Nothing Up My Sleeves

Posted on November 15, 2010 by Timothy Burke

The “interactive budget” feature at the New York Times was kind of interesting. I played around with several scenarios. The thing that surprised me is how easy it is to close the gap simply by returning most taxation to mid-Clinton Administration levels, particularly on people making more than $250,000 a year plus taking away some really huge weapons expenditures. But of course in the dark days of the 1990s, rich people were fleeing the United States in huge numbers, leaving our country a smoldering ruin of middle-classness, so let’s not relieve that nightmare. I’m sure Very Serious People will be along any minute now to tell us why it’s naive to think that this approach to revenue and expenditure could ever be implemented, given that the 21st Century is so very different than the 1990s.

Posted in Politics | 6 Comments

Providing the Bricks, Not the Building

Posted on November 10, 2010 by Timothy Burke

This academic year is turning out to be deeply drenched in committee work for me, but I’m not going to grouse about that as per the professorial norm. The stuff I’m involved in this year feels substantial, interesting, and consequential.

One side effect, though, is that I’m getting a new retrospective perspective on my own career. The deeper I get into the machinery of higher education, the more data and background I see, the more I understand the full picture of what other disciplines do, the more I know about what my colleagues here and elsewhere think, the more cases and controversies I read about or encounter, the more I get a sense of how accidental and aberrant some of my own practices are. When I think about my really traumatically bad oral exam in graduate school, it occurs to me that at least one of my tormentors may well have grasped completely perfectly what kind of academic I was likely to be, and was doing his best by hook or by crook to stop me before I got started. Lately I’ve been stitching together little fragments of conversation and asides from early in my teaching career and realizing that some of the decisions I made about teaching and some of the intellectual interests I pursued may have been far more provocative to some colleagues than I ever guessed. There is something to be said for cultivating a blithe deafness to those kinds of attempts at prior restraint when you’re a junior faculty member, though not to the point that you outright ignore serious danger to your career.

Quite a few academics, tenure-track and otherwise, have a professional practice composed of accidents. Many scholars develop research programs through small, steady acts of transgression against the considered advice of gatekeepers; many courses are taught against the grain of a discipline’s common sense. This is particularly so when you put the specific social identities and circumstances of academics into consideration: junior women who have to struggle through a thicket of barriers put up by male colleagues (and sometimes, to be honest, by senior women); faculty of color through white-dominated institutions, and so on.

This only occasionally breaks into the public transcript of academic life, however, often in those spectacular cases where an entire career built on defiance of controlling norms produces a transformative breakthrough that vindicates the researcher or teacher, as in the case of Barbara McClintock. (Though as in that case, painfully, this often does not happen while that researcher is still actually working.)

There’s a serious risk of narcissistic delusion, of egotistical infantilism, in over-emphasizing your own originality or transgression. Academics who too wholly embrace that self-image are almost compelled to the aggressive pursuit of more and more individually tailored forms of administratively sanctioned internal exile, to become a university of one and therefore responsive to nothing but the beat of their own internal drummer.

In my own case, whatever I do that’s different, it’s a minor variation on a theme, a contrapuntal solo that is still very much within the orchestra’s overall performance. And much of what I do as a teacher is modest, sloppy, rough-edged, not really anything that I’d argue is a model. As a scholar, I’m so unproductive and slow-paced at this point that I deserve nothing but brickbats, not compliments.

But my teaching works for me, and maybe thus at times works for my students, and that seems maybe enough. What works for students and thus maybe for the liberal arts, not necessarily what works for my discipline.

One of the asides that kicked off this bout of reflection and light paranoia for me (tenure being less of a protection from that feeling than non-academics think) was a colleague making it not-too-subtly clear that they thought my selection of texts and themes in courses habitually trespassed onto other specializations in history and onto other disciplines.

I think that’s completely true: it’s just that I don’t like the choice of verb in that characterization, because I don’t think there’s anything wrong about this practice. In fact, this is one place that I’d argue what I’m doing ought to be closer to the norm, the answer to what Gerald Graff has called “courseocentrism”.

