Features: By Robert D. Kaplan A new tyranny rears its head The most blatant tyranny
is the one which asks the most blatant questions,” writes the late
Nobel laureate Elias Canetti in Crowds and
Power (1960). Canetti, a Bulgarian of Spanish-Jewish descent, was
witness to the mob violence over inflation that gripped Frankfurt and
Vienna in the interwar years. He devoted his literary energies to the study
of the human herd. In the mob he saw a wild and dangerous beast that
— indignant over its own perceived oppression — held the
ultimate power to oppress. Canetti discerned six ingredients necessary for
oppression: secrecy, physical brutality, swift reaction, the right to
question and to demand answers, the right to judge and condemn, and the
right to pardon and show mercy.
I read Crowds and Power in Romania in 1984 and related it to the communist totalitarianism around me
that represented the unfinished business of World War ii. What I saw there brought me closer
to one of Canetti’s own obsessions: the manipulation of the crowd in
both its concrete and virtual forms. What fascinated was not the dreary
fact of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s co-tyranny but the mass
psychology that engulfed it, complete with huge pro-Ceausescu rallies to
which I was witness, requiring busloads and trainloads of peasants hauled
in from the countryside to fill the squares. After the Berlin Wall fell, I
reread it and noticed that some of Canetti’s six ingredients were
also tools of legitimate regimes seeking to keep the anarchy of the mob at
bay. Yet to read Crowds and Power now, at a time when truly noxious authoritarian regimes exist
in fewer and fewer places, is to be chilled by another realization.
While quite a few regimes, particularly in the Middle
East, employ that secrecy and brutality invoked by Canetti as their
ordinary means of control, he is far more interesting when he writes about
the power to question and to demand answers, to judge and condemn, to react
swiftly, and to forgive. After all, secrecy and brutality are so obviously
elements of control that they require little explanation. But listen to him
on another element:
All questioning is a forcible intrusion. . . . The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light. He sets to work with the sureness of a surgeon, one who . . . stimulates pain. . . . The situation is most dangerous for the person questioned when short, concise answers are demanded . . . .
Canetti mentions judicial examinations as well, but
those are now conducted within severely proscribed limits with a judge and
opposing attorney present to protect the rights of the interrogee. It is
later on, when he discusses the sheer “pleasure” which those in
power take in “pronouncing an unfavorable verdict” — on
“‘a bad painter’” or “‘a bad
politician,’” meaning, as Canetti himself puts it,
“‘a bad man’” — that a specific idea of the
changing nature of tyranny presents itself.
The pummeling oppression that gripped
broad swaths of the earth as recently as 15 years ago hardly exists any longer. Meanwhile, across the
post-industrial West, elections have become eerily manipulated events
indistinguishable from corporate advertising campaigns, in which candidates
regularly make pronouncements that are obviously insincere or flat-out
false but vital to placating millions of voters on hot-button emotional
issues. As the Austrian novelist Robert Musil slyly intimated in The Man Without Qualities (1952), the world loves the untrue
statement, and the sliest, most successful politicians deeply internalize
this fact. The exalted democratic citizenry is just another of
Canetti’s human crowd-packs.
But few politicians are consistently sly in reading
accurately the crowd’s daily and hourly shifts in passion, and those
who are — because of the fact of their slyness — usually find
it wiser to cave in to these shifts than to lead the crowd down the hard
road elsewhere. Because even our best politicians are cowed by the
electoral herd, we must look to another group for the true source of power
in our age.
As this is an age in which we are bombarded by messages
that tell us what to buy and what to think, when one dissects the real
elements of power — who has it and, more important during a time of
rapid change, who increasingly has it — one is left to conclude bleakly: Ours is not
an age of democracy, or an age of terrorism, but an age of mass media,
without which the current strain of terrorism would be toothless in any
case.
