Glimpses of the Multipolar World, 20 May 2023
Readers. World War One. Mazes and Misperceptions. Come and See. Imperfection. Belarus. Proofing.
Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses for seven days of the multipolar world. This week, I share glimpses of:
Gratitude. Readers.
Reading. Baumeister, World War One and Mazes.
Governing the Multipolar World. Misperceptions in International Relations.
Using History Mindfully. Come and See and Real War Movie.
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Imperfection and Mental Health, Scruton and Havel.
What surprised me most. Massacres in Belarus.
Works-in-Progress. Proofing and Streaming.
1. Gratitude
I am thankful to John Menadue and Aran Martin at Pearls and Irritations for publishing my article, “The crooked timber of an unhappy, dangerous American Empire,” and for the excellent title they chose. Thanks to subscribers who joined after reading the article.
I am also thankful for readers/listerners who have responded to my 100th podcast reader/listener “competition” or participation exercise. Just a reminder I am inviting you until 30 June 2023 to share with me your responses to two optional questions:
What is your favourite episode on the Burning Archive podcast backlist, and why?
What is a ‘fragment of the Burning Archive’ (a cultural or historical artefact meaningful to you and the times) that you would like featured on the podcast?
You can submit your ideas in response to the Substack chat thread or can leave a comment right here
2. What I am reading or listening to
I listened to a great interview with Roy Baumeister on Alex Kaschuta’s Subversive podcast. It was a great reminder of the work of this distinguished social psychologist who is based at the University of Queensland.
My reading has been a bit scrappy, with fragments of three books on World War One. Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923, Arthur Herman, Lenin, Wilson, and the Birth of the New World Disorder, and Hew Strachan, The First World War. I comment on the connections between 1914 and 2023 world crises in section 4.
I have also read a lot of my own writing, because I have a big fat print out of 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing that I am proofing. Dare I quote the near-final, first paragraph of the book?
When I look back now on my life as a bureaucrat, I see a man lost in a maze. The man imagined himself into this maze. His imagination threw him into this maze. The maze was made from images and mirrors of power, and at the centre of the maze, so the story was told, was the minotaur of power itself.
3. Governing the unruly multipolar world
There is one aspect of the scholarship of international relations that intrigues me, and that is the study of perceptions and misperceptions. States and their leaders like to believe they have intelligence, insight, and control of events. They like to assure themselves of the realism and conviction of their intentions. Realist scholars mirror back the faith, and treat the chaos of the world as a game between rational actor states. Decades of scholarship and millenia of literature would tell them, however, they are wrong. But how many of our academic and government leaders read scholarship and literature today?
I do not know if many scholars study diplomacy, war and the current world crisis from this point of view. I am but an isolated lover of knowledge wandering the fields outside the ivory tower in search of bread. But the theme of misperception, and the shadow between intention and the act, stars in Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: the Fall of the Soviet Union, Clark, Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914, and Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World. All three books have helped me to make sense of what is happening right now in this new world crisis of the multipolar world.
Since the drums of World War Three began in 2021, have our government leaders not displayed evidence of misperception, confused intention, divided executives, and grand illusions? Are Biden and his long-time staffers, Blinken and Sullivan, caught in a 1990s mental world of triumphant American omnipotence? It appears they really did believe in 2021 that they could, from the security of the situation room, engineer regime change, economic collapse and pipeline sabotage in the world’s largest territorial state. And Putin, in turn, appears to have really believed, as late as February 2022, that a show of force and a crowd control manouevre in Kiev would bring such true believers to the negotiation table.
Putin has since admitted his mistake. I suspect Biden will die before admitting any of his illusions. Misperceptions can cause both peace and war; but when misperception is shielded by impunity, there is only war. That is the American tragedy, and that is why I wrote in The crooked timber of an unhappy, dangerous American Empire,
However we imagine the story of American decline, today its leaders and its people seem unable to arrest its fate. Trump can no longer be blamed. America has fled reality into a bubble of impunity that stops Americans from learning the consequences of fleeing reality. Its leaders and citizens believe consequences are for lesser nations. But the consequences of imperial impunity disorder the unhappy American nation and destabilise the world.
4. Using history to live mindfully in the present.
Misperception, confused intention, divided executives, and ambitious illusions defined the battlespace of World War One. Leaders of the world, scholars of the world, and, indeed, citizens of the world should reflect more on this most complex and disastrous event to understand the world crisis of today. We need to read fewer morality tales of Munich 1938, and more post-modern novels of the collapse and remaking of empires between 1900 and 1920.
We all use preferred mental models of the past, slices of the past that we compare to current events. They define our stance, our actions and our moral judgements. We come and see and live through stories of the past. But the weird culture of the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and developed) has impoverished the stories we, grand and petty though we may be, use to make sense of our confusing times.
