There is a lot of great analysis of what’s happening in Ukraine right now. I especially recommend Adam Tooze’s Chartbook #90: Heavy Fires which synthesizes a lot of valuable information being posted in social media.
I’m not going to pretend to the specific level of military expertise required to say anything intelligent about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is going or how it might develop. Though like Ezra Klein, I’m not sure that some of the keyboard commandoes on Twitter actually understand that enforcing a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine is essentially calling for NATO or the US to declare war on Russia. Or if they understand that, I’m not sure they understand they’re risking nuclear war. Or if they understand that, I’m not sure they understand that nuclear war is basically the end of the human story. At a certain point down that chain of reasoning, you stop hearing from real people and start hearing mostly from bots trying to create fear and panic on behalf of the Russian government.
One issue I do feel capable of thinking about is the question of how to read the motivation of the Russian government for pursuing this course of action. Or perhaps more to the point, why we all talk so much about the motivation of governments and leaders, especially at the individual level, in these kinds of crises. My friend Claire Potter argues that speculating about whether Putin is mentally ill or otherwise suffering from some kind of disorder or emotional crisis is not useful. Broadly speaking, I think she’s right—that we frequently indulge in these kinds of “distant readings” of the psychological stability or mental health of leaders whenever we feel that their actions violate what we imagine to be institutional or behavioral norms as a kind of roundabout attempt to reassert those norms without having to actually argue for them or assess whether they are in fact norms.
As Potter observes, “normal” leaders declare wars or engage in systematic violence all the time. It remains somewhat bewildering how many mainstream commenters in the US (in government, in public media, in the academy, in think tanks, etc.) continue to believe that the values, practices, and assumptions they (sometimes) regard as preferable are in fact actual norms, especially after the last six years of American politics but also after the last century and a half of human history.
Some of that belief holds up because these experts consciously or unconsciously exempt what they should see as norm violations if they are committed by particular kinds of individuals or particular kinds of institutions. What is condemned as savagely incomprehensible evil from one kind of actor gets reframed as an understandable mistake or as the act of a “bad apple”. What is seen as incomprehensible—or insane—in one instance is carefully traced as the sum consequence of many small errors of institutional action, each rational in their own way, accidentally summing up to a failure in another.
Some of this kind of talk is a kind of bluff stemming from an awareness that all the agreements and understandings and implicit rules have in fact never been agreed upon, understood, or discussed with any degree of consensus, that there is no real philosophical substance to any of these assumed norms. This kind of talk is a subset of a broader move that technocratically inclined elites have been making since at least 1945, which is to try and produce some new form of subjectivity for the powerful and the ruled alike through an elaborate performance of what they believe ought to be true about how states relate to one another, how leaders conduct themselves, how decisions get made, how citizens participate in (but do not determine) the outcome of political reasoning.
But I also think part of the problem is that at this end of modernity, our explanatory cupboards are relatively bare when it comes to explaining why people, institutions and states do the things they do, and it is precisely this kind of crisis that exposes both how uncertain we are about understanding causality within complex systems that interact with human agency (which is to say, most of them in the Anthropocene).
When something happens that almost everyone hates and regrets, an event that is plainly in some sense contingent, that didn’t have to happen, the scrum is on to domesticate that moment in terms of one of our major theoretical systems that work to interpret human life in terms of some simplifying principle, underlying law or model.
One group of folks gets busy trying to figure out how Putin and his associates are in fact behaving rationally within some constrained meaning of that concept, or how they might have come to believe they were behaving rationally based on asymmetrical or inaccurate information. (That was what Mutually Assured Destruction was trying to do as a doctrine, in the end: engineer an understanding of ‘rationality’ such that other possible rationalities were made impossible to think or articulate.) Another group of folks gets busy trying to argue that Putin is insane or ill, isolated or confused, or that he and some group of people around him are pursuing a narrow or particular kind of self-interest that contradicts a wider form of national and international self-interest. A few people trot out hoary old ideas about grand geopolitical structures that explain “Russia” as a relatively fixed kind of materialist actor doomed to repeat certain kinds of cycles, or they dust off some version of a “clash of civilizations” theory. Another language shifts away from individuals or countries and treats militaries, ministries, and other institutions as if they were individuals with their own personalities, interests and subjectivities and then reuses the arguments that would otherwise be applied to particular leaders or political parties.
There’s a basic problem of evidence at the heart of all of it. The kind of power involved in going to war is articulated and shaped in “rooms where it happens”, which we rarely get a real-time look at. We hear about what happened in them later, typically from actors trying to explain or justify what they did, or from documents that are also frequently post-facto creations (minutes, memos, communiques, correspondence, diaries). But even if we had all the surveillance equipment in the world, we’d still be witnessing something as complex and multivalent as any other sort of decision that’s reached by individuals within institutions in relationship to their personal and shared histories of culture, language, knowledge, aspiration, etc. If you’ve ever been in a room where a real and meaningful decision got made that had serious implications for everybody in the room and many people beyond it, you know that even being a direct witness or a direct participant often leaves you puzzled about exactly how the decision developed, where the decision was really coming from, or whether anybody really knows what’s going to happen next. It always feels like there were other rooms somewhere, but also as if some aspects of the decision made themselves, that the systems through which the decision flowed and now through which it will be implemented have their own agency.
We’re uncomfortable with the fact that culture, broadly speaking, is so overflowing with practices, consciousness, interests, psychologies, understandings and beliefs that as individuals and as groups we’re often reduced to telling stories afterwards that truncate, simplify and domesticate the messy surplus of our agency and our responsibility. We’re overwhelmed by the scale of our worlds, even the intimate ones. We are in so many places at once, even just as individuals, and pushed and pulled by so many things, seen and invisible.
So we fall back in these moments when something happens that is so plainly evil, so obviously undesired, so clearly unnecessary: an insane leader! a man being kept from the truth! An autocrat fearing future challenges to his authority! A sinister mafia losing their grip on massive flows of corrupt money! A rational actor (one man, a government, some institutions, an entire country) fearing encroachment or rivalry. A miscalculation of military power—or an accurate calculation of temporary consequences that will fade quickly. (How many companies in the US are still punishing the January 6th sympathizers, only a year later?) We try to pull on one string that will make this crisis something tractable and fully explicable. But what we too often do is walk away satisfied in our interpretation while the whole squirming mess remains tangled behind us.
Image credit: Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash
Yes, to your comment, Tim, and I acknowledge that I pushed the historical complexity button many times but have offered scant attention to the messiness, complexity, of the immediate.
This is so incredibly important, Tim. Pretty incisive on the fate of explanation. I like the spatial references. Cupboard, room. Bringing home how it is so difficult to know what is happening even in familiar settings. But we keep on trying, needing, to explain, even when, as you write, our cupboards of tools are pretty barren.