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McKinley M.
Explaining the Rejection of Data and Intelligence in the Information Age:
The Case for Aquinas’ Ignorantia Affectata (Cultivated Ignorance)
Preface: The Situation Historically
Let us proceed in a Socratic spirit. First, there is abundant evidence of a chronic problem: in the West, and far beyond, there is a catalogue of serious failures at the elite, expert, and analytical levels of the nation state to understand the world. By this is meant that the necessary focus upon one of the most important activities of the state - the gathering of information, and the subsequent analysis of it, to the point at which it becomes intelligence suitable for informing policy, domestic and foreign - and the process by which it is subjected it to in interrogation, has not only very often failed, but failed catastrophically and spectacularly. Accordingly, they deserve a questioning which is systematic, disciplined and deep, and especially concerned with fundamental concepts, principles, theories, issues and problems. Is there too much information, or not enough information? Or is this question itself irrelevant? And the reasons these inquiries become imperative extends beyond the interest we might have in intelligence, per se, to the realm of intelligence sharing by the US (but to various degrees) with allies, friends, and partners of convenience for whom this bounty is the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the relationship. Given that it is never proffered altruistically, but always with the intention of influencing the policy and strategy of recipients, the study of US intelligence becomes ever more urgent in the realization that it is the basis for strategic action.
Indicatively, and only indicatively, in terms of publicly acknowledged failures since the dawn of the “information age,” the intelligence agencies of the United States did not foresee: the subsequent placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 (and, of far greater significance, that some of these weapons were armed and operational); the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the massive Soviet effort in the mid-1960s to match the US in strategic missile numbers and capabilities; the 1973 Middle East war; India’s acquisition of a nuclear capability in 1974; the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979; the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the same year; the rise of Japan as a major economic power, the emergence of inflation as a chronic problem of all industrial nations, and the decline in productivity of all Western powers in the 1970s; and, almost inexplicably, the striking loss of leadership by the United States in the period following the United States defeat in Vietnam. This was followed by the strategic surprise generated by the disintegration of the principal focus of US intelligence and its raison d’etre, the Soviet Union in 1992.
Post-Cold War intelligence followed suit - with a lack of warning in respect of the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 and the Indian nuclear tests of May 1998. Unsurprisingly, the sock of strategic surprises continued into the 21st: on 11 September 2001 four civilian airliners were hijacked and three of them flown into government and public buildings in the US as part of a terrorist strategy. In all between 3,000 and 4,000 innocent people were killed in a period of less than one hour. The US intelligence community - funded, in 2001, to a level of at least $USD30 billion annually, consisting in at least 39 organizations, and having access to at least 75,000 personnel, failed to foresee or prevent these attacks. The US, and the West, moreover, have since the imposition of neo-liberal globalization, failed take appropriate action in the face of its deadly and destructive consequences, and, since 2008, lived with the failure to predict, let alone comprehensively understand, the economic meltdown still under way and known popularly as the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). This last mention catastrophe deserves to be emphasized: as Paul Krugman and Robin Wells argue, its nature and dimensions were not unique; in historical precedents, they were to be found with a remarkable degree of congruency within living memory - 1970, 1982-83, and 1991:
The great financial crisis of 2008-2009, whose consequences still blight our economy, is sometimes portrayed as a “black swan” or a “100-year flood” -that is, as an extraordinary event that nobody could have predicted. But it was, in fact, just the most recent installment in a recurrent pattern of financial overreach, taxpayer bailout, and subsequent Wall Street ingratitude. And all of the indications are that the pattern is set to continue (emphasis added).1
Failure overall has been regular and across all areas of strategic importance. Disastrous political, social and economic changes have been either ignored, not recognised, or discounted. Moreover, there is a justifiable inference from these defaults that the inability to ‘read’ international and global politics arises from chronic conditions, or a matrix of causes which pre-existed the most scarring of events - those of 9/11. Whatever the reason, there is a case to answer and it must begin with a series of questions not normally asked in the mainstream political science, strategic studies, and intelligence studies literature despite the fact that they are pertinent and the answers to them are readily available and highly relevant. Indeed, the proposition is that the inability of US intelligence to understand the processes which culminated in the implosion of the Soviet Union, and the dissolution of the Cold War, were structural conditions which were evident at the time, and thus, were as compelling
1Krugman P., Wells R. The Busts Keep Getting Bigger: Why? A review of Jeff Madrick, Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present. New York, 2011 // The New York Review of Books. 14 July 2011. P. 28.
explanations of prior defaults, as they were predictors of subsequent failures. At issue is here is less that this history unfolded as it did, but more that it proceeded without serious restraint from 1962, the often-cited dawn of the Information Age.
Published research by this author has laid out analyses and arguments which attempt to explain the structural, systemic and technological inducements to the failures of the U.S. intelligence agencies as early as the 1990s2. Of course, Intelligence Failure as a general phenomenon, and the intelligence failures of, and since 9/11 have, attracted such a volume of analysis that the area of study has been transformed into a congested district. For all of that the literature continues to produce very insightful accounts which relate to may of the debacles mentioned above and add to analytical depth of understanding why strategically vital understandings were missed by the experts3. And to them must be added the problem of “too much information,” a condition given appropriate attention in many explanations of intelligence failure and one which provides a useful and partial bridge to the world of citizens in democratic polities.
Within the period of the Information Age, but considerably preceding the widespread access to the Internet, the term “information overload” - with its genus in the considerably older concept of “sensory overload” - had it’s first popular mentions in works by Bertram Gross (The Management of Organizations, 1964) and Alvin Toffler (Future Shock, 1970). Basically, the problem arises from enormous structural change in both technologies and society which overwhelms people and eventually leaves them stressed and disoriented. Within this debilitating process of transformation, analysts, decision-makers and policy-makers are simply “overloaded” by not only the increasing rate of new information and its presentation to them, but also by the magnitude of its volume, its contradictions and inaccuracies, the lack of efficient and accurate filters to filter out what is unnecessary, and finally, the lack of reliable methods for comparing and processing information of different types which might be relevant to the issues at hand. An obverse view is sometimes provided by cognitive scientists who view the overload problem as more a function of “organizational underload” - essentially a failure to understand how to use it for the same task at hand. In turn, those effected , in the
2 McKinley M. American Intelligence as American Knowing // Alternatives Volume 21, No. 1.1996 (Appendix
I), and the original paper this was substantially developed from, Knowing America: Intellectual History, Education, and Contemporary United States Strategy // Paper presented to the Panel “Quo Vadis International Relations?: Some Interrogations of the Theory and Practice of the New World Order”, 34th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Acapulco, Mexico, Session E-18 Thursday, 25 March 1993 (Appendix
II). The latter is available on request.
3 See, by way of two recent examples, Aid M. M. Sins of Omission and Commission: Strategic Cultural Factors and US Intelligence Failures During the Cold War // Intelligence and National Security, 26, 4. P. 478-494 and Shelton C. The Roots of Analytic Failures in the U.S. Intelligence Community. // International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. 24, 4. P. 637-655.
description of Ralph Saul Wurman, approach their analysis and decisions in a state of “information anxiety”4.
Embedded within these diagnoses of human failings is the obvious disposition that not all information, even information on a specific subject within international politics, strategy, and security is irrelevant; that, to borrow from molecular biology of a few years back, some information deserves the disparaging dismissal, “junk” (as in “junk DNA”). The implication is that, if a reliable and effective screening mechanism for identifying and excluding this useless garbage could be developed, then vastly improved understandings, strategies, and policies would follow. Unfortunately this optimistic outlook foundered in molecular biology on subsequent discoveries that “junk DNA” was not junk after all - indeed, it seems to have highly influential, regulatory roles which caution against its dismissal. In the history of the intelligence failures cited above, the historical record suggests that political and strategic analysis would necessarily founder for the corresponding reason that, what has so often been ignored in the past as systemically irrelevant was, in reality, influencing and encoding the future to an unimaginable degree.
An example of the magnitude of this problem might be illustrated by the conditions under which one of the most venerated theories of modern neo-classical economics - one which informs economic strategy and policy in the neo-liberal world - can exist: the theory of competitive general equilibrium. Decades after the 1933 findings of John von Neumann on the mathematical validity of the assumptions required by the theory, Kenneth Arrow, and subsequently Roy Radner explored its implications and concluded that “everyone in the economy needs to have an infinite amount of computational capacity - not just access to a Cray super-computer, but literally an infinite amount of capacity” (emphasis added). Radner, therefore, concluded that the theory of competitive general equilibrium “is strained to the limit by the problem of choice of information. It breaks down completely in that the face of limits on the ability of agents to compute optimal strategies5”.
