As the entire international economic, political and military balance is upended, and governments are going to find themselves in a frightening new world, unlike anything they have ever known, and where neither Powerpoint nor mythical and symbolic politics can help them.
Cross-posted from Aurelien’s substack “Trying to understand the world”
Photo: Screen Grab
I don’t normally write essays that follow on directly from previous ones but, given the situation we are currently in, I thought it would be useful this week to develop some of the ideas in my last essay a little further, especially as they refer to problems of understanding and decision-making in government. As before, I am not going to indulge in prophecy or try to talk about the details of military operations, although I will comment on some things that should have been obvious, but to which the media have only just begun to awaken.
I have argued previously that the defeat the West has been suffering in Ukraine is above all an intellectual one: not being able to understand what we are seeing means it’s impossible to respond effectively to it. But the problem goes beyond the fighting on the battlefield, to the nature of that War itself, and in particular its economic and political dimensions. This is even more the case with Iran, where not only is there no overall US strategy (as opposed to half-formulated fantasies and wish-lists) but where in addition Washington appears to be incapable of understanding that the other side does have a strategy with economic and political components, and is implementing it. As a result, all the media concentration recently has been on the movement of US troops to the region and their possible uses, as though that in itself was going to decide something. Yet in fact, the real issue is the development and deployment by the Iranians of a new concept of warfare, based on missiles, drones and defensive preparations, and the inability of the West, with its platform-centric mentality, to understand and process these developments.
So first of all, I’m going to explain more about how and why this intellectual problem has arisen and how it manifests itself, and then talk about some of the consequences of having a political culture that is incapable not only of seeing the big picture, but also of making the big picture and the numerous small pictures fit together, and so is incapable in turn of a strategy that can actually be implemented, or for that matter of recognising a strategy that is being implemented by others.
Western (and especially US) political culture is known for its short-term thinking, and its obsession with trivia. Even if there are political forces who have longer-term ambitions and aspirations, these are not, as I pointed out last week, the same thing as strategies. But why should this be so? Some of it is endemic in the nature of politics itself, where the most elaborate plans can be derailed by something completely unexpected, and where just dealing with the events of the day can easily consume all of your time. And it’s true that the 24-hour news economy is doing to politics what the permanently online world is doing to ordinary people: destroying attention spans and making it difficult or impossible to think about anything more complex. But I think there are also some deeper and longer-term forces at work.
I’ve referred several times in previous essays to theories about changes in human consciousness over the millennia, and what this might imply. Iain McGilchrist has famously written about the increasing role of the left side of the brain (the Emissary) at the expense of the right side (the Master.) In his conception the left brain, which is concerned with precision and detail, should be the servant of the right brain, which deals in the “big picture” and is capable of setting objectives. He argues that the left-brain with its technocratic orientation has become increasingly and dangerously powerful in recent times. I would add that this increase in power is not necessarily experienced in the same way in all cultures, and that in the West it is very far advanced indeed. Why is this?
Well, one reason is the changing nature of society, and with it the nature of politics itself. There has been a huge movement away from traditional manual and practical jobs towards jobs that are essentially symbolic, and where contact with the real world, or even the ostensible product or service, is at several removes. If you work in the online sales department of a large company, you may have never even seen the product you are selling, or had any direct contact with the customer at all. And of course if you buy something online just before midnight, from a supplier whose site is full of third-party sellers importing from China, and delivered to a pick-up point near you, few human beings are actually involved, and probably none see the product as a physical object, as opposed to a cardboard box with a bar-code, or just lines on a screen. Likewise, very few of those who work for banks these days ever see a human customer. The world of finance, indeed, is probably the ultimate left-brain activity: obsessing over numbers as complete abstractions unconnected to reality, and attributing significance to them for all the world like some latter-day degenerate version of Pythagoras. It’s not so much that numbers can be confused with reality, as that reality in the end is nothing but numbers, and decisions are made and workers rewarded without any kind of real-world check. Everything is possible, therefore, because ultimately everything is numbers.
