Contrarians

 I was reading an interesting new biography the other week of the Quaker intellectual Henry Cadbury (don't ask). I loved the book, and Cadbury proved to be a fascinating and in some ways enviable figure. He lived the type of ideal twentieth century life I always imagined for myself—he was part public intellectual, part human rights advocate, part scholar and teacher, working in both the nonprofit and academic fields, while taking controversial and influential stances on the major issues of the day. 

Amidst this incredibly diverse career, however, what emerges as the stand-out moments (at least in this book's telling) were probably Cadbury's public opposition to U.S. entry into both World War I and World War II. Such positions, of course, were a logical consequence of Cadbury's ideological pacifism (though not one followed out as rigorously by other prominent Quakers of the time—perhaps surprisingly). But simply for taking them, Cadbury faced grave professional consequences and public opprobrium. 

Conventional wisdom these days would tend to hold that Cadbury was right on World War I (and the fact that he was fired from Haverford for taking it is now seen as unjust persecution); whereas he was wrong on World War II. Yet, it's not entirely clear why this had to be the case. Our notion that World War I was the quintessentially "pointless" and "absurd" war reflects the judgment of postwar intellectuals—but if the war's outcome had gone differently, they might have propounded a very different narrative. 

There seems to be a certain amount of arbitrariness in the universal intellectual verdict on the First World War. In hindsight, after all, it's not clear that the moral alarm about Prussian actions was entirely unjustified. To be sure, there was a great deal of inflated wartime rhetoric going around. The atrocity stories circulated about the Germans appear to have been partially if not wholly invented. But the German incursion into Belgium was genuinely unlawful and flagrant. People were not wrong to condemn it. 

Cadbury, to his credit, condemned it too. In his published writing at the time of U.S. entry into the war, he criticized German aggression toward Belgium in strong terms. He insisted, however—for the sake of peace—that the Allies should negotiate in good faith to settle the conflict as soon as possible. Even if Germany was in the wrong—his argument seemed to run—it is better to compromise with the enemy than to spill endless blood in a war that might have been brought more rapidly to a close. 

Simply for making this humane plea, Cadbury lost his job and was publicly reviled in the press. His reputation only began to recover once the nation's intelligentsia as a whole had cooled off somewhat from its initial war-mania. Looking back on it shortly thereafter, it was easy to see Cadbury's stance on World War I as courageous and basically right—while the vitriolic attacks on him were a case of misguided mob-thinking. Within just a few years, the intellectual consensus had already shifted in Cadbury's favor. 

The reverse happened, however, with Cadbury's stance on World War II. Today, even if we respect his principled and logically-consistent approach to pacifism, most of us think that he got this conflict wrong. In one particularly bad take, Cadbury publicly opposed even so much as a limited economic boycott of Nazi-made goods—arguing that "economic coercion" was a form of violence, as much as war was. This position of non-resistance to political evil now no doubt seems to us naïve—even reckless. 

The question for today, then, is whether our stance on the current conflict in Ukraine should be more like Cadbury's position on World War I, or more like his position on World War II. If the former, then supporters of U.S. military aid come across as war-mad jingoists, and the people calling for a settlement on Russian terms come across as the fair-minded Cadbury. If it's the latter, by contrast, then the people calling for a settlement sound like so many naïfs and Neville Chamberlains. 

In the course of the conflict, this blog has adopted both perspectives alternately. And indeed, it may be that the Ukraine war has elements of both—or at least, that neither analogy is wholly implausible. 

On the one hand, Putin is openly invading his neighbors while invoking spurious claims of defending Russian-speaking minorities. This all smacks a great deal of Hitler annexing the Sudetenland. Meanwhile, a growing contingent of far-right fascist parties—including the one that may shortly be coming to power in France—openly aligns itself with Putin, and urges appeasement and complicity in Putin's aggressive attempts to remake Europe's borders. It all feels very much like the 1930s all over again. 

