Andrew Bacevich

Andrew Bacevich: Anti-Imperialist

Andrew Bacevich on international relations and foreign policy.

Title: Surprise!

Keywords:

The Information Age has spawned two insidious clichés. The one relates to speed, the other to distance, with the first reinforcing the second.

According to the first cliché, the very tempo of human existence is rapidly accelerating. We live today in a “fast” world. Change is omnipresent. Success—even survival—requires that people and institutions be quick, nimble, and responsive. To stand still is to be left behind.

According to the second cliché, distances are collapsing. Oceans have been reduced to puddles, mountain ranges into minor inconveniences. Day by day, the world is shrinking and becoming ever more interconnected.

Now many clichés contain elements of wisdom. John F. Kennedy had it exactly right: Life is unfair. The same with Charles de Gaulle: Old age is a shipwreck.

The problem with the clichés of the Information Age is that they are entirely bogus. Worse than bogus: They are pernicious.

All the yapping about our supposedly fast, flat, and wired world fosters bizarre expectations. Computers, we are told, possess and confer power. Out of power comes mastery.

Don’t believe it. The fact of the matter is this: We live in a world characterized not by ever-greater speed but by never-ending surprise. No one—not the pope, the president, or even a fast-world guru like Thomas Friedman—knows what’s going to happen next. Those who pretend otherwise are frauds.

The Information Age has not notably enhanced our ability either to anticipate the future or to respond to the problems that catch us when we are looking the other way.

What prompts these thoughts is the ongoing, slow-motion environmental catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. On April 20, an oil platform located 50 miles off the coast of Louisiana exploded, burned, and collapsed, killing 11 and injuring many more. As a consequence, according to The New York Times, crude oil is now spilling into the Gulf at an estimated rate of 5,000 barrels per day. Meanwhile, nine days later—that’s nine days, folks—U.S. government agencies along with BP, the rig’s owner and operator, are still trying to figure out what to do.

Distance doesn’t matter? Heck, the pipe that’s gushing crude is only 5,000 feet under water—less than a mile. In this case, of course, it might just as well be 5,000 miles. Current estimates say that it may take 90 days to plug the leak. So much for “fast.”

Yet if we consider the disasters of the last decade, the Gulf oil spill doesn’t even make it into the front rank. Crowding it out for top honors are the 9/11 attacks and the mismanagement of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars; the collapse of Enron, the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, the global economic implosion of 2008; and the oh-so-ponderous response to natural disasters such as the hurricanes that devastated New Orleans and Haiti.

The future is opaque. Whatever is coming will contain much that is bad along with some that is good. All the iPods, iPhones, and iPads in the world won’t change the proportion between the two.

Buckle up.

World Affairs Institute World Affairs Daily

Apr 30, 2010 6:45:00 AM EDT

Comments:

Nate

April 30, 2010 12:12:08 PM

I often wonder if people's infatuation with adaptive technology is valued more for what it provides - and how conveniently "fast" it provides it - than for what they do (or can do) with it. I truly appreciate the fact that I can wake up in the morning, sit down at my computer with a simple cup of home-brewed coffee and find out what happened in some distant part of the world while I was sleeping. But at the same time I deplore the banality of hearing someone say, "Didn't you get my Twitter last night? I was letting everyone know that I missed the latest episode of Survivor and how my life is consequently in ruins!". I'm convinced, but not surprised, that "keeping up" in this so-called Fast Brave New World is more dependent on simply "knowing" something, rather than knowing what to do with it. But I especially like the fact that I can wake up and get a "hot off the press" piece by Andrew Bacevich, whose words and writing genuinely help me interpret this seemingly crazy world around me. Buckle up indeed.

sglover

April 30, 2010 01:48:25 PM

Count me as another fan of all the options that new technologies provide. But... To my mind, one of the most dismaying things about our glorious Mesopotamian adventure is this: We launched that war at a time when it was never easier for all ranks of society to get alternative views. During the "marketing" phase leading up to the war, anyone could effortlessly consult a whole galaxy of "open" literature. From that one could find ample reason to treat the administration line sceptically. Much as they might have wanted to, it was never really possible for the Bush/Cheney gangsters to mount a monolithic Kremlin-style information control operation. But in the end, they still got their war crime, didn't they?

