The Age of the Unthinkable (31 page)

Running a government is not, of course, like running an engineering firm in Brazil. But the institutions we use today to deal
with the world are as mismatched to our own landscape as Semco was to Brazil’s at the start of the country’s crisis, fundamentally
incapable of delivering the sort of dramatic, powerful ideas that match revolutionary thinking to a revolutionary age. Remember
Louis Halle, the American foreign-policy thinker from the 1950s, who explained that if you were clinging to a flawed image
of the world, no amount of dexterous policy execution could save you from disaster? We’ve seen this problem over and over
again in this book. And while we’ve outlined to some extent how to deal with it, the reality is that the complex emergent
problems of a revolutionary age are beyond the comprehension of any one man or woman. No president or foreign minister can
possibly master the details of each small problem on the global stage. And while this might have been fine for many years
— after all, environmental worries have had little or no effect on national power for the last few centuries — it’s dangerous
now. It’s part of the reason we feel hopeless when we look at the long list of problems we need to deal with and, at the same
time, see the accumulating history of failure to act. We’re thinking too narrowly.

Today when we talk about reforming the National Security Council or the State Department, the discussion is usually about
devoting more people to Asia, for instance, or deepening our capacity to operate in the Arab world. But even if we could hire
the very best minds to worry about these problems, throwing them into the iced bureaucracy of our current foreign-policy establishment
would deliver only slow, cold death. Our age demands different things from the men and women who are called to high office
— and not least is a different context in which they can work, experiment, and take risks. Cavalier risk-taking would be a
disaster in government, just as it usually is in real life. But smart risk-takers, operating in systems that permit and support
risk, are among the most potent forces in the world. I don’t propose here an instant, knee-jerk, or massive overhaul of our
government bureaucracy. Such an approach would create more problems than solutions. But steady, intense, relentless innovation
is essential; newness of ideas and institutions should be a measure we use to see how successful we have been in adapting
a deep-security outlook.

Halle’s theory of image and action applies as much to our institutions as it does to our brains: as long as we’re trapped
in old structures, we can’t adjust. So we’ve got to begin a process of institutional experimentation. We need to act as if
we’re a company in an innovation race and our products are the tools of power — everything from departments of government
to treaties. Successful innovation will institutionalize as little as possible; it will create new mashup policies that combine
power and expertise. It will bring new, entrepreneurial minds into government and create contexts in which they can flourish.
Imagine, say, if next to the National Security Council we established an equally smart group that would look at problems from
unusual and new perspectives, working to disagree with the NSC at some moments or, at others, bolstering their conclusions
with different arguments. Call it the Deep Security Council. Or what if the Environmental Protection Agency was moved to Silicon
Valley and staffed entirely by people under forty? What about insisting that the smartest hedge-fund managers serve three
years, mid- career, regulating their peers? Or imagine closing down the State Department in phases, replacing the existing
bureaus with a less hierarchical structure, in which individual departments took more authority to innovate, to propose radical
solutions to problems like computer viruses, disease control, and literacy — problems so low on the list of priorities of
most secretaries of state that they are usually forgotten. What if foreign aid were organized into a highly decentralized
Department of Global Decency and staffed in the same way we staff the military, with the promise that joining will yield the
benefits of school loans, adventure, and the chance to have a career with real, resonant meaning?

These are the sorts of ideas we’ve got to begin trying on — less for the specifics of these particular notions than for the
spirit they suggest. It’s a spirit that most old-style thinkers (even if they are thirty years old) will find chafes against
the classic instinct to hoard power and tightly control policy. It militates against much of bureaucratic life. And that’s
precisely why it is so essential to find effective ways to bring this spirit
inside
the system and to find ways to encourage it outside. We’ve got to support the creation of hundreds of foreign-policy entrepreneurs,
both in government and out of it, people who take complex problems and devise new, radical, and inventive approaches. This
is a five- to ten-year project but, done thoughtfully, it would yield new and better institutions. The last time the National
Security Council was seriously reengineered was forty years ago. The fundamental structure of the State Department has not
been revamped since World War II, and today our global aid budget is incoherent. Our errors are loaded into the institutions
we rely on to be smart for us, to do the work of real-time immune-system adjustment.