On the other hand, it is plain at this point that Ukraine has dug into an unrealistic bargaining position that in some ways resembles the intransigence of the Allies that stood in the way of resolving World War I. The Ukrainian government's current position is that the war can only conclude when Russia abandons Crimea and Ukraine joins NATO—two outcomes utterly anathema to the other side. Meanwhile, this week, nations are debating the outcome of the war in Switzerland—but without Russia at the table.

Of course, Putin has no right to claim Crimea, or any part of Ukraine—just as Germany had no right to invade Belgium. Putin is wholly and completely in the wrong. He is the aggressor here. But, that does not necessarily mean that compromise is still the least bad option. It could be that we need to take a Cadbury approach to ending the war: Cadbury too (for all he was falsely painted as pro-German) had no sympathy whatsoever for German war aims; he simply held that compromise was inevitable to secure peace. 

The Greenwaldians, the alt-left, and the alt-right who oppose U.S. aid to Ukraine all probably see themselves as heroic Cadburys, then—facing down the persecution of the stuffy Haverford faculty simply for making a common-sense plea for compromise. They would see people like me, who often accuse them (with reason, in my view) of being "pro-Putin," as being just like the Haverford board of directors—hurling an ad hominem accusation because I have drunk the jingoistic Kool-Aid of our time. 

Yet, meanwhile, I see them as being like the appeasers and isolationists of the 1930s. If they are like Cadbury at all, then, they are like the Cadbury of the World War II era, who didn't even want to dirty his hands with so much as a nonviolent boycott of Nazi goods, because he was simply that squeamish about taking action to resist political evil. And indeed, the ideological alignments of our time seem much more like the 1930s than they do the period leading up to the First World War. 

Look, again, at what's happening in Europe. Far-right parties sympathetic to Putin are gaining power across the continent—shades of Vichy and the rest of the "fascist international" of the 1930s. Mostly, their only reason for opposing Western support to Ukraine is a flagrantly self-interested one. They are tired of paying the higher energy costs that come from sanctioning Russian gas. They would rather let Putin invade and annex his neighbors than pay a bit more at the pump. 

In terms of the dangers we are up against, then, it seems more likely that the West will withdraw support for Ukraine too soon, rather than that it will prolong it past the point at which a reasonable compromise could have been reached. The far-right parties of Europe and the United States "fear for the quo pro quid" with Russia (to quote E.E. Cummings on the subject of the West's failure to stand up to Russian aggression in 1956). All of it is playing out exactly as I warned it would in February 2022. 

This isn't to say that the Western powers should endorse every Ukrainian war aim in its maximal form and oppose every chance for compromise with Putin that could hasten the end of the conflict. I think the opposite. I believe it is worth compromising sometimes—even with flagrantly unlawful aggression—for the sake of halting the bloodshed. (The same is true in Gaza, by the way—both sides have their legitimate grievances against the other; but a ceasefire is nonetheless preferable to prolonging the butchery!)

All I am saying is that the opposite policy would be even worse. The real concern right now—regardless of the official Ukrainian bargaining position—is not that they will fight on until every last inch of Crimea is retaken, and that U.S. aid will enable them to prolong this crusade. The much more likely nightmare scenario is that Trump and France's "National Rally" will cut a deal on Putin's terms, selling out Ukraine and simply delaying global war by a few years until Putin next decides to invade a NATO country. 

To repeat, then, it seems much more like we are living in the 1930s right now than in the World War I era. 

Of course, the Greenwaldians will accuse me of only adopting this position out of national bias. "Of course you think that," they will say—"because everyone thinks that. It's the conventional wisdom of your country, because it aligns with U.S. foreign policy—just as the hysterical denunciations of 'Prussianism' served the policy of Wilson. We are the only ones standing above all of that. We are the only ones who can see past the short-sighted jingoism of our era, and purge our minds of all this war-fever." 

And of course, I can see their point. I am sure that I cannot entirely escape the bias of our collective national psyche. I am a product of my times, as much as anyone else. Yet, it's worth emphasizing that there is a kind of bias in the opposite direction as well. Contrarianism—the desire to regard oneself as the lone persecuted prophet—can become a mental bias in its own right. And, as Wilfred Trotter once observed, it can be all the harder to rid oneself of this bias because it is contrarian. 

