8. STAR TREK, WITTGENSTEIN AND THE PROBLEM WITH FOREIGN POLICY

“Ever since men began in time, time and
Time again they met in parliaments,
Where, in due turn, letting the next man speak,
With mouthfuls of soft air they tried to stop
Themselves from ravening their talking throats;
Hoping enunciated airs would fall
With verisimilitude in different minds,
And bring some concord to those minds; soft air
Between the hatred dying animals
Monotonously bear toward themselves;
Only soft air to underwrite the in-
Built violence of being, to meld it to
Something more civil, rarer than true forgiveness.
No work was lovelier in history;
And nothing failed so often: knowing this
The army came to hear Achilles say:
‘Pax Agamemnon.’ And Agamemnon’s: ‘Pax’”[48]

It’s a regular Wednesday morning and here we are in one of the central chambers of world diplomacy: The United Nations Security Council, where nation shall speak unto nation. Here the discussion is of death and starvation, of sanctions and nuclear weapons, of genocide and ceasefires. Here we arbitrate war and peace; we ponder the fate of millions. We wield the power of life and death in this place, the crucible of our modern secular world order. Our business here could not be of greater import. And yet there is something missing, something vital yet indefinable.

It has been a long morning. It’s hot and stuffy. The chamber is too small for the sixty or so people crammed inside it, arrayed in fifteen tight delegations around a flattened U-shaped table. Chairs fixed to the floor, like some prison canteen, deepen the sense of confinement. The light is dismal. A few stray beams of sunlight filter through the blinds drawn on the day outside.

Through uncomfortable plastic earpieces, the delegates listen distractedly to the monotonous translations of the interpreters who sit behind them, separated in elevated booths, “…My delegation wishes to reiterate the need for all parties to participate in the dialogue and to bring this dispute to a peaceful conclusion…”. One by one the heads of the delegations intone the same platitudes, the same words — states, security, peace, war, civilian casualties — rolling off their tongues in a well-practiced and repetitive litany. I’m thinking about my date in the evening. I force myself to concentrate. It’s twelve-fifteen. We’re halfway through the morning’s agenda. That means we must be discussing…genocide.

I hadn’t thought the UN Security Council would be boring, but it is. I sit, I take notes, I take more notes. I crave a cigarette. We and the other diplomats in other delegations occasionally grin at one another or pass witless jokes on scraps of paper. The day’s agenda is the usual roster of unsolved conflict and human misery: Burundi, Iraq, East Timor, Congo. The list is a long one.

With each new agenda item, another intractable dispute. A map is projected on to a white screen at one end of the room. The UN Special Envoy or Secretariat official is wheeled in to give the Council the state of play: “We regret to inform Council members that fighting has continued over the reporting period, with civilian casualties on both sides…”. The ambassadors sitting at the front flick an eye of greeting and attempt to stay awake for the discussion to come. The diplomats at the rear of their delegations click their ballpoints and open their notebooks.

The junior diplomats in each delegation take the note, as it’s known. It’s a straightforward if demanding job. Most of the wars around the world have similar dimensions, as long as you describe them in a particular way. The attributes of conflict can be simplified in my notes. Lots of people dying becomes, “v.dead”, mass starvation “v. starv”, continuing conflict “cont. conf.”, and so on.

The reports come and go; the maps flicker on and off. Now it’s the densely-packed land of Rwanda, now it’s Sierra Leone. I’m colorblind so most of the maps look pretty monotone to me and I have to look closely to tell the difference. Maps were introduced at the proposal of one well-intentioned ambassador. The idea was to give delegations a better sense of the countries they were discussing. He didn’t mean it as a joke.

The discussions come to an end and, with a sigh and a yawn, the delegations make their way out, the ambassadors to an expensive lunch at one of the many eateries of New York’s midtown, the junior diplomats to a sandwich and back to the office to write up their reports. I wander out, smoke a cigarette, chat to other diplomats, maybe some journalists hanging about outside the chamber. I think about the report I have to write; I think about what I’m going to do that evening.

Somehow the cigarette smoke in my lungs, as I suck it deep down, is more real than anything we’ve been doing all morning. Here we are at a confluence of world affairs, and it doesn’t seem real at all. The issues that we’ve been discussing — war, deprivation, genocide — are momentous and awful: people are dying as we speak. But somewhere along the way they have been made lifeless and denuded of all human content.

