One-A-Day: John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History

Posted on January 9, 2008 by Timothy Burke

My next project, if I can put it together, is going to focus on Africa as a whole during the Cold War. So I’ve been diving into the general historiography of the Cold War as much as I can manage for the last few months, which is a huge and sometimes intimidating body of literature.

One contrast to Africanist writing that leaps out at me is the vigorous presence of a more traditional mode of political and diplomatic history (as well as historical writing that is essentially being done within the discipline of political science), a scholarly form that is relatively rare in scholarly writing about modern Africa in the last twenty years. By training and inclination, I’m a cultural and social historian, but I genuinely try to cultivate a taste for other approaches and styles within the discipline.

There are a lot of things to be said about the formidable work of John Lewis Gaddis within this historiography, and most of them have been said by people for whom this is their primary specialization. His new general overview, first published in 2005, is the kind of work that I think all scholars ought to try and pull off at some point in their career, even in short form: a readable, lucid synthesis of scholarship (and scholarly debates) on a topic they know well. I like Gaddis’ historiographical and methodological statement of principles, The Landscape of History, though I think like many other historians of his generation, he uses “postmodernism” as a kind of all-purpose boogeyman.

Since these are just notes, not full reviews, let me discuss one thing that did strike me reading Gaddis about “traditional” political and diplomatic history. (I think there is a lot of recent work that seems to me to count as political history which nevertheless integrates social and cultural history in a way that Gaddis does not.) I don’t have the driving antagonism towards “great man history” that a lot of older social historians built into their work. Histories which see events as the consequence of decisions made by political leaders and their closest advisors not only have the virtue of great narrative coherence, but are also in many cases empirically correct in a very straightforward way. You can do a social and cultural history of the Cuban missile crisis, but such a history has to focus on what that event meant to large groups of people, or how that event was represented in cultural forms. If you want to talk about the event itself, you’re talking about what a few powerful people did and thought and meant to do, and about how their decisions commanded military and political systems of enormous size and their capacity to act in particular ways.

A really sophisticated “total history” might eventually integrate those two kinds of knowledge by looking at the feedback between these different registers and levels of historical experience. I think that’s the wrong thing to ask of a compact, lucid overview like Gaddis’ book. There is one particular kind of integration, however, that I think even a more traditional kind of political and diplomatic history ought to contain, even when it is a compact overview.

Gaddis does deal with the long-running debate about the relative rationality of Soviet and Western actors during the Cold War, and I like the broad outlines of his composite argument, some of which is informed by the flood of new materials that became available after the fall of the Soviet Union. As I read him, he argues first that ideology was genuinely important to many leaders and their key advisors, both as a prism through which they interpreted their antagonists and as a motivation for their own actions. My reading of Gaddis (not just in this book, but also his other work), is that he sees ideology in this sense asymmetrically, that Soviet or Communist actors were often ideological while Western actors were often pragmatic, flexible and situational. At the same time, Gaddis also acknowledges some structural or systemic aspects of the behavior of political leaders. For example, he discusses a well-known argument in diplomatic history, that one state pursuing greater security for itself can degrade the security of another, which forces the second state to aggressively compensate, which makes the first state less secure.

A social or cultural historian might broaden what is meant by “ideology” in this context to look at someone like Stalin or Kennedy as actors whose personal social and cultural character, in relationship to broader social and cultural patterns, shaped their decision making. For example, reviewing Kennedy’s foreign policy in the context of certain kinds of American and Western histories of masculinity. Gaddis integrates some of that approach as well, again more pointedly in his analysis of Soviet leaders. Certainly more traditional political and diplomatic histories do not lack for attention to the psychology of political leaders.

I think what I’d like to see, however, is more a social historian’s approach to leadership and power. Not as social historians would tend to write it, because social historians often want to deal with much larger collectivities and institutions than “one leader and his immediate circle of advisors and subordinates”. What sometimes strikes me about traditional narrative political and diplomatic history is that there is an assumption of symmetry between a leader’s intention to act and the actions that leader takes, and a belief that any given decision can be atomistically broken down into its causal components.

So Gaddis, for example, argues that from 1941 to his death, Stalin operated with a fairly consistent ideological assumption that capitalist nations would resume rivalrous relationships after the end of the war, and that the Soviet Union merely needed to wait for the inevitable outbreak of conflict and war between Britain, the United States, and other capitalist powers. This view, Gaddis claims, structured a good deal of Stalin’s decision-making in the beginnings of the Cold War.

In the manuscript I’m just finishing on colonialism and individual agency in Zimbabwe, one of the arguments I’m trying to make is that there is first a disconnect between what imperial leaders did and what actors on the colonial periphery did, and that the actions of the latter sometimes drove the former, and that decisions made at either (or both) levels often were internally contradictory, improvisational as well as pre-determined, based on fragmentary or patchwork kinds of knowledge, and frequently opaque to the actors themselves. I’m hoping to carry over some of this approach to the Cold War in Africa.

One of the consequences of the perspective I’m taking is that I’m perpetually skeptical about whether we ever ought to talk about individual intentions in an atomistic way, e.g., where we break down what an individual meant to do and assign proportionate value to different components of intention, and equally skeptical about whether we can ever atomistically describe the relationship between intention and result. That’s just with one individual, but it’s even more so once we talk about how a decision actually is made by small groups of advisors and is then transmitted to larger institutional networks. A certain amount of atomistic language is a narrative and explanatory necessity for historians. You can’t easily represent a decision in indeterminate or “fuzzy” language even if that’s how in the end a decision actually becomes a tangible event in human history.

