetownjournalofinternationalaffairs.org/online-edition/on-containment-and-islamism-moderate-realism-for-a-fractious-age-by-michael-f-duggan). I also keep a silver Hadrian coin for good luck.

Like the later Roman Empire, the days of U.S. military and economic predominance are numbered and the question is whether its decline will be controlled and managed or if resistance to changing economic and geopolitical realities will lead to an uncontrolled collapse.  Will the American empire end with a sensible post-globalist grand strategy of consolidation, or will it end with a bang or a fizzle?  Rationalization and denial are the twin pillars of human psychology, and ignoring realities now coming into focus could lead to a catastrophic collapse or else a dismal protracted decline and an end to the American Century just short of an even hundred.

Rather than continue to embrace the problematic role of the world’s military and naval hegemon, the United States should adopt a policy architecture allowing it to operate more effectively as a robust regional world power with capable land, air, and sea forces to match.  This would allow the nation to protect its vital interests and to meet its treaty obligations while still acting as a world leader in international coalitions to preserve peace and order and to restore the status quo in instances where the territorial sovereignty of a nation has been violated by another.  Such a role would also be an effective means for fostering the international cooperation necessary to address the unfolding world environmental crises. 

Unchecked power brings with it the potential for corruption, hubris, and an unselfcritical sense of entitlement as witnessed by policies enjoining intervention in the internal affairs of other nations.  Americans decry allegations of foreign interference with their elections yet see no contradiction in their nation overthrowing or helping to overthrow inconvenient regimes in far flung parts of the world and open-ended occupations.  The role of the world’s policeman in furtherance of an activist neoliberal worldview by interventionist means has worked against the United States.  The euphemism of “regime change” for one-sided war and the Orwellian designation of “humanitarian intervention” for aerial bombing campaigns have sullied rather than strengthen the reputation of the United States as a force for good in the world, a reputation seen by other nations in recent decades as honored in the breach.

United States military hegemony as the security and enforcement elements of economic globalization constitutes a form of imperialism that is at odds with American first principles.  As a practical matter it is also an unsustainable drain on our economy. Economic globalization has resulted in massive disparities both at home and abroad.  Both a neoliberal world economy and American military preeminence as its protector are as undesirable as they are unsustainable.  As a latter day incarnation of the Great Game, it is a distraction from more important matters like the unfolding environmental crises. 

An entire generation of Americans has grown up to see no anomaly, no abnormally in their nation bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, killing thousands of people in the process.  Several generations of Americans have witnessed their nation use undeclared wars as a basis for foreign policy.  The unintended consequence of this is an inversion of Clausewitz’s “war is an extension of policy” to a state of affairs where policy becomes a justification for military budgets and an endless gravy train for the defense industries.  Budgets may thus become drivers of policy.  Undeclared military campaigns, assassination-like drone strikes, and a never-ending state of semi-war can be used, not only to justify new weapons systems, but to provide convenient venues to test them in real world conditions.  As the demise of the Soviet Union well illustrates, economies typified by little growth and which rely on a manufacturing sector based on the production and export of military goods—as opposed to the durable goods of a healthy consumer economy—are both artificial and symptomatic of decline.

There are notable differences between ancient Rome and the modern United States. There was a brutal honesty to Roman expansion, where our imperialism is generally justified by claims of bringing democracy, economic development, rights, and rule of law initiatives. When the legions showed up in a region they said “we are here; surrender or die.” In such instances, the victims were spared the added indignity of having their deaths justified in terms of high-sounding words. I am in no way advocating Roman brutality. Rather I am saying that the dead and maimed of war don’t care a damn about the lofty motives and justifications of occupiers.

It should be noted that Hadrian’s project of consolidation eventually failed, that empire has a momentum and allure—a will of its own—that is irresistible to those operating under it as it runs course (and bad policy must run its course like an illness). Empires eventually become unsustainable and burn themselves out. Nations that embrace a role that is proportional to their size and resources tend to do better in a mode of steady state than nations that rise to a grand imperial scale and then collapse into a second or third-rate status of post-imperial proportions.

Will Joe Biden turn out to be a latter-day Hadrian, and, if so, will he be more successful than the Roman emperor whose earnest effort and namesake can still be seen traversing the hills and vales of northern England? Pulling out of Afghanistan is a good start, as is the extension of the START Treaty. But an aggressive stance toward China and Russia suggests that not only is the foreign policy Blob back, but that it has the president’s ear.

All historical analogies eventually break down; history “rhymes” more than it repeats itself, as Twain reminds us. But there is enough historical resemblance of our problematic times to others to give us pause.

Please check out my new article on the philosophy of history at the peer-reviewed journal Symposion. Link and abstract are below.

https://www.pdcnet.org/symposion/content/symposion_2021_0008_0001_0045_0077

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsymposion.acadiasi.ro%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2021%2F05%2F2021.8.1.2.-Duggan.pdf%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0dTzG9rqVWRkkLQxdBpVk6VWvR0jX-mfWztEYzhgTs6RhmXzDZO59VsxU&h=AT1IY4LGQRPUQq9BlkmUjCBR8xBx965551VqCIwds9fSIc5ldXXl4aeYS1pf9saW7_KTSwWYxzLc-rcC2N6PtKVKox4U7rp8n3-tgc72sBSV9CRrVn-kOUpKM2Y1GGbdwpw&tn=H-R&c[0]=AT1Yh_ziVosjlj0rqX-J_PTl3dH0R79s6gcwHPhYbPZ8dF6mg_-5gcpvWGoqj–sVqKdS3_jVKSJTS6WvhZN4D9soqQORvPOb6cBx-wy6UmgVkmpZeGkq21t6YKmSQYUHdbDtUdc154YGbpZ0Spv1ViahQ

Abstract: This article examines the basis for testing historical claims and proffers the observation that the historical method is akin to the scientific method in that it utilizes critical elimination rather than justification. Building on the critical rationalism of Karl Popper–and specifically the deductive component of the scientific method called falsification–I examine his tetradic schema and adapt it for the specific purpose of historical analysis by making explicit a discrete step of critical testing, even though the schema is adequate as Popper expresses it and the elimination of error occurs at all steps of analysis. I add this discrete step of critical elimination to Popper’s schema even though the elimination of error occurs at every step of analysis. The basis for critical elimination history is the demonstrable counterexample. The study of history will never approach the precision of science –history deals with open systems that cannot be replicated like experiments guided by fundamental laws.But just because we cannot know something with the rigor of science does not mean that we cannon know it better than we do. There may be no objective truthin an absolute sense, but there is a distinction to be made between well-tested and poorly tested theories and therefore between history done well and history done with less analytical rigor.What I hope to show is how our historical knowledge may progress through good faith critical discussion –history is discussion –and the elimination of error.Keywords: critical rationalism, Karl Popper, black swans.

By Michael F. Duggan

Magicicada septendecim—what the hell was evolution thinking?

The seventeen-year cicada is a large, largely defenseless insect that apparently tastes good to every insectivorous bird and animal and whose survival strategy is to reproduce in such spectacular profusion that the combined appetites of the local natural world can’t keep up with it. How does it pull this off? Born underground, it stays there in immature form living a solitary life that must seem pretty pointless even by large, solitary insect standards for an arbitrary-seeming 17 years (compare this longevity to the four-week lifespan of a housefly). It then emerges simultaneously in uncounted billions. A supreme example of a lopsided lifecycle, cicadas only live for a a few weeks as adults, scratching that seventeen-year itch in a frenzied, buzzing orgy. The cyclic hum-bug is a fascinating natural phenomenon of the Mid-Atlantic states and a few adjacent latitudes of the nation.

One can only wonder if there is a metaphor here for the human condition or if the rest of the natural world sees us the way we see cicadas: a creature that takes forever to mature, becomes sexually obsessed at the age of 17, and then joins a noisy, overpopulated swarm. On the other hand, we live longer, are global in distribution, and are arguably better-looking.

By Michael F. Duggan

I know that this is not an original idea and that I am not alone in feeling this way, but the 2022 midterm elections loom on the close horizon as ominous horsemen of unknown intent. The riders are still too far out for one to discern their countenances or adumbrate their purpose. But one cannot look at events at home and abroad without a sense of national and world-historical foreboding of what they bring.

Again, this idea is not entirely mine; a friend called yesterday and offered the speculation that the ’22 midterms have the potential to make or break the nation, and by extension, the world. Without the hoopla of a presidential year, many Americans do not even follow midterm races. And yet next year’s elections could be the most consequential in U.S. history and will determine how we address our considerable national problems and an increasingly chaotic world to include the unfolding crises of the environment.

Next year’s contests will offer a choice for the nation that is as binary as the two-party system: either a possibility of hope and redemption, or else infamy and perhaps the end of the game, the end of what Jefferson called our experiment. And as the world’s largest economy, it is likely accurate to say, “as goes the United States, so goes the world.”