The modern political class, increasingly dominated by those who have worked in finance, or its close relative management consultancy, therefore largely consist of people with little experience of the real world. Over the last forty years, unsurprisingly, this way of thinking and working, combining symbolic manipulation of numbers and the ticking of symbolic boxes, has become the default in government, and even the military and diplomacy. So the emphasis now is not on the capability to do things and achieve actual objectives, but on the skills of making the numbers look right, and proving that you have carried out the correct steps in the correct order. That is all the system knows how to do
That’s not to say that the left brain is useless or dangerous in itself, of course, just that ultimately the right brain needs to be in control. The left brain is process-driven and has no sense of duration, so it will continue doing the same thing in principle forever. If it encounters an obstacle, its instinct is to keep battering away rather than to try something new. (Cognitive bias, which is where we interpret all problems in the light of our special interests or competencies, is a very left-brain phenomenon.) Moreover, it tends to hyper-specialisation, and rejects information that it does not recognise and is not equipped to evaluate. On the other hand, the left brain is also indispensable if you actually want to get anything done. McGilchrist, like the great Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser, actually thought that the two hemispheres were capable of working together productively: indeed Gebser believed that such an age was already beginning, as human, consciousness moved to an “integral” or “aperspectival” stage.
It will be obvious, I hope, that this left-brain-right-brain dichotomy is important for international politics and for understanding how conflicts arise and play out. It is the nature of a crisis that most attention is focused on transitory daily issues, such that the big picture, if there ever was one, disappears from view. I know from personal experience that in a crisis every long and exhausting day is overwhelmed with meetings, telephone calls, video-conferences, unexpected news or initiatives, requests for interviews, media statements, questions in parliament … the list goes on and on. For those like me who had the temerity to ask what the point of all this was, and about longer-term objectives and plans, the response was typically “we’ll worry about that later.” And quite soon, of course, it’s later, and the system realises that it has no idea how it got to where it is, especially because it actually wanted to be somewhere else. But by then it’s too late.
So the real problem is not so much that the left brain dominates, as that the two modes of thinking are never brought together. This means that quite a lot of left-brain work can go on effectively on auto-pilot, because it develops a life of its own. Thus, ideas for using US ground troops in Iran can rapidly be developed at a technical level, with force composition and generation, potential targets, entry points, logistic resupply, ISR etc, all without the questions of “why are we doing this?” or “what do we hope to achieve?” ever being posed. But of course the output of such activities can be easily expressed in whizzo graphics and AI generated simulations, and it provides the planners with something to do.
History suggests that most serious defeats are the result of the strategic objective and the tactical implementation being treated separately: if you like, by the left brain and the right brain not talking to each other. Since the example of Gallipoli has become topical, let’s glance at that. David Fromkin is right, I think, to argue that the idea of the operation (right brain) as conceived by Churchill, was perfectly sensible, but that its execution by the military (left brain) was unimaginative and almost bound to fail. A small personal gloss on that: some decades ago I was reading through the operational orders given to British Brigade Commanders for the assault itself. They included highly detailed requirements for quantities of weapons and ammunition, instructions for dealing with horses, indeed, everything you might expect of a proper staff instruction. Except that nowhere did it say what the purpose of the operation actually was. The result was that the one Brigade that actually achieved its tactical objective promptly about-turned and went back to the ships again.
