Walking through Books, Inc. on Chestnut in San Francisco with a book under my arm en route to another section to browse some more, one of the sales clerks, an older gentleman, asked what I was reading. The book was one I'd seen favorably reviewed in the NY Times Book Review the day before and I was surprised to see it on the rack because there is often a delay between review and availability.
The book was Max Hastings's Retribution, (Knopf, N.Y., 2007) about the war in the Pacific mainly between the U.S. and Japan, with the China-Burma-India theater also of some significance in terms of British Empire, but not critical to the defeat of Japan. Japan had invaded and captured Burma, the British colony that produced rubber (military tires), oil (military vehicles) and teak (naval vessel decks). Britain wanted the colony back, even though the age of imperialism was dead. The U.S. didn't want to lose American lives helping Britain recover its doomed colonies. The Brits thought, however, in line with Kipling's "White Man's Burden," that raising the heathen to civilization and Christianity was God's mandate to the so-called White Race.
So I showed the clerk what I was reading next and remarked that I liked to read histories that show how we came to the present mess. He replied that the one sure thing from reading history is that we never learn, do we.
That seemed a good observation which has set me to wondering.
Why, exactly, do we never learn from history?
Are we stupid?
Stupidity doesn't begin to explain it. Churchill wasn't stupid, but he wanted his Empire back. It was disintegrating under him, but, he famously observed, "I wasn't elected prime minister to preside over the dismantling of the British Empire." Yet he did. India, "the jewel in the crown," broke loose in 1947.
Americans aren't stupid, yet we get ourselves into the most god-awful messes. We invaded Mexico and stole a lot of their land to make California, Arizona, New Mexico and did I say Texas? And one other. I'll think of it. Maybe.
Why don't we learn?
Well, for one thing, we die and what we know dies with us, unless we write things down for the younger folk to read. Will they read it? Will they learn? No one knows.
We have universities which teach history, culture, philosophy, technology, science, etc. We seem to pass the science and technology parts along quite nicely.
We have the various religious institutions to pass down the generations a set of stories, characters, beliefs, and values that their adherents absorb and identify in a very strong way.
But history as an intellectual exercise doesn't make quite the same impact on our souls, does it? Don't ask me what a soul is. All I can tell you is that you won't find it shown in Gray's Anatomy. It seems to mean the essence of something, or someone. Said to to be able to survive the death or dismemberment of it occupant, or host. I wouldn't know.
Hastings quotes U.S. General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell: "No matter how a war starts, it ends in mud. It has to be slugged out -- there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts."
In his chapter on the British in Burma (today's Myanmar), Hastings writes, "As so often in wars, brave men were to do find and hard things in pursuit of a national illusion."
An illusion is something you believe in that isn't true. There's a gap between the shining idea you have in your mind and reality. If you think you can fly by flapping your arms, the leap off the barn roof will shatter that illusion. Nature cannot be fooled, Richard Feynman said, but you can. "The first principle," he wrote (in Cargo Cult Science, in "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman") is that you must not fool yourself, but remember, you are the easiest person to fool." Why? Because at some level you want to believe that you can fly, and you will in fact fly, if only you believe strongly enough, like Peter Pan in J.M. Barrie's fictional work. Tinker Bell and fairy dust do not make for the world's reality, but a children's fantasy world. A fantasy world is a world of illusion.
Are fantasy and illusion powerful forces in the real world?
They drive it. They run the show. They control countries. They start wars.
Examples:
The U.S. holds the view that we're the best country going. We're the tops. We're terrific. We're so good, being a democracy where the people choose their leaders and the laws that we live and die by. We're so good that it is good for us to spread around this idea. We're like Christians who believe that they have found the answer to life, the way to God, therefore everyone else should be like Christians. So they send out missionaries to proselytize the heathen, the native, the benighted, the poor and down-trodden of the world, whether they like it or not. Christian missionaries sent out by Spain to the New World came to save souls and get rich, not necessarily in that order. They enslaved Native Americans, whom they called Indians, a slight error in nomenclature, along the way.
We invaded Iraq based on an illusion, the belief that he was hiding WMD. Also he was a bad guy. The world is full of bad guys, starting with Washington, D.C., but we don't go around invading the countries of all of the bad guys. There's our bad guys and the other guy's bad guys. We only want to invade their bad guys, not ours.
Hastings reports P. 73, that the British General Slim was called upon "to keep alive a dream of empire which thoughtful men knew to be doomed. Churchill badly wanted to retrieve Burma and Malaya (today's Malaysia, rubber and tea).
"Societies run by civilians proved vastly better able to organise [sic; Hastings is British and they spell funny] themselves to fight the Second World War than those dominated by military men, of which Japan offered the most notable example." P. 48.
"...Intelligence was poor, because the Japanese mind-set mitigated against energetic inquiry, frank analysis and expression.
Our intelligence was never good, because few officers acknowledged its importance. Commanders understood the need for battlefield information, but not for strategic intelligence about the big picture.
The Japanese army did not take intelligence seriously enough...we had no proper system, no analytical section, no resources...
We had no tradition of being interested in other societies and what they were doing. It came as a shock to realize how powerful the Allies were becoming, and how much they knew about our actions and intentions.
Strategic decision-making was concentrated in the hands of perhaps twenty people, military and naval. Even if our intelligence services had gained access to important information, it would have remained unexploited if it ran against the convictions of the decision-makers. They would not have wanted to know.
...The greatest weakness of bushido (the Japanese code of military honor which disdained surrender but exalted death to avoid surrendering)...was that "no one was allowed to say what he really thought." P. 49 [Japanese sources of quotations omitted].