My colleague suggested to me that I had to be responsible first (and last) to my discipline and my specialization in my teaching, that there was something unseemly about the heavy admixture of literature and popular culture and journalistic reportage and anthropology that populates some of my syllabi. I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed as an overall view of higher education in some recent meetings. At a small liberal-arts college and maybe even at a large research university, this strikes me as substantially off the mark. Or at least we need some faculty who are irresponsible to their disciplines and responsible first to integrating and connecting knowledge.

The discipline of history provides a reasonable enough foundation for general thinking about the past, thinking about the present, even thinking about the human future. It’s also a great discipline for skill development, particularly for thinking about how to do research, how to convert information into evidence and then into knowledge.

Foundations aren’t whole buildings, though, and creating the entire foundation that you’d need for a skyscraper when all you’re going to build in the site is a modest ranch home is a wasteful and stupid thing to do.

Faculty need to work for students who are really certain that they’re going to need the deepest foundation. But it’s more important to offer the smaller footprints for the larger group of students, or maybe even just to provide some building materials from your discipline that are an accompaniment to work in a completely different field or profession or to a well-lived life. So that’s why I often do teach materials from other specializations and other disciplines and from outside academia, with relatively careless regard for the deep foundations that generated some of that material.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 7 Comments

What Ifs and Might-Have-Beens: Draft Syllabus

Posted on November 9, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’m teaching a new course next semester on counterfactual and alternate history. The basic structure of the course is divided into four-parts: historiographical and theoretical debates about counterfactuals and alternate history; formal ‘scholarly’ counterfactuals; alternate histories; and workshopping student-created counterfactuals that will culminate in a 15-20 page written work.

Still making some of my final selections of readings (and would love suggestions) but here’s what I’m thinking about as I winnow it down:

——————-

Books for Purchase:

Tetlock, Lebow and Parker, eds., Unmaking the West: ‘What-If?’ Scenarios That Rewrite World History
Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History
Watson & Whates, eds., The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories
Kim Stanley Robinson, Years of Rice and Salt
Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex

Part I: Debating the counterfactual in historical writing

Collins, Hall and Paul, “Counterfactuals and Causation: History, Problems and Prospects”
Johannes Bulholf, “What If? Modality and History”
E.H. Carr, “What Is History”
E.P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory”
Randall Collins, “Turning Points, Bottlenecks, and the Fallacies of
Counterfactual History”
Niall Ferguson, Introduction, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals
Martin Bunzl, “Counterfactual History: A User’s Guide”
Geoffrey Hawthorn, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences, selection
Tetlock and Parker, “Counterfactual Thought Experiments” and “Counterfactual History: Its Advocates, Its Critics, & Its Uses”, in Unmaking the West
Catherine Gallagher, “When Did the Confederate States of America Free the Slaves?” Representations 98, 2007.

Part II: Formal counterfactuals

Walter Laqueur, “Disraelia: A Counterfactual History”
James Axtell, “Colonial America Without the Indians”
Gary Cornblith, “Rethinking the Coming of the Civil War: A Counterfactual Exercise”
Selections from Ferguson, ed., Virtual History
Selections from Tetlock, Lebow & Parker, eds., Unmaking the West
Selections from Cowley, ed., What If 2

Part III: Alternate history

Fatherland (film)
Sliders (television series)
Selections from Watson & Whates, The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories
Robert Conroy, Red Inferno: 1945
Robert Sobel, For Want of a Nail
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Years of Rice and Salt
Martin Delany, Blake, or the Huts of America
Jo Walton, Farthing
Steven Barnes, Lion’s Blood
Sesshu Foster, Atomik Aztex
Scott Westerfeld, Leviathan

Part IV:

Workshopping the papers

http://www.alternatehistory.com/
http://www.uchronia.net/

Posted in Academia, Production of History, Swarthmore | 14 Comments

Restoring Sanity One Civic Ritual At a Time

Posted on October 30, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Couldn’t make it to Washington today, much as I’d like to. As Jon Stewart said when they announced the rally, probably most of us who’d liked to have been there wouldn’t come because we have lives.

For us, that was morning soccer, a Halloween parade and then a Halloween party for kids that my daughter co-organized. All of those things I take to contain the same message that Stewart’s rally does: we’re all in this together. On the sidelines of the parade, it seems ridiculous to think that there are people running to represent the people of this county, this state, this country, who think that many of us who are in that crowd aren’t real Americans, that we don’t count, that they’re not obligated to consider us in the hunt for votes.