Like the priests of ancient Egypt, the rhetoricians of
ancient Greece and Rome, and the theologians of medieval Europe, the media
represent a class of bright and ambitious people whose social and economic
stature gives them the influence to undermine political authority. Like
those prior groups, the media have authentic political power —
terrifically magnified by technology — without the bureaucratic
accountability that often accompanies it, so that they are never culpable
for what they advocate. If, for example, what a particular commentator has
recommended turns out badly, the permanent megaphone he wields over the
crowd allows him to explain away his position — if not in one article
or television appearance, then over several — before changing the
subject amid the roaring onrush of new events. Presidents, even if voters
ignore their blunders, are at least responsible to history; journalists
rarely are. This freedom is key to their irresponsible power.
There is nothing irresponsible per se about publishing
one’s opinions. In fact, government would be worse off with no
pundits than with too many of them. Pundits, in one form or another, have
always had a role to play in free societies. But the ongoing centralization
of major media outlets, the magnification of the media’s influence
through various electronic means and satellite printing, and the increasing
intensity of the viewing experience in an age of big, flat television
screens has created a new realm of authority akin to the emergence of a
superpower with similarly profound geopolitical consequences.
Were Fox News, say, to make a tonal adjustment in its
coverage, if only for the pecuniary motive of stealing some liberal viewers
from CNN, or were the New York Times to retire one or two of its columnists for the sake of a less
wearisome and screechy op-ed page, the ramifications would be not only
journalistic but political as well, and sufficient perhaps to affect the
outcome of a future close election.
But the media are not agents of the decentralization of
authority, which implies a healthy and orderly transformation of sorts.
Rather, they are agents of the weakening of it. The very cynical
compromises politicians increasingly need to make in a media-driven
environment further immobilize them. Politicians are weaker than ever;
journalists, stronger. To be regularly mouthing opinions on television is
to be, as they say, accomplished: To be an assistant or deputy assistant secretary of state,
defense, agriculture, or commerce — jobs requiring much higher levels
of expertise and stress management — means often to slip into
oblivion, at a significantly lower salary. A journalist friend who had been
a presidential speechwriter agreed that were a successful journalist to
accept a typical assistant or deputy assistant secretary’s slot, it
would be as though he had gone missing for four years.
The medieval age was tyrannized by a demand for
spiritual perfectionism, making it hard to accomplish anything practical.
Truth, Erasmus cautioned, had to be concealed under a cloak of piety;
Machiavelli wondered whether any government could remain useful if it
actually practiced the morality it preached.1 Today the global media make demands on generals and civilian
policymakers that require a category of perfectionism with which medieval
authorities would have been familiar. Investigative journalists may often
perform laudatory service, but they have also become the grand inquisitors
of the age, shattering reputations built up over a lifetime with the
exposure of just a few sordid details. When the staff of a show like 60 Minutes decides which stories to pursue and which to leave half-finished on
the cutting room floor, the destiny of any number of people is quietly
being determined. That is actual and not virtual authority, however
responsibly it may be employed: more authority, often, than any congressman
or senator has. And as the editorial tastes of the tabloids dissolve into
those of the mainstream media, the pace of character destruction quickens.
The cosmopolitan network
The media clerisy flatter themselves on inheriting the early twentieth-century
muckraking tradition of investigative journalism. But investigative
journalism is, both chronologically and philosophically, just as much a
legacy of the 1960s
youth rebellion, in which, as Samuel Huntington wrote in his greatest book,
American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (1981),
“the arrogance of power was superceded by the arrogance of
morality.” As secrecy became synonymous with evil in the late 1960s, exposure was elevated from
a mere technique to a principle.
In The Shield of Achilles:
War, Peace, and the Course of History (2002), the academic Philip
Bobbitt builds on this notion. He observes that, “In the
market-state, the media have begun to act in direct competition with the
government of the day.” The media “are more nimble than
bureaucrats hampered by procedural rules,” even as they are
“protected in many countries by statutes and constitutional
amendments.” He adds that the “critical function of the media
in the market-state is similar to that of the political parties of the Left
in the nation-state.” Bobbitt is not here calling the media
left-wing. For all one knows, he may believe that they have become, in
certain quarters, dangerously right-wing. No, Bobbitt leads one on the path
of a different insight: that the essential role of the left has always been
to question and expose authority. For it has been the left’s very
fear of authority that makes it uncomfortable with the concept of
leadership. People on the left rarely write books about leadership and
taking charge: That is the domain of business and military types. Leaders
must choose, and because even right choices may produce imperfect outcomes,
there will always be much to criticize — and to expose. Thus,
left-wing journals can be brilliant even as they are ultimately
irresponsible. And so, as the nation-state slowly dies and market forces
sideline the old left in the wake of communism’s defeat, its function
must be assumed by a new historical actor.
