The Phantom City

Well, the same hosting company that watched our server get fried — to be fair, they also rebuilt it fast, considering — is now moving it to a more secure facility. I just keep imagining a forklift blade stuck through the server rack, somehow skewering only our production server.

Amazing how much lightning running in on one server can kill your time and desire to blog. (Not this server…our production Web server at my work.)

Anyway, another interesting Spiked book review, for two reasons: What the author is trying to tell us, and what the article says about the publication.

First, as you can read in the article, the book being reviewed argues that the modern concept of inclusion is reducing the value in our institutions. To become accessible to the masses, they simply require less of us, which has the effect of removing our desire to aspire to the heights those institutions once exemplified.

While I don’t really disagree with the argument — I’ve spent a lot of time in exactly the kind of institutions that produced the kind of pragmatic education the author says is taking over — I would say that I believe pragmatism about expectations doesn’t necessarily have as much to do with high concepts of “inclusion” so much as it has to do with producing as economically efficient a public as possible.

Instead, I wonder if the lowered institutional expectations are a result of continuing cultural partitioning. At one point, if you lived in middle-class suburban consumer world, you might aspire to the role of intellectual, or artist, or successful entrepreneur. That’s still true today, but less so. You may just aspire to being a better middle-class suburban consumer. And why wouldn’t you? Do today’s intellectuals speak to the masses any more than today’s Hollywood stars, in any way except simple exposure? They both work in their own worlds, in their own circles, with their own expectations.

It’s not surprising that other academics review this book and discuss it, because it has been cast as academic. (What else would a book about intellectuals be?) If the author is lucky, it’ll get noticed by the book-buying public at Barnes & Noble, who will briefly propel it into the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. But in the end, what effect does that have? Some teens decide to cross over, that the academic world is where they belong, so they go to college, major in a soft science, go to graduate school, and reinforce the academic world by writing books and reviewing the books of other people they see at conferences three times a year.

We don’t expect the book to be promoted by Warren Beatty, we don’t expect Willie Nelson to write a song about anti-intellectualism in the United States, and we don’t expect our pastor to have copies sitting in the pews when we walk in. Those are not the worlds where we expect to see this book or its thesis, and we are comfortable with that separation.

And that’s the rub. Perhaps institutions have dumbed down their expectations for the sake of inclusion, but another part of our general dumbing down is our lack of concern about our separations. While we’ve always had those separations, the more freedom we get to cross those lines, the less we actually care about doing so. Culture as mall…you can pick and choose anything, but you’ll primarily go to the stores that have stuff you already know you like. (On the other hand, just try to tell us we can’t go in a store because of who we are. That brings back the caring fast, because that denial is no longer part of our expectations.) We aren’t aspiring to overcome obstacles and gain new worlds, because we simply think of them as being open.

Of course, the greatest danger in taking that freedom for granted, since institutions are so interested in giving it to us, is that we don’t react much if you start taking it away slowly with plausible-sounding reasons…particularly if you work around the less-travelled, less-cared-for edges first. Always a danger.

For the second reason, there is a brief history of the Spiked founders near the end of the article, and it turns out they were, and perhaps still are, Marxists. Wow, I had been reading the publication thinking it was primarily libertarian. I forgot how “conservative” a Marxist can be.

A recent Spiked article has some interesting things to say about modern terrorist movements and their globalist, as opposed to nationalist, backgrounds.

I don’t agree with the main thesis — that Western humanitarian intervention weakened the concept of state sovereignty so much that terrorist movements no longer have nationalist aims — because I don’t think the weakness of the state is a new thing. Internationalism has eroded state sovereignty for quite a long time, but a large part of the weaknesses of the state system are the same ones that it has had all along. (A reliance on national identity for legitimacy, for instance, makes it very hard to fill the entire world with brand-new states, which was the one of the effects of decolonization. Former colony space simply could not remain “empty” of states when the powers of the world were states themselves. After all, with whom do you set trade rules?)

I also take issue with the implication that modern terrorist movements do not have political goals. Of course they have goals. They might have goals that are foreign to our minds. Some of their goals may be so prosaic that we could not imagine shedding lives over them. But they have goals.

(To give the writer credit, the statement about goals is passed over so quickly that I doubt it was explained clearly. It was likely meant to draw a distinction between what Westerners see as clear political goals and what we have actually encountered.)

What the article did to intrigue me, however, was describe “rootless” groups wandering around the world and committing atrocities that shock Western sensibilities for reasons not understandable to those same Westerners. Sound familiar? I don’t think you have to look to internationalism as a primary cause of new-form global terrorism, except in the way that it makes the global adjective realistic through improved communication, logistics, and transportation. I think you just have to look back at what we’ve been doing to each other for centuries.

Sometimes in international relations we forget that sovereignty and the state are not basic concepts, even if they are useful. Both depend on the basic concept of power and are then refined through additional qualifications. However, power does not have to be a complex relationship between a person and his/her government. Humans have been conducting power relations with each other on much more intimate scales throughout our history. Person-to-person, leader-to-tribe, warlord-to-followers…we’re familiar with those concepts. After all, it’s how we built monarchies.