If you make an enormous effort of imagination, you can just about conjure up a picture of the human beings whose existence is at stake — the victims of genocide in Rwanda, the civilians massacred during a rebel advance in the Congo — but it is a stretch, and sooner or later you stop doing it because it’s upsetting, tiring and, frankly, unnecessary. It’s easier just to do what’s necessary, write the report, negotiate the resolution, get home (our hours are long, even by the Stakhanovite standards of New York City). And slowly but surely you become deadened to it all. Wars, brutalities, peace plans, blah, blah, blah.

Though we were at the heart of things, we seemed to be missing the point. Terms — diplomatic words, statistics, resolutions — were our tools to arbitrate a world of blood and agony. We were dealing with reality but working in abstraction. Something was missing.

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This something was not just absent in that airless room; it is an absence in the entire discourse of foreign policy. For the terms and manners of the diplomats in that chamber reflect those of the way in which foreign policy is practiced — by statesmen and diplomats — and talked about — by journalists and academics — across the world. That little room was a microcosm.

The turmoil of recent years has brought attention to international affairs in a way unprecedented since perhaps the Cuban missile crisis or the darkest days of the Vietnam war. Living in New York City before September 11, few of my New York non-diplomat friends talked about foreign affairs; if they did, it was often in an academic, disinterested way. Since that dreadful day, one can hardly avoid it. The terms — multipolarity, containment — the names and acronyms — WMD and GWOT — once only known to the insiders of foreign and security policy, have now become ubiquitous. But like thieves in the night, they have entered our world and discussion un-noticed and unquestioned. Time perhaps to examine the epistemology of diplomacy.

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I was once briefly posted to Oslo. Despite the friendliness of the locals and my colleagues in the Embassy, I often had long hours to kill in the isolated bungalow in the outskirts of Oslo where I lived. I had no car and my bicycle, though equipped with fearsomely-spiked ice tires, was inadequate to transport me in the snowy, dark Norwegian winter. To assuage my loneliness, my boss kindly lent me her large collection of episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (or simply “TNG” as it is known to the cognoscenti). She would give me a commentary on each episode, opening my eyes to the diplomatic morality tales hitherto undetected therein.

“This one’s about Northern Ireland”, she would say and indeed the episode concerned a planet where two communities had warred for millennia. It concluded when Commander Riker, the most American of the crew, declared: “Perhaps peace will come when the first child decides to put down his gun.” There was one about Vietnam veterans, where a planet’s inhabitants had banished a group of genetically-programmed warriors to an orbiting moon because they were unfit for peaceful society now that their fighting was done. That one ended with a little homily too.

The “TNG” character I liked least was Deanna Troi, the “em-path” on the ship who, on approaching an alien planet, would close her eyes, put her fingers to her forehead and say things like, “I am feeling much pain and unhappiness” — such feelings could not of course be detected by the Enterprise’s other sensors. She seemed to me to represent a kind of wishy-washy, psychobabbly approach to tackling aliens and resolving conflict. I preferred the harder, more analytical methods of Captain Picard, played, need it be said, by a narrow-eyed Englishman with a Shakespearean accent (though why does he have a French name?). Guns and treaties were the methods of intergalactic relations I liked, not feelings. If an episode was centered around Troi, I would stop the tape and find a more masculine episode (“Final battle with the Borg”). Such were my days in Oslo.

Unattractive though I found her, Counselor Troi embodied an important insight into the nature of diplomacy (or space exploration, whichever you prefer). This was her ability to enter and interpret the realm beyond normal data-collecting tools. The Californian scriptwriters who dreamed her up may have been thinking merely of the emotional realm beyond conventional measure. But of course it is not merely the emotions that lie beyond the capacity of tools of description or measurement.

All tools of description, all terms and all language, are limited. No measurement, no depiction can ever quite capture the fullness of a phenomenon. It is impossible to describe what an experience, any experience, is actually like. Well, to be more accurate, one can say what it was like, but never what it was. My experience of drinking a cup of coffee is going to be quite like your experience of drinking a cup of coffee, but it is impossible for me to convey to you, however vivid and inventive the terms that I use, the actual experience. I could put the experience into scientific terms and describe the encounter of the heated water and coffee molecules with the nerve endings on my tongue, then the stimulus of the caffeine chemicals upon my brain synapses and blood pressure. I could film the act of coffee drinking, or try to convey it in poetry or music. But whatever the medium, whichever terms I choose, there would always be an absence: the difference between description and the experience.

