Sound philosophy
Bush and Blair: a good year for the roses
May 25, 2007 18 comments
Slouchingly, I turn my late attention to the moment last week when Tony “Still here?” Blair gave a press conference with George W. Bush at the White House. The best line of the occasion has already been widely reported. Bush:
My relationship with this good man is where I’ve been focused, and that’s where my concentration is. And I don’t regret any other aspect of it. And so I — we filled a lot of space together.
Quite so. They did fill a lot of space together. Who can forget the moment in the Rose Garden, back in early 2003, when George W. Bush solemnly forced one end of a footpump down his own oesophagus and one end of another footpump down Tony’s, and then ordered Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to pump away as hard as they could, which the latter men did joyfully, stamping their shiny shoes up and down, only stopping, dripping with sweat and loosened ties askew, when Bush and Blair had been inflated to five times their normal size, and had begun to float up off the ground, tethered to reality only by stressed lengths of rubber tubing? But what leapt out at me besides that precious memory was Bush’s invocation of the dark forces arrayed against America:
No matter how calm it may seem here in America, an enemy lurks. And they would like to strike. They would like to do harm to the American people because they have an agenda. They want to impose an ideology; they want us to retreat from the world; they want to find safe haven.
Just like gay people according to “Melanie Phillips”, the lurking enemy also has an agenda. But hang on — so does Bush:
I’m not going to be around to see the final history written on my administration. When you work on big items, items to — agendas based upon sound philosophy that will transform parts of the world to make it more peaceful, we’re not going to be around to see it.
Well, now I am confused. Can it really sometimes be a good thing to have “an agenda”? It seems so, as long as it is “based upon sound philosophy”. I like this phrase sound philosophy. Just as sound science is a term of Unspeak designed to instil fear and distrust of science, ((Unspeak, p.59.)) so sound philosophy handily denigrates a vast unexamined swathe of what is implied to be unsound or junk philosophy, leaving a kernel of ratiocination that by definition is “sound” as long as it recommends the “agendas” already being pursued.
But it looks like Bush also made a remarkable confession here. Will his action based on sound philosophy actually do what it says on the tin — “transform parts of the world to make it more peaceful”? Not in his own lifetime, he now forlornly admits. “We’re not going to be around to see it.” You might be tempted to take that as a metric of failure for the “agenda” and its attendant “philosophy”, but really, one needs to take the long view. I happily imagine a descendant of Zhou Enlai 200 years hence being asked whether George W. Bush made the world more peaceful, and replying diplomatically that it is too soon to tell.
“I happily imagine a descendant of Zhou Enlai 200 years hence being asked whether George W. Bush made the world more peaceful, and replying diplomatically that it is too soon to tell.”
Unfortunately, this is already a standard talking point of defenders of the Bush/Blair foreign policy – that no judgement should be passed on it until some unspecified amount of time has passed (possibly when the harmful consequences of their disgraceful conduct have finally eroded from collective memory or perhaps superseded by even worse developments).
Similarly, there is the hopeful appeal to the judgement of history, meaning the notoriously forgiving judgement of right-wing military historians and sycophantic establishment journalists who were complicit in the policies under discussion.
Personally, I think we should try and get our judgement in before “history” does.
To be honest, right-wing sycophants aside, the judgement of history is always mostly blind, lopsided and unreliable – and I say this as a historian. The view we can reconstruct after events have passed is limited by contextual knowledge, patience and the availability of informative documents: these just don’t add up to the kind of view that any reasonably informed observer has at the time (which is too obvious to be worth recording).
In other words, to wait for the pronouncements of historians is specifically to hope for an interested filter on events: for a version that’s so ignorant that it can confidently identify a single storyline.
Richard: sometimes historians get it better than contemporaries — using the example of Thucydides, a contemporary and participant in the Peloponnesian wars whose discussion of the reasons for Athenian defeat ultimately pegs on a lack of popular support and perseverance especially with the Sicillian Excursion (is this sounding familiar?), we can see that contemporary analysis is often just as ignorant as historical analysis; moreso in Thucydides case as his own account of events encompasses several devastating factors that he can’t quite see the significance of. Specifically, Athen’s alienation of its allies, repeated plagues and starvation, the oligarchial coups and civil war, the rise of the demagogue Cleon and his deleterious polices and critically, the entrance of Persia and it’s significant naval forces on the Spartan side: a somewhat more substantial threat to Athenian superiority than ‘lack of popular will’.
Apologies for poor paragraphing, wierd phrasing and possible OT-ness. The History of the Peloponnesian Wars does that to me.
I have to acknowledge ruefully that I don’t know anything about the reliability of Thucydides on the Peloponnesian wars: the demands of my current research are such that I don’t get to read much outside it at the moment.