If the left-brain running by itself is inadequate, the same is even more true of the right brain operating alone, without the reality check its partner should be providing. Actually researching information, reading the views of experts, thinking about the practicalities of a proposal—these are left brain activities, and they require organisation, thought and application. That is why, I think, we have seen so many wild, even ludicrous, statements about the wars of the last few years by politicians and pundits. These people are prisoners of right-brain thinking, utterly divorced from any mechanism for assessing reality. After all, traditional right-brain thinking was mythical, symbolic and metaphorical. As Pierre Hadot pointed out, a question like “did the Greeks believe their myths,” says much more about us, and our understanding of “belief” than it does about the Greeks, for whom myth and symbolism were fundamental ways of understanding the world. Similarly, we can’t really expect an answer to the question “did people in medieval Europe believe that the Moon went around the Earth in a crystal sphere?” because the type of “belief” they understood then is one that we have essentially abandoned over recent centuries. And finally, the more recent triumph of the photograph and the rise of representative art has obscured the fact that for millennia art was essentially symbolic in its representation of the world: Raphael’s School of Athens, for example, was never meant to be a realistic depiction of an actual meeting of philosophers, but a symbolic presentation of them and the relationship between their ideas.
Thus, statements of faith in an ultimate Ukrainian victory, or of a future “Free Palestine,” or of the inevitable defeat of Iran, have to be seen, even more than most political statements, as symbolic and metaphorical. They are not deduced from the facts of the situation, nor do there have to be actual processes capable of making them happen. They are battle-cries, slogans for chanting, descriptions of fantasies and in certain cases nightmares. The problem arises when the extreme right-brain thinking that has always characterised politics, exacerbated by the ignorance of modern politicians about real life, collides with the extreme left-brain culture of our modern world as exemplified in government systems, without any transmission mechanism to enable them to work together.
We can see this in everyday politics. When a really major problem arises, such as Covid, then the political class reaches for what it knows and what it can do, because the left brain has very little imagination. So the easiest thing at the beginning is to pretend it’s not happening. Then OK, it’s happening but we don’t know what to do, so anyone who says that we should close our frontiers can be dismissed a racist. Once governments were eventually driven out of their confidence zones, they were completely lost. I remember watching President Macron thumping the table in front of him and somewhat desperately intoning “We are at war!” to the French people, before asking them to do their patriotic duty by only going shopping if they needed to, as you do in the middle of a war. I suspect we shall see something similar, but worse, as the fallout from the Iran crisis starts to have a real impact, and as political leaders react confusedly and almost randomly, searching around for things that they understand and can do, whether or not they are of any value or even any relevance. And the tendency to assume that it’s only necessary to make money available and things will happen automatically is so deeply ingrained these days that only an earthquake will shift it. And unfortunately, an earthquake may be what we are about to get.
Left-brain thinking is extremely rigid and cannot cope with unexpected events or with failure. When confronted with an obstacle it can’t cross, it often practises denial, and goes into a kind of fugue, repeating the same thing, like an old BASIC program stuck in a loop. You may remember that at the time of the Brexit negotiations, the British Prime Minister Theresa May, could not get a majority in Parliament for various proposals intended to be negotiated with the EU. When taxed with this, both by the media and by EU leaders, she had no answer except to mechanically repeat “there will be a majority,” to all questions. (There wasn’t, of course.) This is typical left-brain thinking, encouraged amongst other things by the way in which politics has degenerated in recent years into the shortest of short-term games, where there’s often no incentive, and there’s even some danger, in looking beyond the next move and the next few days or even hours.
Right-brain thinking in politics is equally dangerous when taken to extremes. Recall that the right brain draws no hard and fast distinctions between reality and imagination, or even dreams. There is a New Age quality to some of the behaviour of political figures under its spell: the truth is what we want it to be, the truth is what makes us comfortable, we believe the myth rather than the reality, and anyway what’s the difference? It was much remarked how parts of the political spectrum constructed a Fantasy Bosnia in the 1990s for themselves, full of cartoon-like Good Guys and Bad Guys. This would have mattered less if some governments had not let such fantasies affect their political decisions. The trend has continued up to the present day, and there’s little doubt that many of the originators and supporters of the Iran War, and for that matter some of their critics, are living in fantasy worlds of their own, dominated by excessive right-brain thinking.