The Worsening Situation: 2009-2012
If it is the case that expectations of analytical accuracy in intelligence are necessarily linked to what is accepted, or tolerated at the level of national educational standards, then the prospect is bleak.Providing a comprehensive catalogue of indications and events would eventually become a gratuitous exercise so, in the hope that a few examples might suffice for the purposes of the general argument, a modicum follows on just two issues of global
4 See Wurman R. S. Information Anxiety. Doubleday, 1989 / Information Anxiety 2 Que, 2000.
5Ormerod P. The Death of Economics. London, 1994. P. 89.
strategic significance and extended media coverage, but undoubtedly it is aided and abetted by the pronouncements of the Republican Party’s presidential hopefuls:
On Banks and the GFC: In 2009, 63 U.S. banks receiving U.S. federal bailout funds missed at least one interest payment to the government while all banks, in the same period, were estimated to have charged their customers in excess of $USD39 Billion in overdraft fees. The following year, the six largest banks in the U.S. paid $USD144 Billion in executive bonuses6.
In the first three-quarters of 2011, a leading Republican presidential aspirant,) Mitt Romney, had received $600,000 from employees of just the five largest banks in the U.S. In October 2011, and again in February 2012, he stated his view that: “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there7”.
On the Iranian Nuclear Imbroglio: When, in February 2012, during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, on the basis of the best intelligence the U.S. has acquired over several years, repeated that there were “certain things” the Iranian Government had “not yet done, and had not done for some time” to indicate they were proceeding to a nuclear weapons capability, Senator Lindsey Graham’s riposte was, without providing any evidence whatsoever, that the opposite was true8.
The previous month, during the Iowa Caucuses (in which 30,000 Iowans voted for him), another Republican, Rick Santorum, disclosed that, if he was to be elected President, he would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities unless they were opened for international arms inspectors - this in spite of the fact that inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency have been monitoring every element of programmes using nuclear materials in Iran, and with full cooperation of the
6 U.S. Department of the Treasury and Moebs Services, Inc. as reported in Harper’s Index // Harper’s Magazine. April 2010. Pp. 13, 82; also Jones V. Bank settlement: $25B Down, $675B to Go // Reader Supported News. URL: readersupportednews.org/opinion2/279-82/9920-focus-bank-settlement-25b-down-675b-to-go (accessed March 7, 2012).
7Britney, When Mitt Says, ‘I’m Not Concerned About the Very Poor,’ It’s Not a Slip-Up. He Said It Before // Truthout. URL: www.truth-out.org/print/12110 (accessed February 2, 2012); and Britney, Romney Collects More in Donations From the Five Biggest Banks Than All Other candidates Combined // Truthout. URL: www.truth-out.org/print/11941 (accessed February 2, 2012).
8Clifton E. Graham Doesn’t Believe Clapper; ‘I’m Very Convinced’ Iran Is Building Nuclear Weapons // Information Clearing House. URL: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30556.htm (accessed February 17, 2012).
Iranian Government, for years9. Santorum subsequently told the people of Missouri that, once Iran had a nuclear weapon it would pose a threat to even that state10.
During the same event, Minnesota Congresswoman, Michele Bachmann, stated that, if she was President, she would, “do whatever it takes,” to convince Iran not to develop nuclear weapons: this included a blockade of Iran - not only an act of war, but almost certainly illegal - deploying Patriot missiles, and other weapons systems in the U.S. and the Middle East, and putting U.S. ballistic missiles on standby (presumably as a precursor to launching them)11.
To emphasize, these are vignettes, but they raise a disturbing quandary: while they are, thankfully, far removed from the realm of the intelligence analytical agencies, they are, tragically, within the realm of issues which should seize an attentive public. For all of that, there has been only a lack of sustained popular outrage against they represent - a plutocratic contempt for ethical behavior and responsible democratic government, and a total disregard for facts and the need to stabilize a mounting crisis, respectively. Either the banks’ executives and the presidential candidates genuinely believe in the positions they espouse and think they will be vindicated politically, or they do not really believe them, but think that they will be vindicated politically. Tragically, it does not really matter: for some time now, and certainly for the present and the near future, both options are safe. If the processing of available and plentiful information is a criterion for dissent, then it must be recorded that neither the mendacious financial sector, nor the stupidity and ignorance of the politicians will unduly trouble the citizenry; it is politically disengaged. And dumb.
The former manifests itself in a variety of ways but a 2009 essay by Mark Slouka encapsulates it precisely. In essence, the very notion of an attentive or engaged democracy in the U.S. is a shibboleth despite the persistence of an almost intractable national image:
Here’s the mirror - look and wince. One out of every four of us believes we’ve been reincarnated; 44 percent of us believe in ghosts; 71 percent, in angels.
Forty percent of us believe God created all things in their present form sometime during the last 10,000 years. Nearly the same number, not coincidentally, perhaps
- are functionally illiterate. Twenty percent think the sun might revolve around
9 Institute for Public Accuracy, Santorum on Iran: Ignorance or Lies? 4 January 2012. URL: http://www.accuracy.org (accessed January 5, 2012).
10Strauss D. Santorum: Iran would nuke Missouri // The Hill. 3 February 2012. URL: thehill.com (accessed February 7, 2012).
11Michele Bachmann: Put US missiles on alert to warn Iran // BostonHerald.com New & Opinion. URL: news.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view.bg?articleid=1392642&format=text (accessed January, 4, 2012).
the earth. When one of us writes a book explaining that our offspring are bored and disruptive in class because they have an indigo “vibrational aura” that means that they are a gifted race sent to this planet to change our consciousness with the help of guides from a higher world, half a million of us rush to the bookstores to lay our money down12.
Thus, any expectation that outrage and sustained resistance by the general population will emerge is simply misplaced. The preferred disposition is herd-like - described by Thompson in terms of “panicked sheep,” and by Lewis Lapham as a “colony of despondent ants.” Slouka again reminds us of the sway of this scheme of things:
[C]onsider the numbers. Of the 130 million Americans who voted this past November, very nearly half, seemingly stuck in political puberty, were untroubled by the possibility of Sarah Palin and the first dude inheriting the White House...
The real problem, the unacknowledged pit underlying American democracy, is the 38 percent of the population who didn’t move, didn’t vote.
Think of it: a country the size of Germany - 83 million people - within our own borders13.
And to this must be added the regular surveys of geographic literacy among 18-24 year-olds conducted every four years by the National Geographic Education Foundation. In
2002, for example:
In a nation called the world's superpower, only 17 percent of young adults in the United States could find Afghanistan on a map, according to a new worldwide survey released today.
Sweden scored highest; Mexico, lowest. The U.S. was next to last.
About 11 percent of young citizens of the U.S. couldn't even locate the U.S. on a map. The Pacific Ocean's location was a mystery to 29 percent; Japan, to 58 percent; France, to 65 percent; and the United Kingdom, to 69 percent.
One-third were of the view that the population of the United States was between one and two billion (when, at the time it was 289 million.
This survey, in the words ofRobert Pastor, Professor of International Relations at American University, in Washington, D.C.,“demonstrates the geographic illiteracy of the United States," said. "The results are particularly appalling in light of September 11, which
12 SloukaM. A Quibble // Notebook in Harper’s Magazine. February 2009. P. 9-10.
13 Ibidem. P. 10, 11 respectively.
traumatized America and revealed that our destiny is connected to the rest of the world14”. Four years later, the results were equally dismal:
Only 37% of young Americans can find Iraq on a map - though U.S. troops had been there since 2003.
20% of young Americans think Sudan is in Asia. (It's the largest country in Africa.)
47% were unable to locate India on a map of the world.
48% of young Americans believe the majority population in India is Muslim. (It's Hindu - by a landslide.)
Half of young Americans can't find New York on a map.
One-third could not find Louisiana, and 48 %could not locate Mississippi on a map of the USA even though Hurricane Katrina had placed these southeastern states in the spotlight in 2005.
The 2006 survey concluded: “Americans are far from alone in the world, but from the perspective of many young Americans, we might as well be15”. It is significant, moreover, that these results are typical of the responses to National Geographic’s surveys going back to at least 1988, indicating that, unless serious remedial education has taken place over the last twenty-four years, the current demographic defined by the ages 18-48 is deeply embedded in the polity that is the United States in general and the digital age in particular. And profoundly ignorant.
Data relating to general education achievement standards from 2010 leave almost no room for optimism:
[O]nly 24% of the graduating class of 2010 scored high enough on the ACT in math, reading, English and science to ensure they would pass entry-level college courses16.