I am not suggesting that every contemporary observer must inevitably talk less rot than every historian – personal interest and partial knowledge are not limited to those who come afterwards. I am merely noting that the old Confucian saying “muddy waters let settle will clear” is extremely misleading for the practice of history. The fog through which historians peer can make some things loom up large and others retreat into obscurity; it can favour a certain kind of certainty, but up to a point, whether that certainty actually reflects events in the past is not knowable.
This guy makes Brezhnev circa 1980 look like a genius. This is, I believe, what we’ll see in that ‘final history’ book.
As well, ‘final history’ has an armageddonish-ish feel to it, or it at least bespeaks serious misunderstanding of the historian’s art. For reasons Richard alludes to, among others, there is never a final historical ‘take’ – though historians do often read broad concensus, get bored and move on until some new discovery brings the topic into new light. Given the staggering number of classified documents Bush and co have chucked into deep-freeze we’ll probably still be in the dark as to the full extent of their pefidity in the early 2100s.
“Given the staggering number of classified documents Bush and co have chucked into deep-freeze we’ll probably still be in the dark as to the full extent of their pefidity in the early 2100s.”
Of course there may be very few people left alive by the 2100s and the collapse of civilisation in the face of ecological catastrophe may leave recorded history a lost profession. Perhaps Bush hopes to be misremembered in oral folk tales by the survivors and their descendents?
Funny you should say that, Alex. It reminds me of one of the characters in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, a post-Apocalpytic Hawaiian who is at times haunted by a spirit called ‘Old Georgie’…
One wonders wether Mitchell had the same idea.
I keep thinking of Apocalypse Now “His methods were…unsound.”
Is unsound philosophy philosophy?
Come on now, be fair. It is entirely possible that W might get a thumbs up from historians of the future. After all, we have all had to re-adjust our presidential quality scales downward so that Nixon is now ranked as a pretty darned good President compared to W. Who knows – maybe we Americans will elect a Presidential Caligula who will be so bad that even W will get a boost in the presidential rankings from “worst” to “not as bad as…”
“Come on now, be fair. It is entirely possible that W might get a thumbs up from historians of the future. After all, we have all had to re-adjust our presidential quality scales downward so that Nixon is now ranked as a pretty darned good President compared to W.”
Nicely put.
It is possible, given the collective fawning and amnesia that can sometimes constitute history. When Ford died he was praised, literally praised, for his personal corruption in pardoning Nixon because it spared the Beltway from the agonising trauma that would be the rule of law. And if Reagan had lived in an earlier era, there would now be temples erected in his name.
Even then, George W. Bush will pose a challenge to revisionists. Nixon could actually claim legislative achievements in addition to crookery and war crimes.
Here is what Régis Debray has to say:
[Debray, Praised Be Our Lords (2007), p67]
Nice. I’ll take note of that.
Skull & Bonesman Bush & Truthful Tony- The Axis of Integrity.
An insight into Bush’s ‘sound philosophy’ from his shadowy cohort, MC Rove:
“You know, the Bush doctrine—‘Feed a terrorist, arm a terrorist, train a terrorist, fund a terrorist, you’re just as bad as a terrorist […] It’s going to remain our national doctrine.” [Quoted by Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘Party Unfaithful,’ New Yorker]
To those of us who feel that the US’s instrumental role in training Bin Laden (not to mention Manuel Noriega and all his fellow-torturers and assassins with diplomas from the School of the Americas) is common knowledge, statements like this can be curiously hard to respond to. You want to say ‘well George, in that case I suggest you send your father, ex-CIA director that he is, on one of those charter flights to Guantanamo, and you might finally get a substantive criminal conviction,’ but I find it hard to contest such a total re-imagining of recent American history (except when I’m talking to people who already agree with me). It’s a bit like what it must have been like for Soviet party members when people got erased from photos. I think it’s difficult (even for those of us who don’t face a gulag) to say ‘umm, I’m sure there’s actually a person standing there in that photo.’
If this selective amnesia is what constitute’s Bush’s concept of ‘history,’ it’s not hard to see why he thinks it will be kind to him.
So? What does all this prove? What do we do about it? Or have we all become ‘Unspeakers’ in the 21st Century – the thing we are ‘unspeaking’, that, while we sit around ‘cleverly’ dissecting the words and deeds of others, we’re not now or ever really going to do anything to change it?
Someone once said, once you realise that the authorities or the government are corrupt and dangerous, you have to do something about them…but, you inevitably won’t, because it means fighting the system that you have been convinced is there to protect you…and so, you will ultimately, for all your complaining and clever observations, comply with whatever ‘they’ want from you…
…rewriting history; fabricating evidence; lies; illegal wars of aggression; economics over environment…etc etc etc…
In more “too soon to tell” news, Bush says, of the “surge” or reinforcements: