Rose and any other names as sweet: The Powerful Smell of the Narrative

Postmodernists would have us believe that in today’s world the narrative (or grande histoire) is dead, swept aside by the particular (or petite histoire).  We no longer live under the power of an overarching ideology; we each march to the beat of our own drummers.

Two pieces published this week would contradict that assumption.  Although different, each piece demonstrates not only the presence of, but also the real power of, the narrative, as well as the subtle and subversive ways in which ‘authorship’ can set the boundaries of debate.

Gideon Rose, writing in Foreign Affairs, boldly claims that

We are living, so we are told, through an ideological crisis…In historical perspective, however, the true narrative of the era is actually the reverse — not ideological upheaval but stability.

What follows is a most fantastic and ambitious excercise in agenda setting.

To commemorate Foreign Affairs’ 90th anniversary, we have thus decided to take readers on a magical history tour, tracing the evolution of the modern order as it played out in our pages…It is…a package of 20 carefully culled selections from our archives, along with three new pieces, which collectively shed light on where the modern world has come from and where it is heading.

What Rose does, in effect, is to write again (rather than re-write) a narrative of the contemporary age–the preference for Liberalism, with its democractic and free-market capitalist characteristics.  The act of writing establishes, reifies, constructs a version of events that normative sets out where we have been and, more importantly, where we are going.  In Rose’s narrative, we are going exactly where we have always been going–where we always should be going: onwards and upwards, forever and ever, Amen.  A refinement of the ‘End of History’ thesis, we are no longer in engaged in a battle of ideas: that battle has been won and we are now cruising on exactly as we should be:

more people in more places have lived longer, richer, freer lives than ever before. In ideological terms, at least, all the rest is commentary. [emphasis added]

We don’t have ideologies, we have good ideas that help people.  They (those who don’t buy into this narrative) are ideological, and look where it has gotten them.  What we need is some nudging to put people onto the right path, a global version of The Adjustment Bureau, so to speak.  Enter the Chairman (of the ECB, the IMF, the Free World, whatever).  Done and dusted.

Narratives do not open up debate, they close them down.  The person holding the pen has great power to sketch out what is desirable, what is possible, and why.

Take a look at a recent blog post by Andrew Bacevich.  Speaking about the current era of war (which he calls “the war formerly known as the global war on terrorism (unofficial acronym WFKATGWOT)”), he claims that

the war’s narrative has become increasingly difficult to discern.  How much farther until we reach the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin?  What exactly is the WFKATGWOT’s equivalent of Berlin?  In fact, is there a storyline here at all?

The absence of a storyline is intolerable.  Contrary to the protestations of the postmodernists, we need a narrative, otherwise we cannot make sense of what is happening.  And so, Bacevich takes up the pen and provides one for us.

The WFKATGWOT has proceeded in three rounds, each with its own objective, protagonist, and warfighting approach.

Round 1: Liberation. The Rumsfeld Era. Shock and Awe.

Round 2: Pacification.  The Petreaus Era.  COIN.

Round 3: Assassination.  The Vickers Era.  SOF and Drone Raids.

Fair enough: things need to be ordered, so why not 3 rounds?  Descriptive enough…some might argue whether it is better with 2 or 4, but no bother.  But we can see in Bacevich’s writing a not so subtle normative characterisation which turns the work from mere history into a History:

No one believed more passionately in “shock and awe” than Rumsfeld himself…Unfortunately for Rumsfeld, the “terrorists” refused to play by his rulebook and U.S.forces proved to be less smart and agile than their technological edge — and their public relations machine — suggested would be the case.

Petraeus offered a formula for restoring a semblance of order to countries reduced to chaos as a result of round one.  Order might permit theUnited Statesto extricate itself while maintaining some semblance of having met its policy objectives.  This became the operative definition of victory…Rather than employing “shock and awe” to liberate the Islamic world, U.S.forces would apply counterinsurgency doctrine to pacify it.

[Vickers's] preferred approach to the WFKATGWOT has been simplicity itself. “I just want to kill those guys,” he says–“those guys” referring to members of al-Qaeda…Round three of the WFKATGWOT is all about bending, breaking, and reinventing rules in ways thought to be advantageous to the United States.  Much as COIN supplanted “shock and awe,” a broad-gauged program of targeted assassination has now displaced COIN as the prevailing expression of the American way of war. 

Again, the power of the narrative can be found in how it excludes and closes down debate.  It limits options; it draws pathways, explaining, as Rose hopes, where we came from and where we must go from here.

But we should beware any time someone tries to tell us where to go, how to get there, and takes the time to explain exactly ‘how things work’.  As Robert Cox sagely pointed out:

For Bacevich, there would be value in reading Pierre Bourdieu, who reminds us that theories

construct social reality…They define the visible and the invisible, the thinkable and the unthinkable.  In addition [they] are at once descriptive and evaluative, one side being always considered as the ‘good one’, because their use is ultimately rooted in the opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’.  [Vive la crise! For heterodoxy in social science.  Theory and Society.  17 (1988)]

And for Rose, he would do well to add to his list of important authors the father of the study of modernity himself, Max Weber.  His advice provides a necessary corrective to the idea that a single narrative can and should prevail:

general views of life and the universe can never be the products of increasing empirical knowledge…the highest ideals, which move us most forcefully, are always formed only in the struggle with other ideals which are just as sacred to others as ours are to us.  [The Methodology of the Social Sciences. Translated and Edited by Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch. New York: The Free Press, 1949]

Fortunately for those of us who like to think–and, therefore, unfortunately for those who would rather we didn’t–we are in an era of ideological crisis.  And so we should be.  Bring on upheaval!  Down with stability!