There are indications that this is indeed the case, and likely to get worse. A Newsweek poll published in mid-2007, nearly six years after the attacks of 9/11, disclosed the results of a poll which asked: Do you think that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks September 11th 2001?
14Trivedi B. P. Survey Reveals Geographic Illiteracy // National Geographic. URL: news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/11/1120_021120_GeoRoperSurvey.html (accessed March 7, 2012).
15National Geographic Education Foundation, 2006 National Geographic Roper: What We Found. URL: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/findings.html (accessed March 7, 2012).
16Banchero S. Scores Stagnate at High Schools // The Wall Street Journal, Education Section. August, 18, 2010. URL: online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703824304575435831555726858.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us&utm_s ource=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wsj%2Fxml%2Frss%2F3_7011+%28WSJ.com %3A+What%27s+News+US%29&utm_content=Google+Reader (accessed March 23, 2012).
Not only did 41% of Americans believe that this was the case, the percentage doing so had actually increased from 36% in 2004. Unsurprisingly, a majority could not identify Saudi Arabia as the country of origin of most of the hijackers: 20% thought they came from Iraq, 14% from Iran17. Iran, it seems, is for the United States what Czechoslovakia was to Neville Chamberlain in 1939, “a far away country ... of which we know nothing.” As early as February 2010 a CNN / Opinion Research Corporation discovered that fully 71% of Americans it surveyed were of the view that Iran had nuclear weapons, and 60% were favour of military action is Iran did not desist from its nuclear programme18. In this, sadly they are being led by those who should know better: in July 2011, the U.S. Secretary of Defence, Leon Panetta, justified the US invasion of Iraq in an address to troops in that country as part of the war against Al Qaeda, an argument made by the Bush Administration but totally at odds with his President, the 9/11 Commission, other independent specialists, and the empirical record which is absent of any evidence Al Qaeda had a presence in Iraq before the US-led invasion in 2003.
The reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked,’’ Panetta told the troops. “And 3,000 Americans - 3,000 not just Americans, 3,000 human beings, innocent human beings - got killed because of Al Qaeda. And we’ve been fighting as a result of that19.
Evidently, the condition is contagious as Patrick Cockburn reported of the VicePresident’s visit in late 2011:
Mr. Biden even tried to win the hearts of Iraqis by referring to the U.S. achievement in building hospitals in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, a city he apparently believes is located somewhere in Iraq20.
Nor is it likely that change for the better is imminent; rather, ignorance will remain the norm if we consider the findings of a survey of 17 year-old “digital natives” published in 2008 by the education advocacy group, Common Core, which begins its report as follows: Senator Joseph McCarthy investigated people who protested Fortunately, that war was over before Christopher Columbus sailed to America; otherwise, we
17Catone, J. Number of Americans who believe Saddam-9/11 tie rises to 41 percent // Therawstory. URL: rawstory.com/printstory.php?story=6591 (accessed June 26, 2007).
18 Political Ticker, 70% Of Americans Believe Iran has Nuclear Weapons: Poll // Information Clearing House. URL: www.informationclearinghouse.info/article24819.htm (accessed February 25, 2010).
19Whitlock C. Panetta ties war in Iraq to 9/11 attack // Washington Post. URL: articles.boston.com/2011-07-12/news/29765781_1_al-qaeda-iraq-war-camp-victory (accessed March 23, 2012).
20Cockburn P. Wars without victory equal an America without influence // Independent. URL: www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/patrick-cockburn-wars-without-victory-equal-an-america-without-influence-6275461.html (accessed March 23, 2012).
might have never experienced the Renaissance.
It then notes the survey reveals that, to many of the respondents, the above paragraph sounds “only slight strange” because:
Almost 20 percent . . . do not know who our enemy was in World War II, and more than a quarter think Columbus sailed after 1750. Half do not know whom Sen. McCarthy investigated or what the Renaissance was.
Nearly a quarter of those surveyed could not identify Adolf Hitler; 10 percent think he was a munitions manufacturer.
Fewer than half can place the Civil War in the correct half-century
11% thought that Dwight Eisenhower was the president forced from office by the Watergate scandal; another 11% thought it was Harry Truman21.
To these already depressing indicators must be added the plethora of studies which consistently confirm the declining levels of reading ability as measured by SAT scores, the steady decline in the habit of reading - what is sometimes referred to as ‘functional a-literacy’ - and the very high level of functional illiteracy (as measured over several decades) in the United States. While David Mindich’s study of Americans under the age of forty provides a consolidated account of their refusal to follow issues and policies which have a vital bearing on their lives22, the statistics on general illiteracy indicate only an unfolding tragedy, as per the following summary of data:
Functional illiteracy in the United States is growing at a rate of over 2 million new inductees per year into its ranks . . . Statistics show that functional illiterates:
Constitute 70% of the prisoners in state and federal prisons.
That 85% of juvenile offenders are classified as functionally or marginally illiterate.
That 43% of those with the lowest literacy skills live in poverty.
Over 42 million American adults can’t read.
50 million read at fourth or fifth grade levels.
That the total number of functionally illiterate adults increases by approximately 2.25 million persons every single year.
20% of all graduating high school students are functionally illiterate23.
21Hess F. M. Still at Risk: What Students Don’t Know, Even Now // A Report from Common Core. Washington, DC, 2008. P. 7-12.
22Mindich D. T. Z. Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News. Oxford, 2005.
23 The United States of America and the Functional Illiterates Who Contribute to Its Decline // SlowDecline’s
Parsing the regular, large-scale assessments conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, as many as 35 per cent of the adult population is functionally illiterate, and as many as 44 per cent literate at only the lowest level on the literacy scale; only 15 per cent are fully literate24.
From just these brief compilations, it is clear that the political environment of the United States, or any country with the same trends, is ripe for both extremist simplifications and formulations which are, to put it plainly, wrong and possibly dishonest.25 To venture a second turn, it has emerged and developed in the most strategically powerful state actor in history as, paradoxically, a force independent of the assessments and conclusions of the intelligence agencies, and thus can be appealed to for ‘democratic’ legitimation, especially where and when such appeals are cloaked with higher-than-secular values. Third, it is a willfully dangerous political environment for both the United States and the world in which it acts. And fourth, in the context outlined the new academic and general excitement for the digital / information age is misplaced. Indeed it appears more as a form of myth-subscription than an accurate description of the present and recent past. As Robert Darnton has reminded us, popular notions that: “the book is dead . . . we have entered the information age . . . all information is now available online . . . libraries are obsolete . . . the future is digital” are patent rubbish26. Moreover, the unceasing claims that information will lay the basis for the overcoming of ignorance in intelligence, of revolution in the face of political oppression, and the holding of governments to account are perhaps more deserving of Alan Greenspan’s only memorable description - “irrational exuberance” - or Evgeny Morozov’s “cyber-utopia . . . a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication27”.
The Need and the Argument
In a 2006 conference under the aegis of the Director of National Intelligence, the Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Analysis, Thomas Fingar, provided a unique
Weblog. URL: slowdecline.wordpress.com/2007/10/06/the-united-states-of-america-and-the-functional-illiterates-who-contribute-to-its-decline/ (accessed March 22 2012).
24National Center for Educational Statistics. Adult Literacy in America. 3rd edition. Washington, DC, 2002. URL: nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf (accessed March 22, 2012).
25On the chronic and widespread nature of illiteracy, see especially Kozol J. Illiterate America. New York, 1985; and on a-literacy, defined as ‘the ability without the inclination, to read, see the Librarian of Congress’ estimate in Postman N. Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble about Language, Technology, and Education. New York, 1988. P. 64, 111.
26Darnton R. 5 Myths about the ‘Information Age’ // The Chronicle of Higher Education. 17 April 2011. URL: chronicle.com/article/5-Myths-About-the-Information/127105/?sid=cr&utm_medium=en#top (accessed 19 April 2011).
27 See Coll S. The Internet: For Better or for Worse. A review of Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Knopf, 2011) // The New York Review of Books. 7 April 2011 (hereafter Coll, The Internet) and Morozov E. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. Public Affairs, 2011 // The New York Review of Books, 7 April 2011. P. 20 (hereafterMorozov, The Net Delusion).
insight into the needs of analysis in the contemporary period and with considerable candour28. In the wake of the “tragedy of 9/11” and “the fiasco of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq WMD”, he explicitly disavowed the intelligence-analytical processes of “the feudal baronies” which constituted the so-called US intelligence community during the Cold War: they belonged to a period in which change was incremental and slow whereas the present is a world in which the collection mechanisms are “vacuum cleaners on steroids” and the questions facing decision-makers have to be answered in highly compressed time-frames. The requirement is for “meaningful insight” and understanding on the one hand, and “smart and attentive customers” on the other. And all of this it should be noted, requires “a level of expertise that is beyond that of most individual analysts . . . .indeed is beyond the capacity of most individual agencies or components of the community.” Moreover, it is to be achieved by analysts who comprise less than 20 per cent of intelligence agencies’ personnel and whose increase in numbers, given the nature of the overall problematic, would not improve matters.
