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Morality, a key to understanding people

Anne Applebaum, in her review of the recently translated KGB file of Andrei Sakharov, emphasizes that the spymasters who monitored every detail of the physicist's life struggled to understand why he criticized Soviet society. Even high-ranking Politburo members such as Andropov and Gorbachev strained to explain Sakharov's dissidence as the result of his "living in ideas and theories", or as originating from Western spy agencies, or, ludicrously, as stemming from his wife's participation (being half-Jewish) in the worldwide Zionist conspiracy. Blinkered by ideology or (more likely) by cynicism, the KGB failed to grasp that Sakharov might be motivated by honesty, decency, or any other virtue.

J.R.R. Tolkien makes the same observation in his famous fantasy, regarding the inability of his Dark Lord to imagine that his foes would want to destroy the Ring of Power: "But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it" (II, 2 -- the point is echoed several other times in the book).

The epistemic lesson is this: the refusal to countenance morality as a real human phenomenon (whether due to moral corruption or a theoretical aversion to value judgments) can cripple one's ability to understand basic human behavior. This wilful blindness has been the Achilles' heel of "realist" political and economic theory, from Thomas Hobbes to Richard Posner.

(The Applebaum review is in the current issue of the New York Review of Books:)
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=18353

By Mrooney at 2005-10-06 20:54 | login or register to post comments | 958 reads

A Russian tendency?

In this article describing a proposed Russian law bringing NGOs under government control, I see an echo of the paranoid incomprehension of the West mentioned above:

"Earlier this year, the director of the Federal Security Service, Nikolai Patrushev, accused Western organizations - including the Peace Corps and the British medical charity Merlin - of being fronts for espionage. "Under the cover of implementing humanitarian and educational programs in Russian regions, they lobby for the interests of certain countries and gather classified information on a wide range of issues," Mr. Patrushev told members of Parliament in May, referring to private organizations."

While the U.S. and Europe certainly might like to spy on Russia, anyone who thinks they do so via Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch is simply an ignoramus -- or a would-be totalitarian.

By Mrooney at Thu, 2005-11-24 06:51 | login or register to post comments

Russian tendency

I agree with you. I once argued that Russia for various social and cultural reasons has a natural tendency to authortarianism. Arguing that Green Peace is spying for the CIA or MI-6 is just paranoid - another fine Russian tendency.

BSD

By AEadmin at Fri, 2005-11-25 09:06 | login or register to post comments

Failure of the realist paradigm

Indeed the realist paradigm fails short of understanding what they might call "non-rational" actors. Realism fails to truly account for motivations other than self interest. So a suicide bomber is a difficult to understand as Sakharov. Failure to account for values systems as an influencer of human events can lead people to blind themselves.

As you mention LOTR, I recall a specific event in the The Return of the King where Imarahil used Sauron's realist position against him. "Ever and anon Gandalf let blow the trumpets, and the heralds would cry:'The Lords of Gondor are come! Let all leave this land or yield them up!' But Imrahil said: 'Say not The Lords of Gonder. Say The King Elessar. For that is true , even though he has not yet sat upon the throne; and it will give the Enemy more thought, if the heralds use that name.' And thereafter thrice a day the heralds proclaimed the coming of King Elessar."

The implication is clear here. Aragorn has taken the ring as his own and was marching on Mordor to claim his rights as King. This would have given pause for Sauron as he knew Aragorn's will matched his own as demonstrated by his wresting control of the palentir of Isengard away from Sauron. Sauron would have known the ring would have had an effect, even on the noble Aragorn, making him more prideful. He would have no need for any other "Lords." Indeed short of Gandalf wielding the ring, Aragorn would have been the greatest threat to the Dark Lord's mind. He would have never conceived of a suicide mission to destroy the ring. Thus the limits of the realist framework blinded his "eye" and kept his attention focused on the Black Gate.