Which, by the way, is why I think Halloween is the most amazing accomplishment of modern American culture. For me there’s no clearer way to discover that somebody just doesn’t get it, whether it’s an overly precious K-12 private school banning costumes that derive from popular culture or from problematic history (you think I’m kidding, but I’m not) or some zealot screeching about how Halloween is an endorsement of paganism.

Halloween is pure rocket-fueled awesomeness in every respect: costumes, candy, spookiness, bacchanalia, you name it. Being against Halloween or wanting to censor it into inoffensive oblivion is worse than being against Mom and apple pie.

Posted in Domestic Life, Politics, Popular Culture | 5 Comments

The Forever Blog

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Goodness, is it that long since I’ve posted? Time flies when you’re buried under committee meetings.

Given that it’s been a while, I should talk about blogging itself. I’m occasionally asked by colleagues how I manage to find the time to write this blog. The answer, of course, is that often I don’t find the time. But it’s also that I promised myself when I started that I’d only blog when I felt the impulse strongly and felt I could say something that wasn’t just a “me too”. So sometimes a week or two goes by where there are things to say but I don’t feel all that strongly about saying them or they’ve been said already by the time I might get around to it. No problem: I’m not doing this in order to savagely hold on to my share of attention.

There’s been talk that blogs are over and Twitter and Facebook are king. I meant to say something about this issue when the end of Bitch Ph.D was announced, since that was an important blog for me and many other people. I think it’s only half-right to say that the day of the blog is done.

No matter what alternative venues might come into existence, many blogs were going to have finite lifespans. Even group blogs are not really publications with an identity that stands apart from their authors, into which new authors can come and old ones depart while the blog continues steadily along. Any blog makes sense only at a particular time in its author’s (or authors) life. They’re hard to maintain. At some point, either the author either moves on to some other kind of writing or publication, gets too busy to maintain it, or simply feels worn out by the exposure and repetition involved in long-form online writing.

The repetition used to worry me a lot. It still does sometimes, but I’ve come to realize that there are always new readers who haven’t read me holding forth on some subject that I’ve written about before. Or sometimes I find in writing something that I’ve discovered a new angle or emphasis on an old theme. The exposure didn’t used to worry me and now worries me more. It is hard to write about national politics in the way that I still commonly talk about politics with friends and colleagues because most public, political talk feels like sandpaper over a sunburn to read. It feels impossible for me to say anything that isn’t banal and vaguely stupid and even more impossible to not to simply be a linking point in some other person’s even more banal and stupid mapping of all the people he or she hates in the world.

I often find myself trying to reconcile how it might be possible to appreciate smart, witty written invective or criticism (whether it’s about political issues or scholarly ones) and yet feel somehow as if the last thing in the world that I want any longer is something that’s unkind. When I read someone sandblasting the cultural landscape bare in order to assault a novel or a scholarly article or a pundit, I feel an almost physical weariness, a diminishment of spirit. And then I’ll feel the fire in me and want to do the same thing to some wretch who I think is dragging us all down to hell, and rediscover that my pen (like so many others) is so much livelier when it has a target. Lord of the Rings reference incoming for the geeks: Mopey middle-aged Theoden is about as much fun as a fogbank. Theoden shouting “DEATH!!! and gutting orcs with a spear is the kind of guy you want to hang around with.

I don’t know how to work out that relationship satisfactorily. But it doesn’t drive me away from blogging, not yet. Aggregator blogs were never going to last long: Twitter does that better. Confessional and social blogs were never going to last long: media designed for social connection do that better. Long-form writing that is nevertheless more spontaneous and interactive than journal articles or published essays, on the other hand, doesn’t yet have an alternative venue. I doubt it will. There’s still a place for that kind of work online: indeed, in many respects, Twitter and similar media forms depend upon the existence of content elsewhere to point at and spark off of.

Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment

Goodnight to Goodnight Moon?

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Timothy Burke

The NY Times says that the picture book for children is disappearing, largely because so many aspirant middle-class parents are pushing their children aggressively towards reading chapter books early in life, and receiving some endorsement in this move from teachers who need to prepare students to deal with No Child Left Behind-inspired testing programs.