This situation is exacerbated by the identified requirements for strategic communication in the Obama Administration, and outlined in detail in a report from the President to the President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives on “the comprehensive interagency strategy for public diplomacy and strategic communication.” Foremost among these are two objectives: synchronization - defined as coordinating words and deeds in order that “intended audiences” will favourably interpret and support US decisions, and the reasons given for them, and deliberate communication and engagement-defined as both understanding peoples through a range of efforts, and communicating and engaging with them in order that US interests are advanced29. The demand, simply put, is for analysts that probably don’t exist, to ask questions that are currently unknown, in order to reveal accurate and integrated understandings that are beyond individual competence30.
In a single sentence, the proposition is that the pathological state of affairs outlined in the preceding pages in the United States is intentional, that the ignorance of the general population, from their years of schooling onwards, and into what should be their education, is a period in which it is not only permitted because it serves as a conservatizing force for
28Fingar T. Address to The DNI’s Information Sharing Conference & Technology Exposition - Interlink and Beyond: Dare to Share // The Hyatt Regency, Denver at Colorado Convention Center. August 21-24, 2006. P. 1-3 (hereafter cited as Fingar Address). The writer is grateful to DSc. Professor Evgeny N. Pashentsev, Head of the Communication Management Centre, Moscow, for bringing this paper, and another, National Framework for Strategic Communication (see below), to his attention.
29National Framework for Strategic Communication as forwarded to the Vice-President of the United States (and President of the Senate), and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, by the President of the United States, Barak Obama, 2009.
30Fingar Address. P. 1-3.
existing power and class interests, but also encouraged because, ultimately, it allows for force to be mobilized in their defence and expansion. Notwithstanding that people in good faith lament what has happened, it is nevertheless the result of long-standing countervailing forces that are eminently discoverable and allowed to reign. It is conceded that there might have been a time in which some of the beliefs were honestly heldbut, with the passage of time and the presence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, this tolerance becomes no more than an indulgence, a mortal abdication of responsibility in favour of willed ignorance
- what Thomas Aquinas called ignorantia affectata. The transit is from a habit of mind which, just possibly and briefly, was exculpatory to one which is, beyond doubt, inculpatory. Over time as well, and as its successes grow, it becomes a highly valued, learned adherence which is protected at all costs by lauding adherents as living life in conformity with vulgaris opinio (popular views).Its implications are well framed by Garry Wills:
Certainly in a time that demands intellectual honesty with special emphasis, to remain oblivious of the most basic questions concerning dishonesty is to disqualify oneself for serious exchanges with one’s peers - a disqualification hard to ignore, no matter how urgently one tries to blank it out31.
Wills’ concern is with the ‘structures of deceit’ in the Roman Catholic Church in general, and the Papacy in particular and that is particularly apposite because the argument which follows approaches the practices of ignorantia fectatamainly, but not exclusively in the United States, through the operations which come within an overarching security culture infused with war, and therefore necessarily include the constituents of civil religion, authorized violence, and blood sacrifice. Within their embrace the distinction between intelligence analyst, policy-maker, decision-maker, and common citizen is subject to collapse under the frequently insidious unifying pressures which they are subject to, and the inducements they are offered. In this state, information in, and of itself is, for the most part and for the great majority, irrelevant, frequently even in the face of catastrophe so effective are the structures at filtering out the unwanted, or providing diversions from it.
This emphasis on the U.S. is justified on the grounds that the U.S. has been, and remains “the exemplar of the Western model” according to former long-serving Australian Foreign Minister(and now my university’s Chancellor), Gareth Evans32. Moreover, despite the relative decline in the global status of the U.S., the appeal of its popular culture and its idealized history is not seriously diminished. Implicitly, it is quintessentially modern; at the
31 Wills G. Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit. New York, 2000. P. 9.
32Evans G., Grant B. Australia’s Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s. Melbourne, 1995. P. 6.
same time it has been described by its own political sociologists as a “religion mad” and “religion-soaked” country. Just as important is its relationship to, and history of war - a close and continuing affinity which led historian, Geoffrey Perret, to describe it as “a country made by war,” and Chris Hedges to propose that it is an exhilarating and addictive force that gives America meaning33. And it continues to lead the Western Alliance whose members enthusiastically import its cultures; thus the consequences of its beliefs and practices are inescapable for most of the world’s population. Finally, where these beliefs and practices intersect with the Information Age, the primacy of the U.S again asserts itself: it invented the internet; in so many ways it dominates the World Wide Web, and research in the English language on the Web’s political and social consequences is predominantly based on studies conducted in the U.S.
Within this spirit of inquiry it is necessary to emphasis that the attempt to inquire into the nature of security culture is beset by an immediate impediment: Western Social Science, or, more specifically, its mainstream constituent disciplines. What they find impossible to overcome is their modernist bias which, based on the traditional pillars of certainty, formal rationality (or systematicity), and the need for a “clean slate,” and in their ambition to relevance, scientific understanding and predictability, founders on custom, practice, the local, the particular, and the temporal. In this context the scientism of International Relations and the disinterest of Strategic / Security Studies in radical - by which I mean basic or fundamental - interrogation of the security culture of supposedly modern states are dispositions creating serious and pernicious defaults which almost disqualify them intellectually from any discussion of it. This impasse is complemented by some of the essential elements of security culture being so disenchanted with modernity that they are best understood as reactions to it.
The question of culture and what it entails, for example, is one which too many modernists have sought to efface by overpowering it with a distorted sense of what it means for humanity (or a minority of it) to have experienced the Scientific Revolution which followed the Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment, and to be technologically adept. To speak, therefore, of such things as the enigmatic nature and persistence of “blood sacrifice” within a specific culture is to speak not of modern but of “archaic groups” and “disturbed communities where it serves to restore peace,” but definitely not of the modern nation state34.
33Perret G. A Country Made By War: From The Revolution to Vietnam - The Story of America’s Rise to Power. New York, 1989, and Hedges C. War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. New York, 2003.
34Girard R. Sacrifice / Translated by Matthew Pattillo and David Dawson. East Lansing, Michigan, 2011. P. ix (hereafter cited as Girard, Sacrifice).
To propose that blood sacrifice is a repetitive act which progressively claims more numerous, and ever more precious victims in the world of modernity is to court professional embarrassment and marginalization and to force the critical scholar who takes it seriously into parrMsia - the action of truth-telling in which the teller begins in a subordinate position and persists only at considerable risk. Nor is it any different if the critical scholar should insist on the existence and delineations of a Totem which actually requires these sacrifices. The invitation is to return to a period too terrifying, too tumultuous and destructive:
Kings, nobles, all,
Looked aghast and strange;
The minstrel group sate in dumbest show!
Had some great crime Wrought this dread amaze,
This terror? None seems to understand . . .
I again walked forth;
But lo! The sky
Showed flecked with blood, and an alien sun Glared from the north,
And there stood on high,
Amid his shorn beams, a skeleton!35
Fortunately, “almost” is the operative term because openings can be constructed or forced in the dominant discourse by the very fact that Strategic / Security Studies are parasitic upon other disciplines and areas of inquiry. Indeed, these are normally recognised, as in the case of international politics, international law, history, political philosophy and international ethics. What is less embraced are approaches which come out of sociology, social anthropology and the study of the political significance of religious belief as integral, authentic and significant components of security culture. This paper, in the first instance, is both plea and argument: not so much for a repudiation of the mainstream discourse on the subject, but for a reorientation of the axes of its understandings so that they will be more sensitive, intellectually inclusive and politically potent
By way of a philosophical beginning, the relevant facts with I propose to start with here as undeniable are: [1] that civilization itself is founded on violence; [2] that political collectivities which emphasis self-interest and collective egoism are inherently brutal; [3] that “a nation is a group of people united by a common mistake regarding its origins and a
35Mangan J. C. A Vision of Connacht in the Thirteenth Century.
collective hostility towards its neighbours;” [4] that nationalism is, ultimately, a “community of blood;” [5] that we are all embedded in violence and, to a greater or lesser extent, benefit from it, and [6] that “government is impossible without a religion - that is, without a body of common assumptions36”. These underlie a search for, and an elaboration of that which is at the core of security culture - namely the methods by which a nation’s security is pursued and achieved through requiring its citizens to fight, kill, and perhaps, to die. Foreign and defence policy may be politely and disingenuously configured in monetary terms but the reserve currency of a nation is always its people; more precisely, it is the number and quality of disposable bodies it possesses. Indeed, in March 2010, at Fort Lewis-McCord, on the occasion of another US Army suicide, Major Keith Markham, the executive officer of the deceased unit, wrote to his platoon leaders confirming exactly this, and the need to understand the military economy in the following terms: “We have an unlimited supply of expendable labor37”.
