All Ideologies Are Wrong Headed

June 13th, 2008 Posted in Invention, Iraq, Ideology

Pareto was suspicious of stated motives. Too many people performing the same kind of action offer vastly different reasons. Freud felt that the motive for an action frequently is not easily accessible to the actor. The gap defined by the inarticulable urge is filled by a convention, something that seems normal.

At the social level knowing the norm or the rule or the law is usually all we need. The fact that the individual is lively and capable of logical thought is about as deep as we have to go. Following the correct way is like following the yellow brick road. There it is, there you go.

But the issue returns. The individual who knows not why-he-does is matched by confusion and disagreement over the correct, right, conventional way. One group’s straight and narrow is another’s twisted and convoluted. So the intra-psychic conflict has a parallel in the ideological disagreements in social life.

In the individual’s life the task and the act versus the motive and the reason are like hands waving and yet not meeting. It is not clapping. So in social life the task and the act may not mesh with the conflicting and confusing ideologies. A social order is there, remember, no matter the ideology.

In the Second Iraq War the lean volunteer military combat units have been augmented by civilian firms organized as work formations. The famous Army Engineer battalions have given way to large construction firms on assigned projects. Army mess cooks have been replaced by commercial caterers. The military police have passed on guard and escort duty to bouncers and private eyes. These shifts can be seen as changes in accepted convention. Notice that the same tasks, the same suite of acts, seem no longer to be motivated by duty and public service or, as Durkheim might have called it, by altruism, but instead by an emphasis on profit, a motive extolled to the extreme by the governing politicos.

The specific group of believers can form around the ideology like the gang rallying around the new charismatic teacher; or the group can generate the faith like all other aspects of culture. The agreed correct way is in the going consensus. Over time we forget the origin and simply accept–just as the child adopts the parental language.

But sometimes ideology becomes another disconnect. The conventional reason why becomes a studied blindness. Certain options are made to disappear and with them the possibility of a pragmatic appreciation of reality.

I have been particularly startled by the civilian escort guards for State Department diplomats in Baghdad. The job gets done but the civilian organization and its workers are outside of the military chain of command and have an unclear legal position and are possibly much more expensive than the most obviously sensible military organization for this duty that they replaced. The U.S. Marine Embassy Guards is an established and long standing, specially trained elite force. They guard the American diplomats at their work around the world and the slight extension of the service to trips outside the compound should fall within their competence. And organizationally and legally there are no problems.

Even if the marines were excused from this service for whatever reason, there are other military units and other agencies of the federal government who could substitute for them–the Air Force Security, the Military Police of the Army, the U.S. Marshals Service, all with respectable traditions and reputations.

We have to wonder at the choice that was made to go with profit motive instead of altruistic service. We have to suspect that an ideological bias was at work; a vision that blocked out a range of sensible and moral pragmatic opportunities. The executives in office would argue to the contrary that they have discovered the new and profitable way. Parading as conservative their acts are shockingly radical.

The old altruistic, public service Army is made lean and mean. A lot of its supposed rear echelon functions have been relegated to what we have called the second wave (businessmen and workers for profit, journalists, and eccentric tourists). A change of ideology at the political center finds a new way of doing war.

For me it is a disappointing discovery something like the invention of the designated hitter in American baseball. Some change is unnecessary and dumb especially if it goes against my own ideology. But sometimes the new just doesn’t work as expected. Sometimes it’s a ding-a-ling error.

Old Jock advised the new recruit, “Don’t volunteer for nothing.”