Why are intelligent people sometimes so utterly mindless? In considering the question of the relationship between mindfulness and teleology, one marvels at the brilliant former Yale and Johns Hopkins professor who stands as the indisputable architect of one of the most misguided foreign policy abominations in American history – the war in Iraq.
Indeed, why did then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and his neoconservative brains trust believe, in the former’s words, that "The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their liberator." (USA Today, March 31, 2003) We were not greeted with flowers and candy in the streets of Baghdad, as promised by Wolfowitz as far back as the mid 1990s when the neocons were demanding regime change in Iraq and, with it, the mythic completion of the first war in Iraq.
Iraq today has been reduced to tragic nihilism. This owes, in large part, to what Thompson (2004) would say is the lack of “fundamental circularity” (p.382) between science and philosophy in the approach to the war taken by Wolfowitz and others. Interestingly, Thompson says that such absence of circulation is itself nihilistic by failing to understand that true mindfulness exists at the busy intersection of the objective and subjective or, say, between explicit fact and lived experience.
The ideological blindness suffered by Wolfowitz seems both ontological and teleological in nature. It seems to have removed strategic insight, historical precedent and operational clarity from his leadership, reducing his efforts to tactical considerations over advocating and justifying the war instead of questioning its premise and adjudicating it correctly. In the process, mindfulness born of asking questions and assessing trade-offs was lost.
The Wolfowitz ontology as energized by the events of 9/11 is one that views humankind in rather sinister terms. His teleology is one that considers human purpose as functioning primarily to seek power and dominion over others. As such, an ontology born of negativity would seem to encourage an equally pessimistic teleology and, in the process, ignore the circulation and mindfulness advocated by Thompson (2004) and Senge et al (2005).
Indeed, one wonders whether Wolfowitz spent even one minute in self-doubt and reflection at the bottom of Senge’s U Curve. When the world is viewed largely in power terms, then power seems the only response. Senge et al speak to this phenomenon in writing that, “What distinctive power does exist at the top of hierarchies is usually skewed toward power to destroy rather than the power to build.” (p. 186)
Teleology and Ideology
So what shaped Wolfowitz’s thinking and behavior? For a man reputed to be brilliant, how could he have been blinded to the rather straightforward lessons one could learn about previous failed efforts to conquer and organize Iraq even from simply watching a movie like Lawrence of Arabia? Does teleology based on pessimism create this kind of mindlessness? Perhaps. It does seem, however, that teleology also forms an interim dimension of ideology that can promote a self-certain, self-justifying mindfulness of sorts that supports the immediate political objectives and serves the career and institutional aspirations of the principals involved. Outside the paradigm and its self-justifications, however, everything else becomes mindless.
It’s worth asking whether Wolfowitz and others would have thought differently had they actually served in the military or had children in the services today. It’s possible that such lived experiences would have tempered their misguided enthusiasm.
Fiol & O’Connor (2003) suggest another fascinating possibility. They raise the notion advanced by Weick and colleagues as well as Langer that a preoccupation with failure actually promotes mindfulness. “Evidence suggests that when socially accepted justifications for unsuccessful outcomes are too costly, or when such outcomes are seen to be personally relevant, people tend to employ more mindfully complex decision strategies.” (p.64)
The ironclad certainty about the war expressed by Wolfowitz and others from the start underscores as much a disregard for the worries of failure as it does for the neglect of personal accountability. It also most certainly disregards the health and welfare of our brave soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen who have been asked to sacrifice in the name of an unjust, incompetently prosecuted war.
The neoconservatives were blinded – poisoned, really – by their own ideological framework that defied both the “scientific” truths of Iraqi history as well the “philosophical” truths of man’s reaction to occupation and political systems imposed from outside. It does not appear, however, that these men are suffering now or will suffer in the future from the kind of reflection or remorse that comes with perpetrating such events. Perhaps a dose of humility born of Robert McNamara’s post-Vietnam epiphany represents a kind of mindfulness that actually forces people to question their underlying ontologies and teleologies.
Far from developing Pentagon “support structures in a way that encourages scanning for contradictory information” (Fiol & O’Connor, p.65), Wolfowitz and others were selectively and subjectively parsing information to make their case, no matter its folly. They also seemed then, as now, to be utterly detached from the “realizing” in Senge’s terms of death and destruction at the other side of the U Curve of this war. Could the justifications among Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and others have been nothing more than self-perpetuation of their own careerism? If so, it seems too high a price for we the people to pay.