Ok, I could just endorse the obvious counter-revolutionary message that children need visual literacy too, and work up all the necessary bits of predation on the vulnerable minds of anxious parents. The world is increasingly visual, your children will need to be visually literate in a world full of new media technologies, THE PICTURES THEY ARE COMING FOR YOUR KIDS SAVE THEM NOW.

I could serve up the usual contrarian strategy of arguing that the New York Times story is full of it because it misperceives the subject of its concern, that just because the picture book per se has lagging sales, it doesn’t follow that published work that combines words and pictures is no longer of interest to children and their anxious parents. Maybe they’re buying Jeff Smith’s Bone instead of a ‘classic’ picture book, and so no need to worry, really.

I think what I’d rather do is say that this is a classic admonitory fable about the ghosts that are haunting expertise in the 21st Century, and about how a “Hippocratic Oath” for experts and policy wonks is needed which puts special emphasis on being mindful about unintended consequences.

It would be nice to lay the death of the picture book (if that’s really what’s happening) squarely at the feet of NCLB. But behind NCLB is a much less institutionally aggressive skein of expert investment in encouraging early childhood literacy, and in flogging improved literacy as a key component of readiness for 21st Century careers.

Expert authority may have much less influence in American public life today than it did in 1960, but one segment of the population is still intensely glued to what experts recommend or demand: the professionalized middle classes, who exist in a state of perpetual anxiety about social reproduction. They want to know one thing: what must they do to secure a steady, reliable future for their children in which their children will do jobs and have status approximately commensurate with their parents (or better)?

When experts in education, childhood, psychology, economics, what have you, venture forth into the public sphere to say that our schools are failing to do something utterly essential, or that tomorrow’s children must absolutely have some skill that they do not have now, or that oh my GOD SWEDEN and CHINA and ARGENTINA all have started teaching children how to program in Java while they are still in the WOMB, you know what that’s the equivalent of? It’s like going up to someone who is starting to develop a dissassociative identity disorder and pretending to be one of those little voices from a satellite that he’s hearing that tell him that everyone’s out to drain his precious bodily fluids.

Middle-class parenting is precisely where expertise and the authority of both state and civic institutions often have their most toxic intersection, and where unintended effects blossom like ragweed in September. The double vulnerability of those parents is especially intense now: as they lose many of their most treasured markers of social difference, they’re also waking up to just how much economic ground they’ve lost in the last two decades, and how much likelier their children are to continue that downward mobility.

What a lot of those parents need now are experts who will help them chill the fuck out about the lives and education of their children, who will remind them of how robust children are, who will reassure them not to sweat the small stuff. Your kid is not going to get crushed in 2025 by an army of monstrously capable technological prodigies from South Asia because you didn’t have them reading chapter books by kindergarten. They’re not going to live in some burnout post-imperial ashheap simply because they couldn’t play violin, speak Italian, and program their own database in Scratch by the end of 2nd grade.

Experts who have advice about what parents, teachers and children owe to each other have got to ramp it all, let advice (and curricula) be more generous and heterodox, lower the stakes. If earning your share of attention in the public sphere involves words like urgent, necessity, failure, catastrophe? Better make sure that what you’re flogging really justifies those words. Otherwise, it’s just malpractice, purchasing a membership in a long and dishonorable lineage of selling similarly disposable urgencies whose necessity was long since dispensed with in favor of the next new thing.

Posted in Academia, Popular Culture | 11 Comments

Why the Owl of Minerva Doesn’t Get Party Invitations After Dusk

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I don’t do this very often, but I’m going to get a bit aggressive about disciplinary expertise for a second.

William Easterly has an interesting post about the “mystery of the benevolent autocrat”, observing that while the highest growth rates in the world between 1960 and 2008 are all in autocracies, so are the worst growth rates over the same time period. Easterly concludes that autocracy is a high-risk choice for producing growth, that “for every Lee Kuan Yew, there’s a Jean-Bedel Bokassa”.

Good point. Except that like a lot of policy wonkery informed by economics and quantitative political science, both Easterly and the people he’s criticizing are acting as if autocracy is a discrete choice made primarily for the sake of growth off of a menu of possible options or alternative choices. I know Easterly doesn’t really think that, but life is not a game of Civilization V.

