WWIV and the NeoConservative Paradigm

I’ve just begun reading a book called World War IV, by Norman Podhoretz. If you don’t know, he’s a neoconservative—he calls himself one on page seven of the prologue. According to wikipedia.org, he’s been a neocon since the 1970s and is sometimes considered the ‘godfather’ of neoconservatism. Currently, he’s Guiliani’s foreign policy advisor and is an advocate of an attack against my first homeland, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The book’s title refers to the interpretation that the Cold War ought be considered WWIII, and the current episode WWIV.  

If you know me, you know I’m a liberal. But I find again and again that once I’ve read too many pieces of literature from one paradigm, I forget that it’s a paradigm. So I’m reading this with an open mind, and, one chapter in, my mind is already opened. A few important things have occured to me already:

1. Simply because we recognize that the two political factions operate under a different paradigm–simply because we can say that and say, “yes, that is true,”–it doesn’t mean we understand the extent to which that paradigm affects the way we, and the other ‘side,’ thinks.

2. I am led to believe 1, because the vast majority of criticism that comes from the left to the right seems to assume that the right is operating under the same paradigm that the left is.

3. That the left assumes the right is operating under the same paradigm as the left is an implicit paradigm, not an explicit one: the critics on the left are unaware that they are even making this assumption.

4. The paradigm that masses of the neoconservative movement adopt is not the paradigm that the intellectual leaders of the neoconservative movement hold. And the intellectual leaders do not have the same paradigm as current Republican leaders or oil tzars.

The book is frightening, but not because Podhorotz has evil motives. His paradigm makes sense internally, and as far as I can tell, it has the same end-goal as most of us do: to acquire as much peace, stability, and democracy in this world as possible.

But there are differences. First, it reduces individual people to points in a system that can be adequately explained down to a handful of their explicit beliefs and definitive actions. Podhorotz is analyzing the situation, and he’s doing it well.

No analysis can account for all qualities that a person possesses and all the factors that are involved in a system while still maintaining any sense of clarity: analysis is how we think, but analysis works on ideas, not on actual things: actual things are too complicated for an idea to capture outright. 

Because an analysis is required to achieve clarity about a situation and make conclusions, and because an analysis is necessarily limited in the scope of things it can account for, then theories about what sorts of analyses are best are developed. But while theories can be more or less accurate, our meager minds are simply too limited to have a completely adequate, objective analysis.

Back to Podhoretz and the neoconservative paradigm: the analysis reduces individuals to a certain set of qualities: a group of their most explicit beliefs and definitive actions. Osama bin Laden is someone who wishes to destroy America and the freedoms that we possess and that which America stands for. This is, in fact, true. But it’s only a limited understanding of Osama. There is no need to take into account his social status, the affect his education and upbringing had on him, the affect his religion and random experiences had, or the things that he wishes to do that he legitimately believes are acts of good will. Not only is there no need, but to investigate these things has often been criticized as being traitorous; not by Podhoretz as far as I know, but certainly by others less crazy than Coulter.