Trotter makes this point in an elegant passage in his classic book on group psychology, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War. In a later section of the book, published years after the first part, Trotter reflects back with some embarrassment on the jingoistic tone of the earlier portions (one of which was written in 1915). He admits that, with the benefit of hindsight, these passages now strike him as overwrought. There was too much pompous verbiage, in the first section, about the evils of "Prussianism." 

Trotter therefore admits that he was guilty of falling in with the collective groupthink of his time and place. He could not escape the national bias of being a British intellectual concerned about the war. But, he then adds, the critics of the British war effort were not immune to bias either—they were simply subject to a different bias. And precisely because their bias was in the minority, it made it harder for them to see it as a bias—and thereby, paradoxically, it became harder for them to shake its influence.

Everyone debating the question, then, in Trotter's view, ought to discount the validity of their current opinion by a certain amount in order to offset their natural bias—whether pro-national or anti-national. Moreover, he then added, the "anti-national" camp ought to make especially "drastic deductions" in the presumed certainty of their position "in view of the supposed immunity to prejudice with which minorities are rather apt to assume the absence of vulgar approval endows them."

Indeed, this does rather seem to explain what is happening with the Greenwaldians. In some ways, they have internalized too well the lessons of their mentors and predecessors—people like Noam Chomsky and I.F. Stone. They believe that the greatest intellectual risk is to fall into step with the ideological groupthink and conformity of one's own country's foreign policy. If the "foreign policy establishment" all thinks one thing, therefore—then the opposite must be the case. 

Yet, it should be immediately clear that this is just as irrational a bias as it would be to assume that U.S. foreign policy is always right. If everyone is all saying the same thing, after all, it could be because they've drunk the Kool-Aid—but it could also just be because what they are saying is obviously true. The conventional wisdom occasionally becomes conventional for good reason. It could be, for instance, that "everyone" in the U.S. establishment says Putin was wrong to invade his neighbor because he was!

There is a bias, then, in foreign policy contrarianism as much as there is in pro-establishment thinking. And, to Trotter's point, the bias among contrarian intellectuals may be even worse, and harder to escape from, precisely because it is harder for people to recognize it. The contrarians think: "I can't be biased; look, I'm defying the conventional wisdom of everyone else! They are the ones who are biased." And they fail to realize in the process that this very desire to be the prophetic outsider can be itself a kind of bias. 

As even Cadbury's own career illustrated, the Cadburys are not always right. The lone dissenting voice may be unjustly persecuted at times—but at others it may be justly ignored, because it is actually wrong. The groupthink establishment thinking of the 1930s suggested that Hitler was a dangerous aggressive menace. The lone prophetic voices like Cadbury urged complete nonresistance and appeasement. And, in retrospect, it's easy to see that the establishment voices were right; and Cadbury was wrong. 

Of course, a friend of mine argues that the anti-national contrarianism of the Greenwaldians has an even uglier basis. He thinks they are all Russian assets who have long since been purchased with kompromat or money. And who knows, he could be right. But I think reaching for this conclusion is to multiply entities unnecessarily. There is a more parsimonious explanation: namely, that they mean it all in good faith. They are therefore something more like "useful idiots" for Putin than knowing agents. 

And it's not so hard to see how they could get there. All their lives, they have been arguing that the U.S. is always wrong. And usually, they were right. The U.S. was wrong about Iraq, Vietnam, and a great deal else. But the assumption that the U.S. is always wrong, and the dissidents are always right, can implant a prejudice even more dangerously strong than the bias to favor the establishment. It can lead people to contort reality in the most ludicrous ways, in order to find some way the U.S. position must be unjustified. 

Meanwhile, the reality all the time may be just as simple as it appears: Putin invaded Ukraine. He has been responsible for untold thousands of needless deaths, of both soldiers and civilians (including his own soldiers). He is the guilty party here. And maybe, the reason why the "conventional wisdom" has crystalized so readily behind this viewpoint is not because they have all been brainwashed by Western media—but simply because it is true!