Just to give one example in more recent experience, one of the interesting bits of information to come out of the Iraq War so far has to do with why US intelligence was so off about Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. People who want to argue that intelligence was purely concocted for political purposes are too simplistic, people who want to reduce it all to the will of Dick Cheney or a few neocons are too simplistic, people who want to make it a sincere mistake are too simplistic. Some of what strikes me as actually involved includes:

a. That very indirectly, almost “culturally” or ideologically, actors inside the Bush Administration made it known that they, even more than their predecessors, would not welcome intelligence which blatantly contradicted beliefs or assumptions that they were inclined to make. No one ever sends an order down that says, “Here’s the casus belli we need, please write it up! kthnx.” This kind of pressure gets exerted when someone like Cheney says in a conversation that includes key advisors and heads of executive departments that intelligence has been “too timid” in the past, or is too dominated by experts who are unwilling to act. The thing is, Cheney (or various neocons) could believe that statement as a reaction to some factual understanding of the history of US intelligence, could say it as a reflection of a much more intuitive kind of personal, emotional orientation towards leadership (think John Bolton here), and so on–and could not entirely know themselves why they say it, or how that statement is likely to be received or interpreted.

2) Another thing at play: how the movement of information through institutions is rather like a game of telephone, that there is a kind of drift and transformation which has less to do with intentionality and more to do with processes of translation, reparsing, repackaging and repurposing as information travels from office to office, up and down hierarchies. So at one level of action and knowledge, you can get a very granular, nuanced understanding of the extremely limited value of a source like “Curveball”, but a process rather like genetic drift starts to mutate that knowledge into something else by the time it reaches the layer where ultimate decisions are made.

3) On the other side of things, one reason that US intelligence might have thought Hussein had weapons of mass destruction is that Hussein may have thought he did. E.g., that autocratic leaders often are surrounded by disinformation. After the Gulf War, Hussein may simply have not known much about the actual capacity of his own state apparatus for anything besides punishing dissidents and preventing challenges to his own power, and there was every reason in the world for subordinates and advisors to tell him whatever he wanted to hear. But these kinds of fictions are complex, improvisational things: they hang in the air between people, rather than reside neatly inside any single person’s psychology.

I could add more, but it seems to me that this is what a social history of state or institutional action at the top of hierarchies might begin to look like. I wouldn’t want someone like Gaddis to take this sort of thinking on board so far that it messes up narrative and explanatory clarity, but I do think traditional political and diplomatic history sometimes mirrors a flaw of a lot of social science. Some social scientists confuse explanatory models for empirical reality; some political historians confuse explanatory narratives about decision-making for the messy processes that shape intentions and translate intentions into action and event.

Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves | 12 Comments

One-a-Day: Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It

Posted on January 4, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I really want to like Lomborg’s work more than I do. I’m completely open to and interested in an argument that a smart cost-benefit analysis of conventional environmentalist policy recommendations suggests that money is best spent on completely different kinds of public and private projects than mainstream opinion would suggest. I’m completely prepared to agree that global warming, while caused by human inputs, may be the kind of problem which cannot be well addressed by human action, that we’re past that point. (Gloomy, I know, but it’s at least a possibility.) I’m bothered by the view that alarmist rhetoric and extreme projections are needed to galvanize a lethargic global public into action. I worry about how to use the precautionary principle sensibly. And so on.

Cool It is intended to be a simpler, stripped-down version of some of the kind of argument that Lomborg offered in The Skeptical Environmentalist. Even when I have a notional openness to what he’s trying to say, the guy comes off like a used-car salesman. This is a book that spends a lot of its energies denouncing the misuse of statistical information and other evidence by scientists and policymakers, but Lomborg throws out his own howlers with great frequency.

Just to take a simple example, on p. 101, he writes that when countries achieve a per capital income of $3,100, they then “can eradicate malaria, because their personal wealth will allow them to buy more protection and treatment, while their societies will be sufficiently able to provide general health care and environmental management such as house spraying and mosquito eradication”. From this, he argues that since African countries will cross the $3,100 barrier in 2080 even by pessimistic estimates, the problem of malaria will be eradicated at that point. There’s so much wrong with this that I barely know where to begin. First, because it sees malaria eradication in parts of the developed world as something that just happened magically when people hit a certain per capita income, no planning or effort or will needed. Add $3,100 and plasmodium go bye-bye! But secondly, he assumes that African countries will on average cross that per capita level in 2080 while all other costs remain fixed, and while the basic elements of malaria eradication remain static. Even a bednet isn’t going to cost in 2080 what it costs today. Whether there will be any effective antimalarials left to buy is an open question, let alone what they’ll cost. Moreover, the cost of eradication in temperate climates is one thing. In tropical climates, it’s another. Nor is it a one-time cost, as parts of Italy have been discovering lately with other mosquito-borne illnesses.

I’ll take another example. Lomborg talks about the costs of rising sea levels, and argues that in a world with strong environmental policies, everyone will have 20% less personal income to deal with the personal consequences of rising sea levels. He makes this argument sweepingly and globally, as if it is meaningful for everyone in the same way. Look, a peasant in Bangladesh is not affected by this problem in the same way as a millionaire retiree living in a coastal home in North Carolina. Not just because of different risk exposures, but because of what a 20% differential in income means. If you’re making subsistence-level wages, 20% less income has no implications at all for how you deal with rising sea levels. You don’t have any spare income to deal with that issue in the first place. For the retiree, 20% might also make little difference, because of a whole host of affordable safety nets. So the question is really, “Who is going to feel that 20% tithe to an ‘environmental world’ in such a way that it actually makes a measurable difference in their personal ability to strategically cope with rising sea levels?” I think there may well be people who fall into that category, but it’s a very particular and small subset of the global population.