Once, over drinks in Japan, a former top executive of Sony told me the story of a long report about how and why Sony had failed
in the video-recording business in the late 1970s, when it introduced the Betamax, which was trounced by the VHS tape. (Sony
had bet that viewers wanted quality more than length on a tape, so they introduced a high-resolution cassette that ran for
just one hour — too short for a three-hour movie. VHS ran longer, and consumers, it emerged, cared more about knowing what
happened in the last half of a film than how clearly they saw the first half.) Reading this study was supposed to be mandatory
for rising executives. It was supposed to show them the problems they were meant to avoid. So if you were a curious Sony employee
and wanted to learn from the mistakes of the past — financially Betamax was a disaster — you could read through this report,
learn from it, and emerge with a better perspective about what to do next. There was just one problem: the report was kept
locked in a safe. Sony was simply unable to think hard about where it had failed. In fact, they didn’t want to think about
it at all.

Our institutions today often look too much like Sony. We may know what’s killing us, the lethal Betamax errors in everything
from war fighting to financial management, but we keep those errors locked away and out of view. Like Semco before the financial
crisis, we remain rigidly organized, one jolt away from fracture. Working in international affairs
should
be incredibly exciting now, as much fun in its own way as inventing the iPod or producing mashup music, because it should
be about transforming dreams of how the world might be into reality. “The task of imagination,” Roberto Unger once wrote,
in language someone should translate into Japanese and post next to the office of those poor Sony engineers who were lapped
by Miyamoto’s Wii, “is to do the work of crisis without crisis.” That’s our choice now too: imagination or crisis.

You pick.

Of his early paintings, it is one of the most massive. From one side to the other, it measures 267 inches; from top to bottom,
120. The canvas swallows you when you stand in front of it. But what do you expect from 200 square feet or so of layered and
sculpted paint, each brushstroke pressed onto another in ridges that look still fresh? The title,
Deutschlands Geisteshelden
,
is marked out toward the top in what seems an uncomfortable hand, in letters a foot high.
Germany’s Spiritual Heroes
is how you would translate the name of Anselm Kiefer’s painting. It took eighteen months to complete. Kiefer was twenty-seven
and twenty-eight when he was working on it, all through 1972 and 1973. This was years before he would be acclaimed as a great
painter of our time, decades before critics would look at this one painting and say, “Yes, this is the sort of thing they
will look at in two hundred years to understand our moment in history.”

The canvas shows the most typical of German architectural constructions, a Lutheran meeting hall made all of wood. In the
perspective of the painting, the lines of the floorboards lead away from the viewer like railway tracks. All along the walls,
carefully spaced, are burning oil lamps. Near the base of each, Kiefer has inked the name of a German hero the lamp has been
lit to honor. What gives the painting a particularly disturbing tension is what has not yet started but that we sense is inevitable,
what you can feel as your eyes lead you along the walls of the monumental hall, from flame to wooden beam and back again:
the strange foolishness of so much fire around so much wood. This is a building on the verge of combustion.

What is Kiefer trying to tell us? The first lesson, of course, is about history. You need not pick up on the echo of a concentration
camp that comes from the evocation of railway tracks in the wooden floorboards or the religious resonance of the oil lamps
to pick up the echoes of Holocaust he’s evoking here. You need not know the names along the walls or even much about German
culture to understand the tragedy of those heroes’ names. This painting shows us that what is most powerful in nations or
men is often what destroys them. It is the German historical disaster we already know: how the nation’s great figures lit
the country up at the end of the nineteenth century only, seemingly moments later, to burn it down. This is the way in which
the fierce artistic heat of Richard Wagner’s operas transposed so easily into World War I Krupp canon fire. It was the tale
buried in the lives of Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical überman Zarathustra, Thomas Mann’s soul-peddling Doktor Faustus,
and Hitler’s architect Albert Speer, all of whom pursued incandescent greatness without seeming to mind at all what else was
singed in the process.