Such thinking cannot be challenged by facts, because it is not based on deduction from facts, but on their selection to support a mythological or symbolic narrative that appeals to the thinker. When you hear people say things like “it’s obvious that this was the plan all along,” or “now at last the truth has been revealed,” while perhaps waving some obscure piece of paper at you, you are seeing the right brain at work in its traditional function of finding any old explanation for things that otherwise would have none. Such thinking is impervious to rational enquiry: try saying “if your theory that Covid was a hoax is true, how do you think the governments of North Korea, Nicaragua and Nigeria managed to coordinate their actions and their propaganda so well, along with a hundred and fifty other countries?” and you will get a blank stare, quite possibly followed by threats of violence. But because it is the right brain in action, these theories don’t have to be literally true: like the idea that—let’s say—the US created Al Qaida, they only have to be symbolically and metaphorically true. Recall that the origins of most religious pantheons are supposed to be in attempts to find explanations for puzzling natural phenomena such as the apparent movement of the sky or the changing seasons, and the explanations were symbolic and metaphorical, because those were the only modes of thought that were then available.
A healthy human consciousness, such as Gebser envisaged, would be one where the two brains worked in concert, with the right brain supplying the big picture and the left brain checking practicality and filling in the detail. But we don’t have that: instead, we have a culture which is half myth-making and half obsession with process and detail, with no connection between them. We know from brain research that the two halves of the brain are connected by a bundle of nerve fibres called the Corpus Collosum, which enable the two halves of the brain to work together. When this is damaged, or has to be severed for therapeutic reasons, the so-called “split-brain” syndrome results, with symptoms including difficulty in communication, uncontrolled hand movements and motor coordination problems.
It’s not fanciful, I think, to suggest that something very serious of this kind has happened with our society. Rather than constructively engage the two sides of the brain, political leaders and pundits give the impression of ricocheting between them; one moment expressing dreams, fantasies or nightmares about Iran, the next fussing over the details of missile payloads the intricacies of sanctions regimes and who said what to whom when. It’s the bit in the middle that’s missing. But then, If you think about it, a politician or pundit in their early fifties, at university perhaps in the 1990s, would anyway have been brought up in a kind of split-brained world reflecting the paradoxes of neoliberal society. On the one hand, told that they can be anything they want to be and that individual freedom is all, on the other hemmed in by an increasing number of written and unwritten laws and rules seeking to control every aspect of their behaviour. The strain of trying to live in two different worlds may itself be one reason why political leaders often seem so detached from reality, unable to comfortably inhabit either.
That is inevitably speculation, but what is clear is that there is a huge missing area in western thinking these days between airy concepts and practical implementation. There is an assumption that promising something will be done, or that money will be put aside at some stage in the future, means the problem is solved. After that, I presume, things are supposed to happen automatically. What might be described, using a military analogy, as the Operational level, where ideas get turned into coherent plans, is basically absent. This also reflects the downsizing and de-skilling of the state apparatus in most western countries, and the resulting situation where the capacity to plan and carry out large-scale operational activities doesn’t exist any more. During World War 2, and for several years afterwards, Britain had a Ministry of Food which planned and oversaw food distribution at a time of scarcity. (Ironically, the health of the British people as a whole improved during that time.) No such organisation could be constructed now in Britain, nor in most western countries: the skills and knowledge, and even the trained administrators no longer exist. I suppose we could always ask McKinsey to prepare an action plan, though.
But the lack of such a capability itself is partly because we no longer think in connected terms: politics is about wild promises and vague concepts, accompanied by the smallest possible practical initiatives, and often none at all. So in the recent French Municipal elections, centrist and leftist candidates in areas with high immigrant populations (among others) began to talk of the need for “security.” Previously, this was dismissed as a code word for the “extreme Right” but it turned out that many immigrant parents were worried about the safety of their children in the streets, so the concept was hurriedly added to the manifestos. But, with some honourable exceptions, few of the successful candidates could actually say what they are going to do, apart from banalities. Anyway, the point is to win the election by adjusting your language. What do you mean we have to do practical things as well?