To the extent that the left is still vibrant, I am
suggesting that it has mutated into something else. If what used to be
known as the Communist International has any rough contemporary equivalent,
it is the global media. The global media’s demand for peace and
justice, which flows subliminally like an intravenous solution through its
reporting, is — much like the Communist International’s rousing
demand for workers’ rights — moralistic rather than moral.
Peace and justice are such general and self-evident principles that it is
enough merely to invoke them. Any and all toxic substances can flourish
within them, or manipulate them, provided that the proper rhetoric is
adopted. For moralizers these principles are a question of manners, not of
substance. To wit, Kofi Annan can never be wrong.
Still, cnn — and in particular, cnn International — cannot be defined simply as a
left-wing network. Look at the latter’s exotic female anchors, so
chic and exquisitely made-up. Rosa Luxemburg never looked like that. cnn International is a global
cosmopolitan network, just as Fox News is an old-fashioned nation-state
network gaudied up by the latest technology (and because the meatloaf world
of the old nation-state will remain feisty for a few decades yet, Fox has
hit a gold mine2). Global cosmopolitanism is a world of multiple passport
holders and others whose business and income give them easy access to many
countries even as they have less and less of a stake in any particular one
of them. Just as journalists are not bureaucratically accountable for their
views — disseminated with all the power brought to bear by new
technology — global cosmopolitans are increasingly unaccountable to
geographical space, or to a specific government, or even to fellow voters.
Their friends and acquaintances are spread throughout the planet, and with
less of a stake in geography, they are dull to pleas of national interest
even as they are alive to those of “humanity.” That is to say,
they represent the well-worried. As Somerset Maugham remarked in The Moon and Sixpence (1919),
moral indignation always contains an element of
self-satisfaction.
The principal weapon of the global media, as of any
media, is exposure. After all, there will be always be something
reproachable to expose in even the best-functioning governments and
bureaucracies, as such organizations are by nature supremely imperfect. Of
course, too much exposure can immobilize government, but if you don’t
have a concrete stake in any particular place, that shouldn’t matter.
The very fact of exposure — and the moral satisfaction that derives
from it — is, pace Canetti, pleasurable.
Exposure is the particular terrain of the investigative
journalist. It is the investigative journalist who has inherited the mantle
of the old left, whatever the ideological proclivities of individual
practitioners of the trade. The investigative journalist is never interested in the 90 per cent of activities that
are going right, nor especially in the 10 per cent that are going wrong, but only in the 1 per cent that are morally
reprehensible. Because he always seems to define even the most heroic
institutions by their worst iniquities, his target is authority itself.
Disclaimers notwithstanding, he is the soul of the left incarnate.
When every major domestic policy decision or military
operation is characterized on the basis of its worst flaws, leaders become
increasingly risk averse, for they know that anything even vaguely heroic,
simply by definition, must masquerade as failure until such time as there
is no electoral benefit to be gained from it. It took a generation for
President Gerald Ford to be respected for pardoning Richard Nixon —
an act that helped secure domestic peace even as it may have cost Ford an
election. Indeed, not only has Ford himself been pardoned by the media, but
so, too, it now appears, have presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush the
elder: two men whom the media were accustomed to savage. Who knows, armed
with an acquittal by the media, it may not be long before Bush the elder or
even Ford start appearing on historians’ lists as minor great
presidents. As Canetti would know: To judge and condemn, and then to
pardon, well, that is true power!
It may take longer for the realization to seep in that
Ford has been our greatest contemporary ex-president. For in an age of mass
media — where divinity is dependent upon being noticed by the crowd
and being forgotten is the equivalent of excommunication — high
character is rightly defined by the willingness to embrace obscurity the
moment one relinquishes lofty bureaucratic responsibility.