So what are the aims of our modern terrorists? So varied it isn’t even useful to try to describe them globally. There isn’t a lot of agreement between the aims of the various groups we describe as terrorist. Tamil Tigers are not the same as Hamas, who are not the same as Al Qaeda, who are not the same as Chechen rebels, who are not the same as a dozen groups in Iraq who are kidnapping people, who are not the same as…you get the point. In cases of cooperation, primarily only shared enemies, shared religion, and perhaps a few shared goals keep the fragile coalitions together. (Hmm, starts to sound a bit like Western international cooperation.) As we’ve seen in the past, in many cases if you withdraw that enemy from an area, the area dissolves into a patchwork of warlords. (This is less likely for actual nationalist movements, but those we claim to understand better, even if we condemn their tactics and goals.)

Do those groups have aims? Of course, even if they come down to something as simple as “Get me more power” or “Make them pay.” (A couple of classic motivations, by the way.) To act as if those aims are something new and mystifying if they cannot be fit into the context of statehood or nationalism is to ignore a large amount of our own experience.

I’m thinking, for instance, of the Crusades, a time we try to analyze in terms of broad geopolitical and religious goals, when in reality what it boiled down to was a highly organized form of “roving bands of men,” taking land and gold and settling down in areas to exercise power: The mass export of feudalism to a land that already had a mostly settled civilization. (I don’t think our current turn towards romanticizing the Muslim defenders is simply a politically correct balancing out. I think it’s because we actually somewhat identify with them now.)

Christianity’s power to organize those groups, even if their ultimate goals may have differed or conflicted, should teach us something about cooperation, however. We should not discount the organizing factor of radical Islamic aims, even among groups that may fundamentally disagree. (But, really, our preoccupation with Islam as the organizing factor is misguided. If it wasn’t that, it would be something else. Just the past few decades we’ve had international movements based on Communism and post-colonial nationalism…as odd as that sounds.)

What happens if a terrorist act occurs that has no clear political aim? Aside from the constant human fear for one’s life and the health of others, the primary effect of terrorism is the fear of disorder. We may support resistance groups if we do not like the order they resist, but we fear groups that try to take away the order with which we are comfortable. A lot of terrorist acts have aims that are simply not publicized or discounted. (”Surely they didn’t kill all of those people just because one of their leaders was arrested.”) The acts that go beyond all bounds of normal understanding, such as Beslan, may have been driven partially by such goals, but the method of the violence is designed to create greater disorder, or at least the perception of it, which creates more fear, which creates more perception of disorder, and so on. Since we create order by shared agreement, the perception of disorder creates a vacuum that offers room for the terrorist group to create its own perceived order, no matter what it is.

Is it a winning long-term strategy? Possibly, on a very occasional basis. (While it would be hard to characterize Moqtada al-Sadr as a terrorist, rather than a classic warlord/resistance leader, his disruption of what little order the U.S. had managed to impose may have vaulted him into a seat in the Iraqi government.) However, an eventual apocalyptic showdown with the West — as Al Qaeda’s aim seems to be — isn’t likely to produce anything except many more deaths. Short-term goals may be more achievable, though, and as anyone can tell from reading the local newspaper, short-term goals can make people do some crazy, violent things.

So what has been our own reaction to terrorist acts designed to create disorder? Well, we were determined not to “let the terrorists win” — an interesting statement, since we usually go to war aiming to win ourselves, not just keep someone else from doing so — so we started chasing those terrorists, even into Afghanistan. (Small confession: I think that was the exact right thing to do.) Of course, then we let many of them get away and didn’t provide enough help to the Afghans to keep the country from falling into greater disorder. (The exact wrong thing to do.) Then we invaded Iraq without enough people or commitment and created yet another disorganized space on the pretext we were still hunting terrorists. (Even more wrong.) So, has humanitarian intervention weakened the state? Probably not. However, our own country stomping on anything it recognizes as an organized government, creating plenty of disorder for groups to operate in and reconstruct in their own ways, while failing to pay enough attention to the perverse NGO that is Al Qaeda is accomplishing much of what the author worries about. (Am I saying we always respect the sovereign state? Of course not. But we treat the sovereign state as a state, declare war, and have a clear idea of why we are doing so and what we want the results to be. Doing so while already involved in an unconventional war is a mistake.)

In the meantime, at home, we create enough disorder ourselves as a reaction to the 9/11 attacks that we fill it with such new order as the Patriot Act, a document that makes us feel better, but has yet to prove its worth given the potentially permanent loss of civil liberties we paid to get that promise of more security.

Do the terrorists win? That depends on the minimization of the perception of disorder. If they don’t have room to operate — if the reaction to their acts, for instance, doesn’t turn into sympathy from the local populace — it is unlikely terrorist acts will accomplish political goals any faster than other means, and may actually slow that process. Do we win? Since the state system has proven adept at handling more disorganized forms of power, I doubt they do unless we accomplish their goals for them. Unfortunately for our foreign policy and for the Russians in Chechnya, it looks like that accomplishment becomes more likely with every stumble.

I don’t watch Days of Our Lives most years. Soaps in general tend to be too repetitious for me. (That comment isn’t meant to be seen as a shot at the genre, which I appreciate. I have the same problem with police dramas, no matter how critically acclaimed.) The turmoil and strife among a group of familiar characters — trapped in a isolated setting and in a claustrophobic loop of repeating plotlines — just doesn’t hold my interest for more than a couple of episodes.

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Every once in a while in the blog world, some mildly controversial topic will come along and kick up up a mini-storm of opinions. One of the latest is over Wikipedia, a project encouraging open participation in building an encyclopedia-like reference resource.

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