All of which does not bode well for the West’s ability to identify, much less handle, the kinds of problems that the Iran War is going to bring us, and I want to move on now to giving a few examples in different areas of what they may be and, more importantly how difficult it will be to address them. There have been plenty of sobering articles on things like supply chains by people who know much more than I do: here, I’m going to limit myself to the political and strategic side and the everyday business of government, which are already bad enough.
The greatest challenge, as often, is intellectual. Our masters will have to recognise that chains of consequence and causality do actually exist, that Father Christmas is a right-brain myth, and that there are hard limits on what can actually be done, and hard requirements about what needs to be done, and neither can be circumvented with words. In particular, they need to abandon the delusion that only finance matters, and that numbers on paper represent the underlying reality of the world. (Not even Pythagoras would have suggested that you can eat numbers.) This is most obvious in the endless, earnest discussion of what the Iran War will do to “the price of oil.” In a few cases, pundits even realise that “the price of oil” might affect the prices of other things as well. But from their point of view, “price” and “oil” are two different concepts. The idea that there might just not be enough oil, and that that lack may have practical consequences other than price doesn’t get much of an airing. After all, surely if the price goes up, new suppliers will come forward? That’s how the market works, isn’t it? Isn’t it? The idea that the world will soon lose some of its supply of oil-based products, and that this is a hard limit that cannot be got round, has only just begun to register, and, to the extent that it has, pundits appear to believe that we can substitute, say, solar power for oil, and all will be well. Can you use solar power to make fertiliser? Indeed, can you make solar panels at all without oil-based products? Enquiring minds are waiting for an answer.
Far more likely, I’m afraid, is that the West will be hit by consequences one after another, in no particular rational order, and find itself responding to each in panic, through disconnected and sometimes competing initiatives. In each case it will be a surprise, and in each case pundits will have to spend time with Wikipedia to relearn the kind of thing that people just knew in earlier generations. The very reliability of much modern technology is itself a kind of trap. If you lived in the days of occasional food shortages and power cuts, if you grew vegetables in your garden as a hangover from the war, if many small things that went wrong around the house could be repaired, if cars were made not that far from where you lived and could be repaired by anyone with basic mechanical and electrical skills, if clothes could be home-made and mended, and so on … then you were, ironically, much more conscious of the complexity of society and the economy, because you saw it first-hand every day. Ordering groceries online isn’t quite the same thing. Indeed, the modern family with its two wage-earners, existing off instant meals and take-aways and working long and sometimes irregular hours, is going to find itself hopelessly lost if it is not careful.
I doubt if any western country is now equipped, organisationally or even intellectually, to handle problems caused by scarcity of food. Western states now enjoy little absolute food security—a problem I discussed in some detail last year—but our governments are far from even beginning to grasp the nature of the problem, let alone its implications. Ah well, it will be said, people eat too much and anyway too much food is thrown away. Indeed, but that’s not the answer. It may well be that there is enough food taken in the round, but that it’s in the wrong places, and some of it is prohibitively expensive. Hunger is already a problem is certain parts of cities in Britain, and probably elsewhere as well. In wartime, nations have historically introduced rationing, and most countries had contingency plans to do so as late as the end of the Cold War. But rationing implies an informed awareness of nutrition, a large and efficient state apparatus and a public ready to make sacrifices, none of which exists today.
How would you even get past the first stage, which would be registration? Most countries these days have little idea who is within their borders legally, let alone illegally. How would you determine the rules? Do people have to give proof of their address? How do you discover how many people there are in a household? What do you do with foreign students and workers? Those unable to return home because of transport problems? Illegal immigrants? What about allergies and religious objections to certain foods? How many languages would the average ration-card have to be printed in? And how quickly could that be done and issued? Or is everything to be done virtually? What happens to those who don’t have a phone? If your phone is stolen will you then starve? How will you deal with theft, fraud and the black market that will immediately arise? How most of all will you cope with a bewildered public obliged to deal with absolute, rather than relative shortages for the first time in their lives?
