I used to say to my students ‘never underestimate the cynicism of governments, whetever their political complexion’. Ok, this was shorthand: I didn’t strictly mean ‘cynicism’. Now perhaps I can clarify what I meant, having just read John Bolton’s The Room Where it Happened.
What is abundantly clear from Bolton’s careful and well written account of life in the shadow of Trump is that this smart and worrying foreign policy hawk always had a clear agenda: America first(to coin a phrase). Nothing surprising there of course. But I want briefly to examine what this means. Unsurprising too is Bolton’s dismay and anger when his foreign adversaries also want to put their countries first. Is this hypocritical? It depends what form of life you are engaged in, what language game you are ’playing’, Wittgenstein might say. But it might pay to start with Bourdieu rather than Wittgenstein.
Consider geopolitics as a ‘field’ in Bourdieu’s sense. Setting aside here the salience of the transnational capitalist class for influencing and shaping the policy aims and objectives of the power elites of nation states (my ‘class/command dynamic’), it might be admitted that, like all fields, geopolitics is based on ‘competition’. Outcomes then vary according to the economic, social and cultural ‘capital’ that such power elites and their representatives (including National Security Advisers like Bolton) are able to deploy. The dynamics can be complex, as Bolton details. When the Trump regime was engaged in discussions on nuclear capacity with Kim Jong Un in North Korea for example, this necessarily involved ongoing negotiations also with South Korea, Japan and other proximate nations and world powers. And after the manner of Lukes’ noted analysis of power, Bourdieu’s types of capital can be exercised to multiple ends, including ensuring that nothing is accomplished at a particular congress or enhancing mutual distrust amongst rivals. All this is bread and butter for a sociologist and has been much analysed and debated amongst specialists.
Now let’s turn to Wittgenstein. Consider the field of geopolitics as characterised here as a form of life or language game. It is apparent from Bolton’s account that the various foreign ‘adversaries’ he routinely engaged with – principally at his own level – understood and operated according to the rules of the game. In fact, like members of a poker-playing club, they often got on well, even when trying to outwit each other.They were after all playing the same game according to the same rules.
You cannot , Wittgenstein often seemed to declare, criticise a language game from outside of it. Our tendency to do just this is the source of so many of our philosophical as well as everyday confusions. From outside the field/form of life/language game of geopolitics the likes of Bolton appear disingenuous and hypocritical, deploying a rhetoric of humanitarian concern even as they tell blatant untruths and encourage or facilitate inter-state aggression with inevitable civilian casualties: the US and Western support of Israel in the Middle East despite its iniquitous treatment of the Palestinians is a prime case in point, as is the selling of arms to Saudi Arabia. But are they being ‘disingenuous and hypocritical’? Isn’t it the case that when new, even radical, political elites assume governmental office they find themselves having to ‘deal’ in much the same way, by the same rules, in the same geopolitical domain? Was this the undoing of Robin Cook’s ‘ethical foreign policy’?
I am not with Wittgenstein here, but I think he has a point. I tend to universalism in epistemology and morals alike (which is why I dislike the term ‘epistemological relativism’ in critical realism’s holy trinity, for all that I accept that what people claim to know varies by time and place). So what is telling in the Wittgensteinian approach? Consider the following:
- Is it not strange, if convenient, to complain that those who occupy different statuses/roles from us, and are in consequence players in different fields, fail to observe the rules that obtain in our own differentfields?
- Might it reasonably be argued that such complaints can only have purchase and traction if we say what we would do as entrants to and players in such fields?
- In relation to Bolton’s engagement in the geopolitical field, are we not likely to reject the ‘entrance requirments’?
- If so, and if we insist on complaining, are we not obliged to: (a) devise a replacement set of rulesfor the field of geopolitics, and (b) confront the structural, cultural and other obstacles to substituting our new set of rules?
- In so far as these issues impinge on sociology and sociologists, and they surely should do, does this not confirm the importance of engaging in foresight sociology and action sociology, that is, the analysis of ‘alternative futures’ and an active commitment to pursue progressive social change respectively?