Throughout the book, Lomborg conflates personal income with national income. He implies that turning “the societal knob” and “the climate knob” in policy choices are basically interchangeable and mutually exclusive kinds of choices. He talks the language of trade-offs and cost-benefit in a stunted and impoverished way. He makes linear projections on a whole range of trends that are just as dubious and odd as the worst of his opponents: the guy basically doesn’t seem to have heard of complex systems, emergence, unexpected results. For him, knowing what’s going to happen in 2080 is just a matter of adding +1 for each year between now and then.

It’s a really basic thing with me. If you serve up a big helping of methodological whup-ass on your opponents, it obligates you to do things differently, to work to another standard. Even when I don’t know the science myself, when I read Lomborg, the strident weirdness of the way he talks about projections, choices, and the like makes me disinclined to trust him for even a moment, even when I’m notionally open to the basic thrust of his argument.

Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves | 2 Comments

No

Posted on January 4, 2008 by Timothy Burke

This post makes me feel as sad as anything I’ve read in years.

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Competency as a Cultural Value

Posted on January 4, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Earlier this week on NPR, I heard a man-on-the-street segment about the current election cycle featuring three Southern women, two Texans, one a former New Orleans resident who left after Katrina.

The first woman is an assistant manager in a store somewhere in Texas. She sounded bone-weary about both politics and life. When the interviewer asked what national issues she followed most, she said that she just keeps her head down and tries to keep her family afloat, that all that stuff is beyond her. But when she was asked a bit later about what she’d find attractive about a presidential candidate, she very forcefully turned to the issue of illegal immigration. Illegal immigrants, she said, are what has made it difficult for Americans like herself to access welfare and health care. The interviewer pointed out that illegal immigrants usually don’t make use of welfare or unemployment compensation, but the woman shrugged that off. Her resentments were deeper: she sees people that she’s sure are illegal immigrants driving by in nice cars and they seem far better off than she is. She’s struggling just to keep afloat, she’s had to give up health insurance for her children because it’s unaffordable. Her answer to the mystery of how people around her seem better off is that government has something to do with it but in a deep and enigmatic way, and that she’s looking for the candidate who will admit to it, who will mirror her structure of feeling, long before she’s looking for some highly concretized solution.

———-

In the early 1990s in Zimbabwe, one part of my research concerned how the visible ownership of commodities performed or communicated wealth, and therefore aroused the dangerous jealousies of neighbors. This is a different kind of “mystery of capital” than what Hernando de Soto discusses. I am completely sympathetic to how southern Africans invoke ideas about witchcraft to explain how some people obtain wealth. Obviously it isn’t my own explanation, but there’s a sense in which it’s a completely reasonable attempt to connect the visible surface of material and economic life with the largely invisible mechanisms that move resources and capital around beneath the surface. How did your neighbor get a hold of bricks to complete one wall of his township house when you can’t get any? Where did the family next door get those new shoes, when you know that they don’t have any more access to wage earnings than you do? How did that man keep his job when you lost yours?

One story struck me as particularly potent. I was curious about zvidhoma, spirit beings who are basically the same as the tokoloshe that South Africans talk about. They’re said to be the tools of witches, able to exact invisible revenge on their victims by beating, wounding or causing illness in their targets. But on a number of occasions, I was also told cautionary tales about why you should never pick up what seems to be abandoned or unowned wealth or goods (like a bag of money or a wandering goat) because often these will have zvidhoma “stuck” to them who will then infest the unlucky soul who picks them up. Money and wealth circulate mysteriously, and carry hidden dangers. The people who get rich, in this worldview, are those who’ve learned to manage malevolent spiritual powers. If you’re not one of those people, you’ll just end up a victim if you chase after phantoms.

—————–

I’ve written before in my blog about how “blue state” elites in the United States continue to walk into the trap of blandly assuming that competency, skill and experience are sufficient and universally appealing attributes for a political candidate in national elections, as long as that candidate also has generally liberal views. Following the Iowa caucuses, I’m returning to this theme, because it’s one claim that seems to rub a lot of my readers the wrong way and I’m desperately hoping that this time, the message gets across to Democratic voters.

That woman in Texas is probably not a Democratic voter regardless of whom the candidate is. Her key issue maybe ought to be health care reform, but she’s enmeshed in another kind of narrative, one where racial resentment, among other things, is lurking very powerfully just underneath the surface. But even that is a layer covering the real depths. What I heard listening to her was someone who basically thinks that she’s in a hopeless place because some great engine is churning mysteriously in the depths of history, that life is just bad now. The other Texan on the segment talked about a completely different issue, changes to family life and the status of women, but there was some of the same declensionist mood in her remarks. Families and women are just different than when she was young, she said, and she’s mighty concerned about it all.

Educated liberals have a lot of quick answers to these kinds of statements: they’re factually wrong, they’re unfair, they’re reactionary. All true. But those rejoinders don’t get to the heart of what’s being said: that life is changing, that the changes are mysterious, that power lies somewhere far away from where the speaker exists, and that they don’t believe that there’s much to be done about it. They despair at the way the world and their corner of the world is nevertheless.

I loathe the resentment machine that is built into this structure of feeling, I hate its imperviousness to any persuasion or any evidence or anything outside of itself. When I talk to my mother-in-law, I often get a clear view of its workings, and the role that mass culture (including the mainstream media) play in providing fresh narrative hooks and telling incidentals to its churnings. In the last two years, for example, every time I talk to her, she wants to return to the story of Ward Churchill. Or she wants to talk about how terrible crime is. Or about the problem of illegal immigrants. And so on. These are immobile, self-reproducing, stories. Their truth in her mind is guaranteed by something far outside the actualities and realities that compose any given incident or issue.

But the thing of it is, in some measure, many ordinary Americans are not wrong to think that some of what afflicts or haunts their everyday lives is happening on scales of time and change and causality that aren’t reducible to the kinds of neat policy packages and governmental initiatives and ten-point plans that highly competent, experienced, meritorious political candidates tend to showcase. Like southern Africans, many ordinary Americans may invoke vague and metaphysical ideas about conspiratorial action and sinister agency to explain those larger transformations, but the basic take-away (as in southern Africa) is often: we’re fucked.

