Beware Jupiter in a Hockey Goalie Oufit

In 1962, a British scientist named P.S.M. Blackett published a think-tanky treatise called Studies of War, Nuclear and Conventional. It was a revised compilation of assorted articles he wrote going back to the 1940s. Blackett was an interesting fellow, if somewhat obscure. I’m not sure you can call a Nobel Prize winner obscure, but I just did. He was another one of those fellows that thought that being good at math made him good at politics, and everything else for that matter. It’s a common affliction, especially these days. Truly smart people know that Mr. Spock is a fictional character, and the world runs like a carnival, not a Swiss watch.

Blackett coined a somewhat obscure term that’s quite useful. He called it the Jupiter Complex. He warned against imagining yourself as righteous gods, raining down thunderbolts on your evil enemies. It’s a practical as much as a moralistic warning.

“If a scientist may be forgiven for mixing his classical
metaphors, one might think of the earth-bound soldiers as
becoming beguiled by the sirens’ song of then airmen col-
leagues, who, spiritually intoxicated by flight at 50,000 feet
in a jet bomber with an H-bomb in the bomb bay, sang of the
ease with which they could keep erring mankind in order by
threatening them (as if they were Jove himself) with atomic
thunderbolts. This Jupiter complex of the airmen came to
dominate disastrously the military thinking of much of the
Western world and was an important factor in bringing
about the present Western inferiority in conventional
weapons.”

Blackett warned that on top of the kinds of destruction involved, especially with atomic weapons in the mix, the real problem was that it wouldn’t work. At first, the air force was just a part of the army. My father was in the USAAF, for instance. Army Air Force. But the air force fought for primacy, and what with rockets and bombs and missiles becoming so powerful, politicians stated to look on them as the primary source of military power.

“The rise in the West of the doctrine of winning wars
quickly and cheaply by air attack on the enemy’s war-making
capacity rather than against his armed forces arose out of the
long struggle of the early military airmen to break through
the military conservatism of the soldiers and sailors. This
struggle convinced them, probably at this time rightly, that
the air arm would remain backward technically if left under
the control of the army and navy. Air attack on the enemy’s
war-making capacity rather than his armed forces provided
a military role for air power which could be exercised in-
dependently of the two older services.”

It’s useful to crack a history book once in a while and look at the effectiveness of Jupiter Complex bombardments of military and civilian targets since the Second World War. Japan tried it at Pearl Harbor. It didn’t turn out the way they planned. Another example is the firebombing of Dresden, still remembered mostly because of Vonnegut’s high-school required reading book about it. Dresden was only one of many such raids which heaped destruction on Germany, but were essentially worthless to stop German war production, or even affect their will to fight on. America dropped atom bombs on Japan to close out the war, but Japan still had to be occupied. The firebombing raids that preceded Fat Man and Little Boy were just as devastating, but didn’t force a surrender. The US dropped a lot of ordnance while island-hopping in the Pacific, but they still needed amphibious landings with lots of casualties to win the war. Bombing alone couldn’t do it.

MacArthur surrendered to the siren song of the Jupiter Complex. He wanted to nuke North Korea to break their back in a single stroke. It wouldn’t have worked, and cooler heads prevailed. Vietnam was a textbook example of the Jupiter Complex. Lyndon Johnson was famous for micromanaging the targets, and even the total bomb weights for America’s bombing runs on the north. He literally wanted to be Jupiter. You can make similar comparisons to the soviet, and then the American adventures in Afghanistan. Throw in Black Hawk Down for good measure. The Ukraine keeps trying it on Russia, to little effect.

Blackett thought the Jupiter Complex was a simple case of not thinking a military exercise through. If you look at an attack, especially a pre-emptive attack, what happens tomorrow is never figured in to the equation. It’s just:

Step 1. Bomb

Step 2. ??????

