The New Certainties

Strange how we can at one and the same time deplore the “bubbles” in which people operate and yet, unthinkingly, demonstrate groupthink in our own behaviour. George Parker used the opportunity of a George Orwell award to draw attention to the new mood of “certainty” and tribalism which has been evident in the world these past few years 

When we open a book or click on an article, the first thing we want to know is which group the writer belongs to. The group might be a political faction, an ethnicity or a sexuality, a literary clique. The answer makes reading a lot simpler. It tells us what to expect from the writer’s work, and even what to think of it. Groups save us a lot of trouble by doing our thinking for us.

Politicians and activists are representatives. Writers are individuals whose job is to find language that can cross the unfathomable gap separating us from one another. They don’t write as anyone beyond themselves. But today, writers have every incentive to do their work as easily identifiable, fully paid-up members of a community. Belonging is numerically codified by social media, with its likes, retweets, friends, and followers. Writers learn to avoid expressing thoughts or associating with undesirables that might be controversial with the group and hurt their numbers 

For Parker, it was the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists in 2015 which started the process – when 200 US writers objected to the award that year of PEN America’s first Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French weekly.

 

Thereafter, it became an award for American political activism. PEN was honoring heroes on its side—public figures whom the majority of American writers wholeheartedly support. The award became less about freedom than about belonging. As Charlie Hebdo showed, free speech, which is the foundation of every writer’s work, can be tough going.

 

The fear is more subtle and, in a way, more crippling. It’s the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line.

Last year I taught a journalism course at Yale. My students were talented and hardworking, but I kept running into a problem: They always wanted to write from a position of moral certainty. This was where they felt strongest and safest. I assigned them to read writers who demonstrated the power of inner conflict and moral weakness—Baldwin, Orwell, Naipaul, Didion. I told my students that good writing never comes from the display of virtue. But I could see that they were sceptical, as if I were encouraging them deliberately to botch a job interview. They were attracted to subjects about which they’d already made up their minds.

 

Certainty has a flattening effect. It washes out the details of human experience so that they lose their variety and vitality. Certainty removes the strength of doubt, the struggle to reconcile incompatible ideals, the drama of working out an idea without knowing where it will lead, the pain of changing your mind. Good writing doesn’t deny or flee these things—it explores them down to their depths, confident that the most beautiful and important truths are found where the glare of certainty can’t reach.

Of course, in Russia these past few days, that certainty has now been enshrined in a brutal new law, passed unanimously in the Russian parliament 

which bans news organisations from reporting anything except state approved press releases (it is now illegal for any broadcaster to call events in Ukraine, for example, “a war”). The new legislation, which has also caused the BBC and most other news organisations to suspend its reporting in Russia, will see journalists and media owners who contravene it jailed for up to 15 years. BBC director general Tim Davie said the law “appears to criminalise the process of independent journalism”

But, even in the West, people are, increasingly, expected to toe the “official line” in comments as analysed in this article by Michael Brenner, Emeritus Professor at Pittsburgh and John Hopkins’ Universities. And it takes a courageous writer these days to write a balanced piece about the war in Ukraine such as Wolfgang Streeck’s recent piece 

Both Russia and the United States have long been facing the creeping decay of both their national social order and international position, apparently making them feel that they must halt it now or else it will continue forever. In the Russian case, what one sees is a regime both statist and oligarchic, confronting growing unrest among its citizens, rich in oil and corruption, unable to improve the lives of its ordinary people while its oligarchs are getting immeasurably rich, a regime increasingly turning towards the use of a heavy dictatorial hand against any organized protests. To sit more comfortably than one can on bayonets requires stability derived from economic prosperity and social progress, in turn dependent on global demand for the oil and gas Russia has to sell. For this, however, it needs access to financial markets and advanced technology, which the US had for some time begun to deny.

 

Similarly with external security, where the US and NATO have for nearly two decades now penetrated politically and militarily into what Russia, only too familiar with foreign incursions, claims as its cordon sanitaire. Moscow’s attempts to negotiate on this have led to post-Soviet Russia being treated by Washington in the same way as its predecessor, the Soviet Union, with the ultimate aim of regime change. All attempts to end the encroachment have led to nothing; NATO has moved closer and closer, recently stationing intermediate-range missiles in Poland and Romania, while the United States has increasingly treated Ukraine as a territory it owns – viz., Victoria Nuland’s vice-regal proclamations on who should lead the government in Kyiv. 