srv

April 30, 2010 03:54:59 PM

Sorry, but explaining failure by saying it is too hard is a cop out. The world really isn't opaque at all. All you have to do is pay attention. PBS had a series on New Orleans' future (http://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transcript_neworleans_print.html), anyone reading his statements or reading Fisk knew Osama was coming to America, Enron was widely referred to as a "House of Cards" amongst those of us in Texas, a lot of people thought Iraq was idiotic months before it got started, plenty of people thought derivatives/deregulation/Milton were insane in the 90's, and housing prices were crazy by 2005. Want to know the future? Whatever Iraqi gov't results, it will be torturing and killing its own. We're pounding sand harder in Afghanistan. The next successful attack, even if it is exploding underpants, will send Americans into hysterics. The economy isn't going anywhere next year, there is already a stock bubble, and Wall Street is on target to bankrupt us again with new innovations financed via our last bailout.

Bill H

May 1, 2010 12:10:53 PM

Just as projections usually assume that all trends continue to infinity. "The population of X will be Y in the year Z." Disregard the issue that, for instance, as population becomes more dense the environment becomes less sustaining so deaths increase, births decrease, and people move to more sustaining locations. Surprise, the trend of that day did not continue and the population did not continue to rise at the same rate. Still some us us were not surprised by what happened in Iraq, and I am not surprised by what is happening in the Gulf right now. Saddened, yes, but not surprised.

HyperIon

May 1, 2010 05:21:47 PM

My rant these days is about complexity. The world is orders of magnitude more complex than it was 100 years ago. IMO it's more complex than the human intellect can manage. And computers (which are great at hiding complexity) are as much a part of the problem as the solution. I don't see how things get simpler w/o a (hard) reboot.

Chris S

May 8, 2010 12:23:14 PM

Bill Joy is right, the future doesn't need us. As technology increases, so do the chances of catastrophic unintended consequences.

Sam-WashingtonDC

May 11, 2010 11:58:31 AM

There is no need for SURPRISE any more. It is America's fascination for technology and innovation has gotton us where we are now. And, as we keep going, we shall be where we were earlier, according to Doris Day: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdhAfMor9BM

DE Teodoru

May 21, 2010 05:53:06 PM

I recall the 90s when it was impossible to confront academia in debate over the Cold War. The left acads were at the top of the pecking order and no way would they allow their favored myths to be challenged-- especially not when it was Vietnam. Well, then came the internet and suddenly the vistas were outrageously wide. No one could suppress anyone else. It was a grand decade of debate, though a bit tough on those of us who no longer had editors and typist and couldn't run the keyboard. But somehow, everyone struggled to understand and debate. MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE-- the wonderful concept imposed on academia by that wonderful NY Commie leader of the UC Berkley Free Speech Movement that had made the 60s (briefly) into a time of intellectual discourse like none other-- took off on the internet. Alas, by 2000, a lot of people thought they could make a living "blogging." The idea was to draw people to yourself and then sell slots on your site to advertisers. Pretty soon "blogging" became known as “very many people lecturing to very few.” So the idea was for bloggers to steal audience from each other because, after all, the goal is to make money. The discourse became derisive and the few who read them were totally polarized. Here we are a decade later, with “blogging” reduced to "twitting"-- 180 or so characters. This goes with the times demanding what Bill O'Reily of FoxNews calls "pithy" comments. Finally, the internet-- far more than the media-- has become testimony to EJ Dionne's apt description for America: "ON A LONG VACATION FROM COMPLEXITY." Of course, if you go to Sci/Math sites you can still be challenged so much that all the pyramidal cells in your cerebral cortex light up; but in most places it's pithy, pithy, pithy...That's a pity. Yet no one has better challenged the BS coming from Pentagon bureaucrats than Prof. Bacevich. I would only hope that people give more consideration to his more complex and ponderous writings. In the meantime, the Internet has become increasingly pictorial and technology seems to have dumbed down the human brain as it dumbs up the technology. Pity that it's got to be so pithy…especially when you see how much more intellectuals are doing with it in Europe.

Sam-WashingtonDC

June 26, 2010 05:02:24 PM

Attention: Nate You must be going postal by now. Andrew Bacevich has not written much for a while. How is your hot off the press morning coffee ???