This painful question gets to the heart of Fiol & O’Connor’s work on mindfulness and bandwagons. The push toward war in Iraq with its own teleological momentum around acquiring power, building budgets and advancing careers seems to have created a mindless bandwagon effect inside and beyond the Pentagon. Here again, a prevailing teleology thwarted true mindfulness. Indeed, when the State Department resisted the Iraq bandwagon, it was ostracized from the process.
Seen through the lens of Abrahamson & Rosenkopf as cited in Fiol & O’Connor, however, even Colin Powell ultimately succumbed to the pressures of bandwagon conformity. In the process, the excellent Powell Doctrine that was originally built on mindfulness and asking very tough questions before committing to a war was hijacked by others, as Fiol & O’Connor suggest in referencing Langer and Weick et al, whose mindlessness relied “on past categories, acting on automatic pilot, precluding attention to new information and fixating on a single perspective.” (p.58)
Smart people do dumb things because, sometimes, their underlying teleology can hinder mindfulness. This also presents an interesting question as to whether teleology shapes mindfulness or mindfulness shapes teleology. Well, which comes first, the chicken or the egg? What matters most, it seems, is that the essential dualism between chicken and egg as applied to Thompson’s mind-body problem has us conclude that they are better when considered together than separately.
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr captured this duality best in his work on Christian Realism. According to Niebuhr, morality unbalanced by realism produces naiveté or worse. In Iraq today, we see how a version of self-serving morality held by a few men and unchecked by any objective reality has translated into the worst possible mindlessness. Will we ever really learn these lessons?
References
Fiol, M.C. and O’Connor, E.J. (2003). Waking up: Mindfulness in the face of bandwagons. Academy of Management Review 28:1 54-70.
Page, S. (2003). Prewar predictions coming back to bite. USA Today. March 31.
Senge, P.M; Scharmer, C.O.; Jaworski, J. and Flowers, B.S. (2005). Presence: An exploration of profound change in people, organizations, and society. Cambridge: Society for Organizational Learning.
Thompson, E. (2004). Life and mind: From autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology. A tribute to Francisco Varela. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3: 381-398.
Indeed, why did then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and his neoconservative brains trust believe, in the former’s words, that "The Iraqi people understand what this crisis is about. Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their liberator." (USA Today, March 31, 2003) We were not greeted with flowers and candy in the streets of Baghdad, as promised by Wolfowitz as far back as the mid 1990s when the neocons were demanding regime change in Iraq and, with it, the mythic completion of the first war in Iraq.
Iraq today has been reduced to tragic nihilism. This owes, in large part, to what Thompson (2004) would say is the lack of “fundamental circularity” (p.382) between science and philosophy in the approach to the war taken by Wolfowitz and others. Interestingly, Thompson says that such absence of circulation is itself nihilistic by failing to understand that true mindfulness exists at the busy intersection of the objective and subjective or, say, between explicit fact and lived experience.
The ideological blindness suffered by Wolfowitz seems both ontological and teleological in nature. It seems to have removed strategic insight, historical precedent and operational clarity from his leadership, reducing his efforts to tactical considerations over advocating and justifying the war instead of questioning its premise and adjudicating it correctly. In the process, mindfulness born of asking questions and assessing trade-offs was lost.
The Wolfowitz ontology as energized by the events of 9/11 is one that views humankind in rather sinister terms. His teleology is one that considers human purpose as functioning primarily to seek power and dominion over others. As such, an ontology born of negativity would seem to encourage an equally pessimistic teleology and, in the process, ignore the circulation and mindfulness advocated by Thompson (2004) and Senge et al (2005).
Indeed, one wonders whether Wolfowitz spent even one minute in self-doubt and reflection at the bottom of Senge’s U Curve. When the world is viewed largely in power terms, then power seems the only response. Senge et al speak to this phenomenon in writing that, “What distinctive power does exist at the top of hierarchies is usually skewed toward power to destroy rather than the power to build.” (p. 186)
Teleology and Ideology
So what shaped Wolfowitz’s thinking and behavior? For a man reputed to be brilliant, how could he have been blinded to the rather straightforward lessons one could learn about previous failed efforts to conquer and organize Iraq even from simply watching a movie like Lawrence of Arabia? Does teleology based on pessimism create this kind of mindlessness? Perhaps. It does seem, however, that teleology also forms an interim dimension of ideology that can promote a self-certain, self-justifying mindfulness of sorts that supports the immediate political objectives and serves the career and institutional aspirations of the principals involved. Outside the paradigm and its self-justifications, however, everything else becomes mindless.