Offering a tangible plan that promises this tax incentive, that fact-finding commission, this reinvestment project, this funding for retraining doesn’t reach people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history. In fact, all it does is convince them that the candidate with the plans is one of those folks with his hands on the levers, one of them who always seems to come out on top. Yes, of course one of the things that makes me furious is that many Republican political leaders are exempted from this suspicion when in fact they ought to be the faces on the wanted poster, but that has something to do with the extent to which the Republican leadership since Reagan has largely avoided selling itself as the party of superior competency in policy-making, but instead as the party that can address the deeper spiritual condition of the nation, change the movement of the geist.

It’s too easy to just write this reading of the world off as false consciousness, as many liberals and leftists do in various ways, despite the fact that it is false in many of its particulars, partial in many of its manifestations, hypocritical and vicious in some of the ways it’s voiced and acted upon. It’s too easy because it’s also true.

There isn’t a policy package that can straightforwardly address some of the underlying structural changes in the global political economy that affect Peoria as surely as they affect Shenzen. Your wonkish arms are too short to box with that god. I don’t think anyone is the master of these changes, even though some people and social classes and systems have way more power to direct what is happening than others. Even corporations and governments, bankers and businessmen, technologists and artisans, are sometimes adrift on a swiftly floating river, bound to follow it to its coursing ends.

There isn’t a plan that can respond to how it feels to come to maturity within one structure of feeling and being in the world, the workplace, the home, your body and then wake one day like Gregor Samsa and find out that all those things are something utterly different than what they once were. My paternal grandparents lived in a little neighborhood in Los Angeles that was mostly white when they moved in, significantly latino when they grew old, and mostly southeast Asian when they died. It’s easy for me to be the cosmopolitan that I am and say that they should have cherished that change, recognized it for the profoundly beautiful and American thing that it was. I live in a world where that kind of pluralism means new things to teach and read, new cuisines to sample, new experiences and histories to enrich my community and my classroom. Because I live in a world where I have the tools to master and manage that kind of change. They lived in a world where that change meant that they’d go to the stores down the street and not be able to read any of the signs nor understand any of the conversations around them in the bank, the grocery store and the post office. I was taught to aestheticize and make use of difference. They weren’t.

In other contexts, humanistic intellectuals are perfectly well aware of this aspect of contemporary life. If we’re talking about local cultures in the developing world, we’re savvy. If we’re trying to define and grapple with the concept of modernity, we get the picture. Yes, sometimes we have our own kinds of passion plays, our own hinted outlines of a mystery clockwork churning in the depth of history, our own conspiratorial readings. Some of which aren’t wrong: there are bad people in the world who work busily to create or preserve outcomes at both big and small scales that benefit themselves and harm others. (Just as southern Africans are right: some of the powerful are witches, if by that we mean people who illicitly manipulate invisible and hidden forces to produce selfish gains for themselves at the expense of everyone else.)

Competency is something I value. I believe in it, I vote for it. It is what makes a leader (institutional, national, local) both legitimate and charismatic in my eyes. But that’s significantly because I inhabit social and economic worlds where competency has a very immediate and obvious impact on whether those worlds function well or not. I can see what happens when people like Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove are allowed to suborn the Department of Justice to narrowly self-interested, short-term political ends. I can see what happens when the power of the national executive becomes both unconstrained and arbitrary. I can see what happens when hacks are given the steering wheels of foreign policy.

That sight is partly a function of knowledge, which I still believe can have a universal value to everyone, at all levels. But it’s also self-interest. I am drawn to procedural liberalism because I live in worlds that are highly procedural and my skills and training are adapted to manipulating procedural outcomes. I think the trashing of the Department of Justice is bad for all Americans, but the fact is, I also am aware that it’s likely to be particularly bad for me and people like me. People with money, education, and a familiarity with the procedural world of law and government can navigate the legal system if need be, but only as long as it is a system where its declared aspirations for fairness and political neutrality at least vaguely match its practices, where the people who work the system have some kind of internalized commitment to those values. The more a system like that becomes transparent to short-term instrumental power, the more likely that even people who have knowledge, resources and cultural capital are likely to suffer at its hands. The same goes for most actions of both government and institutions (including private companies). If I feel that the people inside the US government who are contemplating a war are at least willing to consider the views of various experts about that war (or any other policy), to practice inclusive and deliberate governance, then I feel included, I feel like a citizen. But that says nothing to people for whom expertise is something for the eggheads in far-away places.

Our justice system regularly goes awry when it sweeps the poor up in its arms. When working-class Americans encounter government bureaucracy, they’re much more likely to feel completely lost in a maze of procedures. When decisions get made that have major consequences for all Americans, it doesn’t matter to ordinary people whether the State Department’s plan for Iraqi occupation was trashed.

It should. I would like to find a way to circulate an emotionally resonant, intangibly powerful, deeply felt national narrative about why it matters to govern well, why training and knowledge and skill are not just good things in and of themselves, but produce tangibly good outcomes in the lives of all Americans. I think it can be done, but it needs to work upwards from everyday life rather than downwards from the inside-the-Beltway world. Whether you work as a waitress in a greasy spoon, a middle-manager in a large firm, or as a high-powered professional, you’ve seen what happens to systems which otherwise were working just fine when someone who is both incompetent and intensely unprincipled gets access to power. (Unless you’re one of those people who is both incompetent and intensely unprincipled, in which case, read no further: this is not for you.) We all know how horrible and final the consequences of unnecessary failure can be.

