Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. Between 2005 and 2007 I completed an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. I worked for five years for the Canadian federal government, including completing the Accelerated Economist Training Program, and then completed a PhD in Political Science at the University of Toronto in 2023.

Nationalism and selfishness

Yaks grunted and snorted around the tent, munching closer and closer. I shook the tarp to provoke a retreating thunder of hoofs. Against the distant drone of traffic I could hear the delicate pinging of flies trapped between the tent’s inner and outer walls. I lay in my sleeping bag, aching all over, and fervently hoped humans never made it to Mars. We didn’t deserve a new world; we’d just wreck it all over again. As a kid I’d genuinely believed that the discovery of alien life, whether sentient beings or microbes, would change lives, incite a revolution near-holy in its repercussions. At the very least people would be kinder to each other, whether Turkish or Armenian, Indian or Pakistani, Tibetan or Uyghur or Han Chinese. We’d collectively awaken to the fact that we’re all lost in this mystery together.

Now I wasn’t convinced. Discovering extraterrestrial life wouldn’t change a thing, just as learning to fly didn’t lift us higher as people, just as Voyager’s pale blue dot photograph failed to dissolve nationalism the way it should have if we’d truly seen it. “Look again at that dot,” Carl Sagan pleaded. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Meanwhile we’ve discovered microbes eating sulphur in boiling vents at the bottom of the ocean, Earth-size exoplanets orbiting distant suns, proof everywhere of the rarity, ingenuity, and resplendence of life in the universe—and such facts haven’t budged our priorities an inch. What is the point of science and exploration if people persist in living and dying as they always have, namely selfishly, obliviously?

Maybe infinity begins at the point we can’t see past, can’t love past. How small we are when this point is ourselves. The problem with borders, I was beginning to realize, isn’t that they are monstrous, offensive, and unnatural constructions. The problem with borders is the same as the problem of evil that Hannah Arendt identified: their banality. We subconsciously accept them as part of the landscape—at least those of us privileged by them, granted meaningful passports—because they articulate our deepest, least exalted desires, for prestige and permanence, order and security, always at the cost of someone or something else. Borders reinforce the idea of the alien, the Other, stories separate and distinct from ourselves. But would such fictions continue to stand if most of us didn’t agree with them, or at least quietly benefit from the inequalities they bolster? The barbed wire begins here, inside us, cutting through our very core.

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. Alfred A. Knopf Canada. 2018. p. 244–5 (italics in original)

Hindsight bias

In one of the Dan Carlin Hardcore History series, he describes a discussion with a mentor who explained to him that the hardest thing about understanding history is forgetting how we know things will turn out. That impairs our ability to understand why people behaved as they did at the time, particularly because we over-estimate how likely the actual outcome was, and how obvious it should have been to people doing the choosing.

This talk by Nick Means does a good job of demonstrating how hindsight bias works in detail:

As it recommends, I am now reading Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’. The focus is primarily on things like air crashes and industrial accidents — which I find it interesting to read about anyway — but it also has lessons for anybody trying to learn from the past. The central lesson of Dekker’s book, that we can only understand the past if we make the effort to understand why the people then made the choices they did, seems applicable to policy and political analysis in general. In terms of organizing, the shift in emphasis from blaming individuals and treating the problem as solved to understanding what caused them (and likely will cause others) to make an error could be useful for reducing interpersonal conflict and improving performance.

Harrer on Iraqi WMD

However, by concealing their past intentions, the Iraqis encouraged the assumption that those were their future intentions as well. In the first phase of the Iraqi cover-up, the hidden past intentions certainly did reflect the goals for the future of the political leadership, even though Iraqi scientists and experts knew that restarting the programs would be virtually impossible. But why did Iraq not come clean later? Here again comes the problem of the past: admitting a filament-winding machine after the inspectors seem to have forgotten about it, would merely instigate new questions about what else remained to be declared. The piecemeal approach of the first years – with few exceptions always admitting only what would have been discovered anyway – destroyed the credibility of Iraq’s attempt to really come clean in the years 1996 to 1998. In the words of Jafar:

Our adherence to Aziz’s four principles — conceived to limit damage to Iraq’s credibility — actually triggered the opposite effect. One cover-up led to another, and another, which became a stressful exercise … a course which never failed to boomerang and blow up in the face of Iraqi officials.

However, Jafar, who has not only studied in the West like many other Iraqi scientists, but actually lived there both as a child and later, attributes the Iraqi approach in part to “cultural reasons:” in Arab Islamic culture the concept of the “confession box” where “you go in and tell the whole story,” is missing – the process is done in bits and pieces.

Harrer, Gudrun. Dismantling the Iraqi Nuclear Programme: The Inspections of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1991–1998. Routledge, 2014. p. 146