The Power of Doing Nothing

Columbia, Israel, "Childhood's End," and the Impotence of Force

“A State Department friend of mine once gave a briefing to [Lyndon] Johnson. The subject was a Latin-American country where it looked as if one of our military juntas was about to be replaced by a liberal non-Communist regime. Johnson was distraught. ‘What, what,’ he cried, ‘can we do?’ To which one of his advisors—whose name must be suppressed, though his wisdom ought to be carved over the White House door—replied, ‘Mr. President, why not do nothing?’”

-Gore Vidal, interview, 1969

I’ve lived in, sublet, or squatted near the Columbia/Barnard campus on New York’s Upper West Side for years, so it’s been very strange for me to see my old neighborhood become ground zero of the national news—my walk to the subway made impassable by phalanxes of cops in riot gear and reporters with cameras, handcuffed protesters being led past apartment buildings I see every day. My friend Jenny, who teaches at Barnard, reported from the front that her own students at the encampment seemed as cheerful as if they were at Burning Man. She described a guy who brings inflatable dogs to the scene every day, purporting to sell fresh dog meat of all breeds as a Modest-Proposal vegan protest, drafting on the ambient activist/festival atmosphere. She also reported seeing some protest signs that chilled her blood, signs out of late-30s Germany. And a couple of nights ago she heard what sounded like fifty paddy wagons, sirens blaring, headed to campus to round up the students occupying Hamilton Hall. All of which is totally unnecessary, 100% optional chaos.

I was just re-reading Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke, the ur-science fiction novel in which titanic starships suddenly appear over all the world’s capitals, the prototype of that Independence Day trope. After the aliens first appear, one rogue nation risks launching a nuclear missile at one of the ships (conveniently hovering over an enemy nation’s capital), and the world watches, collective breath held, to see what will happen. What happens is that the missile unaccountably vanishes. And the aliens, in response, do nothing; they don’t even acknowledge the attempt. They take a nuclear attack as seriously as we would a dog barking at us from behind a chain-link fence. The government responsible, Clarke informs us, collapses in mutual recrimination a few weeks later. This, in his imagination, is what true power would look like, not the impotent tantrums and posturing of earthbound leaders.

Childhood’s End, back cover illustration by Richard Powers, 1953

Dave Karpf, a professor of political science at Columbia, cites actual works of political philosophy rather than novels about alien invasion in his essay on the demonstrations at his own university, but we share the same incredulous disgust at watching its administration react to its students’ protests in the dumbest, clumsiest, most self-defeating way imaginable, gratuitously escalating a confrontation that never needed to happen into a crisis. Like him, I can’t help but wonder why it never seems to occur to any real-world leaders that doing nothing is a viable—often the best—option. The option not to react seldom seems to occur to them in a crisis, and even if it does, they almost never choose it. They can’t resist the temptation, alluring as a glowing red stovetop coil to a toddler, to Do Something instead. Something Big! Something strong, to intimidate the opposition, quash all resistance, to Show Them All! I know—we’ll call in the NYPD! They always know how to defuse a tense situation. Or Tell you what let’s do: we’ll issue a deadline! Then they’ll realize how serious we are, and they’ll have no choice but to pack up and go home. Which is likely what would’ve happened in about two weeks when the semester ended, had the administration found it within themselves to refrain from freaking out and issued meaningless statements of support for all sides, created an ad hoc committee to study divestment, and benignly indulged the encapment until graduation.

But it seemed as though, once the familiar drama began, they were compelled by ancient forces to step into their archetypal roles, and play Nixon/Dean Wormer/Principal Skinner to the riotous youth. They were scared of being made to look stupid at Congressional hearings and having to resign, and of losing funding from their donors, securing which is a University President’s main job, and so, to placate Republican congressmen who don’t mind antisemitism when it’s expressed by actual Nazis but love making college campuses look like hives of Communist revolution, they instead enforced a big dumb clumsy crackdown: invoking the Rules, issuing ultimatums, calling the cops, making it impossible for the demonstration to end in any way but with a volatile standoff. There was even talk about calling in the National Guard, those heroes of the glorious battle of Kent State. In consequence of which—Oh goodness, who ever could have anticipated this unwelcome result—the protests not only grew and intensified into a kind of angry carnival but spread to other campuses across the country—and not only in the traditional bleeding-heart hippie pinko states like Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and California but in Indiana, Missouri, Georgia, and Texas. By now pretty much the best-case scenario is that Columbia’s president will have to resign after all, but for the opposite reasons she feared she’d have to; worst-case, some students’ parents will be woken in the night by the worst phone call in the world.

Conveniently, since these protests occurred at multiple universities whose respective administrations responded in a variety of ways, we now have some experimental results to compare. Administrations like Brown’s, who agreed to hear out their student’s demands and convene an advisory committee to consider divestment, saw their demonstrations peaceably dispelled. Columbia and UCLA, whose administrations “got tough” and instituted blustering fuckheaded crackdowns, have turned their campuses into the anarchic battlegrounds that Republicans wanted them to be, been denounced by their own faculties, and earned the enduring enmity of their students.

The dumb disastrous decisions that brought about this gratuitous clusterfuck echo, in farcical falsetto, the far more tragic dumb disastrous decisions made by Israel’s fanatical right-wing government in response to a terrorist attack. (I know whereof I speak, as citizen of a country whose fanatical right-wing government made similarly dumb disastrous decisions in response to a terrorist attack a quarter century ago.) Okay, they reasoned, if we simply kill everyone in the occupied territory, that will quash this pestersome terrorism once and for all! ‘Cause then they’ll realize how serious we are, and pack up and go, uh, elsewhere. As a result of which, tens of thousands of ordinary men, women, and children (a lot of children) are dead, various nation-states in the region are tentatively lobbing missiles and drones at one another, like a shoving match in junior high that everyone’s secretly hoping a teacher will break up, and the state of Israel now enjoys much the same level of international sympathy and goodwill as the Khmer Rouge.