To tell that story well, however, we’ve got to recognize that some changes are too big for anyone or any institution to manage compactly, that some transformations fall outside the sphere of policy and government, that it’s a mistake to promise to fix how people feel beyond simply being willing to listen and validate those feelings (however much you might not feel that way yourself).

Hilary Clinton is probably empirically right that it’s not enough to simply wish for change, and not enough to simply demand it. But in saying that you have to be an experienced hand who will work very, very hard for change, she continues to offer up the narrative of competency, of wonkery, of expertise, that has become the trademark of most national Democrats (with the notable exception of the other Clinton). You have to separate that which can be changed through the hard work of skilled policy formation from that which is operating at a completely different scale and sensation of change and dissatisfaction. A commitment to proceduralism and competency cannot be the end of your political or social appeal if you really aspire to lead or transform America.

Posted in Politics | 9 Comments

One-A-Day: A Crack in the Edge of the World

Posted on January 3, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Simon Winchester’s non-fiction is the equivalent of really good popular or genre fiction, it seems to me. Kind of the Stephen King of non-fiction writing. Eminently readable, a clean and accessible style, a good choice of subjects. The Professor and the Madman is his best book. Following the King analogy, it’s his Dead Zone or Shining; that would make A Crack in the Edge of the World his Cujo.

Reading Winchester’s work helped me think more clearly about an issue that was on my mind throughout the fall semester. I audited our introductory studio arts course here, and at one point, I had a renewed appreciation for why it is wrong to try and have a distinctive personal style before you’ve got the basics of a given expressive form under control. If you try to hard to have a style before you’re ready, you’ll never know the difference in your own work between a clear mistake, an interesting accident, and a deliberate refusal to conform to the orthodox approach. I would sometimes draw something and vaguely like the way that it looked, but particularly with perspective, I became very aware that this was often simply because I screwed up, not because I was meaningfully playing with or distorting perspective.

I think I could use Winchester to teach students about how to reliably and reproducibly introduce a sense of style into their analytic writing, precisely because his use of style is so practiced, deliberate and generalized. The undergraduate student who picks up Norman Mailer’s non-fiction and thinks, “Man, that’s how I want to sound” is going be a total disaster. You can’t write like Norman Mailer unless you are Norman Mailer, an option that is now unavailable even to Norman Mailer. But anybody could probably write like Winchester with sufficient practice, as long as they also worked hard on their research, developed a keen eye for telling anecdote and fact, and had discipline.

A lot of the essays I read are burdened by weak, sometimes autonomic or reflexive, attempts at style. This tendency shows up in word choice, in florid phrasing, in grand rhetorical gestures, and in elaborate or convoluted argumentative structures. If you look at the structure of Winchester’s Crack in the Edge of the World, you can see a very clean, reproducible approach to fusing readability with a sense of individual style. The outline ends up looking almost like a formula (though I don’t mean at all to underrate Winchester’s talent or his skill in executing the design).

I could sketch it like so:

Potent anecdote
Signposting of the larger subject
Personal experience which appears weakly connected to subject but gets more so as the recounting goes along
Backing up and talking about huge overall context of the specific subject of book
Very nice narrative device for illustrating overall context in comprensibly human terms (in this case, a journey from the edge of the North American plate in Iceland to California)
Back to the specific subject: narrative account of the earthquake
Why this matters

I think even most undergraduates could do something like this in a longer analytic or research essay. What makes it work especially well is the shifting between different ways of delivering information, different scales of analysis, and a smooth movement in and out of a personalized frame of reference. The result is only as profound as the subject matter itself, and in the case of the San Francisco earthquake there isn’t altogether that much left to say about it, so Winchester’s book can’t be much more than a primer or reintroduction to the subject. But he makes it a very pleasant experience nevertheless, and in a way that almost any writer could reasonably emulate.

Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves | 3 Comments

The Same Game

Posted on January 3, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Raph Koster has an interesting post covering many of the major game releases of 2007. The gist of his argument, as I see it, is that underneath their graphics and storytelling, games like God of War 2, Bioshock, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Call of Duty 4 and so on are all more or less the same game.

On one level, this is another round in the long-running debate between formalist game critics (the “ludologists”) and game critics who are more interested in interpretation, in the hermeneutical and phenomenological dimensions of games (e.g., what games mean and how we experience a given game). The formalists concentrate on the underlying structure of play in a game, the interpretative critics work with the content. From the latter perspective, the difference between Mass Effect and God of War 2 is huge. They’re in different genres, they work with very different imagery, the protagonist figures are extremely different, the delivery of and emphasis on narrative diverges significantly. From the former perspective, they are in fact fairly similar. There’s a few structural variations: in Mass Effect, you have a few points of interactive decision making that God of War 2 doesn’t offer (how to develop your character, whether to pursue side quests) and the actual mechanics of combat in God of War 2 are a bit more tightly scripted and don’t have the variable of squadmates to worry about. (Not that you think too much about your allies in Mass Effect, given the lamentable inclination of your squadmates to fire at walls rather than enemies.)

I don’t think it makes any sense to choose stridently between these perspectives. It would be stupid to simply look past the content and experience of playing either game to some underlying structure that’s somehow more real or important. But the similarity in structure is real, and like Raph, I suspect that’s becoming a very serious cul-de-sac for the future of digital games as a cultural form, on several levels.

For one, for all that digital games are a huge cultural and economic force, that’s partly a consequence of a relatively small group of consumers spending a huge amount of money on a lot of product. Those consumers are extremely literate about the conventions of game design, but that literacy is locking games into a forced path of forward evolution. It’s rather like an extremely tight symbiosis, two organisms that are utterly dependent upon one another within a very constrained ecological niche. Any environmental disruption and you wonder at whether either of them will survive. Digital games could use a push towards ecological generalism, towards adaptability and technodiversity.