This much is obvious and familiar. Philosophers have long grappled with the relationship between description and reality. Ludwig Wittgenstein spent most of his philosophical energies exploring the connections between language and experience. In the only work published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he concluded with his famous near-tautology on the limits of language, “Whereof one cannot speak; thereof one must remain silent.” From the preceding arguments of this strange and sometimes impenetrable book, one can conclude that he meant that while language has a logical structure, that logical structure cannot be described in language; it can only be shown. In other words, the relationship between words and reality cannot itself be put into words; it can only be demonstrated through the use of those words. Wittgenstein in Tractatus takes the argument further to claim that almost everything that is most important cannot be stated at all, but only, at the very most, indicated by our use of language.

In his later work Wittgenstein took a different tack — and a broader view of language — and emphasized the role of philosophy in scrutinizing and clarifying the meaning of words through their usage. But, as Ray Monk describes in his excellent biography,[49] he never abandoned his identification of the limits of ordinary language. As he approached his death, he grew increasingly despairing of the reliance of contemporary society upon the seductive tools and terms of science to describe and arbitrate the world. He remained throughout passionately committed to the importance of music, poetry and other nonscientific, indeed nonlinguistic, forms of expression as revelatory of the human soul, of the human reality. Neither scientific terms nor words could ever be enough. As he says in Tractatus, “We feel that even when all scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course then there are no questions left, and this itself is the answer.”

The distinction between what is describable through words and other conventional descriptive tools and what is not brings us close to other ancient borders, that between the world of physical reality and the metaphysical, and between the rational and the irrational. Some might spot the same boundary between the testable certainties of science and the unprovable inexactnesses of the arts, though Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has perhaps undermined science’s claim — which I suspect that few scientists believe in any case — to certain knowledge.

Mathematics has already, since Euclid, come to grips with the immeasurable. Indeed, the term irrational in mathematics means that which is not commensurate with ordinary numbers, something that cannot be put into finite numerical terms: literally, the unquantifiable.

That the unquantifiable exists therefore is unarguable, and speaks to our own intuition about our existence: there are simply some things that cannot be put into terms and perhaps, as Wittgenstein argued, these are the most important. The trouble with foreign policy, however, is that there is no acknowledgment, least of all reckoning (if such a thing is possible), of this truth. This deficit is one that is shared in all policymaking, indeed in all discussion about policy — the discussion, no less, of how we should together arbitrate our lives. We face a barrage of words and terms that claim to represent “reality” in the international world. The terms of foreign affairs are a specialized language within a language, and thus, a subset of a subset of actual experience. Exacerbating the problem, “statesmen”, academics and commentators almost daily invent new terms to attempt to describe what is going on. For example, asymmetric warfare is a term used, usually though not always, to describe a fight between unequally-equipped combatants, though confusingly it was also recently used by US officials to describe the suicides of a group of Guantanamo detainees, implying perhaps that these were an act of war.

Globalization is a word bandied around with such abandon (including by me) that all but the vaguest sense of its true meaning has been lost. Coined by the Harvard professor Theodore Leavitt in 1983, the term as invented meant that new technologies had “proletarianized” (Leavitt’s own jargon, common at the time but now barely used) communication, transportation and travel, creating worldwide markets for standardized consumer products at lower prices. This careful description has not prevented the word being applied to phenomena as varied as the homogenization of culture, the loss of native languages or the liberalization of capital markets. To add to our distress, we must contend with the deconstructionist critique that words carry an unacknowledged political freight and themselves perform a political purpose.

Metaphors (“ping-pong diplomacy”, “the axis of evil”) are conjured up to give an organizing pattern to matters. In theory, they are supposed to help explain what is going on, but in practice are often meant to shape responses to policy: the war on terror is the most notorious example of this phenomenon.[50]

The decision-making of international affairs is often presented as a calculus, that economic interest X plus security need Y equals policy Z (though as I discuss elsewhere such a representation implies a clarity and deliberative rigor that rarely exists in the rush of modern diplomacy). This presents policymaking as essentially rational, based on quantifiable and verifiable facts. Of course, as many honest politicians and diplomats would confess, it is no such thing. For the business of foreign affairs is above all about ordering the collective life of that most complex and immeasurable of beings: the human. Good politicians and good diplomats all employ a hefty dose of personal psychology and human intuition in their otherwise rational analyzes (President George Bush for instance has admitted that he watches body language closely).[51] Perhaps we need to confess this more openly.