I am not interested here in weighing in on the wretched mess of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, a debate from which no one emerges without being called names. I’m more interested in the operative fallacy behind these seemingly idiotic miscalculations. In the case of university administrations, institutional cowardice is always a ready explanation (“We’ve got to protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen!”), and in the Middle East there’s the ancient maze of hatreds and the unappeasable bloodlust of grief. But behind all these is a failure of imagination endemic to the human species, whereby you assume that your opponents are sniveling villains who will simply have to surrender before your implacable will, rather than people with interior lives and behavioral rules of operation much like your own, who will likely do exactly the same thing you would in the same circumstances.

I often think of a moment from the Erol Morris documentary Fog of War, in which its subject, Robert McNamara, one of the “architects” (if you can apply that word to the construction of a ruin) of the Vietnam War, meets with Nguyen CoThach, the Foreign Minister of Vietnam, formerly leader of the North Vietnamese Army, twenty years after the war’s end. McNamara finally asks him, a little belatedly, why they didn’t just accept the terms America offered back at the beginning of the war—what it would’ve taken to get them to surrender. Thach seems almost bemused at realizing that his enemy never truly understood the reality of his situation:

"Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you had, you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara, didn't you know that? Don't you understand that we have been fighting the Chinese for a thousand years? We were fighting for our independence. And we would fight to the last man. And we were determined to do so. And no amount of bombing, no amount of U.S. pressure would ever have stopped us."

You see this same colossal failure of imagination playing out in our internal national politics, which are increasingly conducted like a war. There’s this idea on both right and left—actually it grants it undeserved dignity it to call it an idea, because it’s an assumption so unexamined it’s better called a delusion—that it is possible, someday, to win our great ideological conflict/culture war: that the other side will finally be defeated, demoralized, forever dispersed. “We live in the land of total vindication,” complains a character in Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise: “See, it’s all a movie in this country and if you wait long enough you get your happy ending. Until somebody else’s movie starts.”

The most naive liberal version of this delusion is that we will be able to explain things clearly enough, dumb down our argument and illustrate it with big pictures and colorful charts, and finally convince people compellingly enough that even conservatives will at last see the reason and fairness and basic human decency of our position, and then we will all move forward together into a Star Trek future of one just and peaceful world government and no more money. While the most malignant conservative version is that maybe if they could just kill everyone who disagrees with them—all us God-hating secular humanists and bleeding-heart Communists and Democrat pedophile groomers—then only the right people, the true patriots and Christians, the good clean decent people, God’s chosen, will be left, and they will finally establish the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.^[1]

Of course it goes without saying that killing everyone who disagrees with you would be wrong. Even if you truly hate the people on the opposing side—even if it’s with excellent reason, because they hate you, and want you dead—you can’t realistically make your goal to defeat or destroy them once and for all. And not because it’s wrong, or because it will debase you and make you No Better Than They Are, but simply because it never works. That is not how history works; it fails to account for what human beings are like. You’ll get to enjoy about three weeks of your liberal utopia before some surly teen discovers a yellowed copy of The Fountainhead and announces he doesn’t want to pay taxes; the conservative paradise will be shattered by some little smartmouth at mandatory Bible camp piping up Are we really supposed to believe there was a talking snake? People don’t like to admit that they’re wrong, let alone concede defeat, and even if you do punish and oppress them so brutally that they’re forced to submit, they just slink off and sullenly scheme their revenge. Even if you slaughter them en masse their children will grow up to garrote you in your sleep. They just come back, again and again.

Some fights do need to be fought, and won; the South was never voluntarily going to abolish the institutional atrocity on which its economy was founded, so we razed their rotten slave nation to shambles and ash. And yet even a war still didn’t decide the issue; we abandoned reconstruction and the old racist aristocracy recurred like a cancer, so we had to send Federal troops back down there again a century later to force them to behave as though they were civilized. To this day, the issue remains undecided; the war goes on. Because law and force of arms may compel people to comply, but they can’t make them understand, or agree.

I’ve never forgotten a story Jenny once told me about the year she lived in Ireland: she and her family toured the ruins of an old castle fortress on the coast, a crumbling tower full of ingenious and brutal deathtraps: false entrances leading into walled courtyards that would become slaughtering floors, “murder holes” through which molten lead would be poured on invaders’ heads, reverse spiral stairs that gave the sword-hand advantage to the defenders above—a monument to human territorial paranoia. After their guide had explained all these grim devices, during the Q&A portion of the tour, Jenny posed a question: whom, exactly, were they defending this place against? Gesturing at the rude stone citadel, the desolate landscape, the frigid iron-gray sea, she asked, “Who wanted this place?” Their guide considered before answering: “People like themselves.”

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^[1] Of course the Left has famously had its flirtations with the kill-’em-all policy, as implemented under such political theoreticians as Stalin and Mao. But I’m writing in this paragraph about the contemporary American political spectrum, and these days, for better or worse, the left in this country has pretty much given up on revolution; it’s the right who increasingly see violence and terrorism as a legitimate political tool, probably because they’re a besieged and dwindling minority, demographically terminal, and they feel cornered and desperate and theirs is already an essentially fear-based ideology.