Updated 2 years ago
There’s a reason it’s called “Fog of War”
Warning: a wonkish diatribe against Democrats’s putting expertise on a pedestal.
Why are some (not all!) in international relations sound like they march to Roger Waters’ drumbeat?
It goes to the core of the problem, which many conservatives, to their credit, have in recent decades been alone in popularizing:
Because of multiculturalism and postmodernism, academia has moved so far away from taking culture and ideology into account, it has lost its moorings. It was deemed ethnocentric (or even racist) to take them into account. “Humans are all the same,” they said. “Just rely on the data.” Mix this with a fawning over Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik, add a few decades to germinate, and the chickens have come home to roost.
And note, that this flies in the face of the Democrat’s defense of academia and “expert knowledge” in the Trump era. This was rightfully used to argue for climate change and vaccines. Rightfully, because those do not involve what goes on in people’s heads. Homo sapiens brains are the most complex devices in the known universe, and to deign to map it out with napkin math invites hubris.
There is a limit to how far you can push any argument before it falls into disfunction. The “black box” of how actual people operate in the real world must never be forgotten and replaced with graphs drawn up by some old man paid to defend his entrenched positions.
While we are all still homo sapiens, culture and ideology still fucking matter, and if your scrawny little tenured head gets so far up your arse you can’t see that, you have become officially epistemologically divorced from the real world, and must be called out.
Like the old chestnut of psychology vs psychiatry, political science is not actually, and can never be, hard science, and any efforts to make it so are doomed to fail. Republicans understand this intuitively. Democrats not so much.
A reckoning must happen.
Full text:
A short thread here about why so some scholars including in intl relations are saying useless things about the Ukraine war.
Nearly thirty years ago, political science as a field became obsessed with being “scientific.” That is, one of the human sciences got tired of humans.
This was the great wave of quantification, when meaningless and equations and graphs and “broadly comparable studies” became the fashion. Now, before I dump on quantitative analysis, I will say: I came from the sciences, I understand math, and it had its place in poli sci.
Whenever you had large numbers of repeatable actions – like voting! – you could do important quantitative analysis. Peace and love to my American politics colleagues. But the pretense to being “scientific” – or as we sometimes called it, “physics envy” – got out of hand.
Add to this the dominance of “realism” in international relations, the idea that states (and I am simplifying here) are basically alike and act based on how many of them there are and how much power they have. It’s a theory that’s never explained much, but entrances scholars.
Why are these two emphases – math over on one side, realism on the other – so powerful and destructive? They are seductive because they relieve scholars of knowing anything about the areas they’re talking about. No need to learn languages or master cultural knowledge.
So you have studies like “Let’s examine sectarian violence! I’ll compare Bosnia and Ireland – never having been to either of them – and I shall code ‘incidents of violence’ to create neat spreadsheets.” Many articles published; not much knowledge gained.
Some of this was the result of kids no longer studying foreign languages. Stats displaced that requirement; I had to be competent in two foreign languages to get a PhD in 1988, but I’m not sure how many places still have that requirement. But why does that matter?
It matters because people who study the world lost touch with culture and ideology. Everything was sacrificed to the pretense of universality. You could either explain it with math, or you could say “realism tells us…” and then pontificate.
One of the most cringe moments in my career was a senior IR guy saying “You don’t need to speak Korean to understand Korea.” Why so cringe? He said to a Korean-American scholar who spoke Korean and forgot more about Korea than that guy would ever know. Yikes.
This insecurity about cultureal knowledge is why there was real hostility in the academy to area specialists back in the 90s. “Barefoot empiricists,” “journalists” – a dire insult in poli sci – “reporters and describers,” and so on. Theory was everything; knowledge was meh.
This is why today you have such sterility in the academy while such important things are happening. The system that was in place for thirty years was hostile to deep knowledge and policy conclusions. To know about policy was, indeed, suspect as being dirtied by politics.
Now, some of you might say that the current public policy schools and depts prove me wrong. What you’re missing is that many such programs were set up to circumvent some unreformable poli sci departments. (example: BU circa 1983) So, yes, things are changing for the better.
And I’ll add two cheers for poli sci depts. There *should* be departments that study politics and political theory and methods and other stuff as an unique academic discipline, and I have some problems with how policy schools are sometimes just all about the issue du jour.
But if you’re outside of academia and you can’t figure out why senior “realists” are writing about “how to deal with Russia” but clearly don’t know diddle about Russia, it’s because of some bad decisions going back 30 years.
I avoided writing about this when I was still teaching because *I* was one of the people who got turfed during the Great War Against the Area Specialists in the 90s. (I also didn’t get tenure on my first go because I was a jerk, but let’s not open that can of worms.)
But everything I worried about has come to pass: a huge disconnect between policy and academic knowledge during a war. I thought 9/11 would fix it; I was wrong. But I will say I am more optimistic now, except about IR specialists.
Finally, some of you might ask if this undermines my arguments about expertise. The academic profession has made mistakes, to be sure. My solution is to let the academy police itself and fix those errors – as I think it is doing now in many places.
The WRONG answer is to say: “Well academic realists and the number crunchers aren’t helpful, so let’s ask Cliff Clavin here what we should do about Ukraine– once we show him where Ukraine is on a map.” That’s not a solution, that’s a reflex.
I might disagree with someone like Charles Kupchan, but we could likely have a productive convo about getting to a good policy, because of a shared basis of knowledge. I want to see area people and IR people and Big Math work together more, and I think that’s happening.
Thank you for coming to my “what the hell happened over thirty years in poli sci talk.” I will not be taking questions unless I really like the person asking or if the question is interesting.