The interesting problem is the direction of that push. I actually feel as if we’re almost already at the point where new underlying structures of play may establish themselves because of the increasing commercial viability of casual games. If digital games become more ubiquitious, and more of those games are either based on familiar non-digital templates (board games, card games, physical games) or don’t require a long experience with the grammar of gameplay, then the market for games will widen considerably.

However, I’m also interested in what could happen within the more inbred creative world of the games that Raph writes about. I can see two plausible changes that would help let some air and light into that room.

The first would be a richer range of genres and a deeper skill with storytelling. My response to Richard Bartle’s recent question about why so many games are built around fantasy (and a very narrow form of Tolkienesque fantasy to boot) is that this is a largely contingent, accidental development at its roots, having to do with the transition from pen-and-paper RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons to early digital games. That beginning has hardened into a path-dependent rule of design, but all it takes for change to become possible is one major commercial success in a new genre. (Say, for example, the impact of Grand Theft Auto in clearing the way for crime- and gangster-related titles.) Bioshock was a fairly good demonstration of what might be possible if game designers concentrate on visual creativity and an imaginative approach to genre.

I am more pessimistic about storytelling, however. The truth is that almost none of the current generation of game designers are good storytellers. Even the best of games rarely rise to the level of being proficiently derivative narrative engines. Look at Mass Effect, a game whose storytelling has been widely complimented. The main plot is pretty much a Science Fiction 101 space-operatic mash-up. Galactic civilization, many alien races, ancient progenitors, even more ancient menace which periodically swats down galactic civilization, humanity struggling to claim its place in the stars. It’s more a platform for character development and for interactive participation, which is what the plot mostly needs to be in a game of this type. As such, it’s great. Write it out as a novel and it seems like fairly thin gruel. Even the side plots are thinly disguised homages to very specific SF stories: at one point, for example, you get Aliens combined with Speaker for the Dead. If digital games are going to tell really interesting stories, their designers are going to need to bring people capable of telling those stories into the process of production.

The other direction where there could be some kind of evolution in games-for-gamers would be towards more emergent or “sandbox” kinds of gameplay. Designers like to claim that their games already accomodate this kind of design, but that’s largely wrong or misleading most of the time. This is one reason that Assassin’s Creed disappointed a lot of gamers. They expected it to be a very open-ended environment filled with NPCs who had autonomous-agent AI, where the player decided when and how to carry out his objectives. In the end, it was a fairly scripted game with a lot of repetition. Bioshock seems to me to be a good example of where this kind of element is really lacking. It’s set in a huge, interesting world, but the player is riding the amusement-park rails the entire time. Any time you might want to get out and explore, there’s a conveniently impassable obstacle. I personally find it frustrating to be fighting enemies who seem to be able to come and go in a way that I cannot. Bioshock at least tries to help with the suspension of disbelief in one direction (the Little Sisters and Big Daddies have methods of travel that you cannot imitate, for good reason) but it still doesn’t explain how everyone else is either able to move freely through environments that you cannot traverse, or mysteriously appears from nowhere.

Moreover, Bioshock only offers you one major branching decision (whether or not to brutally harvest the genetic power of the Little Sisters). If Bioshock were either a genuinely compelling story or a meaningfully open-ended environment, there would be a lot more going on after the major twist in the storyline. (Spoiler warning!) I found myself very intensely engaged in hating Andrew Ryan right up to the confrontation with him. The revelation of how the main character had been manipulated, and of his secret nature, was also emotionally involving. But after that point, the amusement park locks down tightly. In a novel, this would be the point of dramatic choice. In an open-ended interactive environment, it might also be the point where the player would look for other options, other ways to do things. The original Deus Ex still remains one of the few games I can think of where the player can make a dramatic and emergent choice at a number of branching paths and find to his shock that the game allows that to happen. There’s one key moment in the game where you learn how you’re being manipulated and a key character tells you have no choice but to accept it. I remember saving the game and then with some irritation saying, “Ok, I’m just going to kill this guy”, knowing that the game wouldn’t allow it. I was stunned when in fact I was allowed to do it.

I know why most designers don’t let players climb off the amusement park ride and peek behind the scenery. If you’re effectively designing every aspect of the game environment by hand, with creative precision, the labor-time that’s involved in allowing players to wander is very demanding. If you automate the generation of the overall visual environment, it quickly becomes generic and boring, like the interminable and repetitive dungeons of the game Daggerfall. This is a technical problem, but it’s also an indictment of the extent to which designers are afraid to let go or lose control over the experience of players. At least some games need to be reimagined as toolkits: this is what makes The Sims (1 and 2) such an astonishing commercial success. At the very least, designers need to recognize where the content of play creates an intense desire to explore interactive branches in the structure of the game. Bioshock wraps a straitjacket around the player at exactly the moment where the narrative most intensely stimulates the desire to run free and wild, to escape. That may be the aesthetic intent (to reinforce the degree to which your character has been controlled by others) but that ultimately makes for both a frustrating story and a frustrating game.

The main intellectual and critical issue around games for me remains: why aren’t they so much more than they are? In several directions, the far horizons of possibility are both visible and attainable.

Posted in Games and Gaming | 8 Comments

One-A-Day: The Traveller

Posted on January 2, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I’m going to try very hard to post a least a short commentary on books I’ve read once a day, or close to it, in part to get me away from repetitious entries on a narrow range of issues. Not reviews, just notes and reactions.

I’ll start with a fairly lightweight book, John Twelve Hawks’ The Traveler.

I can’t recall reading a work of light speculative fiction that was more clearly written to be made into a film. At times, it’s practically a screenplay. A lot of the online commentary on the book focuses on enthusiastic attempts to promote the book, which included various attempts at “viral marketing”.

