Croaking Toads [RI1]
Why we should look at conflict in popular culture
(What is this? I explain here. You’re reading Chapter 1 in a whistle-stop tour through depictions of conflict in popular culture. You can go back to the intro here, or go on to Chapter 2 here)
“Rascals, would you live forever?”
So sang Frederick the Great to the hesitating Prussian Guards at the Battle of Kolin in 1757. “Rascals” had become “apes”, and “would you” “you wanna” by the time Michael Ironside bellowed it in 1997’s Starship Troopers. I used the quote during my interview for a PhD programme at Kings College Department of War Studies. I thought I was quoting the latter, my potential supervisor the former, and I was accepted largely on that basis. So it’s not like popular culture is without its uses when it comes to the study of conflict.
Stories need narrative, and politicians love narrative[1]. And I believe it is this thirst for narrative, and the desperate attempts to insert it where there frankly often isn’t one (or at least not a clean one) that lies behind the shared oversimplifications of conflict in popular culture and conflict in the political imagination. We live in a world of considerable complexity and limited understanding in which people — in all their contradictions — bounce off each other largely at random. Some of these interactions are violent and when that violence is systemic we call it conflict. Of course, there are stories to be found in all of this, but finding stories is not the same as finding understanding, and should not be confused for it.
Narrativization has other negative consequences too. For one thing: it tends rightwards. The liberal idea of a rules based international order is based on a certain inalienable moral code of right and wrong; a code it is not entirely reductive to refer to as “human rights”. Many critics of this consensus from the right, all of whom fancy themselves as Wyatt Earp no matter how cosseted and pedestrian their actual lives may be, believe that that such a code cannot be applied in the wild frontiers of the “real world” where “strong leaders” are required to take “pragmatic” morally dubious decisions in support of the “least-bad option”.[2]
Our storytellers are under pressure to be interesting, and so they tend to establish their stories at the extremes or beyond the parameters of what is normal, in the places where the rules of our society are most likely to break down[3]. This has the effect of making the taking of extreme actions that break the rules appear to be more morally justified. It also has the effect of making rare circumstances seem more common than they really are, feeding into our sense that we live in the wild west even when we live in Neasden, and even reaching the point where we start to think it is the rules themselves, not us, that is out of touch with “the real world”.
Storytelling also introduces the concept of poetic justice, and (perhaps this speaks of my own hang-ups) I feel this too leans rightwards. A specific example: one can, as I frequently have, both believe ideologically in the absolute wrongness of capital punishment in all circumstances and also believe that within the internal logic of a work of fiction a certain character needs to die — if only for narrative catharsis. And even if this isn’t a systemic effect, art certainly can be— and often is — used by the right as a tool of manufacturing consent.
But the worst thing this insertion of narrative does is mess with our conception of agency. Because if there’s one thing that politicians love more than a narrative it’s a narrative that they’re the star of. So they instinctively place themselves in the position of the protagonist.[4]
In recent years people have started to have some awareness, if not quite enough, of how problematic “white saviours” are — both in stories and in reality. But this isn’t the only issue that this assumption that you are foreign policy’s protagonist has. Protagonists tend to have almost unlimited power, or at least agency. Rather than understanding yourself to be a small and highly compromised part of a large and interconnected system over which you have little if any control; one imagines oneself behind a bank of levers. The decider. The only person who gets to say what happens next.[5]
That’s just not the way the world works. Ever. For anyone. But it’s particularly not the way the world works for a British politician in the early 2020s.
Britain used to be an empire. It successfully transitioned into the role of architect of the global system we have today. British lawyers and civil servants designed and built the UN, most of the world’s international treaties and institutions, and played a significant role in developing some of the standard tools of international intervention: UN peacekeeping is based on British colonial policing, the evolution of economic sanctions owes a lot to the Royal Navy’s Napoleonic blockades, the basis for the post world war two global order was decided at a summit aboard HMS Prince of Wales. But now Britain is a fading power: lower mid-level, of no more than regional significance. But the country hasn’t woken up to this fact, and still labours under delusions of relevance.
That is not to say that what the UK does next does not matter to the world. It does. Deeply. But the most important task for a British politician engaging with foreign policy is to understand that this story isn’t about them.
And we’re not the only one. Many analysts (and I think they are right) use the term “multipolarity” to describe the current era of inter-state relationships. We no longer have five or two or even one superpower to whose drumbeat the entire world dances. Instead the top table, insofar as it still exists, is occupied by a complex tapestry of high-to-mid level regional powers. These powers have spheres of influence within which what they say usually goes or at very least matters greatly; but these spheres overlap, and are contested, particularly at the margins. This is a landscape in which there are no world changing protagonists; only politics, complexity and marginal gains.
To navigate this complexity we need nuance, and we need to understand the perspective of all the different actors involved — not only our own. And we need to avoid the other simplifications I identified in the introduction that compound this error: the Manichean sense of good and evil, the cartoonish views of the violence itself, the lack of focus on aftermath, the failure to comprehend that foreign policy crises are not discrete and episodic.
In order to do this we first need to understand the nature of the problem. But that’s very difficult. The corridors of power are hard places to access, let alone to do any meaningful ethnographic research (also there are already books that try to do that and you are not reading one). So instead let’s do something different and more fun. Let’s study an ecosystem that falls into many of the same fallacies (or is at least similar enough for our illustrative purposes) but is far more accessible. Let’s study the narrativization of conflict in its native habitat. Let’s study war in popular culture.
Click here for chapter 2.
Notes
[1] Just as I was finishing this draft a book came out that explains this point much more comprehensively — “Time’s Lie: The Narrativisation of Life” by Leo Cookman. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t yet read it, but I understand from the reviews that it presents a fairly comprehensive argument that this is indeed the way an increasing number of people, not just politicians, see the world, and that this has a number of negative consequences — well beyond the ones I have quickly sketched out.
[2] One can critique the liberal rules based international order from the left too, and I intend to. But I think we have to accept that the critique of it from the right has had the effect of pushing our world in negative directions.
[3] Take Ian M Banks’ Culture series of novels: some of the most utopian and hopeful left wing science fiction ever written. The premise is that by and large the use of force is not justifiable except in very very rare “Special Circumstances” . Therefore there is a tiny entity of that name that is permitted to take morally dubious actions in extreme and unusual situations. The entire series then almost exclusively concentrates on those extreme and unusual situations and the actions of Special Circumstances. Obviously.
[4] I feel social media exacerbates the problem, in that it encourages individuals to centre themselves in conversations. The easiest way to caveat an argument you only have 280 characters to make is by starting it with the words “I feel”. Like I just did.
[5] The youtube vlogger Princess Weekes has a good line on this in her video essay “Empire and Imperialism in Children’s Cartoons”, pointing out that liberation is invariably driven by rebellion from below but liberation in popular culture is invariably presented as a gift from above, as part of the elite protagonist’s redemption arc.