It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to align the theory and practice of security culture with William Lloyd Warner’s “Cult of the Dead” via, in the first instance, the suspecting glance he extends in the direction of the Christian liturgies of Easter and Holy Week. Notwithstanding the promise of eternal life after death which these celebrate, he questions the need for “continually remembering and re-enacting the great tragedy that their God was made to suffer when he was on earth,” and concludes that the promise is but part of a larger explanation. Those that are emotionally satisfied by this “terror-filled drama” he proposes:
36 Although I assume these six features, they are not at all arbitrarily or capriciously chosen and for those wanting assurance through references to external works I have added the following: [1] accords with - indeed, is derived from Niebuhr R. Moral Man and Immoral Society. New York, 1932, P. xi, and I am deeply grateful to Dr. Daniel Warner, formerly of the Graduate Institute of International Studies, and now Assistant Director for International Relations at the Geneva Centre for Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) for bringing it to my attention in a series of extraordinarily valuable, ongoing conversations in Geneva in August 2011 on the subject of humanitarianism and the tragic in the context of his research into, and analysis of the historical, political and theological contexts of the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross. See: Warner D. Henri Dunant’s Imagined Community: Humanitarianism and the Tragic. (forthcoming).
[1], [3], [4] and [5] are extracted from one of the principal sources for this paper: Marvin C., Ingle D. W. Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag. Cambridge, 1999. P. 15, 27, and 312-313 (hereafter cited as Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation). [6], which expresses what to this writer is a significant truth is more accurately a direct quote from Shaw G. B. Preface // Androcles and the Lion Overruled. New York, 1923. P. 25.
[3] originates with Karl W. Deutsch, but Sands S. When and How the Jewish People Was Invented. Tel Aviv, 2008. P. 11.
37McGovern R. They Died in Vain: Deal With It // Antiwar.
URL: original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2011/08/08/they-died-in-vain-deal-with-it/ (accessed September 7, 2011) (hereafter cited as McGovern, They Died in Vain: Deal With It). In recent times, the suicide rate among veterans and serving members of the US military has reached as many as 18 per day; see Stiglitz J. E. The Price of 9/11 // Unconventional Economic Wisdom. URL: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz142/English (Accessed September, 7, 2011).
not only receive vicarious satisfaction from his tragedy but, because they also unconsciously identify with the killers, can express their deep hatred of, and their desire to kill, their brothers and other members of the Christian human collectivities. Moreover, their hatred is directed against themselves and what they are as moral beings. . .
by self-righteously loving their God and killing him, they can hate others and themselves and, through ritual usage, identify first with the hated human figures and later with the loved and valued God to forgive themselves for their hatreds and efficaciously release their feelings of guilt and self-condemnation38.
Where the deadly consequences of war in pursuit of national security is concerned, the ritual usage which becomes ritual forgiveness, according to Warner, is best observed on days of national commemoration such as, in the United States, Memorial Day, but the derived lessons are portable. The day itself “is a cult of the dead which organizes and integrates the various faiths and ethnic and class groups into a sacred unity.” Moreover, “its principle themes are those of the sacrifice of the soldier dead for the living and the obligation of the living to sacrifice their individual purposes for the good of the group so that they, too, can perform their spiritual obligations.” In the final analysis, “the anxieties man has about death are confronted with a system of sacred beliefs about death which give the individuals involved and the collectivity of individuals a feeling of well-being39”.
For this paper, Warner’s insights are an intimation of the deeper set of coherent ideas concerning security culture. Brief though they are at this juncture, they promise a deeper way of understanding what is really a conundrum if looked at from the perspectives of some of those who have reflected on its consequences with no little irony and a sense of incredulity. Addressing the Harvard University’s graduating class in 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes (an American Civil War veteran himself) spoke as follows:
I do not know what is true. I do not know the meaning of the universe.
But in the midst of doubt, in the collapse of creeds, there is one thing I do not doubt ... that the faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics which he does not see the use40”.
38Warner W. L. The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans. Westport, Connecticut, 1959. P. 426-427 (hereafter cited as Warner, The Living and the Dead).
39 Warner, The Living and the Dead. P. 248-249.
40 As cited in Lapham L. Flies in Amber // Notebook: Harper’s Magazine. September 2007. P. 8.
Forty years later, another veteran:
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty- three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it.
Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
The writer was Smedley Darlington Butler, twice awarded the United States highest award for valour, The Medal of Honor. But then more recently US Admiral Gene La Rocque had the honesty to put it this way: “I hate it when they say, ‘He gave his life for his country. Nobody gives their life for anything. We steal the lives of these kids. We take it away from them. They don’t die for the honour and glory of their country. We kill them.” Many decades
before, of course, Kipling, with ample reason had written of the dead on the Western front: “If they ask why we died / Tell them because their fathers lied.” And in 2011, out of contempt for the consolations fatuously offered by religious leaders for the American dead in Afghanistan, former senior CIA analyst, Ray McGovern, headed one of his many articles with an unpleasant truth: “The Died in Vain; Deal With It41”.
The argument is expressed by way of a simple proposition: that where security is spoken of openly and explicitly, this obscures an always present undertone of equal fervor - a discourse of deciding who is to die and who is to be sacrificed. The one is ever-present, and the one is never without the other. The progression is from the very general to the particular, specifically from the concept of mimetic engulfment to concepts of the nation and the civil religion which frames its attendant security culture discourse; within that we will find the realm of the sacred and the national totem; we will also discover the profane - that which cannot be spoken. And these will reveal the origin of national security myths, and the places and events which are venerated in manners and forms which create the “fatal environment” which sanctions the “blood sacrifice” which security culture holds dear, but cannot afford to admit is a demand of its own making.
Mimetic Engulfment in the Nation
The initial approach is a loose adaptation of Bruce Wilshire’s “mimetic engulfment” (“the prerational structures of involuntary imitation of others”)42. His argument, which influences the analysis at hand, is that:
the formation of identity of self - and education - occurs largely at an archaic level of engulfment in the moody background world of everyday experience . . . . Adults in their own groups typically do not realise the extent to which they are undeliberately modeling themselves upon others around them in
the foreground and the background world.........the typical condition of human
identity is one of more or less compromised individuation. This is vividly evident in times of great stress - in mob behaviour, lynch mobs, etc. Or there are prolonged mass movements of mimetic engulfment in which whole societies move together along lines of least resistance, because it is directly and dumbly felt that the world tilts in a certain direction43.
41McGovern, They Died in Vain: Deal With It.
42Wilshire B. The Moral Collapse of the University: Professionalism, Purity, and Alienation. Albany, 1990. P. 41 (hereafter cited as Wilshire, The Moral Collapse of the University).
43 Ibidem. Pp. 42-43.
In “application” this results in individuals (intelligence analysts, academics, policymakers, decision-makers, advisers, and even those who have earned the accolade of “leader”) locating themselves, insistently, within a world which authorises both their place within a particular “purified group” and the “phobic exclusions of potentially polluting others44.” By extension, critical distance is chimerical and empathy with the other (who is a pollutant) unlikely, perhaps impossible. Furthermore, the intellectual character of the product, in this case intelligence and strategy, will be just another manifestation of the interests of the dominant, authorising community; indeed the attributes of the former will be only a particular case of the generality of the latter.
