Michael Lewis’s Case Against “Abroad”
The New Republic has an excellent piece by Michael Lewis about the sort of self-serious analysis of foreign affairs one finds in such journals as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy and, yes, the New Republic. (To TNR’s credit, Lewis is allowed to mention this: “How many articles in The New Republic on foreign policy do you remember? Me, none except an unintentionally funny one about rebuilding Israel on a reclaimed island in the Mediterranean.”) Lewis makes a very sophisticated case against a certain kind of sophistication — the “prestige of distance”; the deceptive allure of grand, abstract geopolitical theories; the dull, eat-your-vegetables prose:
If there is nothing under the sun that hasn’t been predicted by someone in Foreign Affairs it is because the price of guessing wrong is low and the rewards for guessing right are high. The global thinkers of the recent past who have enjoyed the greatest acclaim are not those who have been right but those who have been melodramatic. Being wrong by itself does not ensure success, of course. George Kennan was mainly right about the Soviet Union, for example. But everyone now knows that if you are able to make an outlandish prophecy about the globe, or some large part of it, plausible for just a little while, you will forever be treated with respect, as was Malthus….
Thus the other common trait of this sort of writing: the banality of its language. At first glance you wouldn’t expect it. If you had a Big Worldview to air you’d think you would want to serve it to the reader as a giant neon pink soufflé—for all the world to see. But reading the various global prophecies and analyses in prestigious journals is more like eating the hole of a doughnut….The telling detail goes unreported because no detail is observed. No detail is observed because the writer is not interested in what is right under his nose, assuming he actually ever gets his nose abroad….
The globe-thinker’s world is not the world around him. It is the world he sees down there from up here. His flight from one kind of idiocy takes him nearly full circle into another, into the small group of people who allow themselves to think of the world from above. The delusion of omniscience follows naturally.
The counterpart of this delusion of omniscience is a illusion of scale: stick the world “international” in front of anything and it seems to become more important.
Coming out of college in the early 1980s, I remember, you would ask some lucky person who had gotten admitted to the Harvard Business School or the Harvard Law School what he or she intended to do afterward, and invariably he or she would reply, “international finance,” or “international law.” I’m now almost sure that no college student really knew what was meant by international finance, and there wasn’t any international law that mattered. (I don’t think these people had the sea lanes in mind.)
What appealed was the notion of “international.” This collegiate internationalism was not the romantic, Byronic lust for foreign adventure—though there was some of that in the air, too—but the anti-romantic quest for importance. To be suspended between nations sounded portentous. The trick was to remain forever uprooted; to go home was an admission of failure. (Nevertheless, home clearly remained the reference point; people left it to see distant things, no doubt, but also to be seen from a distance.)
Let us Pray that we always have a place to rest our weary heads at Home as well as Abroad.
I enjoy reading just about anything by Michael Lewis, but it appears the article in which he makes his case against the analysis in some foreign affairs journals is an archival one from December of 1994. Perhaps nothing about such analysis has changed in 16 years, but I’d be interested in knowing whether Lewis has modified his opinion in the intervening years.
the rewards for guessing right are high
Strictly speaking, the rewards for having guessed right are high. For example, after every financial downturn, one can always find someone among the thousands of would-be seers who prophesied correctly and is thereby famous for about 15 minutes. Such predictions about the future remind me of the old story about how thousands of monkeys typing at random will eventually produce every written masterpiece known to mankind.
Antonio,
Yes, and even a broken clock is right twice a day, etc. But we can’t ask the monkeys questions about what they typed. We can ask the prophet as many questions as we like about how he knew something would happen and if he can’t answer the questions to our satisfaction, then we can safely assume (but not demonstrate) that his prediction was a lucky guess. If a prophet manages to guess right over and over again, we may safely assume (but not demonstrate) that his prediction was more than a lucky guess. (Given enough time and enough prophets, some will be right more than once by dumb luck.) Some who predicted the financial crisis just had a bad feeling in their stomachs that the good times couldn’t last forever; others may have wanted to believe that the whole thing would come crashing down because it was ugly and unjust; others still had well-defined models according to which this crisis and others before it were predictable. We ignore this last group at our peril. Of course, hardline Marxists have models, more or less defined, that have allowed them to predict ten out of the last five crises.
[O]thers still had well-defined models according to which this crisis and others before it were predictable. We ignore this last group at our peril.
As in the Cassandra myth.