By Michael F. Duggan

“Zero population growth could be enforced only by a global authority with draconian powers and unwavering determination. There has never been such a power and there never will be.” -John Gray, Straw Dogs

“Stop, or I’ll say ‘Stop’ again.” -Robin Williams’ impression of an unarmed British policeman.

If the past year is any indication, the future of crisis management does not bode well.

The first tenet of legal realism is that the law is the command of a sovereign, whether it is a king or the collective administrative estates of a modern republic.  Where the command is not enforced, the law ceases to exist.  Laws that are not backed up by force or social custom are nothing more than a kind of literature or a historical curiosity.  In practical terms they become suggestions whose effectiveness depends on the whims of the least dependable among us, Holmes’s “Bad Man.”  Unenforced laws thus rely upon the least reliable to achieve their purposes.  Anybody who has driven on Route 50 between Washington, D.C. and Annapolis on a weekend will know what I am talking about.   

In instances where a jurisdiction is unable or unwilling to enforce the law, the most aggressive and opportunistic go unpunished and dominate, thus putting those who obey the law in danger or at a disadvantage.  Where no laws are enforced the most aggressive and opportunistic people take over and are more likely to enforce their own commands with greater vigor and violence.  Where the law is enforced occasionally, selectively, or haphazardly—speed limits for example—the result will be compliance only when enforcement elements are known or believed to be present, therefore precluding a predictable and well-ordered civil society.  Where the law goes enforced or does not exist—and in practical terms, the difference is trivial—the purpose of the law will go unmet.  Such has been the case for rules governing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic throughout much of the United States.

I have mentioned these statistics before and give them again because the numbers illustrate the issue more clearly than words alone: Taiwan, with enforceable rules in place, had 7 deaths without a vaccine.  New Zealand lost 26.  Vietnam, 35.  What do these nations have in common?  They are small and two are islands.  Taiwan has a large population for a small country— about 23.57 million (two million more than Florida, which has seen 35,306 COVID-19 deaths).  New Zealand has fewer than 5 million people.  Taiwan knew from previous experience with MERS and SARS of the danger of a new and highly contagious virus.  Taiwan and Vietnam are not especially diverse and one could possibly make a cultural argument that East Asian nations tend to be more communitarian than many Western nations.  New Zealand is diverse, but the civic-mindedness, moderation, and rationality for which New Zealanders are famous seem to have been the only things spreading among its more recent arrivals.  It is the rarest creature in the world: a diverse population with a shared normative policy outlook, at least on this issue.   

The odds of large, populous, and diverse nations spread-out over numerous jurisdictions (Brazil, India) behaving as effectively as these small nations are long without strict enforcement measures.  And so, with the authority to deal with the outbreak delegated beyond Washington for the first ten months of the crisis, the United States has now lost about 577,000 of its people to the disease.  But we could have done better.  With the response now taking on the characteristics of a national effort, things appear to be improving.

The United States never fully locked down.  Instead of a coherent national policy based on best practices recommendations with sensitivity to local conditions and needs, authority was delegated to states, counties, and cities, and these ranged from the sensible to the insane, to the belated, to the sensible-but-relaxed-too-soon.  Jurisdictions where enforceable lockdowns were in place sometimes gave into pressures from powerful local business interests and reopened short of victory.  Perhaps I do not understand the mathematics of contagion, but it seems pretty simple: if you put infected people in close proximity to uninfected, unvaccinated people, you will get transmission.  This has happened three times already and, even after more than 200 million vaccinations, the numbers had begun to plateau again.  Hopefully the vaccinations will outpace the spread of the disease.  

As far as world-historical crises go, the COVID-19 pandemic—although still raging—is not of the largest kind.  What historical lessons can we take from the pandemic, the Great Abdication of 2020 and its consequences, and how might we apply them to potentially larger crises on the horizon such as those of the environment?  I think that even at this early point we can distill a few of the more obvious ones:

• Unenforced decrees are ineffective solutions to rapidly-evolving crises; half-measures produce half-results or worse, and they can actually extend the duration of the crisis.
• As with crises of international epidemiology, the problems of the environment will require coherent national solutions within a coherent global approach.  This will have to be based on cooperative nation states effectively enforcing guidelines founded on the best information.  In order to work, such an effort would require a critical mass of regions and states including Australia, Canada, China, Europe, India, the Islamic Middle East, Japan and the nations of the Pacific Rim, Russia, South Africa, the Republics of Latin America, and the United States.
• The character of the crisis must be accessed and determined as quickly and accurately as possible. Likewise the most effective possible response must be devised as soon as possible. With the crises of the environment, we will have to get the solutions right on the first try.
• Nature does not bargain.  It does care about democratic form or rights (there is no such thing as “natural” rights; rights are human constructs).  Solutions must be formulated on the terms dictated by the crisis.  Beyond an unknowable and unpredictable flexibility, the environment will not forgive us our mistakes, excesses, and missed goals.
• All solutions and their enforcement must therefore be based on real situational dictates of the biosphere, and they will have to be flexible enough to change as those realities and our understanding of them change.  Carbon generation goals based on human schedules (for example) are meaningless if those timetables are not directly reflective of environmental realities.
• Approaches to the crises of the environment will have to include both social and technological elements.
• Finally, an effective approach to the climate will require strict laws and equally strict enforcement of them.

That last point is the kicker. 

If the pandemic demonstrated anything, it is that necessary measures have to be enforced in order to mean anything.  The various responses to COVID-19 have been a test case for how the world deals with a rapidly-developing global crisis.  It was a dry run that exposed what worked and what did not work, and the initial results overall are not encouraging.   

Americans were asked to make the most modest of sacrifices—to wear cotton masks, and to take a life-preserving vaccine free of charge.  Many flouted these simple and realistic measures and some still resist.  One is left wondering if some of our demoralized citizens have a conscious or unconscious death wish or if their mindset is somehow akin to those of suicide cults.  To the degree that we are succeeding or will succeed in defeating the virus, it is because of medical technology and the more sensible national approach of recent months rather than the willingness of all Americans for shared sacrifice. If we address the crises of the environment in a similar way, we will fail.

If we are faced with a far more serious set of crises over the coming decades, and it becomes clear that strict measures are necessary, say, the limiting of every couple in the world no more than one child (in order to address the overarching population crisis), or serious jail time for improper disposal of plastic (to address the plastics crisis), equally strict enforcement will likely be necessary to make such measures work.

If an existential crisis were to appear and necessary measures turned out to be politically impossible, then it is the system and not the solutions that is unrealistic.  This is chilling in its implications and hard to write because it suggests that remedies to an existential world crisis would require the absolute enforcement of laws.  If nature decrees it, it will have to be so, unless we are content with putting rights and liberties above life itself and the life of the planet, in which case our rights and liberties will die with us.  Jefferson’s great experiment will have failed along with an even more notable experiment of evolution.

If, on the other hand, such an approach worked—with uncompromising laws and their enforcement—powerful bodies of oversight would have to be put in place to prevent abuses.  Much of a liberal democratic system could be preserved so long as people willingly made the necessary sacrifices to ward off global catastrophe.  But the sacrifices would be significant and part and parcel with a complete reconfiguration of the human relationship with the planet.  A big part of this would be to strictly limit what people and industry could take from the world, and what they could put back into it.

Even with an effort with the nearly universal appeal of continued survival, this may not be possible.  Few national endeavors were as popular as the U.S. mobilization during World War II.  And yet perhaps a full quarter of all U.S. retail transactions during the war were illegal black market purchases by people trying to beat the system and flout restrictions.¹  If a robust body of laws were enacted with a goal of implementing something along the lines of the prescriptions of Edward O. Wilson in his book, Half-Earth, it is hard to imagine how it would be enforced without stern measures and a fair amount of persuasion. 

There are historical precedents in this country for installing desperate measures in desperate times.  During the Civil War, the Maryland legislature was planning to vote on the question of secession.  If it had voted to side with the Confederacy, the capital of the Union would have been 100 miles behind enemy lines.  The vote was therefore an existential threat to the nation, and to prevent it (and other threats such as the sabotage of strategic railroad lines), Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, the cornerstone of the English common law and U.S. case law.  Lincoln’s justification was that by enforcing “all the laws but one” he could preserve all of the others.²  It was, Lincoln reasoned, a wartime measure necessary to secure the survival of the Union and thus preserve the United States.  So it would be with the crises of the environment.  As Robert Jackson warns, “without a little practical wisdom” the Bill of Rights could become a “suicide pact,”³  The implication is that survival is the first law and above all others.

Rights and security are binary elements of our system that exist in relation to each other like weights in the pans of a balance scale, a relationship that requires constant readjustment.  As with equality and freedom, they are first principles at odds with each other. When security goes up via enforcement, rights will suffer.  When people are given absolute freedom, security suffers.  There can be no final configuration to address this tension, this constant state of imbalance.  It changes as conditions changes, and thus governing is a never-ending sequence of fine-tuning based on changing social realities.  Of course, other than extinction, the greatest danger in a free country is the relinquishing rights. Once lost there is a chance that they will not be regained. 