Implied in such an approach, and now made explicit, is the salience of the concept of “discourse” and its operational mode of “discursive formation,” which as Robert D’Amico characterises it, “authorises certain kinds of speaking, writing and analysing45.” This warrant, it should be noted, includes both what is to be spoken, written and analysed as well as who is to “occupy the position of a subject.”46 On the face of things this course is required by just three observations of reliable provenance made in respect of, for example, American cultural, intellectual, and political life - the US being selected because it is, for many observers and scholars (among them Sir Ralf Dahrendorf) nothing less than “the Applied Enlightenment.” The first is that made by an English observer, Alan Ryan, who is, nevertheless, supported by an American counterpart, Louis Menand, to the effect that the United States is “astonishingly group-minded” and lacking in real cultural diversity47. A commentary on the natural affinity between intelligence analysts and university scholars steeped in modernist conceit provides the second:
[The CIA’s] analytic staff, filled with American Ph.Ds. in the natural and social sciences along with engineers, inevitably shares the outlook of US. academe, with its penchant for philosophical positivism, cultural agnosticism, and political liberalism. The special knowledge which it derives from classified sources is mainly technical; the rest of its knowledge, as well as the intellectual equipment which it brings to bear on the evidence, comes from academia (emphasis added) 48.
44 Ibidem.
45D’Amico R. What is Discourse? // Humanities in Society. Volume 5. Summer & Fall 1982. P. 210 (hereafter cited as D’Amico, What is Discourse?).
46 Ibidem.
41Menand L. The Myth of American Diversity from “Being an American” // Times Literary Supplement (London). 30 October, 1992.
48 Richard Pipes, Team B: The Reality Behind the Myth // Commentary 82. October 1986. P. 29, as cited in
And Edward Said’s even more recent account of the strong conformity which reigned in policy circles during the 1990-1991 Gulf War against Iraq is the third:
What prevailed was an extraordinary mainstream consensus in which the rhetoric of the government, the policymakers, the military, think tanks, media, and academic centres converged on the necessity of United states force and the ultimate justice of its projection, for which a long history of theorists and apologists from Andrew Jackson through Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Kissinger and Robert W. Tucker furnished the preparation (emphasis added) 49.
Knowledge, as it is described in the above, accords very much with the Nietzchean formulation of it as a mode of power or, in William E. Connolly’s description, “a distinctive tool of power” which renders - which is to say, forms, organises and simplifies - the world in such a way that it is made comprehensible50. Discourse is, therefore, a producer of knowledge and, thus, a practice done unto things; a voluntaristic practice, moreover, which is carried out “despite resistances” which might be offered by the thing being rendered51. In an analogous, if not the same, way that strategic intelligence gives understanding to strategy, discourse, as a strategy in its own right, makes intelligence, understanding, and clarity possible in the first place. In a discourse, therefore, are to be found practical (rather than formal or mathematical) rules for the functioning of the discursive system and a resulting regularity in the practices which ensue and then give rise to a finished text52. Just as clearly, discourse is a practice of construction, easily institutionalised, and all the better facilitated if it is so located.
Thus constructed is a framework of interplay between engulfment and discourse in which the former holds the status of an intellectual ambience, an object of purely intellectual intuition akin to the Kantian category of noumenon, and the latter a culture-specific catalyst, or phenomenon essential for producing reliable, which is to say predictable outcomes. And, to maintain the Kantian analogy, it is an interplay which brings to the fore the basic thrust of both components, namely the presupposition and eventual self-fulfilling vindication of a mind-world correspondence. In these terms, it is the relevant accounts of nation, society, and state which warrant investigation because, in the context of questions relating to the nexus with security and strategy, it is these institutions, groupings or qualities and their agents which,
Johnson L. K. America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society. New York, 1989. P. 301.
49Said E. Culture and Imperialism. New York, 1993. P. 287-288 (hereafter cited as Said, Culture and Imperialism).
50Connolly W. E. Political Theory and Modernity. Oxford, 1988. P. 144-145.
51 Ibidem.
52D ’Amico, What is Discourse? P. 210.
overall, claim responsibility for, embody and articulate the various notions of national identity, ideology, and culture.
If we recall Niebuhr’s pessimism concerning political collectivities organised around the principles of self-interest and collective egoism, then the prospect is not only of inherent brutality, but of perpetual rivalries which can never be extinguished because there is a virtually infinite set of objects of desire which will require violent intervention, and which will be supported by the engulfed discourse. No matter the emphasis placed on individuality and the spontaneity of desire, the unconscious conformity which results is essentially a social phenomenon subject to both effacement and intensification. The former proceeds quite naturally from the Western cultural defence mechanism that asserts the self as an autonomous, deliberative being, while the latter is the equally natural consequence of mimicking that, or those we admire. Either way, the self-interest and egoism of the collectivity in relation to the objects of desire engenders a frustration which requires satisfaction. Moreover, its pursuit is understood by others - equally organised around the principles of self-interest and collective egoism - as a threatening egotism, a desire for superiority over others. Mimesis within nations is reciprocated by mimesis between nations and, ultimately, by what Rene Girard defines as “violent reciprocity.”
This is not a surprising relationship given the essence of the nation-state as recently proposed by Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle. If traditionally we understand the nation-state as the “legitimized exercise of force over territorial boundaries within which a population has been pacified,” then, because nations frequently lack “the commonality of sentiment shared by members of a language group, ethnicity, or living space,” the fundamental commonality is actually “the shared memory of blood sacrifice, periodically renewed.” The nation, therefore, commits itself to war ad infinitum :
is the memory of the last sacrifice that counts for living believers. Though the sovereign nation, or nation-state, is an agreement about killing rules that compels citizens to sacrifice themselves for the group, the felt nation makes them want to.
The creation of sentiments strong enough to hold the group together periodically requires the willing deaths of a significant portion of its members.
The lifeblood of these members is shed by means of a ritual . . . [and] the most
powerful enactment of this ritual is war. . . . [which] leads us to define the nation as the memory of the last sacrifice53.
Interim Reflections
What this paper has set out with regard to being able to see and understand national security is generally in accord with Albert Camus’ depiction of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus - “that divorce between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints.” It disappoints in no small part because it remains unclear to human reason, and it remains unclear in no small part because too little effort is spent in understanding the concepts that are routinely taken for granted and the violence that the current structures of world politics is embedded in. The exponential production and publication of information, data, analysis and opinion, if anything, only exacerbates this condition. In a state of estrangement and alienation the response has been to seek security by responding to the condition in human terms, but human terms which reproach reason which, because of that, allow the illusion of clarity through forms of community, belief, political organisation and violence. Nation-states and their citizens are thus obsessed with security and fascinated with violence; equally they are illiterate in understanding their own traditions and practices which ostensibly honour peace require a more suspecting glance than they are accorded. More specifically, the search for an exposition of security culture confronts three tragic facts - that, in everyday life, state violence is first venerated, and then unexamined; more, examination is taboo. What has been attempted in the preceding pages is a theoretical detour through everyday discourse with the intention of looking at, viewing, and beholding what is otherwise obscured by emotion and the unconscious.
Collective self-deception through mimicry is the most urgent symptom requiring investigation. The ritual need for blood sacrifices, and the Cult of the Dead which follows them, retain their mobilizing and lethal power only so long as they are not understood as illusions; should they be seen as such, and named for what they are, they will become impotent. This is the very reason that exploration will be resisted: it risks the decomposition of the civil religion and, in Eisenhower’s terms, lead to conclusions of the senselessness of the regnant form of government. Better to follow the old Roman adage: se non evero, e ben trovato (‘if it’s not true, it’s still a good story’). More preferable, it seems, is the practice of sending people to their deaths as an act of sacred murder. But there should be no doubt what obedience to, and within this security culture requires: anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism, a disciplined passivity in the face of needless death and destruction, and the elevation of faith
53Marvin and Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation. P. 3-5.
over reason. As Girard expresses it succinctly: “a melange of naive credulity and extreme
cynicism54”.
IAS (Information Age Syndrome): Ignorance, Stupidity, Dumbing-Down and Seriously Diminished Attention Spans
In the contexts outlined in the preceding pages, and still within the ongoing Socratic spirit, the new academic and general excitement for the digital / information age is also misplaced. In the first instance it is more a form of myth-subscription than an accurate description of the present and recent past. As Robert Darnton has reminded us, popular notions that: “the book is dead . . . we have entered the information age . . . all information is now available online . . . libraries are obsolete . . . the future is digital” are patent rubbish55. Moreover, the unceasing claims that information will lay the basis for the overcoming of oppression are perhaps more deserving of Alan Greenspan’s only memorable description -“irrational exuberance” - or Evgeny Morozov’s “cyber-utopia ... a naive belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication56”. Such a dismissal of the proposition that the Information Age will ultimately provide the truth that will make people free requires further elucidation - and it is provided through a brief examination if what is here referred to as Information Age Syndrome (IAS).
