When self-immolation is a rational
choice By Spengler
Apropos of Washington's triumphal response
to the high voter turnout in last week's Iraqi
elections, we should ask this simple question: why
do political leaders believe that democracy
fosters peace, despite innumerable examples to the
contrary? History shows us that the broad
electorate can be as bellicose as the most
bloodthirsty tyrant. But there is a sound reason
to equate democracy and peace; sadly, this
argument has a fatal flaw.
The argument
begins with a perfectly correct observation:
decisions made by large numbers of people are more
likely to be
rational than decisions made
by an autocratic clique. Madness may prompt a
single tyrant towards war, but madness is unlikely
to infect the whole electorate. This argument is
perfectly true, and explains why democracy is
better than autocracy.
The argument
depends on the beneficent effect of random error.
Within a given population there will exist a
certain number of dangerous lunatics, but the
delusions of lunatics are randomly distributed.
One lunatic believes that the world will come to
an end if spotted owls leave old-growth forests,
another frets about an invasion of space aliens,
and so forth. If the entire population is allowed
to vote, the delusions of the various lunatics
will cancel each other out, and voters with
rational perceptions and real information will
decide the outcome. That is why a broad and free
market does a better job of setting prices than a
central planning authority.
The trouble is
that entire peoples frequently find themselves
faced with probable or inevitable ruin, such that
no peaceful solution can be found. Situations of
this sort have arisen frequently in history, but
never as frequently as today, when 90% of the
world's languages are not expected to survive the
next century. A people facing cultural extinction
typically will choose war, if war offers even a
slim chance of survival.
Paradoxically, it
is possible for wars of annihilation to stem from
rational choice, for the range of choices always
must be bounded by the supposition that the
chooser will continue to exist. Existential
criteria, that is, trump the ordinary calculus of
success and failure. If one or more of the parties
knows that peace implies the end of its existence,
there exists no motive to return to peace. That
explains why the majority of casualties in such
wars are suffered long after all hope of victory
has disappeared (see More killing, please!,
June 12, 2003). Democratic governments are quite
capable of taking such an apocalyptic direction.
That is why Iran's President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad is the Islamic world's pre-eminent
democrat, telling the Islamic masses what they
want to hear while the tyrants and autocrats of
neighboring lands growl indistinctly through their
American-made muzzles.
The landslide
victor in June's presidential poll, Ahmadinejad
heads a new generation of elected fanatics. By the
same token, Hamas represents the popular will in
Gaza and the West Bank. A majority of Palestinian
Arabs now support an Islamist party committed to
destroying Israel by means of terror. Regarding
the participation of Hamas in Palestinian
elections, President George W Bush said earlier
this year, "I think people who generally run for
office say, vote for me, I'm looking forward to
fixing your potholes." The trouble is that the
West Bank as a whole is a pothole, and not
fixable.
Ahmadinejad's threats to wipe
Israel off the map and deriding as "myth" the
murder of 6 million European Jews appeals to the
Islamic electorate. Popular sovereignty in the
Arab and Persian spheres favors the war party. The
Iranian president grasps this elementary truth,
which makes him a far more effective force in the
Middle East than the Bush administration. As it is
presently constituted, Iran has no future, and the
Islamic world broadly faces a social crisis of
lethal proportions (The demographics of radical
Islam, August 23, 2005). Within the
Islamic framework, war represents the sort of
rational choice that popular majorities will
embrace.
This is a very different argument
from the "essentialist" claim that Islam, by
virtue of the percept of jihad, must inevitably
promote aggression. Without minimizing the dangers
inherent in the notion of jihad, I believe the
present war stems from the response of Islam to
particular circumstances at a particular point in
time.
Islam may harbor a predisposition
towards conquest, but the closest parallels to
Ahmadinejad's are to be found in Europe and the
US. On December 6 (Iran's strength in
weakness) I compared today's Iran to
Adolf Hitler's Germany on the eve of World War II.
Karl Marx observed that history tends to repeat
itself, the first time as tragedy and the second
time as farce - or Farsi, we might say in
Ahmadinejad's case. But for Americans to promote
the canard that democracy fosters peace must be
the most extreme case of amnesia on record, for
two democratically-elected governments fought the
most destructive war in the history of the Western
hemisphere.