Therefore, one of the most dangerous things a person can do is to flirt with draconian solutions.  As a rule I eschew eschatology, tribalism, and utopianism, preferring workable non-ideological piecemeal solutions and that is what I am attempting to frame here.  As Tony Judt writes in his final book, Ill Fares the Land, “If the twentieth-century taught us anything, it should have been that the more perfect solution, the more terrifying the consequences.”  There are no perfect solutions.  But there are workable ones.  The task will be to devise plausible and enforceable solutions while preserving liberalism and democracy.  To do this, we will likely be required to pursue a robust piecemeal approach with stern enforcement measures.  We will have to strike a balance, but it will have to be on nature’s terms.   

Of course if the angry extremism that is still widespread in parts of the country persists, a certain minority of Americans will not comply with necessary measures or perhaps even believe in the reality of the crises of the environment.  Fortunately, recent polls suggest that a large majority of Americans now believe that humans are altering the environment.  The now task will be to convince them of its existential seriousness as an impending reality.  Even more important than enforcement will be the general compliance with the law.

Still, some will resist strong laws addressing the environment.  With the rise of militias, it is possible that the enforcement of necessary policies will result in widespread, perhaps even generalized, violence.  It is not clear whether laws can work at all if a large minority of people will not obey them, even with the most vigorous enforcement measures in place.

To appreciate the importance of general compliance in respect to a system of laws and its goals, we need only look at the example of Marxist-Leninism.  Communism is based on egalitarianism and a presumption of altruism in the human heart.  But what happens in a nation that adopts a communistic form of government when its leaders realize that the motivations behind an egalitarian outlook and altruism are not the predominant human motivation?  In such a case, the system is not automatically self-reinforced by normative morality—the ideology is found to be at odds with other concerns of the people.  You then get compliance forced by the state.  You get the Soviet Union.

As regards the crises of the environment, I am not talking about perfection, but rather “good enough to work” for the sustainable, long-term survival of the planet and our species by strictly enforcing necessary laws while cutting back on a few notable ones.  What is the point of laws if the planet dies along with everybody on it?

What is “good enough to work”?  The New Deal was hardly a workers’ paradise, but it worked well as a program of large-scale piecemeal measures to address a serious economic crisis.  Even with a quarter of Americans flouting the law, the U.S. industrial mobilization with accompanying social restrictions also worked.  Both of these measures worked in spite of a fair measure non-compliance because the nation was still fairly homogenous.  

This time we faced a world-historical crisis and the results, other than in vaccine development and now in their distribution, were not impressive.  This time the solution—assuming it continues to work—was singular and technological.  It is dangerous to assume that technology will always save us, and there will be crises where technology will not be up to the challenge or will only be part of the solution.

The law is not morality, but as an external system of rules it stands in proximity to a normative ethos.  In order to work, a considerable majority of people must believe in the law or else grudgingly obey it out of respect for its legitimacy.  It must then be enforced for those not inclined to obey.  As regards the laws necessary to address the crises likely to face us in the coming decades, if anyone knows of a way to do this without force and the sternest of measures, I’m all ears.

Notes

1. Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns, The War, 223.
2. See generally William H. Rehnquist, All the Laws but One. 
3. Terminicello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 37 [1949].

By Michael F. Duggan

“The word hip was used in those days to mean “knowing,” not to mean what was fashionable.” -Pete Hamil

I posted a version of this short essay in April 2019 as a part of a longer piece on language and usage (I originally wrote it two or three years before that). For the past day or so I have been revisiting the essays of Norman Mailer, and felt compelled to put it up again by itself.

Present rant triggered by a routine stop at a coffee shop.

I appreciate that language evolves, that the meanings of words emerge, evolve, disappear, diverge, procreate, amalgamate, splinter-off, become obscure, reemerge and overshadow older meanings, especially in times of rapid change.  I am less sanguine about words that are appropriated (and yes, I know that one cannot “steal” a word) from former meanings that still have more texture, resonance, authenticity, and historical context for me.

For example, over the past decade, and probably going back to the 1990s, the word “hipster” has taken on a new, in some ways inverse, but not unrelated meaning to the original. My understanding of the original meaning of “hipster” was a late 1930s-1950s blue collar drifter, an attempted societal drop-out, a modernist descendant of the romantic hero, and borderline antisocial type who shunned the “phoniness” of mainstream life and commercial mass culture and trends and listened to authentic (read: African-American) jazz—bop—(think of Dean Moriarty from On the Road).¹ 

He/she was “hip” (presumably an evolution of 1920s “hep”)—clued-in, disillusioned—to what was really going on in the world behind the facades and appearances. This meaning stands in contrast to today’s idea of “hip” as being in touch with current trends—an important distinction. It was a modern echo of Byron’s being “among” the crowd rather than “of” it. The hipster presaged the beat of the later 1950s who was more cerebral, contrived, literary, and urban. In the movies, the male of the hipster genera might have been played by John Garfield or Robert Mitchum. In real life, Jackson Pollock will suffice as a representative example. Hipsters were typically flawed individuals and were often irresponsible and failures as family people. But at least there was something authentic and substantial about them as an intellectual type.

By contrast, today’s “hipster” seems to be self-consciously affected right down to the point of his goatee-ed chin: consciously urban (often living in gentrified neighborhoods) consciously fashionable and ahead of the pack, dismissive of non-hipsters (and quiet about his/her middle-to-upper-middle class upbringing in the ‘burbs and an ongoing childhood once centered around play dates), a conformist to generational chauvinism, clichés, and dictates.  It is therefore snobbery or reverse snobbery (if snobbery can be thus qualified). Today’s hipster embodies the calculation and trendiness that the original hipsters specifically stood against (they were noticed, not self-promoted).  It sees itself as ahead of the pack, but most are squarely in its middle. Admittedly, hip talk was adopted by the Beats and later cultural types and elements of it became embedded in the mainstream and then fell out of favor. Today it seems affected and corny (as Hemingway observed “…the most authentic hipster talk of today is the twenty-three skidoo of tomorrow…”).²

I realize that this might sound like a “kids these days” grouse or reduction—and I hope it is not; upon the backs of the rising generation ride the hopes for the future of the nation, our species, and the world. I have known many young people—interns and students—the great majority of whom are intelligent, serious, thoughtful, and oriented toward problem solving and social justice. They are also angry, and there is a strong current toward rejecting the trends of previous generations among them (perhaps an echo of the disdain of the original hipsters with mainstream life). The young people these days have every right to be mad at what previous generations have done to the economy and the environment. Perhaps the hipsters among them will morph into something along the lines of their earlier namesake or something better.

If not, then it is likely that the word will continue to have a double meaning as the original becomes increasingly obscure or until another generation takes it up as its own with its own new meaning. And then old dogs like me will growl about it.

1. For the best analyses and commentary on the original meaning of “hip” and “hipster,” see Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro,” “Reflections on the Hip,” “Hipster and Beatnik,” and “The Hip and the Square,” in Advertisements for Myself.
2. See “The Art of the Short Story,” The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, Hemingway Library Edition, 2.

Reviewed by Michael F. Duggan

Everybody has his or her own Hemingway, and someone else’s Papa will never be entirely yours.

A part of the problem is that I waited a year for this film.  Although it would be a overstatement to say that my anticipation for this documentary got me through the first year of the pandemic, I did look forward to it and sought out and watched the new trailers as they were issued. Biography, as a subset of history, is selective, and readers all have their own Hemingway. No account will appeal to everybody.

Full Disclosure: I like Hemingway’s better novels and stories and I consider his blend of stoicism and Epicureanism to be one of the most satisfactory replies to the modern void that followed in Darwin’s wake.  I find him to be a commentator on life of the first order.  I also like the films of Ken Burns, who, like Hemingway, has produced a handful of classics and larger number of good efforts (of course Hemingway also had some notable failures).  

Let me start with what I liked about Hemingway.  Unlike Burns’ treatments of topics with fewer contemporary images (e.g. Lewis and Clark), this one is not all just sunrises and scenery.  The collection of photos, film footage, and audio recordings, is impressive.  I was bowled over by a short clip of footage showing a young Hemingway with other convalescent soldiers and a nurse (who is not Agnes von Kurowski) in Italy in 1918.  As someone who has read a lot by and about Papa, I had no idea that this even existed. There are also some insightful observations about well-known and less obvious influences on Hemingway’s art, like the music of Bach along with more well known influences, like Cezanne. It also emphasizes the importance of rhythms in his writing.

The declarative narration of Peter Coyote is spot on (thank goodness writer, Geoffrey Ward, did not lapse into something like “Hemingwayese”).  Jeff Daniels is more than adequate as the voice of Hemingway (who did not have a good speaking voice), and Meryl Streep, as Martha Gelhorn, once again proves to be the paragon of accents. Hemingway also gives a good chronological outline of the events of the writer’s life for those who are not familiar with it.  His various books, injuries, marriages, and wars stand like mileposts in a high-intensity life that burned out before he was 62.