It’s worth asking whether Wolfowitz and others would have thought differently had they actually served in the military or had children in the services today. It’s possible that such lived experiences would have tempered their misguided enthusiasm.
Fiol & O’Connor (2003) suggest another fascinating possibility. They raise the notion advanced by Weick and colleagues as well as Langer that a preoccupation with failure actually promotes mindfulness. “Evidence suggests that when socially accepted justifications for unsuccessful outcomes are too costly, or when such outcomes are seen to be personally relevant, people tend to employ more mindfully complex decision strategies.” (p.64)
The ironclad certainty about the war expressed by Wolfowitz and others from the start underscores as much a disregard for the worries of failure as it does for the neglect of personal accountability. It also most certainly disregards the health and welfare of our brave soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen who have been asked to sacrifice in the name of an unjust, incompetently prosecuted war.
The neoconservatives were blinded – poisoned, really – by their own ideological framework that defied both the “scientific” truths of Iraqi history as well the “philosophical” truths of man’s reaction to occupation and political systems imposed from outside. It does not appear, however, that these men are suffering now or will suffer in the future from the kind of reflection or remorse that comes with perpetrating such events. Perhaps a dose of humility born of Robert McNamara’s post-Vietnam epiphany represents a kind of mindfulness that actually forces people to question their underlying ontologies and teleologies.
Far from developing Pentagon “support structures in a way that encourages scanning for contradictory information” (Fiol & O’Connor, p.65), Wolfowitz and others were selectively and subjectively parsing information to make their case, no matter its folly. They also seemed then, as now, to be utterly detached from the “realizing” in Senge’s terms of death and destruction at the other side of the U Curve of this war. Could the justifications among Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith and others have been nothing more than self-perpetuation of their own careerism? If so, it seems too high a price for we the people to pay.
This painful question gets to the heart of Fiol & O’Connor’s work on mindfulness and bandwagons. The push toward war in Iraq with its own teleological momentum around acquiring power, building budgets and advancing careers seems to have created a mindless bandwagon effect inside and beyond the Pentagon. Here again, a prevailing teleology thwarted true mindfulness. Indeed, when the State Department resisted the Iraq bandwagon, it was ostracized from the process.
Seen through the lens of Abrahamson & Rosenkopf as cited in Fiol & O’Connor, however, even Colin Powell ultimately succumbed to the pressures of bandwagon conformity. In the process, the excellent Powell Doctrine that was originally built on mindfulness and asking very tough questions before committing to a war was hijacked by others, as Fiol & O’Connor suggest in referencing Langer and Weick et al, whose mindlessness relied “on past categories, acting on automatic pilot, precluding attention to new information and fixating on a single perspective.” (p.58)
Smart people do dumb things because, sometimes, their underlying teleology can hinder mindfulness. This also presents an interesting question as to whether teleology shapes mindfulness or mindfulness shapes teleology. Well, which comes first, the chicken or the egg? What matters most, it seems, is that the essential dualism between chicken and egg as applied to Thompson’s mind-body problem has us conclude that they are better when considered together than separately.
Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr captured this duality best in his work on Christian Realism. According to Niebuhr, morality unbalanced by realism produces naiveté or worse. In Iraq today, we see how a version of self-serving morality held by a few men and unchecked by any objective reality has translated into the worst possible mindlessness. Will we ever really learn these lessons?
References
Fiol, M.C. and O’Connor, E.J. (2003). Waking up: Mindfulness in the face of bandwagons. Academy of Management Review 28:1 54-70.
Page, S. (2003). Prewar predictions coming back to bite. USA Today. March 31.
Senge, P.M; Scharmer, C.O.; Jaworski, J. and Flowers, B.S. (2005). Presence: An exploration of profound change in people, organizations, and society. Cambridge: Society for Organizational Learning.
Thompson, E. (2004). Life and mind: From autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology. A tribute to Francisco Varela. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 3: 381-398.