The Age of the Unthinkable (5 page)

Morgenthau knew better, and his worries leak out in his speeches and in the most personal passages in his writing. He had,
after all, lived with the Nazis, had lived the costs of those footnoted forces. You could no more edit such dangers out of
your models than you could out of your life. “Political reality,” he confesses, not without some sense of frustration, “is
replete with contingencies and systemic irrationalities.” And he knew the limits of using science to model humans, a tension
he had explored with masterful fluency in
an earlier book,
Scientific Man Versus Power Politics.
The truth was, he wrote, the world wasn’t a math problem. It wasn’t simply replete with contingency and irrationality; in
some ways it seemed to be nothing but contingency and irrationality. Yet in their eagerness to bring some sense of order to
that reality, many of Morgenthau’s more enthusiastic acolytes pushed these dynamic parts of the system off to the side.

“Systematic irrationalities” have always tripped up simplicities like Democratic Peace Theory, have always challenged policy
makers, whether they are American presidents or Roman generals. This is one of the reasons that, when they finally do get
their hands on real power, many foreign-affairs academics or economic masters are quick to leave their beautiful scholarly
ideas behind. Lawrence Summers, the Harvard economist who became secretary of the treasury under Bill Clinton and then head
of the National Economic Council under Barack Obama, once said to me that the most important thing he had learned from Robert
Rubin, his predecessor at the Treasury and a rigorously practical former Goldman Sachs trader, was to “adopt a probabilistic
view of the world and discard the black-and-white models that make for success in academia.” During talks with the Chinese
premier Zhou Enlai that reestablished U.S.China relations, for instance, there was a memorable exchange in which another former
Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger (then national security advisor), said to the Chinese leader that many of the ideas the
two of them were discussing were almost exactly the opposite of what the theories he once taught would have suggested. Lovely
as they were in the classroom, those Cambridge models were largely useless in reality.

The complex physics of our world now makes this even more apparent. The more beautiful a theory is in the lab or those Heidelberg
halls or some guy’s basement, the less it seems to hew to a reality in which, to give just one example, states and their leaders
aren’t always rational. (Or they may be rational in a way we think is crazy — a conundrum captured in a popular quip about
Iran at the turn of the millennium, that the country needed to decide “if it was a nation or a jihad.”) The idea that two
nations could ever see their interests in the same way assumes a sort of objectivity that’s impossible. And the allegedly
clear, stable, knowable interests of states are often none of those things. They change and move as rapidly as our personal
idea of our “interest” changes as we age, confront crises, strike it rich. National interest can be jarred and reshaped in
an instant. Pearl Harbor transformed many Americans’ view of the country’s position in a single morning. That day, Senator
Arthur Vandenberg sadly remarked, “ended isolationism for any realist.” September 11 was a similar shock. The old line that
“there are no permanent friends in international relations, only permanent interests,” got it half right. Even interests themselves
can be refigured with incredible speed.

Realism now falls down in other ways, too. It famously assumes, for instance, that states have a monopoly on violence. But
in this age of computer hackers, terrorists, and drug cartels, that’s certainly no longer entirely accurate. And, confronted
with the peculiar nature of a financially interconnected world, where danger, risk, and profit are linked in ways that can
be impossible to spot and manage, theories that involve only armies and diplomats don’t have much use. Political power is
spreading more widely than it did when Morgenthau wrote. More than 90 percent of the nongovernmental organizations in the
world were created in the past ten years, for instance. And recall Morgenthau’s line about the uselessness of morality, that
only might made right? Even if such an assumption were honest enough, because it can be hard to say who is right or wrong
in a moral argument, some of the most energetic modern forces, as different in their decency as Hizb’allah and Greenpeace,
draw power from an explicitly ethical worldview. You might disagree with the morality of such groups, it might look twisted
when lined up against your own, but their followers are unquestionably driven by lively ethics as much as by a lust for power.
The classical models shuffled such worries into the footnotes because they were too hard to model. Unfortunately, these worries
are now among the most important parts of the system.

The revolutionary physics of our world now has the effect of taking what might have been idle curiosities in one era — the
charming but simple ideas of journalists, say, or the theories of criminologists who were history buffs — and turning them
into dangerous weapons of self-destruction, as if one tried to use Newtonian physics to control a nuclear reactor. But this
is an important reminder before we move on. When confronted now with “experts” giving advice about the international situation
or proposing to conduct diplomacy on your behalf, it is not unreasonable to ask about their background. What are they rounding
out or footnoting in their own thinking that they might not even be aware of? In the past we might have believed that the
best preparation for a career in foreign policy was a fluency with European history, an ability to speak Russian or French,
an understanding of the roots of world order. The future demands a different résumé. Today the ideal candidates for foreign-policy
power should be able to speak and think in revolutionary terms. They should have an expertise in some area of the world —
be it China or the Internet or bioengineering — where fast change and unpredictability are the dominant facts of life. They
should have experienced the unforgiving demands for precision and care that characterize real negotiation — as well the magical
effect of risk-taking at the right moments. They should have mastered the essential skill of the next fifty years: crisis
management. And they should be inclined toward action, even action at times without too much reflection, since at certain
moments instinct and speed are more important than the lovely perfection of academic models. The recent history of American
foreign policy is filled with tales of academic or journalistically trained bureaucrats who were paralyzed instead of energized
by the demand for what Churchill used to call “action this day.” Most of all, however, we need policy makers and thinkers
who have that intuitive revolutionary feel for the inescapable demands of innovation. We need early adopters, men and women
who touch newness and change as an almost totemic reminder of what is possible in the human spirit and who are honest about
the fights and struggles that lie ahead. Believing, for instance, that the triumph of democracy and capitalism is inevitable
should disqualify you immediately from a serious position in foreign policy.