Some innovations would help the way foreign policy is conventionally discussed and arbitrated now. First, we need constantly to interrogate the terms we use to check their correspondence with reality. It might be better if we tried using simpler terms that everyone can understand; to try, as Wittgenstein urged, to see things as they are. The arms race of neologisms to describe our situation must stop. So perhaps instead of talking about asymmetric warfare, we should talk about conflict between grossly unequal parties; instead of globalization, we should talk about the growth in international trade, or the liberalization of national capital markets, or global income inequality or the homogenization of national cultures, whichever it is that we mean; and instead of the post-modern world order, we should talk about the way the world is organized in the early twenty-first century. Simple language is needed to get to grips with a complicated world.

There are methods to help us understand and arbitrate the non-empirical. The Oxford Research Group, through its Oxford Process, has developed techniques to try to get at the underlying assumptions and emotions at play in political, and in particular conflict, situations. They have realized that there are often deeply embedded philosophical assumptions at work in a political position — about how the world should be organized and how people should behave. Such unquantifiable elements often underpin deep-seated conflict and are yet not addressed — or given weight — in conventional analyzes employing the accepted terminology of diplomacy. In organizing dialogue sessions between antagonists, the Oxford Group have found that even simple things like providing good food and musical entertainment can contribute substantially to beneficial outcomes. Though seemingly obvious, such aspects are given very little attention in the formal, anti-emotional, masculine-dominated world of traditional diplomacy.

To get to grips with the immeasurable, let alone the indescribable, is more difficult. The language of international affairs is limited; all language, all terms are limited. What lies beyond contains phenomena and components of human existence that are measureless in their importance. This observation sounds, for an atheist like me, uncomfortably close to a declaration of the significance of religion. But at a minimum we should acknowledge the importance of the metaphysical. This is the realm of the artist, the writer, the musician, the moral philosopher, and even the imam, the rabbi or the priest. If art informs us about the nature of ourselves as individuals, why should it not also help us understand our world internationally?[52] The semiotician can help interpret the signs which are not articulated by conventional language. In all of this, we should cultivate an eclecticism of source and information.

We need help to navigate this territory beyond the scientific and the rational. For in this province lie questions that no amount of economic theory, models of “statecraft” or quantitative analysis can answer. These include the moral questions about what is the right thing to do and, most fundamentally, how we should live. In a science-obsessed age, we have become used to turning to science, or pseudo-science, for answers, but it is perhaps time to acknowledge the limits of those answers and realize that we need to develop new ways of engaging with and arbitrating the irrational in ourselves.

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This, I suspect, was the missing something in the Security Council: the difference between description and reality, the indefinable component of human experience. I cannot be sure, and I cannot prove it. But that there is a gap between talking about, say, genocide in Eastern Congo, and experiencing that horror, is unarguable. That disparity may account for the choice of indifference over action. In my work on Iraq (chapter 3), it without doubt contributed to the crudeness (and cruelty) of sanctions policy. The real experience — and suffering — of the Iraqi people were the absent truths at our negotiating table.

The ambassadors of the Security Council have in recent years made some attempt to bridge the gap by traveling to the trouble spots they are dealing with. But even this commendable effort is limited by the inevitable brevity of the visits and the diplomatic version of Heisenberg’s problem whereby the object of observation is altered by the act of observation. I have no first-hand experience of this but often, I gather, when the ambassadors travel to a region, local interlocutors put down their guns and agree to talk, only to resume fighting as soon as the diplomats have left.

We have no Counselor Troi to sense the immeasurable. But we do have means to interpret the ineffable of human experience. Every political leader who has effected fundamental change, from Gandhi to Mandela, has given heed to this moral force. Even if we cannot quantify, we can account for — or at a minimum acknowledge — this undeniable constituent of our existence. Failure to do so, Wittgenstein believed, could lead humanity to disaster.