I also like what I took to be the film’s tagline: “the man is more interesting than the myth.”  The movie effectively shows Hemingway’s complicated relationship with the truth: the life like truth of his fiction and the omissions of his journalism, and of course, the myth, based on lies and distortions to impress those expecting to meet the legend. Herein too is a most interesting aspect of the film, the not entirely original thesis that the persona Hemingway created took over and smothered what was good in him (see also: Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas/”Instant Dylan”).  Some biographers mark the arrival of the Hemingway avatar with the swaggering narrator of Death in the Afternoon.  Gertrude Stein places it much earlier, believing that he had been ruined by the age of 25 or about the time his first book of short stories, In Our Time, appeared.¹

What the film does well, it does extremely well. Its ambiance is wonderful. The soundtrack is pitch-perfect and nails the atmosphere of the time and places depicted. The film captures the writer’s personality through illustrative quotes and excerpts from Hemingway’s own works and from those who knew him. For a subject of this complexity, three two-hour segments feels about right, and the film is nicely paced.  It is a well-crafted documentary.  And yet by focusing predominantly on Hemingway’s personality and relationships, there are important omissions in other areas.

For instance, although the film mentions the influence of the writing guidelines of the Kansas City Star on the budding reporter, it skips over the 1922 Genoa Conference where Lincoln Steffens and George Seldes taught the young journalist how to write “cablese”—a method of writing for the wire services using a bare minimum of words.  Hemingway himself references the cable style of writing and regarded to be “a new language.”²  Nor does the film mention his “iceberg” theory of writing—his most important structural/stylistic contribution to literature and the reason why he won the Noble Prize for Literature. It does quote period critics and clips of scholars commenting on his minimalist style.

The film does mention Hemingway’s admiration for Theodore Roosevelt and Jack London, but not Rudyard Kipling or Stephen Crane (another young war correspondent whose cut-down journalistic style in “The Open Boat,” reads like Hemingway and who is mentioned by name in The Green Hills of Africa),³ and contemporary influences such as Ring Lardner and other sports writers of the period.⁴  It mentions important friends in passing, but does not investigate why those who were not driven away defended him and his friendship to the end of their lives.  These accounts, from people now mostly dead, in books like Denis Brian’s classic The True Gen, shed more light on Hemingway’s frequently contradictory character than guesses at cryptic sexual references in letters and novels unpublished in his lifetime (The Garden of Eden, Islands in the Stream, and True at First Light are merely a suggestive apocrypha).

Even more important than his pared-down style is the Hemingway Code, its hero, and the Hemingway philosophy (there is a brief discussion of his outlook in the segment on The Old Man and the Sea).  Where most protagonists of the modern canon are helpless victims (e.g. the Kafka protagonist) or else are outright pathetic (e.g. Leopold Bloom, Willie Lohman, and J. Alfred Prufrock), the Hemingway hero stands in defiance, a modern cousin of the Byronic hero.  He may not push the limits of human potential like the heroes of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, but he does push back and stands up to the modern void on his own terms and without illusion.  He is a beer-drinking version of the Nietzschean aristocrat of merit. To be fair, by using so many excerpts from Hemingway’s novels and stories, Burns may be cleverly employing an “iceberg” approach of his own, letting the philosophy emerge through inference.

As much as his lean style, it is Hemingway’s outlook that explains his continuing relevance. Traditional stoicism can be construed as morally austere and life-denying. It is only valid until it crushes joy. Hemingway’s importance therefore, is not only placing stoicism in a modern context, but in showing how life may still be enjoyable without illusions. He affirms the pleasure of the physical, the appetites, and the idea that even in a world without intrinsic meaning, life may still be heroic. And he does this in the most unique of voices and with clipped impressionistic description.    

With all of the film’s preoccupation with gender and the Hemingway women, it is striking that there is no mention of Pilar, his most interesting female character and a pillar that allows For Whom the Bell Tolls to stand (the film does mention more conventional, if idealized, female love interests like Catherine Barkley and Maria as well as the thoroughly modern expatriate bad girl, Lady Brett Ashley, the thinly veiled Lady Duff Twysden).

Above all, I wish the filmmakers had spent more time focusing on his philosophy of life rather than trying to psychoanalyze him and speculate about his sexuality, as has been so often done in various decades-old debates.  This is the kind of head-shrinking and psychologism that Hemingway loathed: the reduction of an artist or philosopher by a critic or psychiatrist to his constituent parts and why he might have done the things he did. Beyond biographical trivia, why is a person’s sexuality even that interesting?  Are we allowed to like him more if there are hints in his oeuvre of a view of sexuality that is in keeping with those of a more enlightened time? Are we really that insecure and intolerant?

I don’t believe that an ability to write a plausible character of the opposite sex (e.g. Flaubert/Madam Bovary, Mary Shelley/Victor Frankenstein) necessarily makes you androgynous. It does mean that you are a perceptive and empathetic writer. Also, the wont of the filmmakers to reference so many of his comments about death and suicide makes the course of his life and its outcome seem as inevitable as a Greek tragedy or Spanish bullfight.⁵

On a side note, I found it curious that Jeffrey Meyers, one of the most notable Hemingway biographers did not appear in the movie. It is also odd that no mention is made of Lillian Ross’s hatchet job, “How do You like it now, Gentlemen?” that appeared in the May 6, 1950 number of The New Yorker, and which portrays a Hemingway already in steep decline. In a similar vein, Burns uses a long quotation of the worst lines from what is widely regard to be Hemingway’s worst novel, Across the River and Into the Trees—lines that are read aloud by Daniels and appear on the screen as text as they are spoken to underscore their rambling, cringeworthy inferiority. Like Ross, or a clever prosecutor, Burns thus allows Hemingway to hang himself with this own words. This struck me as unnecessary and mean. It inspired me to reread the book, which I found to be better than I had remembered and far better than the way it was characterized by contemporary reviews.

It is best that the discussion of his suicide was brief.  Was it purely psychological?  Was it heredity or physiological—the byproduct of hemochromatosis, a blood disease?⁶  Was it an obsession with death and his father’s suicide that he could no longer suppress?  Was it the result of his many concussions?  Was it alcoholism?  Bipolar disorder?  Was it an expression that seamlessly flowed from his philosophy of life, given his appalling physical and psychological state near the end (if a brave man like Frederic Henry could run away from a war that meant nothing to him, why couldn’t a man leave an intolerable life?)?  Was it some or all of the above?

As a realist with some romantic inclinations, I prefer to believe that when life no longer allows for any of the things that give it meaning, the Hemingway Code allows, perhaps requires, that you leave it on your own terms.  Hemingway loved hunting, fishing, traveling, drinking, storytelling and reflecting on his life, sex, and above all, writing.  None of these things were possible for him by the summer of 1961.

Finally, to those viewers who might be turned off by Hemingway’s shortcomings as a human being (“seldom has a man written so well, yet lived so poorly”), I think it is important to separate the man from the art and its prescriptions.  The fact that he could be a horrible person who often failed to live up to his own Code does not mean that the Code is bad, nor does it detract from his work or its comment any more than the behavior of Mozart, Beethoven, Byron, and van Gogh spoils their art. To be great is to be abnormal, and oftentimes the art of highly flawed people is important and pure.  Show me a well-adjusted person, and I’ll show you a mediocrity.

My reading of the Hemingway Code is that in a world without intrinsic meaning, what matters is the courage and dignity with which you face it.  Then, when you are beaten, you will not be defeated. And that is something.

So, Hemingway really wanted to be a girl, eh?  My God, who cares?  I give the film an A-.

Notes

1. See Paul Hendrickson, Hemingway’s Boat, 277-278.
2. Hemingway talks about the function of cablese in his Esquire article “Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba,” Esquire, December 1934.  Reprinted in Byline Earnest Hemingway, 177.  George Seldes tells the story of Hemingway at the Genoa Conference in his memoir, Witness to a Century, 312-313. Seldes also writes: “[l]ater he spoke of this as the time he discovered a new language.” Denis Brian, The True Gen, 37.  See also Jeffrey Meyers, Hemingway, A Biography, 94.
3. Hemingway, The Green Hills of Africa, 17.
4. Brian, The True Gen, 17.
5. This may be justified. As Norman Mailer writes, “The story [of Hemingway’s boxing match with Morley Callaghan] offers a fine clue to the logic if Hemingway’s mind, and tempts the prediction that there will be not definitive biography of Hemingway until the nature of his personal torture is better comprehended. It is possible Hemingway lived every day of his life in the style of suicide. What a great dread is that. It is the dread that sits in the silences of this short declarative sentences. At any instant, by any failure in magic, by a mean defeat, or by a moment of cowardice, Hemingway could be thrust back into the agonizing demands f his courage.” See “Punching Papa,” in Mind of an Outlaw, 169.
6. Hemingway’s younger brother, Leicester, references this condition in a interview with Denis Brian. It is unclear what he is attributing to the imbalances resulting from this disease as opposed to the shock treatment that Hemingway was receiving near the end of his life. The True Gen, 252.