The thing is, both the character of government and economic growth are the products of histories both particular and global, and the moment where leaders sit down and make a clear choice about either never comes.

This is pretty much what drives me up the wall about the cottage industry that’s grown up in development circles that aims to identify the magic variables that have allowed Botswana to have a positive trend line in so many areas. Here’s how I see it: you can list all the variables you like, test them out in the data, and probably identify many valid contributing factors. But as a historian, I have to tell you that a lot of it goes back to subtle contingencies involved in the manner of Botswana’s incorporation into the British Empire, the particular political and cultural leadership of certain 19th Century Tswana chiefs, the complicated social history of many Tswana communities in relation to Christianity, and the proximity of industrializing South Africa. And then from that, diamonds and a single major ethnicity and a rather enlightened postcolonial elite and so on.

So: history. And non-reproducible history at that. Not a strategy chosen off of a menu of options in an abstract setting.

This is why historians aren’t generally a big presence at the policy-makers’ table.

Posted in Academia, Africa, Production of History | 5 Comments

Crime and Punishment

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Timothy Burke

What should happen to the Rutgers students who livestreamed a roommate having sex, spurring him to suicide?

This isn’t the first time the question of criminal consequences for an action like this one has come up, and doubtless it won’t be the last. But the question of when “the last” might come is the question that matters.

Jail, expulsion from Rutgers, financial liability. At least two out of those three is likely to come to pass, and probably all three should. I wish there was some way to ensure, either with the authority of the state or the civic pressure of our society, that something else followed, possibly instead of any of those consequences.

I hate it when a public official is forced to confront a scandal and says something like “I claim full responsibility” or “The buck stops here”. Much as I hate it when a celebrity faux-apologizes, a defendant reads off a lawyer-written bullet-list of regrets, anything that uses the rhetoric of apology to try to cap the well after a crime or misdeed, to “move on”.

“Claiming full responsibility” should be a lifelong sentence. Not to wear a sackcloth and ashes or a scarlet letter, not to stand abashed before a hostile crowd repeating a memorized confession under the watchful eyes of minders. It should be a sentence to work tirelessly to make it right, and never give up until it is.

The worst thing about a society that has fully monetized liability is not that people lawyer up and withhold apologies until the attorneys have worked out just how much cash the guilty party owes. The worst thing is that we’ve amputated everything else from the idea of responsibility.

What I’d like is that the two Rutgers students spend the rest of their lives talking in public about what they did, and how what they did touches on all of our lives, and maybe implicates more of us than we’d like to admit. I watched and chortled at the Star Wars Kid: I bet you did too. Didn’t we help to make a world where it’s slightly more permissible to think of humiliating someone with a viral video?

What I’d like is that the two Rutgers students have to work in everything they do for a more humane culture, for a wiser use of communicative media. I’d like them to have a special charge to live and teach the Golden Rule to their children, their friends, their neighbors, their co-workers, their communities, to any stranger who will listen and maybe even those who’d rather not.

I want this for everyone who causes this kind of pain to the world. I want state officials and policemen who prosecuted innocent men on flimsy evidence that is exposed later by genetic testing to have to spend the rest of their lives trying to make it right for the justice system, to dedicate themselves to fixing the problem. You can’t apologize for stealing someone’s life, and no payment can really compensate. Make it better, make it never happen.

I want company executives whose carelessness destroys communities, lives, whole economies, to have to make it right. Not to be thrown in jail or pay off hush money or weep on television. I want them to plug the holes, clean up the system, become the most tireless of reformers.

Of course this is not going to happen on that scale. But maybe, just maybe, we could make a small start with these two small, cruel people.

Posted in Politics | 9 Comments

Who’s Martin Luther?

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Let’s say there’s this person. He or she and family regularly go to church on Sunday, and their church is Lutheran. For them, church is a supportive community first, a theological and philosophical experience second (or third or fourth). He or she thinks about spirituality when there on Sunday and sometimes in the week in between and tries to act on spiritual thoughts and beliefs with some consistency in life.

So, should he or she know who Martin Luther is? Fewer than half of Americans do, apparently, as well as half of Protestants in specific. As always with these things, “experts” have come swarming out of their crevices to let our punditry know that this is a serious concern, a public menace, a danger, and of course, a reason to hire more experts to do more as-yet-unspecified things to repair this situation.

