Careful scientists involved in behavioral research are ever-vigilant for a particular kind of error. Are the results colored by the experimental conditions themselves? Is the aggression of Jane Goodall’s chimpanzee colonies a natural phenomena, telling us something about the nature of primates, or is it simply how primates act when they’re in the presence of their human observers? Child Psychiatrists and Psychologists see this kind of error all the time. Parents bring a child in complaining of a certain behavior, and it turns out that the cause is some idiosyncratic parenting style rather than something wrong with the child. Some call this "law of unintended consequences." In intense relationships, it’s ubiquitous. What spouse hasn’t been in a marital argument that started out as a complaint about something, only to hear that the "something" is explained as a reaction to your own "something else?" It’s so common that it’s a testimonial to the power of human affiliative needs that any marriage lasts beyond infatuation – survives the "he said, she said" era. My hat’s off to Marital Therapists who spend their days trying to parse such things with warring couples.
When it comes to large groups, like those groups we call countries, such parsing becomes impossible. The tangle in the Middle East reaches back to the dawn of time and will never be solved by figuring out who is "right." If anything, like most of human history, it’s the battle between groups of people who are sure they’re "right" that perpetuates the whole unending mess. But now we have an insoluable problem involving this law of unintended consequences. In response to an overwhelming provocation, the bombing of the World Trade Towers, we attacked the wrong enemy. It’s clear that in doing this, we fueled the fires that lead to the attack on us in the first place. Bin Laden sought to intimidate us with his attack. We sought to intimidate our enemies with our attack on Iraq. Now, the Insurgency is trying to intimidate us. And so it goes. We can never undo our invasion of Iraq, so we will now have to deal with both the already difficult situation that exists in the Middle East AND the situation we’ve caused by going off half cocked.
There is really no solution to this impossible situation. All we can do is pick our way through it, bit by bit, very carefully keeping an eye always pointed towards which part is the result of our own "provocation." The only thing we can be sure of is that our current leaders can’t help us. They think they know what to do, and it’s gradually dawning on us that not only do they not know what to do, they are absolutely incapable of looking through glasses informed by the "law of unintended consequences." Too bad for us for sure.
Too bad for them too, because they have to go away now.
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