By Michael F. Duggan

After more than two months in steep decline and the introduction of four highly effective vaccines, COVID-19 numbers in the United States are plateauing again. This of course is after three spikes that made the U.S. number one worldwide in the total number of COVID deaths. In some respects, the way that much of the country has dealt with the pandemic is reminiscent of how the Allies prosecuted the First World War on the Western Front.

The Great War in the west was a war of position. After an initial campaign of maneuver during the summer of 1914, the front quickly bogged down into a 450 mile-long line characterized by trenches and deadlock—”trenchlock.” The lines would barely move in either direction for four years.

The problem was not one of parity between the belligerents, but rather a disparity between modes of warfare at that point in military and technological history. The defensive, the inherently stronger mode, was given an exponential advantage by modern weapons wrought by the Industrial Revolution (repeating rifles, smokeless powder/flat-trajectory bullets, barbed wire, machine guns, modern artillery, etc.). The technologies of the modern offensive were more complex and technologically sophisticated—light automatic weapons, flamethrowers, attack aircraft, tanks—and were in their infancy or were actually developed during the war. Even if these weapons had existed in numbers, tactical, operational, and strategic doctrine was not sufficiently developed to employ them effectively until 1918. Even then, they were not definitive in securing victory.

As recent historians have observed, the First World War was characterize by a learning process: new weapons were developed (poison gas, flamethrowers, and tanks were all spawn of the Great War). New and innovative tactical and operational approaches were also formulated: the British and Germans both experimented with modern small unit infiltration tactics, and the combined arms attack that would win fame in the Second World War as Blitzkrieg were born during the First. But these measures were too nascent, too weak to overcome the entrenched power of the defensive mode. If this period marked the birth of the offensive revolution, it was more notable as the apex of the defensive revolution.

For most of the period from late 1914 until well into 1918, the war was characterized by unimaginative “pushes”—the “classic” World War One infantry assault supported by artillery hoping to punch through the enemy lines to a war of sweeping mobility and victory. Sure the generals tinkered with the formula: creeping barrages, “hurricane barrages,” gas barrages, variations in unit density, tanks used here and there, limited “bite and hold” attacks, etc., but most of the major attacks from Loos in 1915 to the great German Spring Offensives in 1918 were fairly similar. Both sides kept trying the same thing in the face of failure. So it is with so much of the American approach to COVID-19.

There was a learning process during the COVID-19 pandemic too, but it was mostly technical. Unlike the technical developments during the First World War, the development of a vaccine was quick and effective—the companies working on them got the solution (several solutions) right the first time. One genetics company mapped the genetic sequence of the virus in a matter of hours. Vaccines were produced within weeks, and were being administered to the public by December. It is one of the great success stories of medical history. But again, policy interfered.

I am not a physician, much less an epidemiologist. I am not a medical professional of any type. I do not understanding the mathematics of contagion, of vectors and trajectories of infection. And yet I do understand that if you put people infected with a highly contagious disease in close proximity to uninfected, unvaccinated people, the disease will likely spread. This is what happened: first in April, then in July, and then massively in the fall and early winter. Increases in new cases followed public celebrations of holidays and the partial reopening of businesses (fortunately the nation was spared a post-Christmas/New Years spike). Major universities opened in the fall of 2020 and then quickly shut down again after outbreaks among the student population.

Americans—a large percentage of whom seem incapable of any kind of shared national sacrifice—have let down their guard time and time again during this crisis. Some never had their guard up. Rather than bite the bullet and shut things down in earnest, the authority to shut and open business fell to the states and local governments. The result was a checkerboard approach of half measures and temporary half-results. Premature partial re-openings kept infection rates high until early January when the numbers began coming down. Now a new wave of relaxed state and local restrictions appears to be causing a plateau in the number of cases in spite of the impressive vaccination effort by the new administration. Since many Americans apparently no longer possess the kind of determination that gave us the magnificent industrial mobilization and war effort that let to victory in WWII, perhaps technology will save us in spire of ourselves.

By contrast China, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Vietnam did bite the bullet—came up with strict national policies that effectively shut down the virus. Not only are all of these nations open for business today, but their losses relative to ours speak volumes: Taiwan lost 10 people to the disease (Florida, with a population smaller than that of Taiwan has lost 32,712 to date). New Zealand lost 26 people. Vietnam, 35. If Chinese numbers are to be believed, their nation, which has a population more than four times larger that of the U.S. has lost 4,636. As of this morning, the United States has lost about 541,000 people to COVID-19. When necessary policies are rendered impossible or ineffective by the system, then it is the system and not the policies that have failed.

The offensive revolution in arms, technology, and doctrine arrived in earnest on the Western Front during the summer of 1918. But its success was mostly local in actions like the battle of Hamel on July 4, 1918 and on a larger scale at Amiens a month later. But by then the Germans, unable to capitalize on their gains from the Spring Offensive and faced with the prospect of 1,390,000 freshly-arrived Americans, succumbed to exhaustion and mostly traditional Allied attacks all along the front, rather than the decisive arrival of the modern combined forces offensive.

It is possible, perhaps even likely, that the rapidly-increasing number of vaccinations will eventually outpace contagion. With more than 80 million vaccines already administered, hopefully the plateau will not become a spike. Of course to defeat the virus, we will have to reach a percentage of vaccinations possibly in the 80s or 90s, and recent polls suggest that a quarter or more of Americans say they will not take the shots. The alternative is to reach herd immunity through a combination of injection and infection. In this case some of the non-vaccinated will continue to die (if there is no price for stupidity, then what is the benefit of not being stupid?). Let us just hope that the virus does not mutate sufficiently to produce a vaccine-resistant variant before we reach population immunity.

And so, like the chateau-bound generals of the Allied high command in WWI, governors of some states are pursuing a policy of more of the same. By starting to reopen businesses, the hope, presumably, is that a strategy that is largely responsible for the deaths of more than half a million Americans will yield fruit this time. Infection rates are increasing again in 16 states. The Great Abdication continues.

By Michael F. Duggan

The foreign affairs Blob is back.  In spite of appearances, it never really went away, and the past four years were not a significant deviation from the foreign policy course of the previous three decades.

In light of the return of a more overt interventionist foreign policy, I am posting this outline of aphorisms or tenets on what moderate realism means in a foreign policy context.  I put this sequence together a decade or more ago as a part of a much longer list of foreign policy prescriptions.  Many of these ideas also find expression in various articles of mine.  This is a short, partial list, and I may add to it from time to time.   

