August 27, 2007--Chaos

A persistent theme of many of the previous 599 Behind blogs has been how at our peril we ignore the promptings of culture, emotion, and the “irrational” on individual, group, and national behavior. Friday postings have been unabashedly devoted to how these urges, perhaps welling from the prehensile depths of our DNA, can lead to various forms of fanaticism. From the relatively harmless—going into deep debt to pay cash for liposuction, to the immeasurably dangerous—attempting to bring God-ordained “freedom and democracy” to the Middle East. If looked at “rationally,” taking into account the full measure of history, none of this would make “sense.” And yet we persist. I have placed quotation marks around rational and irrational and sense to signal not only their socially-constructed nature but also to indicate, because of these cultural sources, how value-suffused they are. Each, as they say, exists in the eyes of their beholder. I suppose I have been attempting here to urge, as we lunge so assuredly forward, that we pause to look into these beholder’s eyes in an attempt to understand the inner logic of what often appears to us to be conflicting and contrary motivations. Let me again use the situation in Iraq as a critical illustration. Looked at reasonably, though Iraq is a geopolitical fiction, created by the western colonial powers that drew proverbial lines-in-the-sand, one would expect in the current desperate circumstances that regardless of their historical differences the people who live within these artificial borders would at the minimum see their best interest to be in establishing a tense form of order. So people could live something resembling “normal” lives. All right, lives that they themselves would define to be normal. The neo-cons had at least this much right—it was not irrational to expect that after, and as a result of, the devastation this would be what people would see to be in their interest. But instead we find as much aspiration to what we consider to be chaos as we do to unity. Wouldn’t it make much more sense, we think, for them to be looking for the compromises that would permit a measure of safety if not a feeling of national identity? That people there would be seeking to draw their own lines in the sand that this time were guided by religious and cultural differences? There is, though, a different logic at work. To quote a recent column in the NY Times (linked below): Iraq has become a cellular nation, dividing and redividing into competing constituencies that have a greater stake in chaos than compromise. Thus, what we think of as a central government, a goal we see to be desirable, to many there it would be a threat to their autonomy because they derive power from the ongoing crisis. This then may be more the local logic which, though we see it not to make sense, will more determine the final outcome than all our money and seeming power.