By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, May 18, 2018
I’m writing this with a pretty stiff
cold-medicine-and-Irish-whiskey hangover, married to some dismayingly early
cigar smoking chased down with coffee. Don’t judge, I need the nicotine and
caffeine because I am beyond exhausted: In the last ten days, I’ve given talks
or interviews in New York, Chicago, Austin, Dallas, D.C., San Francisco, Yorba
Linda, and Los Angeles, half of it with a head cold and the other half with the
head of Alfredo Garcia in a duffel bag. (Sorry, that’s the hallucinatory
cocktail of cold medicine speaking.) But I am also your humble servant, and I
want to hold up my end of the bargain with you, my Dear Readers. So let’s see
what I can come up with.
I’ve always been fascinated by useful idiots — and I
don’t mean interns who are good at fetching coffee or pumicing my feet. I mean
“useful idiots” in the Leninist sense (even if Lenin may not have in fact
coined the term). Useful idiots, according to lore, were the Western intellectuals
who could be counted on to defend or apologize for Bolshevik or Soviet
barbarisms and other crimes.
The Soviet effort to cultivate, feed, and support useful
idiots is an absorbing tale in its own right. But the fascinating part is how
the real heavy-lifting was done by the Western intellectuals themselves.
I’m reminded of Randolph Bourne’s famous line about the
receptivity of progressive intellectuals to the First World War. Describing a
“peculiar congeniality between the war and these men,” Bourne said that it was
“as if the war and they had been waiting for each other.”
As I took in snippets of the coverage from the
Gaza–Israel border this week, it was as if the bloodshed and the usual suspects
had been waiting for each other. It wasn’t so much a case of the facts on the
ground not mattering as it was a case of only certain facts mattering a great deal — and others not at all.
Israelis were shooting Palestinians; the rest was commentary.
Another apocryphal quote, which I first heard ascribed to
Rodin — that’s with an “I” for the artist not an “A” for the daikaiju monster —
goes like this:
Q: How do you sculpt an elephant?
A: Simple. Take a block of marble
and remove everything that isn’t an elephant.
This is how so much coverage of Israel seems to work:
Take an event and remove all the facts that don’t fit the desired final
product. By now, the examples of what I’m talking about should be familiar
enough: the Palestinian cripple who could suddenly walk; the confession — from
Hamas itself — that nearly all of the “innocent victims” of Israeli “murder”
were in fact terrorists; the admissions from the Hamas cannon fodder that their
intentions were violent. But none of that mattered. Nor did it catch the
media’s attention that there was no rioting in the Fatah-controlled West Bank,
but only in Hamas-controlled Gaza. That Hamas has been fomenting this macabre
publicity stunt for weeks didn’t seem to matter either.
The articles hadn’t been written but the plot had already
been agreed upon.
The far more plausible explanation that this was all a
barbarically cynical effort — sponsored by Hamas’s patrons in Iran — to foment
outrage against Israel on the backs of Palestinian human sacrifices was too
plausible to contemplate. Instead, the same tired story of authentic and
spontaneous rage against oppressors by indigenous victims just had to be
unfolding in front of our eyes.
As I write this, news has broken of a school shooting in
Santa Fe, Texas. I checked Twitter to see if the familiar mad rush to pan the
river of events for golden nuggets to adorn a preferred narrative is unfolding
once again. It took seconds to see that it was:
On another front, the great fight to prove that either
President Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election or that the “Deep
State” conspired to in effect frame the president is really just an ugly
contest of two groups of storytellers desperate to definitively print the
legend — their legend.
This effort is a subplot of a larger story in which
supporters or opponents of Trump believe that the master plot will culminate in
a climax of vindication for one side or another. The idea that Trump — and by
extension his supporters or opponents — will be proven neither heroic nor
villainous is too terrible for some to contemplate.
Every Tribe Is a
Story, Every Story Has a Tribe
Reason as a distinct mode of thinking is a fairly new
thing in human history. This is not to say we didn’t have the faculty to reason
for hundreds of thousands of years. But the teasing out of reason as a
stand-alone system of thinking is quite recent and actually much harder to
sustain than we moderns assume. For most of our existence, we thought in terms
of stories. Story-telling is how we learned to hunt cooperatively. Stories were
— and are — how we understand ourselves, our history, and our place in the
universe. Every great religion is encased in a series of tales about prophets,
tyrants, and redeemers. The idea that there is a right side to history boils
down to the faith that, in the long run, the great novel of man will end on
terms we like.