• Never underestimate the imperfection of the world and its complexity.
• History has a will of its own and its course cannot be guided, reigned-in, or shaped by simple rationalistic, ideological, theistic, or utopian programs. A great leader (e.g. FDR) may for a time guide a nation via a general program, if that nation is willing. Programs may not be successfully imposed from the outside, unless a nation is willing to accept it.
• Even when a leader or a nation is acting altruistically, power is the underlying currency and subtext of human interactions.
• Power must always be tempered.
• Policy and governing are about the wielding of power, even when policies, governance, and laws are altruistic, egalitarian, and generous.  There is no contradiction in this observation.
• Although policy is fundamentally about vital interests, in diplomacy, personal relationships and connections are everything in terms of making it work. A real diplomat can and should ameliorate and minimize—ideally eliminate—personal animosities and grievances that may interfere with policy and relations.
• In matters of diplomacy, never cause the other side to lose face in public.
• In spite of appearances and proximate causes, never underestimate contempt, hatred, and revenge as the real causes of war. Consult history and apply empathy in order to understand these things. To better understand human nature, also study sociobiology.
• The foreign policy of a nation should be concerned with implementing or forwarding long-term, enlightened national interests.
• A nation’s foreign policy should be rational, moderate, and non-ideological.  It should not be based on morality.
• It is not in a nation’s interest to act abroad in an immoderate way, even in furtherance of the highest motives.
• A nation should recognize and respect the legitimate interests of other nations.
• Do not dismiss the national security claims of other nations, even when they run contrary to the security concerns of your own country. These are points that require focused attention and diplomatic maturity.
• When a nation puts moral, ideological, or theoretical considerations above considerations of vital interest, it puts its own long term prospects in jeopardy.
• Historically speaking, moderate realism has produced better moral results than policies specifically designed toward moral or ideological ends.  Measured, moderate or progressive realism (but not realpolitik) are preferable to fashions and bubbles like Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, and economic globalization.
• Realism is a range of outlooks. It can be circumspect, high-minded, moderate, progressive, sensible, vision-based, and non-ideological—its defining characteristic—or it can be cynical, mean, ill-considered, intolerant, reactive, short-sighted, and unbalanced (e.g. “crackpot realism,” realpolitik, etc,).  One can imagine a scale with these as poles and innumerable degrees or shades between them.
• If a nation is a force for good in the world (i.e. a regular provider of relief programs generally not subsumed under foreign affairs), then when it helps itself, it also helps the world.
• A nation that cannot lead by moral example has no business telling other nations how to run their domestic affairs.
• Leading by example is a better basis for instruction than preaching, brow-beating, threats, sanctions, invasions, and occupations.
• Sometimes the realistic thing to do and the “moral” thing to do overlap or are identical (e.g. the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps, etc.). 
• In every geopolitical situation, history cannot be discounted. History may or may not be destiny in every case, but you ignore it at your peril.
• A broad and deep understanding of history is a better basis for policies and decision-making than economic theories and ideology. There are no guarantees of success in approaching policy, but a diplomat or policy planner with historical understanding is better off than those without it.
• An intimate understanding of a region is a better basis than formal education (i.e. an insightful person who has lived among the people of a region has a more nuanced understanding than an expert with a Ph.D. in policy or area studies with no intimate understanding).
• As with most other areas of human endeavor, in policy, there is nothing more dangerous than a true believer. More comprehensively, the most dangerous people are those who feel too much or too little (or not at all). The next strata are the sycophants and enablers, and the opportunists of the chaos they sow.
• Power, interests, and irrationality are the underlying currencies of human interaction, and are drivers of conflict.  Altruism is another basis for human behavior, but it is not predominant.
• Diplomacy should avoid the language of arrogance and stridency, moralism and self-righteousness.
• Never underestimate the importance of the personal in foreign affairs. Snubs of national leaders in public have set back relations between countries by years. That said, George Kennan believed that “governments should deal with other governments as such, and should avoid unnecessary involvement, particularly personal involvement with their leaders.” (NYRB, 8/12/99)
• The purpose of negotiation is not to dominate, but rather for both sides to achieve their respective goals as nearly as possible.
• Without equality between parties, there can be no justice in negotiations, only dictation and charity (see: Thucydides, Hume).
• Great national leaders set a sensible course and then bring the electorate around to this perspective.  This is what Roosevelt did during the run-up to the Second World War.  Lesser leaders determine which way public opinion is leaning and then get out in front of it.  The most pernicious presidents choose a bad path and then get others to follow.
• The greatest American presidents have been generous at home and tough but cautious abroad.  This suggests that morality is a partial basis for domestic policy but not foreign affairs.  
• Presidents and other officials making public statements about foreign policy should avoid manipulative euphemisms, especially when they are transparent and reveal cynicism.  “Private military/security contractors,” for example, are likely seen by people in a war zone as mercenaries (the way Americans see “Hessians” from our War of Independence).  Inaccurate or grossly overstated comparisons of other national leaders to Hitler should be avoided.  Such comparisons drive wrong-headed policies (the subtext being that Hitler cannon be allowed to remain in power).
• As George Kennan often suggested, United States foreign policy should be insulated from domestic politics, domestic and foreign lobbying efforts, and parochial considerations.  Kennan suggested an independent State Department perhaps along the lines of the Judicial Branch or the Federal Reserve.  This is because every four to eight years, U.S. foreign policy risks ideological swings (although this has not been the case since the perspective of Washington Consensus—The Blob—took hold after the Cold War).  To further this idea, the U.S. should develop, articulate, and implement a singular long-term policy vision.  It should define the interests for which it will fight.  In order to be sustainable, it should probably be the vision of a robust regional world power, and not “the world’s sole remaining superpower.”
• Policy planners must try to see the United States the way others see it and without illusions.
• The death of the Westphalian paradigm has been greatly exaggerated.  The nation state is still the basis for the prevailing world order.
• As George Kennan and other realists have noted, powerful and non-powerful nations should be afforded the same diplomatic respect.
• The problem with the Great Game is the game itself: it is a rotten, egotistical, and ultimately self-destructive contest.  This is even truer today at the dawn of the Crises of the Environment. The United States should therefore willingly relinquish its status of predominance—leave the Great Game insofar as possible—as a matter of mature, measured policy.  Simply put, the role of superpower is intrinsically undesirable, and the Great Game is a set of infantile distractions that the world can no longer afford.  It begs rational understanding why military, foreign, or economic policymakers would want to sustain hegemonic status, given its significant liabilities and diminishing returns.  The most powerful nation on earth will always be regarded as a force of oppression if it exerts its power abroad.  A nation’s military should reflect its size and resources, rather than pride, ambition, and the realities of the past.
• The desirability of the consolidation of the U.S. to a more manageable and sustainable status of a regional world power is self-evident and based on the singular fact that the United States occupies the best real estate on the planet; it is large enough to be self-sustaining and has peaceful neighbors.  It is thus exempt from the endless local contests of the World Island.  If Afro-Eurasia is the World Island (see: Halford MacKinder, Alfred W. McCoy), the Americas are the “other” islands.
• The United States should not involve itself in regions that do not want it’s help, and do not need it, or where its very presence is a destabilizing factor.
• Hostile ideologies that cannot be defeated outright should be contained.  Islamism, like Marxism, and Puritanism are examples of revolutionary eschatology.  It is nearly impossible to sustain revolutionary fervor over time, and sometimes leaving a holistic ideology alone is the best way to defeat it. Without external fuel, they will burn themselves out within a few generations.  They may periodically wax and wan, but they can be waited-out without engagement.
• As much as possible, the United States should disengage from the Middle East.
• In the Middle East, Americans will always be seen as outsiders, meddlesome interlopers, occupiers, and infidels. As long as we are in the region, there is nothing we can do to change these perceptions, and the more we try, the more obvious they become. The more we try to change these perceptions the more cynical we appear.
• In the Middle East, as elsewhere, what people say is unimportant relative to what they do.  Always watch what people do and take their public statements with a fair degree of skepticism.
• When the Untied States plays the role of the even-handed referee, and then favors one side over another, it does not fool anybody.
• Unless it falls victim to a major internal crisis, China will be the regional hegemon of the Far East. U.S. naval dominance in the South China Sea makes about as much geographical sense as Chinese dominance in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s dominance will be undermined by the crises of the environment.
• As long as there are large powerful nations, there will be spheres of interests in which their interests trump that of outsiders.
• Denying the existence of spheres of influence is the geopolitical equivalent of denying the existence of gravity around planets and stars in astrophysics. As with gravity, you ignore the existence of spheres of influence at your own risk.
• Consistency is to high of a standard to expect of people.

On War and Insurrection

• Most of the world’s problems are not amenable to military solutions.
• War must always be the policy choice of last resort.
• In spite of the rational and quasi-rational reasons for war, conflict is a part of the human condition. Its ultimate causes are irrationality and the aggressive pursuit of perceived interests.
• War is the manifestation of the behavior of an intrinsically aggressive animal.
• In proximate terms, war is the result of policy failure.  Bad leaders precipitate crises; good leaders resolve them.
• War is generally an indicator of one or more of the following: failed policy, bad leadership, an interventionist foreign policy, or a system that inhibits or precludes more effective policies.  The United States has labored under all of these for some or all of the past 60 years.
• The stated reasons for war and policy are often not the real ones, and are never the only ones.  As George Kennan has observed, the misstating of reasons is to make war and policy more palatable for public consumption and something that puts democracies at a serious disadvantage.
• As von Clausewitz famously observes, war an policy are incarnations of the same overarching enterprise of power and interest that also includes economics (finance, trade, etc.), and the law.
• War and policy can be defined in terms of the other: war is the achieving of policy goals via hostile means; policy and diplomacy is the achieving of goals—is war— via civil means.
• War and bad policy are like a disease, a syndrome: once initiated it must run its course. 
• Before waging armed conflict, policy planners should be able to answer two questions in the affirmative: 1). Can the U.S. do anything (i.e. is the problem amenable to a military solution?)?  2). Should the U.S. intervene (i.e. is this a necessary war from a perspective of vital national interests?)?
• In conflicts between the insane and the insane or the insane and the idiotic, it is best not to take sides.
• In war, the goal must be specific, well-defined, and achievable.  Both the goal and the means of achieving it must be integrated and realistic.
• A common mistake: the purpose of war should not be to kill as many people as possible, but to achieve a goal with as little destruction as possible.  
• Asymmetrical wars should be avoided at all costs, especially wars against guerillas.
• Never engage in fighting a foreign insurrection unless national survival is at stake.  It is difficult to imagine such a scenario.  
• You cannot “save” people who do not want to be “saved.”
• Invasions and occupations tend to destabilize regions they were intended to save or stabilize.   
• Civil Wars are by their very nature among the most bitter and destructive.  The best an outside nation can do is to help contain a civil war (especially one with vicious ethnic factors, such as the Balkans wars of the 1990s) is to contain the conflict to prevent it from becoming a regional war and to aid in negotiations.
• The United States should never involve itself in a conflict that is likely to degenerate into a guerilla war unless: 1). Doing so is of such overwhelming national importance, that not fighting it will be significantly worse than fighting it even with the chance of defeat. 2). The insurrection is unpopular with a large majority of the people of a nation (as with Malaysia in the 1950s and Bolivia in the 1960s).  Insurrections on islands or peninsulas or other geographical features where supplies can be cut off, are sometimes vulnerable counterinsurgency measures.                                                  If these criteria are not met then the only alternative in fighting such wars is to kill everyone in the nation in which the insurgency is occurring.  This is obviously not how a great republic should act and would run contrary to goals of “saving” the nation (a stated purpose for U.S. involvement in both Vietnam and Iraq).
• If a plurality or majority of the people in a nation support an insurrection, there is no way to reasonably defeat it (unless the nation can be easily divided along ethnic-geographical lines).
• If a guerilla flees into a crowd, and no one in the crowd turns him over, then they either support him, are afraid of him, or both. This is a most ominous sign. Likewise, if a soldier does not know whether to kill a person or help him, then the counterinsurgency (COIN) policy is hopeless.
• Budgets should never be allowed to drive policy.  Exaggerating the danger of “adversaries” should not be allowed to drive policy or budgets.
• If you are a liberal, what are the chances of a conservative talking you into being a conservative?  If you are a conservative, what are the chances of a liberal talking you into being a liberal?  The chances of you talking a Sunni or Shiite into adopting the worldview of an outsider is even less likely by an order of magnitude.  
• Another mistaken lesson: transformational warfare is not more or less successful against popular guerillas than older conventional warfare doctrines.  Just as the United States did not scrap its conventional forces after the War in Vietnam, it should not abandon all of the ideas of transformational warfare. 