Today our global policy is largely conducted by elites who are descendants of Morgenthau and disciples of Babst. By definition
such people make pretty poor revolutionaries. Why change a system that’s been working well for
you?
This makes it vitally important that they learn to think in terms that can correct the blindness that a Harvard education
or decades of living in Washington, D.C., seems to produce. At a time when the major international issues were contests between
nations, when those hat-dropping Metternich moments turned the pages of history, putting the winners in society in charge
of policy might have been reasonable. Anyhow, it was probably inevitable. (Though it still led to many bloody confrontations.)
But in an era when many of the most dynamic forces in society come from outside elite circles, from geeks who in the past
might have been thought of as “losers,” such an approach is an error of catastrophic proportions.

It isn’t easy to accept that the world is being shaped by forces you don’t understand and can’t agree with. It requires a
willingness to master some of that strangeness instead of simply labeling it as “mad” or trashing it as “evil.” It means getting
comfortable with the attitude that Niels Bohr once described as an inevitable part of a quantum view, that tickling “are you
kidding me?” feeling as you try something a bit nuts only to discover that it works wonderfully. Building a bureaucracy that
can do that, populating it with minds capable of such leaps, is going to require a heroic act of reimagination on our part.
But, as I think you’ll see by the end of this book, there’s no reason to think we’re not capable of it.

In December 1974 the Austrian economist Friedrich August von Hayek received one of the very first Nobel Prizes in economics.
Hayek was a prince of the same European intellectual court that had produced men like Morgenthau. A genius economist, he had
been among the first to describe how central banks could use money to influence the expansion and contraction of economies.
On the afternoon of December 11, delivering the traditional Nobelist’s lecture, Hayek first remarked what a privilege it was
to receive the award. The addition of a Nobel in economics to those given for hard sciences such as physics, chemistry, and
medicine was, he said, a sign of the field’s graduation from black art to real social
science
. The Nobel Prize, he began, “marks a significant step in the process by which, in the opinion of the general public, economics
has been conceded some of the dignity and prestige of the physical sciences.”

But, Hayek said, he was wondering just how much of that prestige was really justified. “Economists are at this moment,” he
continued, “called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation, which, it
must be admitted, has been brought about by policies which the majority of economists recommended and even urged governments
to pursue. We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.” Thus Hayek
began what was essentially a twenty-minute apology for winning a Nobel Prize.

Hayek titled his speech “The Pretence of Knowledge,” and what he had to say was important not simply as a set of observations
about economics. To treat complex phenomena as if they were simple, to pretend that you could hold the unknowable in the cleverly
crafted structure of your ideas — he could think of nothing that was more dangerous. “There is much reason,” Hayek said, “to
be apprehensive about the long-run dangers created in a much wider field by the uncritical acceptance of assertions which
have the appearance of being scientific.” And if you insert “foreign policy experts”
or “financial gurus” for “economists” in Hayek’s remarks, well, you have a sad, disturbing summary of the state of our world
at the moment.

Concluding his Nobel speech, Hayek warned, “If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order,
he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot
acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible.” Politicians and thinkers would be wise not to
try to bend history as “the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate growth by providing the appropriate environment,
in the manner a gardener does for his plants.”

To see the world this way, as a ceaselessly complex and adaptive system, requires a revolution. It involves changing the role
we imagine for ourselves, from architects of a system we can control and manage to gardeners in a living, shifting ecosystem.
For hundreds of years now we have lived in our minds as builders: constructing everything from nations to bridges, heedlessly
grabbing whatever resources we’ve needed in pursuit of a dream of some imagined palace of global prosperity. This mode of
existence, which delivered amazing progress, is no longer suitable. The world is too complex, its resources too limited, and
its internal dynamics too unstable to accommodate much more of this mania. It is now delivering the opposite of what we intend
even as it presents us with new and insoluble problems. In a revolutionary age, with rapid change all around us, our architects’
tools are deadly. It is time for us to put them down and follow Hayek’s injunction to live and to think as gardeners.

Shortly after September 11, 2001, the National Academy of Sciences called together a group of American scientists and presented
them with a question: could science and technology combat terrorism? With great minds hustling from lab to Pentagon and back
again, the meetings had a sort of 1950s smell to them, reminiscent of the early Cold War, a time when the firm knot of American
technology and policy seemed to promise the greatest security. In meeting after meeting, the eight subcommittees the academy
had assembled imagined all sorts of potential disasters and tried to outthink them. The teams were a Who’s Who of modern American
science: plucky Nobelists, directors of some of the largest labs on earth, professors so brilliant they would never have to
teach a single class. In a reflective moment, you might have pictured this battle of minds as a contest between science and
fundamentalism, sketched out in the lives of Americans and the country’s enemies, except that there were moments (too many
of them, if you wanted to ask) when science and technology appeared to be on the side of terror. In the days after the National
Academy began planning these gatherings, someone mailed envelopes filled with military-grade anthrax spores to the offices
of the
National Enquirer
.