This is a strong message, but it is not the only reason you can never walk away from
Germany’s Spiritual Heroes
quite the same as before you ever laid eyes on it. No, that indelibility comes from an artist’s trick Kiefer uses here to
masterful effect: from where we stand, in the field of perspective of the hall, we too are
in
the painting. And there is no clear exit. We’re trapped. This is not the usual thing in a historic painting. It is not Emanuel
Leutze’s famous
Washington Crossing the Delaware,
from which the viewer is as removed from the great general as if he were behind glass in a museum diorama. And it’s not the
image of Napoleon on the back of a rearing horse we know from Jacques Louis David’s painting. We are
in
Kiefer’s painting; we’re part of the action too. When those walls in the wooden heroes’ hall finally do catch fire, they
will do so with us inside.
Germany’s Spiritual Heroes
resonates not because of the general question it poses about history, but because of the very specific one that Kiefer asks
each of us personally. There are moments, and this is one of them, when we are not spectators to history but participants.
Kiefer is asking, in every brushstroke: What do you do now? Stay? Run? What kind of spiritual hero are you?

Kiefer finished design school in 1969, and his graduation project wasn’t the predictable color-field painting or abstract
sculpture you might have expected from an ambitious young student. Instead it was a set of photographs of Kiefer making a
Nazi salute in different places around Europe. The images were a sort of ersatz vacation portfolio.
Here I am stiff-arming the Louvre. Here I am saluting the English Channel.
If the photographs enraged his evaluation committee — they failed him — the members were at least so perplexed that they could
only retreat into the narrowest cave of artistic defense. Kiefer’s work, they said, “lacked distance.” But this was exactly
Kiefer’s point. How on earth was one, a German after all, to have any distance from the country’s recent past, from its murderous
cultural and historical habits? The lone committee member who voted in favor of Kiefer was Rainer Küchenmeister, a painter
who had survived a concentration camp, a man with no distance, at any moment thereafter, from what Kiefer was trying to evoke.
He understood the message of those pictures, that there is finally no way to walk away from history or stick it behind glass
like some diorama. It comes to find you, as it had found Küchenmeister and his family.

Later, explaining the photos, Kiefer said it was best to think of them in these terms: he wondered, as a German, precisely
what sort of political DNA he carried, wanted to feel if anything in him
moved
when he raised his arm like that. Would just the right combination of historical conditions bring out a dormant fascist instinct,
like some invisible, hereditary, fatal disease? He wondered what he might do if a moment in history collided with his life.
It is the same problem that emerges for us now as we look at this fast-changing world, where history is happening to us and
to the people we love, not contained in a museum diorama that we can study coldly on the way to the gift shop.
You think this canvas is swallowing you?
Kiefer is asking on that massive painted slate. Well, wait until you’re swallowed by history.

My friend Li once told me a story from 1967, the very early part of the Cultural Revolution, when he was fifteen or sixteen.
One day he was discovered to have a stash of illegal books: Plato, Baudelaire, I can’t recall what else. Anyhow, it was all
banned. Li is of an irrepressibly intellectual bent. He had collected those books with great care over several years, gathered
them from hidden parts of the secondhand bookshops he frequented. Though the Cultural Revolution was then in full swing, Li
and his best friend had managed, until someone stumbled on those books, to avoid the fury of the local Red Guards, teenaged
bullies hopped up on patriotic righteousness. This was unusual. Geeks like Li were the first targets of these gangs, but he
and his friend had survived by a quirk of fate: they had once kept the leaders of the local Guards from failing out of school.
But the books? Baudelaire in the middle of 1967? Well, that was inexcusable.