The temptation is to wave hands, and say “we”ll sort it out.” But we won’t, and nothing in the way that western governments have behaved recently suggests they will be able to cope. Can’t charities help? Maybe, but unless you can magic up more food from somewhere then all you’re doing is passing the parcel. As it happens, there is a lot of experience of what happens in situations of severe shortage, and the answer is that the rich buy what they want, the poor buy what they can, and organised crime steps in to put those with money in touch with those with things to sell. The capacity of western states has been radically reduced over the last couple of generations, even as the power of organised crime has grown. We can imagine what shortages of basic medicines would do, and who might wind up controlling their retail sale. In reality, attempts by government to control the availability of everyday necessities will lead nowhere and arouse public opposition. The Internet will have a field day: it will be worse than Covid. This shortage of food doesn’t really exist you see, it’s just the Davos brigade trying to kill off as many people as it can, this time by hunger.
Perhaps it won’t be that bad? I certainly hope not. But for it not to be that bad, then in our hyper-coupled and highly complex society, everything has to continue to work flawlessly all the time. In most western cities these days, there is a maximum of three days’ supply of food and basic necessities in the shops. Most of the disruption will be localised and temporary, but it will also add up. A ship that cannot sail or arrives late here, a haulage company out of business because it cannot afford the petrol there, a power cut making the contents of a frozen goods emporium useless in a third place. In our modern society, it doesn’t need much to go wrong, but it needs an awful lot to go right. And if it goes very wrong the political effects will likely be beyond what we can imagine.
Even basics like petrol and power will be a problem, if there just isn’t enough. Who gets priority? How would you enforce it? Let’s say you decide to keep ambulances on the road. But then paramedics will have to have the petrol to get to work. But what about administrative staff? But what about the managers? But what about the private company that provides the hospital catering? What about the senior management of that company? What about the directors of the private equity company that owns the company that owns the company that cleans the floors?
If you’ve ever worked in government, you don’t need me to tell you that these kinds of practical questions have no real answer, and that there are layers and layers of other practical problems beneath them. But there are also larger-scale problems that are even worse. We may finally see an end to the refrain I’ve heard all my life: “it will all be done by computers!” From taking up a room to sliding into my pocket, that’s been true since the 1960s. But now it turns out that there are problems with plastic, problems with silicon chips and most of all problems with sheer power.
Those “AI” data centres? Not looking so good now are they? What happens to economies when the “AI” boom folds up even quicker than anticipated? What happens to all those companies who sacked half their workforce because “AI”? What happens to students in year or two, graduating from university but unable to write connected prose, only to find that “AI” isn’t there any more? But what about existing data centres on which the world largely depends. They aren’t, in spite of propaganda, in “the Cloud,” they’re in certain countries, some of which are vulnerable, others of which might suddenly find they have a strategic asset. And the modern heroes of Industry, your Gates, your Musk, your Bezos and their little friends, where will they be? And why should we listen to them any more?
And there will be any number of totally unexpected and indeed unforeseeable minor consequences, as you would expect from a world which is so deeply connected and tightly coiled. So, as a random example, what about Gulf investments in Europe, where they have been big in the property market for years now. Will Qatar have to sell Paris Saint-Germain? And if so, who’ll buy it?
I think we are about to experience the Crunch Event that has worried me for some time: a head-on collision between really serious economic and social problems and the ever-diminishing capability of governments to deal with them. I fear that what we call Complex Emergencies when they happen to others are about to come and visit us, and we no longer have the tools, institutions or even societies capable of dealing with them. Given their record over the last decade or so, it’s not hard to see some governments, at least, just buckling under the strain.
Dire as that situation would be, it is obviously only part of the problem, as the entire international economic, political and military balance is upended, and governments are going to find themselves in a frightening new world, unlike anything they have ever known, and where neither Powerpoint nor mythical and symbolic politics can help them. Unless something even more catastrophic intervenes, I’ll talk about that next week.
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