By AEadmin at Fri, 2005-10-07 08:30 | login or register to post comments

Suicide Squad

Speaking of the difficulty in understanding suicide attackers, Christian Caryl reviewed several recent studies on the topic a few weeks ago in the NYRB:

Like many of the other scholars on the subject, Pape is deeply skeptical about the notion that suicide bombers are the warriors in a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. Pape's survey reveals that there is nothing intrinsically "Islamic" about the suicide bomber. By his estimate, Islamist groups account for no more than 34.6 percent of the suicide terrorist attacks staged in the past twenty years. The real common denominator of suicide terrorism campaigns, he argues, is that they are all, in one form or another, responses to occupation or foreign control of a national homeland.

And speaking of Hobbes, one reason he argues for the absolute control of religious doctrine by the state is to ensure that people don't get crazy ideas about afterlife rewards points. Recall that the lynchpin of Hobbes's social contract is the overriding fear of violent death. As Hobbes was well aware, however, if people have fanciful ideas about the spirit world, the fear of death will erode -- and with it, the possibility of a science-grounded, liberal state. See chapter 12 of Hobbes's Leviathan ("Of Religion" -- the one just before the most famous chapter).

By Mrooney at Sat, 2005-10-08 18:41 | login or register to post comments

Tolkien

Apposite passages can be found in "The White Rider" and "The Last Debate". It's in the latter chapter that Gandalf explicitly describes that the suicidal attack on Mordor's front door will be seen by Sauron as the mad pride of a new Ringlord.

Tolkien's critique of political realism can be also be seen in his depiction of Denethor, who by any standard is the most "rational" leader in the book.

By Mrooney at Fri, 2005-10-07 12:23 | login or register to post comments

10, 000 years from now

Do you think it possible that if environmental disaster were to strike us nearly dead as a civilization that the LOTR trilogy would make a good Bible if it were to survive (and all those Gideon Bibles were destroyed)?

By AEadmin at Sat, 2005-10-08 16:57 | login or register to post comments

DJ Jesus

The Bible itself matters much less than its institutional and cultural contexts. There's so much there -- the Bible is a sort of chance distillation of hundreds of disparate sources writing at different times and responding to different situations. It is as if we inherited someone's loaded iPod of 2nd century BC Judaism and took that as our starting point for understanding everything. The New Testament and the Quran, we might say, are personal mixes by innovative DJs. Because the text is such a disorganized collection (to use another technological analogy -- it's like the web), putting it to use will depend on a narrow filtering, focusing on just a few select bits to construct anything like a single argument, overarching metaphor, or unitary narrative. For example, Calvinism, which forms the basis for much of the evangelical Christian worldview, stems from placing a huge emphasis on a handful of sentences from Paul's letters. And that narrow filtering almost always reflects the social and personal context of the individual far more than it does the Bible "itself" (whatever that would be).

By comparison, The Lord of the Rings is a tightly focused, unified, and rigorously consistent narrative (indeed, it is far more so than most novels -- check out those day-by-day timelines in the Appendices). There are massive conflicts surrounding the most basic movements of Jesus in the NT, whereas LotR can be used as a GPS on Frodo's every campsite. Tolkien probably would never work as a religious ur-text -- it isn't nearly chaotic enough.

By Mrooney at Sat, 2005-10-08 18:00 | login or register to post comments

Bible - Remix

In other words the Bible is such a confused mixmash of information that you see whatvever you want in it, allowing numerous offshoots to spring up that focus on one part or another. This means instead of providing clarity, a religion must provide a certain amount of ambiguity in it's texts in order to foster the organic growth we have seen with Christianity and Islam

It's interesting that Scientology which has rigidly controlled texts has had a huge amount of growth in the short time it's been around. On the other hand the 7-10 Million Scientologists world wide might be all there will ever be with Scientology. Scientology has a strict hierachy and tightly controlled texts and vocabulary. This means Scientology while always be a small niche religion, as it lacks the necessary confusion for a world religion. :-)

By AEadmin at Sun, 2005-10-09 11:18 | login or register to post comments