On Democracy and Foreign Policy

• There is a tendency, common among Americans, to confuse or conflate democracy with liberal values and rights.  Democracy is a form of government; liberalism is a sensibility.  One is structural, the other ideological.  Although they go hand-in-hand in the nations of northwestern Europe and North America, where they originated, they are not synonyms.
• Democracy embodies a self-evident legitimacy, but it is not a panacea against conflict.  At times it is a driver of conflict and domestic violence.
• Mutual economic success in a region has more to do with preventing war than does form of government.
• Policymakers in the United States should never become seduced by their own secular holy words.  The idea of “freedom” in an Islamic nation might mean the liberty to practice their religion and customs without outside interference. To a Russian, “freedom” might mean the chaos of the 1990s.
• Governments should be judged on what they do and not on what they profess or on their structure.  All else being equal, democratic form is preferable to authoritarian regimes or governments based on holistic ideology or tribalism.  However, as many people (including George Kennan) have noted, a moderate and/or rational and stable despotic government may be preferable to a brutal, fanatical, or excessively corrupt republic.
• Democracy and liberalism exist within a tradition of intellectual history.  They are not fungible things to be cut out and laid down when and there they are needed, like carpet.
• The advice of dissidents and expatriates with only an ethnic connection to a region must always be treated with skepticism. Always beware of easy toadies eager to serve for money.
• The greatest mistake the U.S. took away from the end of the Cold War was that its own ideology was the correct one, the chosen one. If we had learned the true lesson, we would have emerged with a suspicion of ideologies, especially ones preaching an “end of history” narrative.
• A binary, either/or choice between isolation and interventionist internationalism is a false one.  Between these extremes is a wide and fruitful middle ground of limited internationalism.  This middle ground should be the spectrum of where U.S. policy should reside.
• An effective way to destroy a vigorous nation is to make it into an imperial power.
• Most empires do not last for more than a century in good health (the Roman Empire lasted longer by invading rich neighbors).
• An old saying: “When you Romanize the provinces (the world), you provincialize Rome.”
• Economic globalization is imperialism in modern garb.
• Areas that lend themselves to global and/or large-scale regional approaches include international law enforcement, military coalitions to enforce violations of territorial sovereignty, international health issues, and the global environment crises.  Neo-liberal globalization has proved to be a world-historical debacle resulting in greater disparities both at home and abroad.

By Michael F. Duggan

A few months ago, a friend of mine observed that as a historian and sociologist, Marx got a lot of the generalities of history as class struggle right, while Marx the optimist, the revolutionary (to the extent that he is one at all), fails utterly.¹  He fares even worse in providing a basis for practical politics.

My friend’s point was that power concentrates, and when it does, the newly powerful—whether it is a feudal nobility, capitalist oligarchy, or communist nomenklatura—favor their own and distance themselves from the less powerful.  It’s what people in power do.  And if an existing system is violently overthrown, the new landlords will eventually act as badly as the old ones.  You can replace regimes, but you cannot perfect human nature, with or without holistic ideology. Bertrand Russell makes a similar argument in Why I am not a Communist.²

Between the wars, Ernest Hemingway wrote that the world at the end of the Great War was ripe for revolt and that military debacle was a prerequisite for revolution.  Thoroughly defeated countries like Russia dissolved into revolution. Partially defeated nations like Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, and Italy were not too far gone to ward off utopian revolutions from the left.³  If Marx was the man of the moment in 1917-1923, then the man of the present moment and for all time is Malthus.

I knew Marxian professors and students in grad school, but I never warmed up to Uncle Karl and his righteous heirs.⁴  Their brand of moral rationalism struck me as overly selective, rigid, uncompromising, and reductive, and I saw people as being neither predominantly good or rational.  History makes no moral or rational assumptions, and, if the course of events was deterministic, it had more to do with biology or physics than with historical “laws.”⁵ The chaos of history was not amenable to the imposition of rational order.

When believers would speak to me about Marx and his interpreters, it was as if a key part of their understanding of history and humans—of complexity and nuance—was missing or else dismissed as marginal details.  They saw some things a little too clearly and other things not at all. They had latched on to a single current and made it dominant, even monolithic.  It was all so simple: the reduction of history and people to categories of economic class could explain everything and Marxism was the basis for an understanding by which all could be fixed.  The proof was all around us and apparent to anyone sufficiently evolved or moral enough to notice.

Indeed, their outlook was based on a noble human inclination to set things aright, but there was a real-world disconnect between the scholars and the subject. I came to realize that a lot of American intellectuals know a lot about Marx, but virtually nothing about how working people actually think; your average bartender or Madison Avenue adman/adwoman knows more about how the “masses” think than do most radicals with a Ph.D. As Hemingway observed, you shouldn’t write about the proletariat “if you don’t come from the proletariat.”

To the faithful, the underlying narrative of history was real and singular and Marx had figured it out.  Marxism was more than an interpretive frame for them, and, standing analysis on its head, history became a sequence of ideological confirmations.⁶  For me history was and is about irrationality and power in the pursuit of perceived interests with occasional periods of enlightenment. Economics may be one of the most important avenue of power, but it is not the only one.  History is comprised of numerous currents, dominant, complementary, independent, countervailing, and ambiguous. It should not be used as a basis to justify a singular program limited to one or another of these.

To the Marxians, history was a great morality play of good and evil, of haves and have-nots, and, like a heroic tragedy, its outcome was inevitable. By contrast I preferred (and still prefer) sociobiological explanations of human nature that dealt with evolutionary trends tens of thousands of years older than capitalist economics and subsequent commentary.  Marxism, like theistic religions, gives itself moral authority by placing blame—something Marxists seem to relish—along with causes; sociobiology attempts to describe causation as well as the basis for why we blame and why we enjoy it.

To be fair, Marx had hit on some real human propensities (we do order ourselves in terms of class, nobody likes to be a “have-not,” and oppressed people will eventually push back) which he misconstrues as historical laws.  But they allowed him to extrapolate trends that now seem to be playing out in the globalized economy—something that closely resembles “late stage capitalism” (a term Marx never used).  Again, these are just tendencies, but Marx saw them as the material unfolding of the inevitable, as do some, but not all of his latter day acolytes (not all Marxians and Marxists believe in historical determinism).  I don’t like true believers, packages of beliefs, and intellectual herds left or right; every true believer, intellectual ideologue, and partisan is the bitch of an idea and usually a faction.  In spite of their radicalism, Marxists embody an orthodoxy—they are members of a tribe of the saved frequently at odds with itself. In the real world, discord is the path of Marxism as diverging branches come into conflict with each other (see: Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky).

It is impossible to approach the world without assumptions—ideas. All analyses and observations are theory-laden. Even the most rational of us brings preexisting ideas to analysis, whether it be to the power of the ideas themselves (including rationality and skepticism) or the human authority behind the ideas. Marxists are especially wed to their ideology.

There are rackets and there is orthodoxy, and we must learn to see through the trappings of both.  Which does the greater harm is an open question. My sense is that it is the ideologues of the latter category because they are defined and driven by dogma and righteousness, and there is nothing more dangerous than a true believer (and I know that Hemingway also writes about this somewhere).

Rackets are characterized by corruption and sustained by cynicism.  A cynic can be won over or bought off; a true believer cannot.  But true eschatological zeal is difficult to sustain, much less pass down intact.  Kids roll their eyes at their parent’s earnest faith. Last year’s radicalism is this year’s cornball.  In the real world, Marxism starts off as dogma and becomes a racket.  Over generations, Marxists become just like everybody else in every other gamed-out system. The Soviet Union died of an internal collapse, a crisis of faith that had begin decades earlier. By the late 1970s there were few true believes and virtually no young believers in Marxist ideology. Thus Soviet Marxist-Leninism followed a course similar to American Puritanism.

