The Doubter's Companion (5 page)

ARMAMENTS
   Extremely useful for fighting wars. A dead weight in any civil economy.

Throughout history functioning societies have accepted that an appropriate quantity of arms is a necessary burden which must be paid for, even though they cannot contribute to prosperity. There are two reasons for this endemic negative weight:

1.  Arms are a consumer good. They either sit on the shelf like unused lipstick or are used to destroy other arms and people. In the process a large part of them disappear. They either explode or are exploded by the other side.

In short, the purpose and use of arms includes none of the intrinsic qualities of capital goods. They cannot, for example, be used to make other goods or to provide services. That is, they contain almost no multiplier effect. Steel used for weapons has a multiplier of one—steel into weapons. But steel into road-building equipment and trucks is another matter. The equipment produces roads which permit transport, which uses trucks, which carry goods which create trade in other areas.

2.  Arms have no market value. They cannot have one because the seller is a single government, and the buyer is a single government. And the seller and the buyer are usually one and the same government.

That the company producing the weaponry may be privately owned, or that there are several rival privately owned companies, is irrelevant. Markets (competition) are created by demand, not by production. There is no economic demand for arms. They are required only to protect the state or to destroy another state. This is not an economic function.

In order to create real market values for arms, we would have to set expressed values—fixed or floating—for each person killed or each object destroyed. During the French/English Indian wars of the eighteenth century this was tried. Scalps were assigned a cash value. A market was launched. The result was military and social disaster for all three sides (the English, the French and the Indians). A somewhat less specific market system was attempted during the Renaissance with the mercenary armies, especially the condottieri in Italy. It was equally disastrous.

The problem with linking military activity to any market-place has always been that if you set values for destruction you encourage destruction, which is not the same thing as preventing or winning wars, which is, after all, the purpose of armies and of arms.

Curiously enough, since the early 1960s—and in particular since President Kennedy's special message to Congress of February 6, 1961—the Western technocratic élites have been attempting to convert weaponry into a positive economic force. This imposition of an abstract idea onto a non-conforming reality is the sort of economic determinism which resembles alchemy, the obsessive mediaeval belief that base metal could be turned into gold. There is nothing unusual about the alchemist approach. Charles Mackay described sixteen phenomena similar to our armaments folly in his mid-nineteenth century masterpiece
Extraordinary Popular
Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
³
.

Kennedy and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, treated arms as if they were automobiles and so the armaments industry began to act as if it were Detroit. These two sectors were artificially linked by imaginary truths such as
TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS.
National weapons needs were to be paid for by massive exports of more or less the same weaponry. Around the world a fresh new technocracy followed suit. Productive civil economies were transformed into falsely productive military economies.

The Reagan/Bush partnership took this illusion a step further and turned the arms “business” into a make-work program. Around the world more people followed suit. Arms were soon the single most important element in international industrial trade—some $900 billion per year. Research and Development (R and D) everywhere came to be dominated by military imperatives.

The third and current phase began with the fall of the Soviet Bloc. Something called the
PEACE DIVIDEND
raised its head briefly only to evaporate. Governments began to act as if the principal reason for building weapons was to save jobs.

Early in 1994 the most important American advocate of a new policy was nominated as Secretary of Defense. William Perry, a quiet technocrat, became the new-model McNamara. The ideas advancing behind him are presented in such an inoffensive, number-crunching way that few people have noticed them. This third stage involves total integration of the civil and military economies under a concept called
DUAL USE,
which subjects defence needs to market forces.

We are distracted from this by various international disarmament successes which amount to little more than a yearend clear-out in a cosmetics store. The old lipstick is swept from the shelves into the garbage or is sold off at knockdown prices in provincial markets. This makes room for the new consumer models.

The end result of our three-step, three-decade evolution has been the inversion of the meaning of the word armaments. What for thousands of years was a non-productive necessity of warfare has been dressed up as a productive necessity of both job creation and technological innovation. Where the public ownership of arsenals had once given some guarantee that weaponry would relate to defence and attack, the privatization of production puts the requirements of national protection on the back burner. In other words, the only way to reduce expenditures while ensuring the production of the right quantity of the right weapons without international proliferation would be to reverse the current policy: establish a monopoly of state production and openly assume the costs of defence.

ARMPITS
   See:
REALITY.

ASPEN INSTITUTE
   A supermarket of conventional wisdom for middle-level executives.

Corporate life, particularly for those not on the fast track, has all the bureaucratic pitfalls of directionless boredom. To distract these confused but loyal servants from what Thoreau called their “lives of quiet desperation,” they are periodically shipped off to rest camps where, over the period of a few days, they are taught important things which can change their lives, their company, the world. Failing that, the experience may help them to hold on a bit longer. See:
BUSINESS CONFERENCES.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

1.  A by-product of fiction which combines the dramatic methods of the romance novel with those of the adolescent adventure story.

2.  A product of Heroic mythology usually written by a false Hero.

3.  A celebration of the author's moral weakness.

4.  Exhibitionism by someone too old to take his clothes off in public.

5.  An obscuring of the author's actions behind his emotions and subjective state.

6.  A plea by the author to be accepted as he is; that is, an excuse for his actions; that is, an attack on
ETHICS.
See:
BIOGRAPHY.