I’ll give it this much: I read it quickly but with some degree of intense interest in what would happen next, even when I was utterly certain what was going to happen next. That’s almost a more difficult trick than writing something truly original: writing something derivative that nevertheless is an involving page-turner. You can pick out all of the riffs and tricks the stripped-down, cinematic narrative is employing (two brothers, one drawn to good, the other evil! a forbidden romance! a grouchy mentor! bad-ass black warrior almost certainly to be played by a lower-rent version of Samuel L. Jackson! reluctant but sexy warrior with father issues!). You can spot the fairly shameless strip-mining of other cultural properties, most notably The Matrix. But damned if it isn’t kind of entertaining. At times, the sketching out of a successfully panoptic society is creepy and evocative enough to start inducing a kind of paranoia. I began to think about the Vast Machine and the Grid and all that about halfway through. The downside to that, like the Matrix trilogy, is that there are probably enough people out there who will take this stuff just seriously enough to feed the pseudonymous author’s tendency towards pretension in later books.

In fact, the set-up for later books (the sequel is already out, but this is one of the most wait-for-the-paperback things I’ve ever read) is both screamingly obvious and kind of annoying. For example, the bad guys, who are kind of a riff on the Illuminati, have been trying to steer human societies towards order and control under their secret rule for millennia. We only really see two of their faceless leadership, one a loyal and remorseless warrior and the other an American General With A Plan.

This group, called the Tabula or the Brethren depending on whether you like them or not, has been hunting down and killing the titular Travellers because the Travellers can send their souls into other dimensions, returning with spiritual insight that tends to disrupt the order and control the Tabula are seeking. But now the General With a Plan has a new gizmo that puts him in contact with intelligences from one of those dimensions. They just want to share knowledge with us, they come in peace, and so on. They have useful ideas, like using genetics to build killer demon-creature animals. When it gets disclosed in passing that one of the realms that the Travellers sometimes visit is more or less Hell, is there anyone in the room who doesn’t know what’s coming next in these books? I guarantee you that the gate to Hell is gonna get opened, or nearly so, and that the remorseless Tabula warrior (a dude named Boone) is going to ally himself with his enemies, etcetera etcetera. What I don’t know is why the steering committee of a group of people who are really, really into order and control would say, “Hey, the General With a Plan wants us to contact alien intelligences from another dimension about whom we know nothing but who have these cool recipes for hideous demon-beast monsters! Let’s go for it!”

Here’s hoping there’s at least a cool action figure of The Vast Machine when the movie comes out.

Posted in Books, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves | Comments Off on One-A-Day: The Traveller

Prisoner’s Dilemma, Ethnic-Conflict Style

Posted on January 2, 2008 by Timothy Burke

On various listservs, African Studies scholars are buzzing with irritation about coverage of the political turmoil in Kenya following the election. (I’m continuing the Hate-the-NY-Times Week.)

I think they’re right to complain in this case, for several reasons. Jeffrey Gettleman’s January 31st article in the New York Times on the election was a good example. It’s ok until about six paragraphs in, when Gettleman sums up the post-election violence by saying it exposed “an atavistic vein of tribal tension”. Couple that with the earlier rhetoric about Kenya’s “stable democracy”, “powerhouse economy”, and billion-dollar tourist industry, and you pretty much miss the point of what’s going on, much as most of the US and European press missed the point in Rwanda until well after the genocide.

The narrative that Gettleman (and a number of other reporters) end up offering is Kenya as modern nation threatened by primitive “tribal” identities erupting out of its past. If I described Quebec separatists as evidence of an “atavistic vein of tribal tension” in Canada, Scottish autonomy as the triumph of “tribal primitivism”, or ethnic tensions within contemporary Belgium as primordial savagery, I think that rhetoric would feel very weird to most readers.

I am sometimes equally uncomfortable with the common response of Africanist scholars to these kinds of misrepresentations, which is to describe contemporary ethnic or “tribal” identities in Africa as wholly modern and invented. Many of them are felt identities because they distill and reconstruct historical experiences that include the postcolonial and colonial but are not limited to them. “Zulu” or “Kikuyu” or “Yoruba” are inventions, but they’re meaningful inventions that weave together a wide range of rooted, authentic experiences from the distant and recent past. Much like “American” or “Irish Catholic” or “Sicilian” or any subnational or national identity anywhere in the world.

The important thing, then, is that ethnicity is not the cause of the post-election violence in Kenya. It is structuring the response, perhaps, but the basic issue is also a familiar one in most parts of the world. A ruling party chose to boldly and obviously steal a close presidential election with overt fraud. The supporters of the candidate who should have won are thus in a very difficult position. It is one thing if this is an uncommon event, if you have at least some faith in most political and civic institutions, if you have some hope that the rule of law will prevail, if you feel that reform of the system was possible, or even if the fraud was relatively subtle and ambiguous. In Kenya, none of that is the case. The only uncommon thing is that the election was allowed to go forward far enough to make the fraud a more panicky and obvious response. The putative losers have no reason to have faith in any aspect of the formal political system to make things right.

I don’t endorse or cheer on the violence, but I do understand it. At some point, if the supporters of Raila Odinga don’t find a way to make this kind of fraud costly to the people who perpetrated it, give them some reason not to do the same thing next time around, nothing can or will ever change in Kenya. There are better ways to make fraud costly than rioting or murder, which are mostly self-destructive and present worse suffering and injustice than allowing a fraud to be a president. But I have the privilege of distance and disengagement, which are not luxuries available in the townships of Nairobi. There isn’t any way at present to exact those costs within the formal political system, nor any reason to expect that the international community will do anything besides tack on a feeble set of easily-circumvented conditionalities on next year’s flow of aid and grants. This is a calculation that people all over this planet have to make in the course of their political lives: when do you stop accepting the position of a permanent loser in a game of prisoner’s dilemma? There’s nothing “tribal” or “atavistic” about that calculation.