The disembodied newscaster
Divinity has certainly been redefined in this epoch of ours. Like the saints in
medieval icons who were worshipped with incense and burning candles
beginning around 500
A.D., television newscasters are, in the words of art and social critic
John Berger, the “epitome of the disembodied.” Berger notes in The Shape of a Pocket (2001)
that “it took the system many years to invent them and to teach them
to talk as they do.” The result, he suggests, is not for the viewer a
sense of freedom, or of empowerment through information, but its very
opposite: “a profound isolation” and sense of nothingness
before such remote spirits. It is a disease-variant of religious worship. I
do not refer specifically to the three network anchormen, who are in the
early phase of retirement. Compared to what will follow them, they will
appear in hindsight the way mid-twentieth-century intellectuals do now.
Go to any airport, where you are rarely out of sound
range of a 24-hour
news channel, and when you are, you are assaulted by the subtitles. You
realize that oppression constitutes being forced to pay attention; or, for
that matter, being forced to get attention. If civilization is built on a
plea for privacy and some silence, then the media are an unabated noise.
Between that noise and you is nothing but desolation mixed with
claustrophobia as the world around you is reduced to one bleating
disembodied voice, which assumes the dimensions of a prison.
As with medieval churchmen, the media class of the
well-worried has a tendency to confuse morality with sanctimony: Those with
the loudest megaphones and no bureaucratic accountability have a tendency
to embrace moral absolutes. After all, transcending politics is easier done
than engaging in them, with the unsatisfactory moral compromises that are
entailed.
To wit, some of our most prestigious correspondents
have occasionally remarked that the only favoritism they harbor is toward
the weak or toward the victims in any crisis. That may do in church, but it
does not necessarily lead to trustworthy analysis. As Musil hinted, bankers
are more dependable than angels because the desire for wealth preserves
critical thinking more than does the desire for love. In any case, weakness
defines a power relationship, not a moral attribute. One side’s being
weaker than the other — or harboring more victims — does not
necessarily mean that its cause is just or even moral. Rather, it may mean
that it has miscalculated militarily or adopted a more cynical policy
toward its own civilians. Victims need to be humanely attended to, but it
does not follow that their side in a conflict is entitled to political
support by way of sympathetic news coverage. In an essay about growing
European anti-Semitism, the French social scientist Alain Finkielkraut
warns against those who evince “unerring solicitude” toward
those who commit “reprehensible acts” merely because such acts
issue from exploitation and oppression.3 His target is not the global media but European elites
in general, but there is an overlap.
Because the media confuse victimization with moral
right, American troops in Iraq have had occasionally to contend with
unsympathetic news coverage, which in an age of mass media has concrete
tactical and strategic consequences. Last spring, I accompanied the first
United States Marines into Fallujah. After several days of intense
fighting, the Marines — reinforced with a fresh new battalion —
appeared on the verge of defeating the insurgents. A cease-fire was called,
though, snatching defeat from victory. No matter how cleanly the Marines
fought, it was not clean enough for the global media, famously including
Al-Jazeera, which portrayed as indiscriminate killing what in previous eras
of war would have constituted a low civilian casualty rate. The fact that
mosques were blatantly used by insurgents as command posts for aggressive
military operations mattered less to journalists than that some of these
mosques were targeted by U.S. planes. Had the fighting continued, the
political fallout from such coverage would have forced the newly emerging
Iraqi authorities to resign en masse. So American officials had no choice
but to undermine their own increasingly favorable battlefield position by
consenting to a cease-fire. While U.S. policy was guilty of incoherence
— ordering a full-scale assault only to call it off — the
Marines were defeated less by the insurgents than by the way urban combat
is covered by a global media that has embraced the cult of victimhood.
