You don’t have to believe that the end of the world is nigh to enjoy this blog, but it helps. A scan of recent posts throws up Alex on “life after the flood”, Charlie on why the government won’t tell you when that flood is coming, and David on how John McCain is a harbinger of much nastiness to come. Fair enough – the future does look sort of shit right now. But, I hear my co-authors cry, can we quantify the level of shitness, possibly through the utilization of funky social science?
Their answer? In sum, “ooh yeah”. Alex set out some ideas on how G8 leaders could spice up meetings on the Guardian website last week, and his proposals sound more productive than the reality by a long shot:
Global leaders need to develop much deeper shared awareness of common challenges – and each other’s positions on them. Today’s summits are too formal and rushed to produce that. Leaders should spend more time together outside the tightly scripted confines of formal meetings – the original idea behind the G8 – and they should employ full-time rather than part-time “sherpas”, tasked to think through (and even “war game”) future scenarios, rather than fill time drafting communiques.
Now, I’m basically kept on this blog as the in-house miserable reactionary with a remit to point out that very little is really new out there, but I do actually believe in a lot of this stuff. But, as ever, I sense a historical precedent coming on. Reading Alex’s piece, I wondered what rules the G8 gamesters might follow. The set that came to mind were penned by Herman Kahn, a Cold War-era RAND thinker who founded the Hudson Institute. Here are his guidelines on “The Uses of Scenarios”:
(1) They serve to call attention, sometimes dramatically and persuasively, to the larger range of possibilities that must be considered in the analysis of the future. Scenarios are one way to force oneself and others to plunge into the unfamiliar and rapidly changing world of the present and the future;
(2) They dramatize and illustrate the possibilities they focus on in a very useful way. (They may do little or nothing for the possibilities they do not focus on);
(3) They force the analyst to deal with details and dynamics that he might easily avoid treating if he restricted himself to abstract considerations;
(4) They help to illuminate the interaction of psychological, social, economic, cultural, political, and military factors, including the influence of individual political personalities upon what otherwise might be abstract considerations, and they do so in a form that permits the comprehension of many such interacting elements at once;
(5) They can illustrate forcefully, sometimes in oversimplified fashion, certain principles, issues, or questions that might be ignored or lost if one insisted on taking examples only from the complex and controversial real world;
(6) They may also be used to consider alternative possible outcomes of certain real past and present events, such as Suez, Lebanon, Laos, or Berlin;
(7) They can be used as artificial “case histories” and “historical anecdotes” to make up to some degree for the paucity of actual examples.
That may all seem quite useful. But beware where your ideas come from: Kahn is now largely forgotten, but in his day he was a notorious advocate of nuclear war-fighting. Some of his writings on the subject were reproduced verbatim by Stanley Kubrick in Doctor Strangelove. He used his scenarios to suggest that death-rates after a nuclear exchange might be acceptable, and he treated most arguments against nuclear weapons as “nonissues” or “almost nonissues” until the end of his career. And while some of his presentations lasted for literally days on end, most of his projections are now dismissed as baseless tosh.
None of which is to say that gaming scenarios, or even Kahn’s guidelines, should be abandoned. But if we are to promote a new generation of scenario-planning, strategy-making, war-gaming and thinking about resilence, we shouldn’t forget that a lot of the intellectual tools at our disposal have been passed down to us from defense intellectuals we might feel distinctly uncomfortable with.
It’s obvious really. But worth keeping in mind.