AWARD SHOW
   Mechanism by which the members of a given profession attempt to give themselves the attributes of the pre-modern ruling classes—the military, aristocracy and priesthood—by assigning various orders, decorations and medals to each other.

These shows are a superficial expression of
CORPORATISM.
As with the pre-modern classes, their awards relate principally to relationships within the profession. Each time the words “I want to thank” are used by someone being decorated, they indicate a relationship based on power. The awards have little to do with that corporation's relationship to the outside world—what you might call the public—or for that matter with quality. See:
BALLROOM.

B

BABEL, TOWER OF
   Multilingualism remains the source of movement and growth in a civilization.

The ability to fill the house of reality, intellect and imagination with different furniture is a great pleasure and a great strength. The strengths of comparison and of contradiction. The ability to draw on the originality or strengths of one to enrich another.

But for this to happen, writers and intellectuals must play their role, carrying words, images, emotions and ideas back and forth between languages. Unilingualism is one result of the acceptance by writers of professionalism. As they embrace the related idea that creativity is a sufficient justification for writing, so many become lost in the worship of a single tongue. The only status worse than this involves seeing themselves as the professional voice of a culture or a nation.

The laziest intellectuals have been produced by the four or five dominant cultures of the West. They claim that it is hard to write well if you speak more than one language, a problem which Dante, Voltaire and Tolstoy do not seem to have encountered. More recently they have taken to complaining that a similar unilingual sectarianism has sprung up among smaller linguistic groups who feel threatened. At both levels the writers are guilty of betraying their obligation to communicate.

Today more senior bureaucrats and business executives are multilingual than writers. The corporatist élites are therefore inheriting by default the right to decide what will be in the language of our international agendas, whether they deal with politics, business or culture. See:
CORPORATISM
and
DIALECTICS.

BABY SEAL
   A superior form of animal life which holds animistic power over the European imagination.

Many civilizations have wrapped themselves in skins to assume the qualities of a particular animal. Chiefs, warriors, indeed European kings have often worn the hides of courageous or powerful beasts such as the lion, the wolf or the buffalo. Rabbits and hyenas do not attract them.

The principal characteristics of the baby seal are the purity of its whiteness, a face eerily reminiscent of the infant child and its lack of intellectual pretension. Since Europeans seem to admire their own intelligence and have never developed a religious fetish for brown, grey or black seals, it can only be assumed that they identify with this animal's infantile whiteness.

The adoration of the infant seal is a reminder that colour is more than artifice. Other species, usually endangered, have mobilized a limited élite in their defence. Only the baby seal—always in ample supply—has moved millions of people of all ages and backgrounds. These people believe in the absolute value of the life of each member of that particular species.

To the question “Surely all animals, like all humans, are equal?” the answer is that of Napoleon the pig. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
¹

The same English man, woman, child whose eyes fill with tears before the photograph of a baby seal is indifferent to the genetic manipulation of the sacred chicken whose entrails decided public policy for our ancestors. Science, for the sole purpose of producing larger breasts, has created physically challenged birds, who could make a living in a topless bar had they not been left so top heavy and with so little brain that they can't walk let alone dance. And what of the French, who weep for the baby seal over dinners of artificially swollen goose livers. The divine goose of our Greek heritage has a large wooden tube shoved down its throat and is force-fed to death to produce
foie gras.
In defence of the Italians, it must be said that by locking young calves in pens so small that they become bloodied invalids, they have turned their backs on the Old Testament temptation of the Golden Calf. They have rejected idolatry in favour of
fegato alla Veneziana
.

But a nagging doubt remains that idolatry is idolatry whether a calf or a seal is worshipped. The important thing for the adored one is to establish the difference between being god and being food or clothing. The baby seal has succeeded in doing this and may therefore be a great deal smarter than it looks.

BACON, FRANCIS
   The English Cartesian. See:
DESCARTES.

BAD NEWS
   Those who have power always complain that journalists are only interested in bad news. “But if the newspapers in a country are full of good news, the jails are full of good people.”

Elsewhere, bad news comes as light relief from the unrelenting rightness of those with expertise and power. They insist that they are applying the correct and therefore inevitable solution to each problem. And when it fails they avoid self-doubt or a public examination of what went wrong by quickly moving on to the next right answer. Bad news is the citizen's only available substitute for public debate.

BAD PEOPLE
   In public life bad people, like bad money, drive out good. Only a constant effort by the citizenry to favour service over ambition and, in policy, balanced complexity over manipulative simplicity can draw the good forward.

It is far easier to gain and hold power for those who seek only power. Self-interest is not constrained by the distracting difficulties of trying to serve the public good. Unless society has a respect for public service so strong that it amounts to an unwritten obligation, a large number among those who present themselves will be the unreasonably ambitious and the emotionally damaged seeking to work out their
INFERIORITY COMPLEXES
and other problems in public.

This difficulty has always been with us. In his definition of Fatherland, Voltaire complained that “he who burns with ambition to become aedile, tribune, praetor, consul, dictator, cries out that he loves his country and he loves only himself.”
²
Yeats returned to the subject in “The Second Coming”—“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” What is this lack of conviction?

Relatively well balanced, disinterested people make an important private sacrifice by giving time to the general good. They also have trouble believing that their contribution could be important. This is not false modesty. The energy of political ambition is like a tornado which clears out those who don't have it. The particular problem of our courtier-ridden society is that its standards are those of pure power and of money.