If a syndrome is defined very generally as an association of several clinically recognizable features, or symptoms, which tend to occur together and which reflect the presence of a particular, predictable pathological social condition or characteristic pattern of behaviour, then, increasing “naive credulity and extreme cynicism,” accompanied by the catalogue above and on a mass scale, are all that is to be expected as the Information Age extends in time, and its instruments in international space. Paradoxically this will occur simultaneously with the availability of unprecedented volumes of information and equally unprecedented access to it. Neither of these phenomena, in and of itself, is the root cause of the syndrome; neither are the methods of access - computers of various types that can access the internet. Rather, the general proposition is that the cause is to be found in the combination of the ways in which so much of the information on the internet is presented, the habits acquired in accessing and using the internet for other (social) purposes, the cumulative consequences of these for deep reading and thinking, and the willful embrace of the new technologies by all levels of the education systems of the developed world. And all of this in defiance of the preponderance of scientific evidence across three core areas of research -
54Girard, Sacrifice, P. 60.
55Darnton, 5 Myths About the ‘Information Age.
56 See Coll, The Internet. And Morozov, The Net Delusion.
psychology, neuroscience, and web design - that the age’s current regime is so technologically deformative of what it touches that it is intellectually, socially, politically, and culturally suicidal. Even for those who came to the technologies late, which is to say after their years of formal schooling and education (‘digital immigrants’), the same holds true. That said, the principal focus must be on those that are products of the regime that I displacing traditional education and learning.
These are “othered” in a curious way, being commonly referred to as “digital natives,” or “netizens,” appellations which, in one move, both reduces them to an imputed primal state yet elevates them to a place in the national pantheon. It is as if they are seen as possessors of an alien culture, knowledge, and language which, if they can be translated, transposed and unlocked for general comprehension - will yield truths which have eluded past generations and provide pathways to an enriched future. In reality, this is fatuous, the Information Age’s version of “cargo cult.” More accurately, these “digital natives” and “netizens” speak not a sophisticated language capable of conveying infinite shades of meaning, both scientific and artistic, but a form of pidgin - essentially a rudimentary form of communication between people who have no common language between them, or at least no widespread proficiency in, and access to such a language; it is a jargon particular to, in this case, their sub-culture and, like all jargons, of a deservedly low status in comparison to other, developed languages. And this accords with research that not only points to their escalating ignorance of the world in general, but also their illiteracy in, of all things, Information and Communications Technology. Literacy is here defined by the U.S. Educational Testing Service in terms of “the ability to conduct research, evaluate sources, communicate data, and understand ethical/legal issues of access and use57. Notwithstanding that the technology encourages instant questions, and provides seemingly instant answers, this action-reaction is erases interpersonal spontaneity, and the time for discussion, dissent, debate, and reflection, reducing the users to little more than indiscriminate, passive and superficial receivers of information.
This finding is hardly spurious if the quite typical accounts to hand from university-level teachers is a reliable indication. One of the more persuasive critiques is provided by Brian Cowan, a self-confessed technophile and instructional designer at Windsor University, in an essay in which he debunks four popular myths surrounding the “digital natives.” Thus he argues against the beliefs that: digital natives are automatically digital learners, students
57 These findings are extracted from the Educational Testing Service’s web site (www.ets.org/ictliteracy.org) as cited in Bauerlein M. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. New York, 2009. P. 113 (hereafter cited as Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation).
prefer using technology to learn, cyberspace is the new classroom, and today’s students are multitaskers. Essentially, these turn on the proposition that technology is ancillary, a mere tool, and not a force which should disrupt the basic human relationship between teacher and student - specifically, the “skill of the teacher and the motivation of the student” - the latter being the more important. What Cowan emphasizes is one of the perennial truths suppressed by the modern university in its obsession with students’ happiness: given the teachers goal is to motivate, demonstrate, clarify, and reinforce . . . the student’s goal is to be open to instruction, to understand, to memorize - to learn.” He continues: “Technology will not make learning painless. It will not necessarily make learning easy or fun58.” Indeed, would it not be revolutionary (and refreshing) if universities were more honest in their objectives, publishing widely and explicitly that their end state following four years of undergraduate study could well be one of frustration, as per a recent essay Stefan Collini:
The really vital aspects of the experience of studying something (a condition very different from the ‘student experience’) are bafflement and effort. Hacking your way through the jungle of unintelligibility to a few small clearings of partial intelligibility is a demanding and not always enjoyable process. It isn’t much like wallowing in fluffy towels59.
What such accounts suggest is that the insufficiently critical embrace of the Information Age and its accoutrements is misplaced; that there is both a radical disjunction between means and ends, and a distorted understanding of what it means to be learned, educated. Of greater significance, not only is there abundant evidence to support this conclusion, but an extended inquiry of related phenomena confirms a trajectory - a regression
- to a pre-Gutenberg age of general and complete illiteracy at the functional levels required in a 21st Century democracy.
The Dynamics of IAS
What follows is of necessity truncated, but hopefully faithful to the reported research findings across several disciplines in the human and social sciences. Specifically, they are derived from books and research monographs which, in very many cases themselves rely on a growing corpus of surveys, and research in the disciplines of psychology, and neurophysiology60. In tone, they are pessimistic as to present states of affairs and extremely
58Cowan B. ‘Digital Natives’ Aren’t Necessarily Digital Learners // The Chronicle of Higher Education. 6 November 2011. URL: chronicle.com/article/Why-Digital-Natives-Arent/129606/?sid=at&utm_medium=en (accessed November 9, 2011).
59Collini S. From Robbins to McKinsey // London Review of Books. 25 August 2011. P. 12.
60Abelson H., Ledeen K., Lewis H. Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion. Boston, 2008; Carr N. The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. New York, 2009, The
pessimistic in their views of the future - a consequence of the cumulative effects which are running through society and will continue to do so at an accelerating pace. After the symptoms of the digital age have been identified and categorized, the fons et origomali is the displacement, facilitated by the neuroplasticity of, and in the brain, of the capacity to concentrate and contemplate, by the commercial imperative, and thus, the intentional design of web pages which promote an habitual, and eventually addictive surrender to distraction. The media in question act at the level of the central nervous system, and nothing less than the “re-wiring” of the brain, and the reshaping of human activity and its meaning takes place. In the words of Michael Merzenich, “our brains are massively remodeled by this exposure [to the internet] ... When culture drives changes in the ways that we engage our brains, it creates DIFFERENT brains” (emphasis in the original). And all throughout this transformation, the digital native can be persuaded that she / he is in control but this is no more than comfortable hubris because the intellectual trajectory is towards a technologically camouflaged ignorance61.
If, to an addiction to the internet per se, is added the notoriously addictive subcultures of video games (Nintendo and Xbox, for example) and social media, then the diagnosis is particularly bleak. Communication in the former has two hallmarks: it is a system closed to all except team members, and it is entertainment62; the latter has four. It is about self-immersion - a horizontal communications system focused on the “me;” by extension, it is system of “peer absorption” and “non-stop peer contact” in which the goal is the easy affirmation of the self; what passes for reality is, therefore, highly personalized, and horizontally constructed and affirmed, and finally, the language style thought appropriate is “bland but immediately accessible,” narrowly expressive, and lacking in eloquence. Incipiently it is a form of linguicide. Moreover, so close if the popular affinity of video games and social media with the internet, the digital generations use the internet, “for everything but news” (emphasis in the original)63.
Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. London, 2010 (hereafter cited as Carr, The Shallows); Jackson M. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. New York, 2009; Jacoby S. The Age of American Unreason. New York, 2009; Keen A. The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated Media are Destroying Our Economy. New York, 2008; Mindich, Tuned Out; Siegel L. Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. New York, 2009, and Vaidhyanathan S. The Googlization of Everything - and Why We Should Worry. Berkeley, 2011.
61Carr, The Shallows. P. 1-4, 6, and 35; Merzenich, as cited at P. 120.
62Tanner R. The Myth of the Tech-Savvy Student // The Chronicle of Higher Education. 6 November 2011. URL: chronicle.com/article/The-Myth-of-the-Tech-Savvy/129607/ (accessed November 9, 2011).
63Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation. P. ix-x, 133, 137, and 150-158; Carr, The Shallows. P. 107-108; and Mindich, Tuned Out. P. 4.
Their posture is well described by Bauerlein as, “self-oriented, present-oriented, antitradition, knowledge-indifferent,” conditions in which the higher intellectual standards of sophisticated knowledge sources, bothersome ideas, issues and people, and the unfamiliar are blocked out, and with them, the growth of curiosity and the need to reflect64. In unadorned terms, they are perpetual but conforming, conservative adolescents dedicated to retarding their own maturity while rejoicing in characteristics which, by definition, disqualify them from being taken seriously as other than negligent citizens65. Politically, morally and socially, such people are not competent; indeed, as little more than signal processing unit(s), ”they are as deserving of Carr’s description - “technological idiot(s)” - as they are of McLuhan’s dismissal of their predecessor generations - ”sex organs of the machine world”66. And the metaphor is appropriate: thinking is generically similar to diesel engines, sexual prowess, a fleet always in port, and a large military force standing idle in the desert - use it or lose it.