Posted in Africa | 2 Comments

Nominations of Better Columnists

Posted on January 2, 2008 by Timothy Burke

As an extension of my last post, let me start the nominations for online writers that you feel like could serve as better columnists for the New York Times than most of the current group. Basic things to consider: reasonably good writers in stylistic terms, evidence that they could handle writing regularly and could write within the space constraints, evidence of the ability to surprise either in their take on issues or in the way that they choose to write about issues, evidence of a wider or different range of concerns than the Usual Suspects.

Make no more than three nominations so that this doesn’t turn into a huge loves-and-kisses to all your blogging buddies.

Here’s my starter list, people I think combine a distinctive style and range, a demonstrated ability to think on their feet in short-form writing, and a fresh angle on things.

1. Scott McLemee
2. Belle Waring
3. Michael Bowen

I could list another twenty people who primarily write online without breaking a sweat who I think would all be interesting, superior additions to the NY Times’ roster of columnists. Another one hundred, probably, if we’re talking about who might be more interesting than Bill Kristol. I can also think of many mainstream nonfiction writers and essayists who I’d love to see take a stab at a regular column.

Posted in Blogging | 14 Comments

Viral Disgust

Posted on January 2, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I have almost the same reaction to two utterly separate kinds of mainstream media decisions over the last two weeks: both decisions drive me to the brink of ending my consumption of that media.

The first is the New York Times announcement that they’ve added Bill Kristol to their stable of op-ed columnists. It’s a stupid move, and not because of Kristol’s politics. I have no issue with that aspect of the decision. What I object to is that it is yet another draw out of the narrow, incestuous pool of fetid stillwater that breeds the columnist class. I could sit down right now and write every column that Kristol, Krugman, Kristof, Friedman, Brooks and Dowd will write over the next year. You easily could design a specialist AI that could spit out a column by any of them in response to a given issue or event.

The newspaper world is full of talk about the menace of the new media, about plummeting circulation, about the challenges of the 21st Century. If this is what passes for adaptation to changing conditions, the sooner the stinking corpse of newspaper journalism is buried, the better. “Hey! There’s lots of commentary available online in alternative formats, lots of new voices and ideas and approaches that are drawing our readers away! What shall we do?” “I know, let’s hire Bill Kristol. There’s a fresh voice saying new things.”

I have a dream. I dream of waking up and picking up the New York Times and seeing on the op-ed pages a columnist who reacts to changing events in unpredictable ways, who isn’t just a convincing automaton simulating human response along preordained political lines, who doesn’t just consult some paymaster at party headquarters to find out what the fresh spin of the day might be, who challenges me to think in new ways. Someone who provokes me, delights me, puzzles me, but all in good ways, rather than some feeble re-enactment of dance steps that were old when the waltz was a sparkling new invention. You know, a columnist who justifies the physical effort of turning the pages to the end of the A section. Style and wit optional but preferred. JUST ONE. That’s all. I can find plenty of people like that online. Surely there’s at least one that the Times could bring into a new format, to a new audience.

It’s a small dream. As far as the mainstream media is concerned, evidently an impossible dream. I’ve never been so close to giving up newspapers entirely, a feeling which stuns me, given that at times in my life, I’ve regularly bought and read as many as six dailies.

—————–

The other experience that almost drives me away from a popular media form that I have consumed loyally for most of my life? It’s considerably more trivial, but equally a case of people operating inside some kind of editorial bubble that is floating a million miles away from audiences and creative integrity, of the fouling of a nest. The current editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics decided that the character of Spider-Man, having been married in some versions of his comic to Mary Jane Watson since 1987, is not “interesting” as a married person. That already strikes me as a failure of the imagination as a whole: a good writer can make good stories from any situation. Marriage is not the end of life or drama. It’s also a failure to understand the arc of this specific character: the story of Peter Parker in the comics is a struggle to achieve and hold onto maturity. There’s always a new challenge around the corner in that story, trust me. You think you’ve got life figured out and then something happens to disabuse you of that notion. You don’t have to stick Peter Parker in his first year of college eternally to tell that bigger story.

I might also point out that Marvel publishes several very good titles that feature unmarried “alternate” Spider-Man characters: it’s possible to have it both ways here.

But ok. So that’s what the editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada, wants to do with the character he oversees. There are ways to make these kinds of changes in serial shared-universe fictions, whether they’re comics or soap operas. Divorce the character, or make him separate for a while from his wife. Give him amnesia for a while. Kill Mary Jane Watson off. (You can always undo a death in comic books or soap operas.) Trap him in an alternate reality for a while where he never got married and let him explore that life. Whatever.

What did they actually do? Spider-Man makes a deal with the devil to eliminate not just his marriage but everything about how his life has changed and he has grown over the last twenty years of storytelling in Marvel Comics in order to save the life of his frail and elderly aunt.

I dunno what the rest of you might call someone who would give up being happily married to a supermodel and erase the existence of their own child (Parker is also given a vision of the loving, beautiful daughter he was otherwise going to have) as well as about ten rich, complex years of adult experience in order to keep an eighty-year old mother-figure alive for a few years more. “Norman Bates” is the first name that comes to mind.

I’m supposed to like this character now? Sympathize with him? A dude who agreed to have Satan kill his unborn child and destroy his happy marriage for an elderly mommy-figure to whom he has an unhealthy attachment?

———

Some bad decisions by cultural managers only make you feel bad about their own immediate properties. I thought the second two Pirates of the Caribbean films were a lame waste of potential, but what the heck, that happens. Sometimes, though, they make you question the entire cultural form, and to see all its flaws and self-destructive tendencies magnified.

Posted in Blogging, Popular Culture | 5 Comments