Read that Pew survey again. It’s not about knowledge and ignorance, it’s a map of use and disuse. Does Martin Luther matter to my hypothetical Lutheran? In the practical everyday of his or her spirituality, no, not really. Are most Lutheran congregations strongly and consistently driven by doctrinal debates which have a binding effect on the spiritual experience of congregants? No. Do contemporary Lutheran congregations in the United States strongly resemble or call back to the life and times of Martin Luther, or religious experience in Europe during and just after the Reformation? Hell no: the crucible of the Reformation may have made American Protestantism possible, but it’s also about as emotionally and intellectually removed from contemporary American Protestantism as early modern science is from what won the Nobel Prize last year.

I’m not saying the history doesn’t count, or that I don’t want people to know it. The DNA of older eras of religious experience is still there inside of contemporary churches. Tim Harford’s argument about historical institutionalism is pertinent in this case as well. The point is, however, when do people need to, want to, or have to think about those deeper histories?

My hypothetical Lutheran might want to think about Martin Luther if there’s something in his or her contemporary church experience that’s unhappy, something he or she wants to change. How far back does that something go? Equally, if there’s something he or she really values, something that might be lost. Maybe there’s reason to be reflective, to wonder about the limitations of a current religious life. Is there something in Martin Luther’s experience that might broaden, complicate, or reassure a contemporary churchgoer who is reflecting about their own spirituality? Sure! Seems like a good starting place for a Lutheran or any Protestant.

Those are uses. Notice that they only make arise out of specific needs or issues. Is there any other reason for a Lutheran to know about Martin Luther? Simple curiosity, I suppose: you’d kind of want to know where your denomination’s name comes from. That slender impulse might get overwhelmed by the tidal flow of information you’d get from the very first second of inquiring about the name, though. Does a Lutheran have a sacred obligation to know about Martin Luther as a Muslim would have to know about Muhammed? Not in any way that I can see: one of the baseline impulses of Protestantism is to shuck off that particular doctrinal responsibility, and Martin Luther himself was quite specific about the low value of most of his writing for later generations.

What the public reading of these kinds of quizzes imply, however, is that this kind of knowledge is a sort of steady-state obligation that stands apart from any reason for it to commonly exist. You want to tell me that knowledge of Martin Luther is obligatory, especially for contemporary Christians, just because it is? Ok, fine. Why? And if so, believe you me, you had better not stop with the simple, heroic image of him nailing his theses to the door or represent him as a figure with a single revealed and finalized theology. You’d better not forget the messiness of his role in the violence of the Reformation or his anti-Semitism. If you’re obliged to know, you’re obliged to know the whole magilla.

Or maybe, just maybe, worry about him when he becomes relevant, when there’s some reason to know. And so too should we worry less and be interested more in what we find out about what people use and don’t use of the knowledge potentially available to them.

Posted in Academia, Production of History | 5 Comments

Viruses? Assassination? Arming Insurgents? How Could That Go Wrong?

Posted on September 28, 2010 by Timothy Burke

You don’t have to be paranoid or a conspiracy freak to think that re-engineering the technology at the heart of digital communications so that it can be legally wiretapped is a bad idea. Drearily, this is another example of how little the Obama Administration cares about reining in the out-of-control national security shadow state inside the U.S. federal government.

Though I think the roots of their reluctance go deeper than diffident centrism. At this point there’s no government in the world which has any interest in reducing its investment in secret and security institutions. Covert power has increasingly become the only place where the 21st Century state has the luxury to imagine itself as having producing willed and deliberate political and social change.

The official transcript of government power is riddled with audacious high modernist failures. Most politicians and political elites know it once they’re off the stage. Wherever you go in the world, no citizenry really expects its government to do more than tread water or at best tinker incrementally with the major public aspirations of the modern nation-state: education, public health, regulation of the economy, safety and security, support for the arts and sciences. More often, whether in authoritarian or democratic states, many citizens rightfully suspect that much of that agenda is a bunch of hollowed-out humbug.

The shadow state, on the other hand, remains an extravagant domain of fantasized action and has been since the 1950s. The more I read about the culture of Cold War espionage for my current research, the more charmed I am in a way by the brash sociopolitical hallucinations and improvisations of spies, military planners, covert-action diplomats, and dark-arts technologists.