The cult of victimhood is another legacy of the 1960s and its immediate aftermath
— when, according to Peter Novick in The
Holocaust in American Life (1999), Jews, women, blacks, Native Americans, Armenians, and others
fortified their own identities through public references to past
oppression. The process was tied to Vietnam, a war in which the photographs
of civilian victims — the little girl fleeing napalm —
“displaced traditional images of heroism.” The process has now
been turned upon the American military itself. When not portraying them as
criminals in prisoner abuse scandals, the media appear most at ease
depicting American troops as victims themselves — victims of a failed
Iraq policy, of a bad reserve system, and of a society that has made them
into killers.
Yet the soldiers and Marines with whom I spent months
as an embed in ground fighting units found such coverage deeply insulting.
At a time when there are acts of battlefield courage in places like
Fallujah and Najaf that, according to military expert John Hillen,
“would make Black Hawk Down look like Gosford Park,” media coverage of individual soldiers and Marines as
warrior-heroes is essentially absent.4 The heroism of someone like Jessica Lynch is acceptable
to the journalistic horde because it is joined to her victimhood. There are
exceptions: The coverage of Pat Tillman, who left the National Football
League to be an Army Ranger and who was killed in Afghanistan, is one. But
serious analysis requires generalization, and pointing out exceptions
— at which the media are especially adroit when they themselves are
criticized — does not constitute a rebuttal.
Celebrating military heroism is not glorifying killing.
War is a sad fact of existence, but a fact nevertheless. To be heroic can
be an indication of character rather than of bloodthirstiness. Moreover,
the American military — active in dozens of countries each week,
fighting terrorism away from the headlines — is providing the
security armature for an emerging global civilization whose own
institutions are still in their infancy. And while the U.S. military may
employ a variety of methods, including humanitarian aid, in the fight
against terrorism, the use of force is central to its enterprise.
Al-Jazeera, a quasi-independent television organ, is itself a product of the creeping
liberalization of Middle Eastern society for which the American military
deserves partial credit.
Why should they fight?
During world war ii American soldiers and journalists belonged to the same
crowd-pack, so news coverage was more empathetic. It made heroes of
American troops when the facts so demanded, which was often. American
troops have changed less than American journalists have. The crowd-pack to
which the latter now belong is that of the global media — an
upper-income, transnational human herd. This is not a manifestation of
character — good or bad — or even of personal proclivity. This
is a mark of profound world-wide social and economic transformations that
are eroding the nation-state, with refugee migrations at the bottom of the
ladder of human activity and a prosperous class of global cosmopolitans at
the top. Prestigious media and intellectual organs have come to constitute
an important bellwether in their own right for international power shifts.
Jean-Paul Sartre in The
Reprieve (1945) suggested that what
separates
the well-off from the working class is that the latter
simply don’t give in. They fight as long as it takes, not because
they are without doubts, but because if they weren’t fighting, they
would be occupied at other hard, physical labor. As for the middle class
and above, “Why should they fight? They were waiting for nothing,
they had all they wanted.” Perhaps that is why media elites imagine
that everything that degenerates into an actual struggle must ipso facto
correspond to a scandal. And a scandal of
delinquent planning and miscalculation it may be. But that does not demonstrate that the struggle is not worthwhile
anyway and that real character doesn’t mean seeing the thing through
and celebrating heroic action in the process. Because the media conflate
warrior-heroism with the glorification of killing similarly to the way they
conflate victimhood with morality, only those such as al Qaeda are left to
venerate old-fashioned warrior virtues. I am not worried, though. As
Stendhal notes in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839),
in order to be happy after a long period of “insipid
sensations,” it is necessary to “perform heroic actions.”
For better or for worse, the worship of heroes in war is coded into the
human psyche.
Still, the socioeconomic separation between American
troops and American reporters was dramatically — if briefly —
bridged in 2003 during
Operation Iraqi Freedom, a conventional infantry operation in which
embedding became the travel method of choice for many journalists. But
afterwards, as the war turned unconventional and seemed to go sour —
and as editors back home became uneasy with the newly sympathetic attitude
of their employees toward the military — journalists gradually began
rejoining their new-old global media crowd-pack. The large-scale embedding
that occurred during Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was to be but a
brief respite from an ongoing trend.