All of this accords with what the internet actually provides in a revolutionary way: interactivity, hyperlinking, searchability, and multimedia. Honesty requires that, under certain conditions there are benefits to be acknowledged. The problem is that the operant condition “under certain conditions” is not dispensable, yet it is rarely enforced. To the contrary what reigns is what Cory Doctorow refers to as an “ecosystem of interruption technologies”67. In plain terms, “the Web is a consumer habitat, not an educational one,” and internet pages are not intended to facilitate the stability of the curious minute, let alone the longer periods required for in-depth inquiry because profitability is a direct, quantitative function of “hits” on a page not the quality of its content. It is no exaggeration to say that the Web is designed to “goad” users to moving swiftly through its pages, and overwhelmingly (84%), they do not read the pages linearly, “word by word, sentence by sentence68”. Instead, they “multitask,” by constantly shifting their attention and engaging in exploration at only a superficial level, their brains become more nimble and a “widespread and sophisticated development of visual spatial skills” has been documented in numerous studies, as have “lower-level, or more primitive, mental functions such as hand-eye coordination, reflex response, and the processing of visual cues.” At the same time, this is to arrive at conclusions concerning human intelligence in the Net’s own standards. It is also to ignore what the same studies tell us about
64 Ibidem. P.vi-vii, 136-138 and 172-173.
65Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation. Pp. 34-35, 136, and 232-233.
66Carr, The Shallows, pp. 4, 116-117, 122. The citation from McLuhan is, as cited, on p.46 and is taken from McLuhan M. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, critical ed. Corte Madera, CA, 2003. P. 68 (hereafter cited as McLuhan, Understanding Media).
67Cory Doctorow, “Writing in the Age of Distraction,” Locus, January 2009, as cited in Carr, The Shallows. P. 91.
68Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation. P. 143-148.
the consequential costs which have gone hand in hand with the alleged benefits: a weakening of capacities for the kind of “deep processing” which is the basis for “mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”69 Worse, if that is possible, a 2009 Stanford University study found that “intensive multitaskers” were “suckers for irrelevancy,” a conclusion made even bleaker by Merzenich’s - specifically, that online multitasking is a scheme for “training our brains to pay attention to the crap,” and therefore, intellectually “deadly”70.
The crux of this diagnosis is to be found in the ways in which internet-induced multitasking attacks the memory by, in the first instance, flooding the working memory -known to be capable of holding on to only a very small amount of information at any one time
- with so much information that the high cognitive load involved acts a distraction rather than a focus for reflection. Over time, as an individual brain becomes more distracted, it finds “distractions more distracting”71. This results in the transfer of only a “jumble of drops” from the torrent of information into the long-term memory - that part of the brain which is the “seat of understanding” because it not only stores and organises the information into patterns, but also develops understandings and complex concepts and schema. It is, therefore, the source of the depth and richness of human thinking72. Citing from the research of the educational psychologist, John Sweller, Carr notes that, “the more complex the material we’re trying to learn, the greater the penalty exacted by the overloaded mind”73. So determined, and as experiments confirm, the closer the working memory approaches its limits, the more difficult it becomes to “distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, signal from noise,” and the closer the individuals come to their membership among the “mindless consumers of data”74.
The comparison with reading the page of a book is dramatic and illuminating: the accomplished reader, explains Maryanne Wolf, develops specialized brain regions geared to the rapid deciphering of texts”75. Moreover, when this takes place, “the information faucet provides a steady drip, which we can control by the pace of our reading . . . [and] through our
69Carr, The Shallows. P. 140-141, at which is reported the findings of various studies by cognitive neuroscientists, and developmental psychologists.
70Ibidem, and with the same notation. P. 137-139 and 140-142.
11Klingberg T. The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory, trans. Neil Betteridge. Oxford, 2009. P. 39 and 72-75, as cited in Carr, The Shallows. P. 125.
72Ibidem. P. 124.
73Sweller J. Instructional Design in Technical Areas. Camberwell, Australia, 1999. P. 22, as cited in Carr, The Shallows. P. 125.
74 Ibidem. P. 125.
75 Wolf, M. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York, 2007. P. 142-146, as cited in Carr, The Shallows. P. 64.
single-minded concentration on the text, we can transfer all or most of the information . . . into long-term memory and forge the rich associations essential to the creation of schemas76”. And then there is the fact, apparently anomalous in the history of psychological development, that reading demanded “sustained, unbroken attention to a single, static object,” and therefore taught the reader to “focus on a single task, relatively uninterrupted” by the temptations of ambient distractions - to focus on, in other words deep reading and its concomitant, deep thinking77. For its part deep thinking then acts to inspire “new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies”78.
Expanding on this, the consolidation of memory is contingent upon being thoroughly and deeply processed by “strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement ... [thus] the sharper the attention, the sharper the memory79”. If this process of engagement and memorising is foregone, as it is in the endemic practice of deferring the reading of a text by depositing it in some form of digital storage for (possibly) subsequent recall, the memory in question will atrophy, and with it, the art of thinking. But the casualty list does not stop there: while the refusal to memorise entails the refusal to understand the repose of events, facts, concepts and skills, and how these are formed and are deployed by the intellect, the same condition in, and across, large populations threatens the existence of the “collective memory,” the construction of a “singular intelligence,” and the process of cultural transmission. In sum, the threat of the internet here described as a “technology of forgetfulness,” is to the depth and distinctiveness of individuals and their shared culture80.
Final Reflections
There are at least seven consequences for democratic politics in general, and communications management and strategic communications in particular which flow from a critical understanding of the issues of national security resulting from this syndrome. The first is that the trend is towards ignorance-based polities, or, perhaps to be fair, towards higher levels of ignorance-based polities in which ignorance is acceptable and comfortable. Second, as currently abused and indulged, the unprecedented availability of digital information, most of it un-refereed, is antithetical to democracy in general, and the scrutiny of all governmental
16Carr, The Shallows. P. 124-125.
77 Ibidem. Carr, The Shallows.P. 64-65, and, as cited in these pages, Bell V. The Myth of the Concentration Oasis // Mind Hacks blog, 11 February 2009. URL: www.mindhacks.com/blo/2009/02/the_myth_of_conc.html (accessed February 11, 2009).
78 Ibidem.P. 74.
79 Ibidem. P. 193.
80 Ibidem.P. 143, 181, 193, and 195-196.
actions in particular, if the citizens are incapable of drawing distinctions between these actions, the theories they embody, and the consequences which will flow from both. Third, such citizens are, at best, partial, and ripe for manipulation. Fourth, there is an urgent need to acknowledge a widespread confusion in the Western and developed world between information, knowledge, and understanding and, while this exists unaddressed, thought, and what passes for thought on questions of national security, is on a spectrum between extraordinarily difficult and impossible. Fifth, the situation now confirms McLuhan’s understanding of the impossibility of peaceful coexistence between old and new mediums because the new one will simply never “leave the old one in peace;” indeed, the newer will oppress the older media “until it finds new shapes and positions for them.”81 Sixth, to the extent that a minority evade, or resist, the debilitating temptations of the internet, and persist in the traditional habits of deep reading and deep thinking, they will constitute the reemergence of an elite which the Gutenberg revolution, the Reformation, the scientific revolutions which followed it, and the age of free, compulsory and secular education were meant to have made extinct: a reading class able to divine the meaning of texts and available for advice to both the illiterate and the alliterate. The very real danger here is that this class will in reality constitute an intellectual ottimati - effectively it will be a return to the era of the late Roman empire in which those who understand their competence as an opportunity to be well rewarded for reflecting the interests of the nobilitas in whatever instruction they provide to the populares.
Finally, there is the imperative to reformulate the answers we might give to the states of ignorantia affectata wherever we might find them. There will not be, nor can there be, any single answers; far more critical thought must be given to the processes which have brought intellectual life to its current pass and the likelihood is that it will eventually reflect local and temporal influences. What is known, however, is that the simple responses which the conventional wisdom has provided, and can be relied upon to provide into the future are simply that: more conventional than wise. Even if it is accepted that the ignorance they are responsible came as a result of once sincere beliefs, that radical unawareness, left unaddressed, is morphing into a form of conscientious stupidity.
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