The split between intelligence and covert action is an old mainstay in policy debates and research on espionage. For all of that, most expert analysis underappreciates how “pure” advocacy of intelligence over covert action fits with an old paradigm of rational modernism. Covert action flourishes in our later era of pervasive state incapacity. Intelligence in its purest form presumes that with the most accurate information, state actors and political leaders can make the proportionately wisest and most rational decisions in committing state power.

If there is any sense in which that is true, it is only in the most subtle and slight ways. Domains of overt state action which are drenched in data don’t magically induce better outcomes: not only do you need a political elite which is willing to act on what they know, you also need an issue which is actually tractable to the toolkit and abilities of a technocratic state. Which is not most social or political issues.

Intelligence only just barely produces demonstrably better outcomes in the relatively simple, agency-drenched environment of a single discrete military battlefield, and is subject to the same limitations. You need military leaders willing to act on information, you need the military capabilities to take the action that intelligence recommends, and you need a desired outcome that can be accomplished with the military power available on the battlefield.

So it’s not surprising that the cleanly rational ideal of provisioning intelligence to government leaders about the hidden or unknown intentions of other political or institutional actors was quickly entangled in and then engulfed by covert action. What’s more interesting is that covert action as an idea has been so thoroughly able to exempt itself from the global skepticism that has fallen on high modernist state projects like a ton of bricks, even though there’s even less evidence of its ability to produce deliberate, planned instrumental outcomes that work towards the generalized interests of a given nation-state.

Don’t get me wrong: covert actors can make a lot of things happen, including, apparently, screwing up Siemens-built infrastructure with a targeted virus. They can kill people, subvert governments, mine harbors, ship weapons, torture prisoners, play dirty tricks, mess with computers, destabilize currencies. All of which is quite meaningful if you’re one of the people killed, tortured, blackmailed, poisoned or driven into madness. What it means beyond those immediate outcomes is less clear.

Covert actors can accurately match outcomes to interests in two ways: outcomes which advance their own specific institutional power, and outcomes which narrowly deliver a desired self-interested result to individual clients. If you’re a corrupt political elite and you have a connection to covert instruments, you can divert more cash or resources in your direction. Again, this is not terribly different from overt action. A development agency can advance its own specific influence, and it can deliver to specific clients outcomes that suit their self-interest.

Covert action doesn’t seem any better than overt action in deliberately producing complex, multilayered sociopolitical change. “Get this government to stop doing something that is not in our long-term interests”, “Change the cultural and social nature of this government over there”, “Make this place stable”, “Make this group of bad actors less able to do bad things in the world”.

A covert action plan can, if all the stars align, accomplish these goals for a little while in a little way. Not, as far as I can see, to a degree markedly different than many overt institutions can. But there is something about secrecy that unleashes extravagant dreams and imaginative fantasies about a world where sociopolitical trends have simpler, more intimate, and more knowable levers, where killing heads of state is a hey presto! way to make a new state, or mindfucking insurgents with some leaflets and misinformation is a way to get rid of an insurgency.

It’s not just that coverts and their armchair supporters dream of finding the delicious center of tractability inside of the confusing, multilayered Tootsie Pop of modern life. It’s that they also hope that covert action will somehow rid us of the demon of unpredictable and unintended outcomes who so relentlessly stalks most other policy-making, as if covert action might be a humanint form of a smart missile, delivered only to its target. But if there’s any domain of government action where that demon makes his home, it’s covert action: most of all, he hates sunlight and transparency.

Stuxnet in the infrastructure of its producer? Re-engineering the Internet for wiretappability only to open up a security hole a mile wide for every underemployed Bulgarian hacker in the world to luxuriate in? Arming and training Afghan insurgents to kill superpower militaries? A President asking you to dirty-tricks his political opponents just like you dirty-tricked the country’s foreign enemies?

You can quite like and appreciate spies (who at times strike me as an exotic mutation of anthropology if they’re field intelligence, and of hard social science if they’re data analysts) and yet think that the extravagant dreams that flit and float around the idea of secret action and surveillance are less the harbinger of some perfected Orwellian dystopia and more just the worst and most perversely productive example of how the modern state has clay feet.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics | 2 Comments