The Western Allies (U.S. and Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada) possessed advantages not only of better direction and resources, but also of language. English, properly used, is a clear and powerful medium of expression. Japanese, by contrast, is fraught with equivocation. Tokyo's forces suffered chronic communications difficulties because signals were so vulnerable to misinterpretation.
There was no mistaking, however, Emperor Hirohito's broadcast circumlocution in which he told his people that the war has ended "not necessarily to Japan's advantage."
One of the reasons causing societies to go off on a self-destructive track is that when the people in control of a country have a mind-set that this is the way to go, all who differ are stifled by charges of unpatriotism, treason, and are marginalized as dissidents. I don't know how to stop this, except to point out the advantages of free mind and expression guaranteed, to the extent we can guarantee anything, by our First Amendment.
So today, decades after the event, we have a historian and writer, Max Hastings, telling us what was wrong with Japan and Britain. Would it have made a difference had Japan and Britain been told at the time they were going down their wrong paths that their paths were wrong? Of course not.
If you tell President Bush, V.P. Cheney, Sec'y of State Condoleezza Rice, former Sec'y of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and former Sec'y of State Colin Powell that invading Iraq was a wrong exercise for non-existent reasons, would they have believed you? Of course not. The possible exception is Colin Powell, but when the chips were down and he was given a look at the evidence supposedly justifying the invasion, he swallowed it hook, line and sinker, to his lasting discredit. We trusted him but he wanted more to be on Bush's team than America's. So he told the world, at the U.N. that the evidence was good and we had little choice but to accept, at least provisionally, what he claimed, which turned out to be wrong, as he has acknowledged, but Bush, et. al. have not.
This is how it goes.
Despite all the training, our minds are controlled, some at least, by cultural imperatives that require us to fall in line behind our political leaders in the name of national unity, patriotism, etc. When these gods turn out to be false, we wonder how we got into this fix. Dissenters at the time are ignored or put down. Writers like Hastings have the benefit of 20:20 hindsight and we applaud their intelligent analysis, sung as a lament over the ashes of millions of war-dead, civilian and military, while we, the descendants of those who lived and died in the war are free to learn or ignore the lessons of that history.
The trick, it seems to me, is to learn the history and then become a leader. This doesn't always happen. Furthermore, each of us is free to draw his own lessons from what historical evidence and narrative exists. We can't even agree on what our Constitution means, and what the Framers intended, much less the many other so-called lessons of history.
When making decisions about current predicaments, such as whether to invade another country such as Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq, the nation, meaning its military and civilian political leaders, must assess the current circumstance through the lens of one's national history and experience, meaning how we understand the lessons of that past. If burned sufficiently the last time, we may hesitate the next, but not always.
Germany was starved by naval blockade into submission and defeat in World War One. The Kaiser, Wilhelm, abdicated and fled. Germany was disarmed and the Rhineland demilitarized. This was the territory between the river and France, to serve as a buffer protecting the French. But the Germans felt betrayed at Versailles, where the treaty ending the war was forced down its throat. Germany began secretly to re-arm. Hitler rose to power by mobilizing the grievances triggered by the treaty. And as soon as possible launched another war, World War Two. The lesson Germany learned was that it did not wish to be a downtrodden former superpower when it could be a superpower by force of arms yet again.
Germany was devastated for a second time, its cities carpet bombed. Japan was also firebombed and nuked flat. Neither country has been a problem since then. Before these terrible events they were terrible problems, enslaving and murdering millions of people.
If there's one thing we've learned it is that we must keep a sharp eye peeled on what the next country is doing. We invaded Iraq on the chance that Saddam may have had WMD, and ours was a preemptive strike.
The strike succeeded in toppling Saddam.
The outcome of the effort to introduce democracy into a region dominated by a paternalistic Muslim culture for over a milenium remains to be seen.
Making the correct diagnosis as to what ails us is of critical importance for military and political leaders as well as physicians. Jerome Groopman, M.D., about whom I've written earlier in the week (on 3-31-08) discusses why doctors fail to think straight, thus misdiagnosing, and missing, what is truly causing the malady they need to treat. They keep making the same errors, over and over. What kind of errors? Thinking errors. Doctors are made from smart, high-performing students who proceed from high school, where their intelligence is demonstrated, to the better colleges and universities, to medical school, internship, residency, fellowship, and finally private practice or other fields of practice such as academic, military, public health, etc. So these are very smart and well-trained physicians. We all rely on and respect them. Yet they continue to err, as Groopman points out. He tries to do something about it, by pointing out what kinds of errors his students, colleagues, and himself, continue to make. Thought mistakes are usually made without a lot of attention to the thinking process itself. Much thought is given to the medical aspects of distinguishing one disease from a near-lookalike based on incomplete evidence in many cases. But not a great deal of thought is given to the logic or completness, meaning incompletness, of one's thinking. This is where the trouble arises.
What influences physicians most to correct their thinking? Groopman asks. "The last bad experience," he answers. The last bad experience is when a physician loses a patient he need not have lost given a better diagnosis, or is sued, an unpleasant enough experience. This is what causes physicians to mind their thought processes more carefully, according to this report, to those who are thoughtful and sufficiently analytical of self and context, with or without the assistance of colleagues and other critics.
So you see that it is hard to cure people of being people, in the medical world, the political and military worlds, and in fact, just about any world. I don't know of any group which has a monopoly on insight or intelligence, and that includes academics, philosophers, religious leaders, or whatever. I cannot tell you on whom to rely for best analysis and answers. It is up to you to decide who to follow, if you must follow someone, or elect someone, or to make up your own mind based on your own investigation of what seems right or wrong.
Good luck.
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