Robert Wright's Nonzero (private feed for eveningglass@gmail.com)
Society & Culture:Philosophy
How many newsletters do you know of that, in a single issue, deal with both the mind-body problem and the American foreign policy problem? (No fair answering that question with the question, “How many readers want a newsletter that does both of those things?”)
Below you’ll find:
(1) A revised version of the animated micro-lecture on consciousness that I produced in collaboration with Nikita Petrov and that we workshopped with paid subscribers two months ago. (Those of you who complained about the electric-guitar transitions will be glad to hear that they’re gone—the people have spoken!);
(2) A brand new animated micro-lecture that’s a sequel to that micro-lecture;
(3) A conversation about the foreign policy “Blob” that will go public on the Wright Show tomorrow evening but which you can listen to (above) or watch (below) now. The conversation is with alleged (by me) blobster Thomas Wright (no relation) of the Brookings Institution, who was mentioned in my recent essay on blobology and who kindly agreed to debate the whole Blob question with me. Below the video of our conversation you’ll find:
(4) a short excerpt from the conversation which has some relevance (as I explain below the excerpt) to a Blob-related piece I posted last week, “Steven Pinker and the Apocalypse”.
As always, comments welcome.
(Cleaned up) transcript of the part of the video that begins around the 29-minute mark:
Tom Wright: You know, we sort of owe it to each other to say, okay, where is each side coming from and to accept as a starting point, you know, that they're coming in good faith. Because—and I know you didn't make this point, but Steve Walt has made it on many occasions and some others have, too—you know, it's this idea that the Blob—quote unquote—is sort of compromised, right? Because they're all in it for their own self-interest, they have grants, or they have jobs that sort of require them to have these views—and you know, that it is sort of inherently compromised or problematic. And that makes me pretty uneasy because you know, that may happen, and it may also happen on the other side too, but in my experience, most people are coming at this in good faith, right?
Bob Wright: I'd like to speak to that. I'm not sure if Steve Walt put it exactly as you said he may have, but here's the way I would put it, and I suspect he'd agree:
On the one hand, yes, we think the money that goes to support think tanks has an unfortunate influence on policy discourse. And the money comes from the arms industry [and] from various more narrow interests: there’s the so-called Israel Lobby, pro-Israel money; there has been more and more money from some Sunni states in the Gulf—UAE, Saudi Arabia… and there's probably money on both sides of the China thing right now.
[So] we do on the one hand think that this money has an influence, but I don't think that means anyone is arguing in bad faith. It's not like the think tanks go out and find people on the street and say, OK, we're going to hire you, and unless you agree with us on A, B, and C, we're going to fire you. They just hire people who agree with them.
You know, there was a moment once where Noam Chomsky was talking to, I think, a BBC commentator. Of course, Chomsky's view of this is at least as cynical as mine in terms of the way financial interests influence discourse. And the journalist was all offended—he was saying [to Chomsky], “You're saying, that I believe these things because I'm paid to!” And Chomsky said, “No, I'm just saying if you didn't already believe those things, you wouldn't have that job.”
Now, Tom, you can't deny that think tanks—ones that you might identify with ideologically and other ones, including the Quincy Institute—when they hire people, all of these think tanks, they are usually filtering by ideology. That's the way it is. It's just that until the Quincy Institute, the great bulk of the money was coming from the kinds of interests I described. And now for the first time you have an institution that has some financial support from restrainers.
But, the main point is, I'm not saying anyone's arguing in bad faith… And I'd be curious if you would take issue with the claim that when think tanks hire, they are imposing—whether or not it's explicit—a kind of ideological filter.
Tom Wright: On that question, I don't, I don't really agree with the characterization…
If you want to pick up the conversation at this point, that’s here. Meanwhile, one afterthought:
This idea that the individual people who shape foreign policy discourse are acting in good faith, yet the discourse as a whole is corrupted by money, is one thing I had in mind when I wrote this in the aforementioned piece about my conversation with Steve Pinker:
This built-in tendency of people to believe in their own goodness strikes me as a big problem for an anti-Blob insurgency. After all, if you want to rally support for tearing down the foreign policy establishment, it helps to paint its occupants as evil, as willfully and mercilessly destructive. As in: “These coastal elites will gladly sacrifice the lives of 18-year-olds from flyover country on the altar of profit and power and empire!” And it’s harder to say things like that if you believe, as I do, that pretty much everyone in the Blob is in fact convinced that they’re doing God’s work.
Which isn’t to say that the policies they favor don’t bring them profit or power or serve empire. It’s just to say that, even when these policies do have these properties, most blobsters have a nobler narrative in mind, thanks in part to our evolutionarily ingrained gift for building, and buying into, self-serving narratives.
To put the challenge faced by the anti-Blob insurgency in slightly different terms:
One thing that typically energizes revolutionaries is seeing the existing regime as the enemy. And of course, the Blob is in a sense the enemy—but it’s not (according to my takeaway from evolutionary psychology, at least) an enemy that deserves to be depicted the way we’re accustomed to depicting enemies: as malicious, barbarous, and various other adjectives that let us abide, or even take active pleasure in, the enemy’s suffering.
In some future issue of the newsletter. I’ll return to the question of how we can go about the business of destroying the Blob without treating blobsters as if they’re arguing in bad faith. For now I’ll just say that I think you can be as mean as I was to Rich Lowry in Friday’s newsletter while still thinking (as I do) that Lowry is arguing in good faith.
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