Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 2, No. 1 | Knowledge and its Returns (low bandwidth)

Stephen Graubard is Professor of History Emeritus at Brown University. The long-time editor of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he served in that position from 1962 to 2001. Most issues of the journal were reissued as books, and he served as editor of many, dealing with diverse subjects, including, among others, Europe; universities; Edward Gibbon; Historical Studies Today; Showa, the Japan of Hirohito; Australia; artificial intelligence; and Science in Culture. His published books include studies of British Labour and the Russian Revolution; Burke, Disraeli, and Churchill; Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind and Mr. Bush’s War. He is now writing a work, to be published in 2004, on the American presidency in the twentieth century.

In medicine, as in so many of the natural sciences, the links between new knowledge, theoretical and empirical, and their subsequent applications are easily established. For those, for example, who wish to determine how specific diseases were eradicated, what role science played in these admittedly successful ventures, how funding, public and private, contributed to prolonging life and diminishing suffering, there are ample resources for such inquiry. Regrettably, no comparable certainty is as easily realized in the social sciences, though the evidence is scarcely less abundant. When one takes issues like war and peace, for example, no less complex and certainly no less important than those that affect the health and well-being of the world’s population, the relation between knowledge and success, and even more between the absence of knowledge and failure, is too rarely investigated or acknowledged. It is in this area, admittedly more controversial than any in purely scientific inquiry, that new research is required, more than ever since the tragic events of September 11th.

What is one to say, for example, of the extraordinary success achieved in the almost half century that began in 1945 and ended in 1989 that saw war avoided between two heavily armed states, ideologically and politically hostile, the Soviet Union and the United States? Is credit for this undoubtedly remarkable achievement to be given simply to political leaders in both those societies, and perhaps in others as well who saw the need for restraint, preached it, and practiced it? Or, ought one to acknowledge that in the absence of knowledge, of many kinds, these heavily armed states might have resorted to war, as others had done in 1914, with even more catastrophic consequences? How much did the study of arms control, supported initially largely in the United States, create knowledge eventually shared with others that made all who possessed atomic weapons realize the hazards of their use? How much were the control systems, devised by the great powers, the intellectual inventions of scholars, men and women who understood that the new weapons were not simply more powerful than those that had existed previously, and would not be controlled by the legal procedures valued by so many in the inter-war years who constantly preached the necessity of disarmament? To argue this is not to denigrate the achievements of a Reagan or a Gorbachev, though both were almost certainly exaggerated; it is simply to say that a peace, maintained for forty-five years, despite constant provocations, owes a great deal to that generation of arms control scholars whose names are legion, today too little remembered. In any tribute to peacemakers, the name of Bernard Brodie must figure prominently, along with dozens of others. They developed the ideas that recommended restraint. The institutions that supported their research—that recognized the imperative need for new knowledge—must also be recalled; the two together produced the intellectual armament that so greatly helped to prevent war.

Peace, however, was not maintained simply through the invention of a new arms control philosophy. For two potentially belligerent states, each supremely confident of its own virtue, knowledge of the other was essential. Know Your Enemy (John Murray, 2002), the title of Percy Cradock’s recent book, might have been the inspired title of any number of books published during the long years of the Cold War. In fact, knowledge of the Soviet Union, as it existed in the United States before 1941, was minimal, communicated largely by a small number of cultivated and perceptive Russian émigré scholars in the country’s leading universities. Though the war did something to create a greater acquaintance with the Bolsheviks who had held power since 1917, much of what was learned was subjective, greatly influenced by the understandable appreciation of a regime and a people who had courageously resisted the Nazis, and had made an incomparable contribution to the final Allied victory in 1945. The disillusion that followed the war had effects, both good and bad, but no one can doubt that the impetus given to a more serious study of the Soviet Union in all its dimensions must figure as one of its more beneficial results. Again, the new knowledge of Soviet society, the new learning, supported by foundations like Carnegie Corporation*, gave the country an intellectual resource it had previously lacked. While the federal government, in the CIA and other agencies, also supported research on Soviet Russia and its satellites, and while much of this remains secret even today, it would be interesting to know whether their contributions to an understanding of Soviet politics and society was in any way equal to that of the small army of “Sovietologists,” in universities and research institutions, who published their work openly. That knowledge helped greatly to shape the opinion of ordinary citizens, of journalists, politicians, diplomats and professors, of all who felt an obligation to speak or write on the subject. The importance of that knowledge cannot be exaggerated; one may argue legitimately that it did much to preserve the peace and to prevent war.

The Knowledge Void
Where such knowledge has not existed, where scholarship has been weak and fragmentary, journalism has been the mainstay of public opinion, and the results have generally been less happy. While it would be an exaggeration to say that the errors made in Vietnam through four presidential administrations—those of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford—can be attributed principally to the paucity of knowledge in the United States of the societies of southeast Asia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, or of the country’s inadequate understanding of the nature of guerrilla warfare, such a claim is not wholly unreasonable. In the Second World War, while the country started with substantial knowledge of its principal European enemies, Germany and Italy, and with considerably less knowledge of Japan, it recognized very early the necessity of making great efforts to increase its knowledge of all three. By providing instruction to both civilians and selected military personnel in the requisite languages, but also, more importantly, in the politics, economics, and cultures of societies fundamentally different from the American, a major contribution was made to winning the war but also in keeping the peace. The intellectual profit the country realized through this investment in education cannot be overstated. No comparable effort was made before the war, during the war, or since the war in southeast Asia. It remains terra incognita for all but a few experts able to claim learning in an area that today embraces hundreds of millions, if south Asia is seen to be integrally connected to it. That ignorance is replicated in other areas as well.