Step 3. They surrender

He didn’t think that would happen, and explained at some length why that was the case. And unlike others, he wondered what would happen on Day 2:

“In my view, no real military theory of the ” exercise of
true air power,” as it later come to be called by some British
writers, was ever achieved: in effect, what passed for one
was a theory of the exercise of air superiority, that is, how
best to destroy the enemy’s war-making capacity when the
enemy could not destroy yours. No complete theory of such
an independent strategy was ever formulated because it could
not be kept within the air force’s own province : for it would
have been necessary to include in it the passive defence of
one’s own civilian population. This is so because it soon
became clear that air attack on the enemy’s war-making
capacity generally led to attack on cities and so on the civilian
population. If the usual military principle had been adopted,
that of preparing to be attacked with the same weapons with
which one is preparing to attack an enemy, then the huge
cost of an adequate civil defence system would have had to
be incurred.”

Of course, in today’s world, the “adequate civil defence system” is just a bunch of anti-missile missiles, of very dubious effectiveness, with astonishing price tags, followed by telling everyone to duck. It’s the Jupiter Syndrome, only Jupiter is wearing a hockey goalie outfit.

Good luck with that.

It’s a Small World, But I Wouldn’t Want To Have To Rebuild Chesterton’s Fence Around It

Well, we chewed over and mangled Bastiat’s perfectly sensible parable the other day: That which is seen, and that which is not seen. We bent it and twisted into a poorly reasoned blog post to fit our warped worldview. That was the original purpose of the internet. You know, before all those girls showed up and turned it into a giant shoe store. Of course the internet could be Exhibit A if you’re arguing for obvious benefits and beaucoup hidden harms. But the point, that you have to take potential secondary effects into account when deciding on a course of action, has a nifty corollary, if you’re interested. Why only misread Bastiat when we can bollix up G.K. Chesterton‘s ideas, too?

Gilbert didn’t have a busted window. He had a fence someone wanted to demolish. Chesterton’s Fence is a somewhat more subtle, but perhaps more universal gloss on things unseen. Like a lot of his writing, it’s a lively, but formidable paean to respect for tradition.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

Chesterton’s “more modern type of reformer” is everywhere nowadays, desolating the landscape. Sometimes it’s as trivial as banning straws, other times the malignancy grows into banning farming. They’re one-note pianos, banging out their monotone destructive fugues. They’re not interested in that which is unseen, and they generally don’t have the intellectual horsepower to operate something as complicated as Chesterton’s fence latch.

I like using ideas like Silly Putty, and G.K.’s fence is no exception. The other, other day, we talked about movies a little bit. There was an hint of get off my lawn in it, but only a hint. I asked the rhetorical question, Why Does Hollywood Hate the American Revolution?  I touched on the same topic again here:

I like to listen to old pieces of music, and to video like this one, and try to put myself in the time and place it was presented. Adapt the mindset of the time to better understand how you’d react to it. Good movies are able to do that, but good movies are a very rare thing. Most movies just have modern people wielding modern mindsets tossed catch-as-catch-can into hoop dresses and drawing rooms.

Stick with me here. I think I can build Chesterton’s Fence around this whole mess.

The reason why the modern type of reformer pulls all sorts of things down without a second thought is their utter inability to put themselves in someone else’s place. They’re totally solipsistic. The past is another country, as they say, and they never go there. Tradition is simply a bad word, and that’s that. It exists only to be destroyed. It’s the reason why so much entertainment falls flat lately. They just can’t enter into the mindset of anybody from a decade ago, never mind two centuries. The people who made history are just dead white guys, and they don’t deserve to be judged on their merits in the context of their times. Or even understood, never mind judged. Hannibal shouldn’t have ridden on those elephants. That’s cruel. Why didn’t he just drive an electric car over the Alps like a normal person?

So Bastiat asks you to consider the unseen consequences of a course of action. Chesterton reminds you to understand the reason for the way things are before you start tearing things apart.

I don’t know about you, but I’m not enjoying the results of the more modern type of reformer burning Bastiat at the stake daily, using Chesterton’s demolished fence boards for fuel.