Robert Wright has an interesting essay on the
stubbornness of tribal thinking (and Sam Harris’s belief that he can transcend
it). According to Wright,
We all need role models, and I’m
not opposed in principle to Harris’s being mine. But I think his view of
himself as someone who can transcend tribalism — and can know for sure that
he’s transcending it — may reflect a crude conception of what tribalism is. The
psychology of tribalism doesn’t consist just of rage and contempt and
comparably conspicuous things. If it did, then many of humankind’s messes —
including the mess American politics is in right now — would be easier to clean
up.
What makes the psychology of
tribalism so stubbornly powerful is that it consists mainly of cognitive biases
that easily evade our awareness. Indeed, evading our awareness is something
cognitive biases are precision-engineered by natural selection to do. They are
designed to convince us that we’re seeing clearly, and thinking rationally,
when we’re not. And Harris’s work features plenty of examples of his cognitive
biases working as designed, warping his thought without his awareness. He is a
case study in the difficulty of transcending tribal psychology, the importance
of trying to, and the folly of ever feeling sure we’ve succeeded.
Another way to put it: Tribal thinking is commitment to a
story about how the world works. Steven Pinker has a story. I have a story. We
all have stories that we believe are correct, and we look for facts that
support them. This is unavoidable, because if we did not generalize or
streamline our understanding of the world to a set of facts that we believe to
be the most important, we wouldn’t be able to think at all. There’s just too
much data out there. Without the craft of editing and sifting through the data,
we’d be left with what William James called a “blooming buzzing confusion.”
The prerequisite for useful idiocy isn’t malice or
villainy: The apologists for the Soviet Union were not knowing traitors for the
most part (though some were). Rather, they simply became too invested in the
story they want to tell, like Colonel Nicholson in Bridge over the River Kwai, at least until he has his epiphany and
says, “What have I done?”
When the story fully takes over, reason takes itself out
of the game. All that matters is the ultimate resolution of the narrative. For
Hamas, the story of national liberation is all that matters. Marxism is not a
system of thinking but a romantic story (in all the different meanings of
“romantic”) about the progress of humanity that ends with all contradictions
being eradicated in the last chapter, titled “The End of History.”
The problem with this sort of thinking is that it is
dehumanizing — because it assumes that individual human beings are simply
acting out some foreordained narrative. One of the great clichés of writing is
that you have to be willing to “kill your children”: Erase, cut, yank out
anything that does not advance the story. The same process of killing your
children — for the greater good — all too often applies to the self-anointed
authors of human affairs, sometimes literally, but more often figuratively.
Which brings me back to where we started. The people who
insist that the Palestinians are unalloyed victims remove human agency from
them. According to this thinking, they are not making choices; they are playing
their parts. How dare you ask why someone
would bring a (very sick) baby to a riot? How dare you suggest that there is
subtext to the story of Palestinian righteousness? If you point out that
the real villain in a shooting isn’t the inanimate object but the person
wielding it, you are muddying the plot. Populists always tell a story about the
righteousness of “the people,” but they invariably mean only “the right
people”; the rest are barely people at all.
To a lesser extent, such thinking can also dehumanize the
people employing it. George Orwell saw this clearly. In “Politics and the
English Language,” he pointed out how the language of the stories we tell can
take over like an auto-piloted algorithm and do our thinking for us.
When one watches some tired hack on
the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities,
iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to
shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live
human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger
at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into
blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether
fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance
toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of
his larynx, but his brain is not involved, as it would be if he were choosing
his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed
to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying,
as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of
consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favourable to political
conformity.
You cannot eliminate the drive to craft stories. The best
you can do is have some humility and some openness to the possibility that
there are facts and experiences contradictory to your own. I’ve written at
length about how I think one of the defining features of conservatism is
“comfort with contradiction”:
At the very core of conservatism
lies comfort with contradiction, acceptance of the fact that life is not fair;
that ideals must forever be goals, not destinations; that the perfect is not
the enemy of the good but one standard by which we understand what is good in
the first place –though not the only standard.
The best story of America isn’t the one where America is
always right. The best story of America is the one where Americans collectively
and as individuals have the freedom to make mistakes and then learn from them
and then improve. This is the best story not because it casts us in the best
light. It’s the best story because it is true.
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