To wit, embeds using the words “we” and
“our” in their narratives came under attack by media critics
for going native with the troops, but the use of those words is completely
appropriate for an American living with troops, and taking part in most of
their activities, for weeks on end. World War ii correspondents such as Richard Tregaskis in Guadalcanal Diary (1943)
and Robert Sherrod in Tarawa: the Story of a Battle (1944)
made constant use of “we” and “our.” Not to do so
can be awkward in passages where one is describing the effects of the sun,
or of indifferent food, or of bullets and mortars fired at the troops and
the journalist who is with them. But, more important, the fact that the use
of these words became sensitive in media circles constitutes proof of the
psychological barrier between the American contingent of the global media
and American troops. The American media have lavished praise on those who
cover life exclusively from the viewpoint of oppressed minorities, as John
Howard Griffin did in Black Like Me (1961),
or the working poor, as Barbara Ehrenreich did in Nickel and Dimed (2001): Yet to do the same with
America’s own working-class troops is to risk censure.
Therefore, in the next war, while the media provide the
global cosmopolitan perspective, the troops themselves may well provide the
American one. The fact is that most grunts can’t stand to be
portrayed as victims. The quietly mounting trend of American soldiers and
Marines writing about their experiences and posting them on weblogs rather
than having their experiences interpreted by transnational journalists is
proof enough. AndrewSullivan.com, among others, has periodically posted such accounts. I recall one from a Marine
chaplain in the Sunni Triangle pleading that the grunts’ morale was
fine and suggesting that their principal fear was the home front going
belly-up on them. The parts are all in place for an explosion of this type
of commentary. Almost all the troops have their own laptops and access to
cybercafes at their bases. The American perspective does not whitewash
problems or claim a situation is better than it is, but it does promote
warrior virtues and submerge the cult of victimhood, and it recognizes that
good morale does not mean the absence of complaints — troops complain
all the time; it would be suspicious if they didn’t. It means only
the continued spirit to fight.5
Unelected and uncontrollable
The medieval age ended with the reassertion of authority. The bureaucratized
French state that emerged in the early seventeenth century, thanks greatly
to Cardinal Richelieu, gradually supplanted the individual arbitrariness of
feudal barons. Its forerunner was the strong Sicilian state created by the
Norman monarch Roger ii of Hautville, who, five centuries earlier, had employed absolutism
toward liberal ends in protecting his citizenry against a
“woolly-headed” idealism associated with a vast and ineffectual
papal universality.6 To compare the global media with such a universality is
to exaggerate. Still, comparison with the past is all we have. I submit
that the global media are emerging as a wet, ineffectual blanket of
moralistic authority like the medieval papal one. Nevertheless, it is real
enough to stifle and influence the more legitimate authority bequeathed by
an electorate — that is in turn anchored to a specific geography.
Our preoccupation with promoting democracy is slightly
misplaced. Freer, more historically liberal societies are emerging anyway.
Even in the Middle East, the new generation of leaders will not have the
luxury to rule as autocratically as the passing one. Tumultuous social and
economic change needs to be managed, not ignited. But another type of
tyranny rears its head. It is a mob I worry about: unelected,
uncontrollable, moving from one lynching-of-sorts to the next, fighting
amongst itself, dispersing, falling apart, and regrouping again and again.
It can never be wrong because its cause is that of the weak and oppressed:
Therein lies its power of oppression.
1 See William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance (Little, Brown, 1992). 2 The word “meatloaf” in connection to old-fashioned America was used in the December 2001 issue of the Atlantic Monthly in David Brooks’ article, “One Nation, Slightly Divisible.” 3 Alain Finkielkraut, “In the Name of the Other: Reflections on the Coming Anti-Semitism,” Azure (Autumn 2004). 4 See Captain Roger Lee Crossland’s “Why Are Our Victims Our Only War Heroes?” Proceedings (U.S. Naval Institute, April 2004), and Rich Lowry’s tremendously insightful “Where Are the Heroes?” National Review Online (July 1, 2004). 5 Edward N. Luttwak, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace (Belknap Press, 1987). 6 See John Julius Norwich, The Kingdom in the Sun: 1130–1194 (Harper & Row, 1970). |
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