I should make it clear that Streeck,  although a very highly respected German sociologist and political economist, does not pretend to have any particular expertise in International Relations – although he has ventured in the last few years into the field of analysis of German politics. For really solid analysis on issues of security I’ve found Anatol Lieven very reliable and in mid November last year – in the middle of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan “The Atlantic” published this piece of his reminding us that “Ukraine was the most dangerous place problem in the world” – to which there was then a solution (Minsk II) that, however, the US was resisting

Such inconvenient truths are quickly pounced upon and held up to ridicule by the liberal  mainstream media; this New Republic article has indeed invented a new name -  “westplaining” – for what it calls the 

“unending stream of Western scholars and pundits condescending to explain the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, often in ways that either ignore voices from the region, treating it as an object rather than a subject of history, or claiming to perfectly understand Russian logic and motives. Eastern European online circles have started using a new term to describe this phenomenon of people from the Anglosphere loudly foisting their analytical schema and prescriptions onto the region” 

Wolfgang Streeck is, of course, on the list – but I have to say that his geopolitical analysis gives us the sort of balanced view which any attempt at negotiation will desperately need. With Ukrainians struggling for their lives under murderous aggression, we are understandably focused on the human suffering involved. We are currently in war mode but need to think ahead…. 

After the media debacle of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, showing strength vis-à-vis Russia seemed a safe way to display American muscle, forcing the Republicans during the run-up to critical midterm elections to unite behind Biden as the leader of a resurrected ‘Free World’. Washington duly turned to megaphone diplomacy and categorically refused any negotiation on NATO expansion. For Putin, having gone as far as he had, the choice was starkly posed between escalation and capitulation. It was at this point that method turned into madness, and the murderous, strategically disastrous Russian land invasion of Ukraine began.

 

For the US, refusing Russian demands for security guarantees was a convenient way to shore up the unconditional allegiance of European countries to NATO, an alliance that had become shaky in recent years. This concerned especially France, whose president had not long ago diagnosed NATO to be as ‘brain-dead’, but also Germany with its new government whose leading party, the SPD, was considered too Russian-friendly. There was also unfinished business regarding a gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Merkel, in tandem with Schröder, had invited Russia to build it, hoping to fill the gap in German energy supply expected to result from the FRG’s Sonderweg running out of coal and nuclear power. The US opposed the project, as did many others in Europe, including the German Greens. Among the reasons were fears that the pipeline would make Western Europe more dependent on Russia, and that it would be impossible for Ukraine and Poland to interrupt Russian gas deliveries should Moscow be found to misbehave.

The confrontation over Ukraine, by restoring European allegiance to American leadership, solved this problem in no time. Following the lead of declassified CIA announcements, Western Europe’s so-called ‘quality press’, not to mention the public-broadcasting systems, presented the rapidly deteriorating situation as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, the US under Biden versus Russia under Putin. In Merkel’s final weeks, the Biden administration talked the US Senate out of harsh sanctions on Germany and the operators of Nord Stream 2, in return for Germany agreeing to include the pipeline in a possible future package of sanctions. After the Russian recognition of the two break-away East Ukrainian provinces, Berlin formally postponed regulatory certification of the pipeline – which was, however, not enough. With the new German Chancellor standing next to him at a Washington press conference, Biden announced that if necessary, the pipeline would definitely be included in sanctions, Scholz remaining silent. A few days later, Biden endorsed the Senate plan that he had earlier opposed. Then, on 24 February, the Russian invasion propelled Berlin to do on its own what would otherwise have been done by Washington on Germany’s and the West’s behalf: shelve the pipeline once and for all.

 

Western European governments dutifully suppressed all remaining memories of the deeply rooted recklessness of American foreign policy, induced by the sheer size of the United States and its location on a continental-sized island where nobody can get to them, regardless of the mess they make when their military adventures go wrong – and, astonishingly, gave the United States, a far-away non-European declining empire with different interests and a host of problems of its own, full power of attorney in dealing with Russia over nothing less than the future of the European state system.

What about the EU? In short, as Western Europe is returned to ‘the West’, the EU is reduced to a geo-economic utility for NATO, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help ‘the West’ encircle Russia on its Western flank.  

Further Important Reads

https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/what-to-read-on-ukraine/ - a fascinating commentary and selection

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/03/vladimir-putin-ukraine-war-chechnya - an interesting analysis of Putin whose biography by Masha Gessen reports his being kicked out of the Pioneers for being an uncontrollable lout. Plus ca change

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/03/02/russias-attack-on-ukraine-represents-a-demand-for-a-new-world-order/ Some people consider that Putin invaded Ukraine because he fears democracy – this energy blog offers another explanation – relating to energy supplies from which at the moment Russia is making almost 1 billion dollars a day.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/04/what-would-ukraine-russia-peace-deal-look-like - a very recent article from Anatol Lieven (see body of post)

Ukraine and Russia – from civilised divorce to uncivil war Paul d’Anieri (2019) - apparently a very balanced analysis

https://samf.su reading listbstack.com/p/space-and-time?s=r - military analyst Lawrence Freedman’s latest assessment

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/domino-effect?pc=1426 

follow the money my favourite (Canadian) blogger gives his take – the discussion thread is worth following

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/the-prospect-podcast-219-peter-ricketts-how-to-stop-putin - Peter Ricketts was a UK Ambassador to NATO and he's interviewed here by Alan Rusbridger