In some respects, Malthus is even more difficult to warm up to than Marx, but he cannot be dismissed.  We must take account of him with the realization that the desire for something to not be true has no bearing on its truth.  His projections of population growth have a character that strike us as inevitable and inexorable, unfeeling and unthinking—removed from both the passions and reason.  They undermine notions of social progress and the perfectibility of human nature as effectively as Darwin’s natural selection undermines the idea of eternal values and objective morality.⁷

History has no underlying narrative, but the playing out of natural trends represented by numbers does.  Like Marx, Malthus latches on to a human proclivity, but unlike Marx, it is not one of rational tendencies but rather of biological impulses—of reproduction—and the math of reproduction outpaces the math of production.  When An Essay on the Principle of Population came out in 1798, the human species looked like it was heading lemming-like toward a cliff.

And then we caught a break, or seemed to, from another historical current.  The Industrial Revolution and its applications in agriculture put off the doom implicit in the geometrical tables of human reproduction.  By the time Malthus’s third book, Principles of Political Economy was issued in 1820, the world population was already more than one billion, but perhaps it did not matter.  The history of technological innovation for the next 200 years would be characterized by a litany of breakthroughs allowing for more and more people live without hunger.  For the time being, production outpaced population. 

But it was a temporary reprieve, a fool’s paradise born out of a stay of execution and faith in the promise of technology.  Technological progress appeared to be the savior of Enlightenment and Victorian notions of social progress.  Still, dark realities loomed.  Modern capitalism aided by technology is based on the demonstrably false belief in endless growth on a small planet with limited resources.  Eventually population would outpace production or production would desolate the biosphere, or both. Malthus, broadly construed, was right.  He just got the timetable wrong.  Technology merely delays the inevitable.  

When I bring up Malthus in conversation, people sometimes push back with numbers showing that with current agricultural methods and resources we could feed the entire world and that getting food to those who need it would be a mere logistical detail, if the political will was there. 

This argument does nothing to undermine the Malthusian position.  It is also an academic point.  Surely the dead and malnourished don’t care about such distinctions.  It is irrelevant if they starve for logistical reasons or a lack of political will rather than from a lack of sufficient production (“political will”—what eternal hope must reside in this term, as if it were a thing to be switched on or off like an electric light).  We must also realize the broader implications of Malthus: that the production of food (to say nothing of extractive activities) at current levels by current techniques is destroying the planet.  As the British philosopher, John Gray observes, with 7.8 billion people in the world “[w]e cannot tread the world so lightly” as to not trample it.  Wherever you have human beings in numbers, you will have ecological degradation.⁸

The sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson, writes that we surpassed the Earth’s sustainable capacity around 1978, and that as of 2002 about 1.4 four planet Earths would be required to sustain its human population.⁹  We are well beyond that now.

At present there are about 100 million refugees worldwide from all causes.  As thus number swell into the multiple hundreds of millions to a billion or more, successive waves (and then a continual tide) of desperate people will break over the rich West.  At that point, life for most people will resemble life in a Mad Max film, the way it already does in some of the poorest countries.

Some commentators younger than me have suggested that because the United States and other rich nations have disproportionately benefited from what we have extracted from the planet, and abused people in poorer regions in a variety of ways in the process, we should therefore let in people from these places to share in our fleeting wealth as the planet dies. 

If you believe that the world is too far gone to save, then this argument seems to make sense.  If you believe that the U.S. could still be a force for good in the world by standing apart from the population bomb, then it makes no sense at all.  To let in millions of people with no cultural connection to a country with high unemployment makes no economic sense and it will solve none of the big problems.  It also plays directly into the hands of neoliberal wage slavers who would love for the United States to become another low cost production zone.

Young people, too, are more open to ideas like socialism. I have heard some speak of a kind of spontaneous, democratic socialism as a structural panacea to the worlds problems: give people access to power, and they will vote for their clear-sighted interests.  In doing so, they will save the world.  And yet when you ask advocates of this position how to do it, they are short on answers beyond the necessity of doing so and a blind faith in something close to direct, borderless democracy.  There are no historical examples of open-border socialism, and examples of functioning democratic socialism involve small, homogeneous, highly-educated countries (e.g. the Scandinavian nations).  It is a harsh fact that past a certain healthy and desirable point, the more diverse and populous a nation becomes, the less governable, and certainly the less democratic it becomes.  An enlightened social democracy is a non-starter in a large, overpopulated, polyglot nation.¹⁰ 

In the end, all of the existential problems that face our species other than the possibility of nuclear war are the result of human overpopulation or else are severely aggravated by it: carbon generation/climate change, the loss of habitat and biodiversity, depletion of vital resources, the plastics crisis, water crises, etc.  If the world populations was 500 million instead of our current 7.8 billion, most of these issues would be manageable.

This is where we stand.  Is there a global Marxist revolution in the offing for the near future?   In the West, there is a lot of dissent in the air, but much of it is on the populist far right.  Capitalism appears to be succumbing to its own excesses, as Marx predicted, but his solutions remain as impractical as ever, and even with modern communications, there is no way to coordinate a global revolution a la Trotsky.  Even if there was, what would its supporters hope to accomplish? The violent overthrow of the existing order?  Good luck with that (the dispossessed are more likely to overwhelm it via migration), and even if they succeed, they will inherit a dying planet and not a blank canvass for a workers’ Utopia.  No, in spite of his keen historical insights, it is not the vision of Marx that will come to pass, but the apocalypse of Malthus. 

The advantage of the study of history in our time is that of a superior vantage point: we see the bigger picture more clearly and fully than any previous, more optimistic time in a similar way that an older person has a fuller idea about the meaning of his or her own life than does a younger person.  We know more about the plot at the novel’s end. 

As regards global history, this broader perspective is not an attractive one. The meaning of the human story will likely not be that of the triumph of Enlightenment reason or a nineteenth-century belief in social progress.  It is not the unfolding of Hegel’s vitalism or the moral rationalism of Marx’s dialectical materialism, the pseudo-scientific monstrosity of National Socialism or the ultra-humanism of the New Left.  It is neither the self-created meaning of the existentialists or “the end of history” dreams of globalization beyond the nightmare of the uncontrolled spread of our species across the planet. 

The larger meaning of the human experience is one of biological imbalance, an extension of the viewpoint of Malthus and fundamentally linked to his idea of population increase and the subsequent depletion of resources.  Combined with the Gaia hypothesis, we have a powerful interpretive frame for history that is more accurate than all previous models.  Increasingly, human history appears to be a catastrophic prong of natural history, a runaway project of nature and our own nature.  As our population growth continues unabated toward eight billion and beyond, and with a biomass well over 100 times larger than any other large animal that walked the planet, the human project has taken on the appearance of a natural-historical plague species responsible for the Earth’s sixth great extinction.¹¹  We are both the asteroid and its victims.

Please do not misunderstand me, I am no misanthrope—all of my favorite people are human beings.  I love innumerable of our kind and our best examples are my greatest sources of inspiration.  It’s the species en masse—including myself—and what we are doing to the planet that I loath, but cannot blame.  What is a thoughtful cancer cell or locust to do?  Sartre was wrong: Hell is not “other people,” it is the teeming swarm.

I have long hoped that humans could rise above biological determinism, rise above our own unthinking biology via cooperation, moderation, and reason.  As Hume reminds us, reason is a marginal junior partner to the passions. But there was always hope that we might curb the worst excesses of our nature and in doing so, save ourselves from becoming just another casualty of our own success.  Take a look at the world around us.  How are cooperation, moderation, and reason doing these days?

Note

1. An even more accurate account of class struggle is that of Brooks Adams, brother of Henry Adams.  He held that the law served the powerful but that concessions were made by them to keep those without power more or less content.  Over time, however, he believed that democracies tended to tear themselves apart.  For a description of Brooks Adams’s pessimistic view on class struggle as manifested in the law, see James Herget, American Jurisprudence, 1870-1970 (Houston, TX: Rice University Press, 1990), 131-134.
2. Bertrand Russell, Why I am not a Communist, 133-134
3. See Hemingway’s December 1934 article “Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba,” reprinted in By-line Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967) 178-185. 
4. Traditionally a “Marxian” is someone whose economic outlook is influenced by Marx, while a “Marxist” embraces his politics.  As originally explained to me, the former tended to be academics while the latter were actual revolutionaries.
5. See generally, Karl Popper, The Poverty of Historicism, (London, 1957).
6. Karl Popper relates a similar experience of Marxists finding confirmations of their interpretation of history on every page of a newspaper.  See Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 2^nd ed. (New York: Basis Books, 1965), 35.
7. T.R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford World Classics, 1993 [1798]), 72. The ideas of Malthus gave rise to a stern and unsympathetic kind of economic and political conservatism embodied by Charles Dickens’s character of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Given that better living standards and social factors like women’s rights actually decrease population, I would argue that it is possible to be a Malthusian progressive and social democrat.
8. John Gray, Straw Dogs (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002, 2007), 7.
9. Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2020), 27.
10. Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land (New York: Penguin, 2010), 69-71.
11. On the human biomass, see Wilson, 29.