Quote bleg
I dimly remember a quote about the fallacy of talking of countries as willful entities, I think by a French man using the colonization of Algeria as an example, and saying that things would be clearer if instead of claiming that France send so many troups, we would say that out of a territory inhabited by so many million individuals, a few hundred ( Read more... )
There is a famous paper which deals exactly with this issue of how "strategic thinking" turns human realities to bloodless abstractions. Especially:
Whether in the State Department, the Defense Department or the White House, whether in Democratic or Republican administrations, this same dehumanized pattern of decision-making on all foreign policy issues has been evident. It is the way nations traditionally carry on their business in the world. [...] The issue, then, is not the men or the particular period of this tragedy. [...] To blame the Presidents who heeded them is to dodge the harder question of why they (and so many of us at lower levels along with them) thought and acted as they did. The answer to that question begins with a basic intellectual approach which views foreign policy as a lifeless, bloodless set of abstractions. A liberalism attempting to deal with intensely human problems at home abruptly but naturally shifts to abstract concepts when making decisions about events beyond the water's edge. "Nations," "interests," "influence," "prestige" -- all are disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end. [...] The same bureaucracy which thinks of the world in abstract images, and which prizes at least the illusion of pragmatic decision making, imposes a style of behavior on its members which precludes open and forceful concern with human issues. The men involved in making decisions on Vietnam in the early 1960's were aware of, and must have been privately concerned with, the human dimensions of their decisions. But such concern as they felt was not allowed to be included in their formal, written recommendations and analyses. It simply is not done.
Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, "The Human Reality of Realpolitik," Foreign Policy 4 (1971): 158-162.
Of course, this kind of collective blindness is not at all specific to the case of the US government in the 60's. It is rooted in the very nature of groups of people and/or organizations which indulge in using abstractions for reasoning about the world ; which indulge in turning themselves to a machine.
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Why does "human" apply, and not "interest"? Because "human" is redundant and meaningless and always applies as long as humans are concerned (duh), so is necessarily true (and completely uninformative), whereas "interest", "prestige" and "influence" are fallacious, because they are somewhat meaningful attributes of a person, but not of a nation - so we are back indeed in the hypostatization of nations as persons.
The authors you quote, just like you, are emotionalists, with no principle to distinguish between valid and invalid abstractions, yet with the conceited pretense of knowledge despite his intellectual limitations.
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Humans are concrete beings: you can touch a human. As far as I know, I cannot touch a "prestige" or an "interest", nor an "influence".
Do you know what an abstraction is ?
Either you use the word "abstraction" as in "mathematical abstraction", which is a well-defined concept. But it would be widely irrealistic to imagine that one can reliably use such abstractions in reasoning about the real world.
Or either you mean that everything in a human's mind is an image of reality, not reality itself, and you use the word "abstraction" for this purpose, but then almost everything is an abstraction.
To be clear, we should say that most of the time, a human's mind contains partially abstracted images of the reality, and recognize that how exactly the combination of such images is performed is as a matter of fact unknown.
This could perhaps cure you from an excessive self-comfidence in telling others what is the right way to think, for the truth is that in fact, nobody knows exactly what it is.
Concretes do not allow reasoning, planning, or any kind of discrimination necessary to action. Only abstractions do.
This is complete bullshit. If it were so clear, it's a long time ago that we would have intelligent machines, and as far as I know, there are none yet.
And precisely, one of the important reasons why till now, it has been impossible to build efficient planning mechanisms (e.g. in robotics) is because abstractions are not appropriate as approximations of the real world. Neither is the kind of binary reasoning which comes together with mathematical abstractions appropriate for reasoning and acting in the real world.
Thus you have no clue about what you are speaking about, otherwise you would at least know the basics. And when no known answer exists in the state of the art, it's especially disingenuous to claim that you know it.
The problem is to distinguish the true from the false, i.e. those abstractions that fit the reality they are claimed to describe from those that don't
This is not the only problem, for solving this one, honesty and accurate information is sufficient (although too often, there is a shortage of those in politics).
The real problem is to decide where the priorities are, what is more important and what is less important.
Why does "human" apply, and not "interest"? Because "human" is redundant and meaningless and always applies as long as humans are concerned (duh), so is necessarily true (and completely uninformative)
You just did not read the paper: what the guy says is that in his own experience, concrete human realities were never taken into account in government circles.
This changes completely the reasoning, for in such a context, you can perform well while ignoring all along that the direct consequence of your data-processing actions will be murder.
Thus it's just the opposite of what you say: introducing knowledge about concrete human realities is extremely informative, precisely because it prevents people from abstracting away this aspect of the reality, and shutting down their empathy.
The authors you quote, just like you, are emotionalists
This is just a buzzword which has nothing to do in a rational discussion, IMHO.
You want to speak about emotions ? Well, perhaps it would be interesting to know that over the last ten years, more and more people in cognitive science are interested in emotions, because it seems that they are a quite fundamental mechanism in cognition.
yet with the conceited pretense of knowledge despite his intellectual limitations.
I'm afraid that the pretense of knowledge, along with the intellectual limitations, are very much rather on the side of those who suicidally mangle their own minds by means of silencing their emotions, because they stupidly believe in a false theory which states that one can become more intelligent and more efficient this way.
But in fact, such people have a very limited understanding of what knowledge and intellect are, and when finally science will be available to really prove them wrong, it will be too late (at least for them and their victims).
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Here is the opinion of somebody who knew these things much better than you:
Concern for man and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors. Never forget this in the midst of your diagrams and equations.
Albert Einstein
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