The Confederate States of
America arose through irreproachable democratic
forms, with the overwhelming support of the
populace of the southern states, who sent
three-quarters of their military-age men to fight.
In proportion to population, the 289,000
Confederate dead of 1861-1865 - one quarter of the
military-age population - dwarf the million or so
Iranian fatalities during the war with Iraq and
seem trivial by comparison (6% of total population
vs 2% of total population).
No war cabinet
ever enjoyed more enthusiastic support than that
of Jefferson Davis, and no modern people ever
matched the Confederacy's willingness to sacrifice
for their ambitions. Yet the Confederacy was an
evil proposition from start to finish, not merely
because it wished to preserve the three-fifths of
its net worth embodied in human chattels, but also
because it proposed to create a vast slave empire
in Latin America. [1] A slave economy based on
cotton, which then ruined the soil in less than a
decade, could not persist another generation
without expanding its territory. The vast majority
of Southerners did not own slaves, but hoped to
get them through conquest. [2]
Iranians
elected Ahmadinejad and American Southerners
elected Jefferson Davis for what might be termed
rational reasons. The South was running out of
land; Iran is running out of young people as well
as oil (see Demographics of Iran's imperial
design, September 13, 2005).
Present-day Iran will cease to exist in a
generation, as Ahmadinejad knows better than
anyone. He has already proposed to relocate 30
million rural Iranians, half the country's
population, as the majority of villages become
unsustainable in the declining countryside.
The same aspirations put a field marshal's
baton into the rucksack of Napoleon's soldiers,
and made Hitler a hugely popular war leader until
Stalingrad. The Germans of 1939 wanted to be the
Herrenvolk, enriched by slave labor and
looted land. As I observed earlier this month,
Hitler launched the World War II with the
Fingerspitzengefuehl of a popular
politician, telling his military commanders, "At
no point in the future will Germany have a man
with more authority than I. But I could be
replaced at any moment by some idiot or criminal
... The morale of the German people is excellent.
It can only worsen from here."
Popular
majorities supported and sustained what arguably
was the most ruinous conflict in Western history,
the mutual annihilation of Sparta and Athens
during the Peloponnesian War. Western political
philosophy originates in the repudiation of the
results of Athenian democracy by Socrates, Plato
and Aristotle. If the people are pre-disposed
towards evil, no cast of philosophers will hold
them back from destruction, however. Socrates, the
martyr to the vengeance of Athens' democrats, is
not an oligarch, but rather an ironist, as Soren
Kierkegaard argued (see Socrates the destroyer,
May 24, 2004).
There is a school of
thought, associated with the late Leo Strauss,
according to which American democracy has enjoyed
unique success because the political philosophers
who founded it crafted a "low and broad"
constitutional structure that thwarted the worst
impulses of the demos. Not surprisingly,
the constituency for this view is heavily
populated by political scientists, whose sense of
self-importance it flatters. An alternative view,
which I share, is that for democracy to produce
good results, first one must have a good people.
America succeeded by creating ex nihilo a
new kind of people, in whose hands self-government
would have different results.
[2] Victor Davis Hanson made these
observations about the warlike character of
Athenian democracy in a September 30, 2002 column
for National Review Online: "We associate
democracies with peace, and thus think that it is
hard to convince thousands of free citizens to
support a war. But we need not despair about
getting democratic approval for the action against
Iraq. Herodotus wrote that it was easier to
convince thousands of free Athenians than a few
skeptical Spartan oligarchs to go to war. In fact,
consensual governments have never been averse to
fighting - read Thucydides' account of how the
frenzied Athenian assembly insisted that their
generals invade Sicily. Indeed, once democracies
get their blood up, free citizens - not their
professional generals - prove to be the truly
bellicose. Nicias the Athenian, George McClellan,
and perhaps our current reluctant Pentagon
hierarchy have all learned the peril of standing
in the way of an aroused citizenry. Democracies
are actually war-prone owing to their very moral
conceit - their confidence in the superiority of
their culture and system of government - and the
ease by which a simple majority vote of their
legislatures can instantaneously mobilize an
entire society for war." It is odd that the
possibility never occurred to Professor Hanson
that democracy in Islamic countries also might lead
to stronger support for war, as it has in Iran.
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