These are problems of the past that persist today. Another, however, has become paramount since September 11th. While research of even the most elementary kind cannot fail to reveal that terrorism figured as a subject of great interest to those concerned with rogue states and revolutionaries after the demise of the Soviet Union, it is no secret that terrorism never commanded the intellectual resources given over many decades to a study of arms control or international Communism. To say that the field has lacked definition, and cannot today claim intellectual pioneers of the distinction of Brodie or Adam Ulam—whose number might be multiplied a hundred times—is to state the obvious. More serious, perhaps, and worth reflecting on, is whether the subject is today being pursued in a way that gives promise of providing defenses this country and others so desperately require. The atom bomb obliged whole societies to think the unthinkable, but also to reflect on ways to prevent the unthinkable. Is this, in fact, happening today? Or are we hearing a muffled debate that never deals with essentials? Does the creation of an Office of Homeland Security, however important, or the institution of new surveillance procedures at airports and in other public places, begin to acknowledge the seriousness of a problem as threatening as any posed by the Soviet Union in the pre-Gorbachev era? What needs to be studied—what needs to be known—if the next attack is not to make that of the Twin Towers seem as primitive as the early bombing of Berlin when compared with what followed at Hiroshima? Who, then, is to study what? Are atomic devices, chemical and biological weapons the ones that require close scrutiny, or are others, more conventional in every respect, capable of inflicting fewer casualties while producing no diminished sense of insecurity? What can private and public institutions, as distinct from the federal government, do to encourage these studies and indeed give them intellectual authority? Is the United States today a country equally hospitable to the objective study of Arab and Israeli politics, of the religious fundamentalism common to both? Indeed, is that the region of the world that waits to be studied, more seriously than at any time in the past? Does this country’s continued reliance on Middle Eastern oil determine much of American policy in the region, and does this dependence not guarantee continued acceptance of governments that can never be mistaken for democracies? Do all such policies contribute to Muslim hostility? Are these the issues that we need to know more about, or is this a time to study how terrorists are made and why it is so difficult to control them? In a time when secrecy seems imperative, when politicians and journalists are reluctant to risk themselves, fearing the catastrophe that may occur at any moment that will show them to have been callow and unfeeling, there is a desperate need for more knowledge, for more informed discussion of conditions too frequently ignored. As with the circumstances that prevailed after 1945, yesterday’s defense solutions are not likely to be useful in resolving the twenty-first century’s crises. How can whole populations be instructed in the dangers that now impend?

Scholarship is the Key
There are no obvious answers to any of the questions posed in this essay. All, however, presume a willingness to study the present and to learn from the past, not only that of ancient Greece and Rome, of nineteenth-century Germany, France and England, but also of the United States. We need to know more about our political and social system, how it has changed since the time of Lincoln, Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Truman and Eisenhower. Kennedy and Nixon, Carter, Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton are not simply the political heirs of these earlier men. To learn more about them all, so fundamentally different in their intellectual and moral capacities and concerns, but also in their political understanding, is not simply to study individual administrations in times of war and peace. It is to inquire closely into the ideas and values common in their time that made certain policies palatable, and others unthinkable. What institutional innovations were attempted in the long twentieth century, by whom, and with what success? How was public opinion changed, and with what consequences, and for whom? In short, at the moment, there is an imperative need to know the democracies of today, including our own, no less important, perhaps, than learning about regimes, groups, and individuals who for whatever reason choose to threaten these democracies. Philip Bobbitt, in his recently published book, The Shield of Achilles (Knopf, 2002) argues that the “long war” that started in 1914 and ended in 1990 is indeed over, but that the threat of further conflict, of a very different kind, is no less great. His is not simply the cry of a Cassandra; rather, he is arguing for an understanding of the world we live in, and while there is no need to accept his definitions of that world, there is a desperate need for the kind of knowledge that no amount of investigative reporting can ever provide, that only the scholar can bring, marrying theory to a close study of empirical fact. We have never been more privileged with respect to information; the urgent need today is to know how to use that information to devise policies to create again the sense of personal security and safety that so many once imagined nation states were in a position to provide. That knowledge is desperately needed, and only institutions committed to social scientific inquiry of a difficult, sensitive and potentially contentious kind can stimulate individuals to produce it.

* The Russian Research Center at Harvard University was founded in 1947 with support from Carnegie Corporation, which continued its funding for ten years. The Corporation’s support for the center was aimed at stimulating “…a larger volume of research in the Russian field [and giving] impetus to studies which will make use of the best of modern social science methods in an attempt to understand some of the crucial problems of Russian behavior.”