An example from the week was a speech by the Secretary of Australian Home Affairs Department, Michael Pezzulo, that made some gestures to being profound and informed by history. On the occasion of Anzac Day, he wrote to staff that the lesson he drew from centuries (why not millenia, I ask) of wars, was shock that civilized Europe could still suffer war, and how the “brave people of Ukraine ... simply wish to live in peace.” His writers went on to quote Clausewitz, “We are all bound in a sacred duty to do whatever we can to prevent war.” He might need to check in with the White House whether they are the right talking points. The USA and Australian governments have clearly failed in their sacred duty over the last thirty years in Ukraine. They plan to fail faster over Taiwan.
But then Pezzulo betrayed his true quality of mindful thought on history. His message encouraged his staff to watch 1995 Hollywood blockbuster Crimson Tide, starring Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman. The film’s plot is: “On a U.S. nuclear missile sub, a young First Officer stages a mutiny to prevent his trigger happy Captain from launching his missiles before confirming his orders to do so.” Its script and imagery, from memory, is full of the triumphalist vision of America in the 1990s. Its plot is a metaphorical lie about who really initiated the end of the Cold War.
As it happened, I had watched on the weekend the earlier Soviet film, Come and See (1985). Some people rate this film the greatest war movie ever made. Even its IMDB rating is much better than Crimson Tide. It arises from deeper pain and profounder suffering than Hollywood has ever known. Perhaps next Victory Day, Michael Pezzulo should write to his staff, and urge them to watch Come and See. They might then come and see that not all the brave people of Ukraine, certainly few of its less courageous leaders, simply wish to live in peace.
5. Fragments from the Burning Archive
On the podcast this week I talked about why governments keep failing in mental health. I share some testimony from my three decades as a government official in which I was an eyewitness to that failure. I venture the unpopular opinion that the Victorian Royal Commission into Mental Health was also a failure. This inquiry was sacralised for political benefit, but I read, during the week, that at least some mental health advocates are slowly and reluctantly acknowledging that “the window of reform is closing”.
Failures this vast and complex, of course, have many authors. But in the podcast, I focussed on a political attitude that has underpinned so many of the grandiose and grinding reform efforts to mental health since the 1980s. Roger Scruton called it the ‘planning fallacy” or “unscrupulous optimism”. I described it as a discomfort with imperfection. Alas, mental illness reveals the imperfection of all our minds, even great helmsmen and visionary mind doctors.
Scruton wrote that his prime criticism of this political attitude was that,
by pursuing a single and complete solution to human conflict, a solution that eliminates the problem forever, it destroys the institutions that enable us to resolve our conflicts one by one. (The Uses of Pessimism)
A more progressive or centrist political thinker Stein Ringen wrote in similar terms on the dangers for democracy of the discomfort with imperfection that I perceived in todays ‘reformers”, those bureaucratic utopians. In How Democracies Live, he wrote,
To be democratic is to accept the imperfect. It is because we humans and our communities are messy that we need the cumbersome democratic way of managing our affairs. The tolerance of imperfection is an extension of people’s tolerance of each other.
States that accept imperfection, and tolerate true differences, do not declare the end of history, the elimination of a virus, the eradication of disagreement, or the extinction of unfavoured attitudes. They proclaim no Year Zero, and few, if any, Zero policies on anything. They do not imagine they can end family violence, halve suicide, extinguish mistakes in hospitals, or lock their citizens in their homes to safeguard their zeal.
On the podcast, I also quoted a fragment from the Burning Archive, that offers some imperfect hope, and a more modest stance to the difficult art of governing. “In Politics and Conscience”, Vaclav Havel wrote
I favour… Politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them. I favour politics as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans. It is, I presume, an approach which, in this world, is extremely impractical and difficult to apply in daily life. Still, I know no better alternative.
Today, we are all waiting for Havel.
6. What surprised me most this week.
I learned by watching Come and See that during World War Two the Nazi Germans and their allies, including presumably some Ukrainians, burned alive all occupants of over 600 villages in Belarus. Truly shocking. Barely known in the West.
7. Works-in-progress and published content
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 101. Mental Health, Government Failure and Human Imperfection
On the YouTube Channel I did my second livestream, focussed on Democracy's Discontents - Thailand, Trump, Türkiye and Imran Khan. You can watch the replay here.
I proofed 3 chapters of 13 Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat, including the essay I wrote in 2013 on “Why is Alcohol Policy Difficult?”.
On Pearls and Irritations, I published “The crooked timber of an unhappy, dangerous American Empire,” and many people were kind enough to share and to like. I also did a video poem version that I shared on Substack and Twitter.
On Twitter, I mainly promoted my works but did share with Bob Carr a stanza from Shelley, “England in 1819” from which I drew the phrase in “Crooked Timber” of “an old, mad, blind, despised and dying king”
On Sub-Stack I released my subscriber-only, fortnightly post - a summary guide of my entire podcast backlist - and for everyone, the video poem version of “Crooked Timber”
Next week…
On Tuesday on Youtube, I will do my next Livestream (May 23, 12.30pm AEST) on books on World War One. I will share what I am reading and writing on this topic, and will respond to viewer questions and comments.
I will be getting my online courses ready for launch.
On Friday on the podcast, I might talk about America and India, in the wake of Biden’s no-show at the Quad. I have not decided yet.
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And do remember, “What thou lovest well will not be reft from thee” (Ezra Pound, Cantos)