McNamara's ghost

Robert Strange McNamara died yesterday at the age of 93. He passed peacefully, in his sleep. 

 

McNamara is most remembered for his seven-year tenure as Secretary of Defense during the height of the Vietnam War. Less remembered is his time at Ford Motors, his 13-year tenure as head of the World Bank or his creation of the field of policy analysis. Instead he's managed the rare feat of being hated by liberals, right-wingers and centrists, for very different reasons.

 

The archetypal technocrat, McNamara was almost the living embodiment of the belief that even the most insoluble problems (guerilla war, poverty, economic upheaval) could be filed, stamped and numbered into obsolescence; that everything could be fixed if we just bring enough IQ and statistics to bear.

 

A little while back I wrote about how the World is Not a Chessboard, specifically in reference to Iran and various theories by Very Smart Important People about how we should re-align the Middle East to fight them:

 

Much disaster has been caused over the years, especially in the realm of foreign policy, by viewing the world as a chessboard: with monolithic blocks of nations and peoples that can be moved around to some greater goal that never seems to arrive. When the countries crack open, when they inevitably prove to be not monolithic at all, but complicated and dynamic, bristling with corners and contradictions, the august sages get to throw up their hands, write a mea culpa and hit the lecture circuit. Pundits will nod gravely, then praise them for their humility and gravitas. 

 

McNamara was exactly who I was thinking of. 

 

His shadow is long, and it still falls upon us all.

Throughout McNamara's five-decade career, he pops up at all sorts of strange (heh) places. It almost seems that every time a technocratic approach was implemented to bring precise discipline to a previously chaotic area, McNamara was there.

Strategic bombing in World War II? McNamara's crunching figures for Curtis LeMay. Creating the modern corporate behemoth? There's McNamara, heading up Ford's "modernization" (he died, fittingly, with Detroit and the auto giants in ruins). Cold war paranoia? He was one of the main architects of MAD, statistically laying out the probable death counts of apocalypse.

His long stint at the World Bank helped craft a financial institution whose stats, rules and projections can hold more sway over the lives of millions than their own governments: Technocracy ascendant.  

His role in Vietnam is well known. Many wars afterward have followed a similar pattern and a similar delusion: if only enough raw power can be properly brought to bear, any conflict can be won. Lesser known is that the whole field of policy analysis -- which many institutions increasingly rely on -- was birthed from McNamara's attempts to reduce the bloody art of war to number-crunching.

It is telling too that in his late-career Damascus moment (and The Fog of War is an excellent movie) McNamara managed to salvage a better reputation than many of the activists and thinkers who rightly saw Vietnam as a mistake from the very beginning. 

He wasn't evil. In his World Bank days, his poverty and disease-fighting efforts did considerable good. But importantly, people don't need to be evil to end up doing evil. That too is one of the key features of technocracy and like the others, McNamara personified it: despite private doubts, he used his considerable talents to bomb, sack and destroy just as loyally as he did to reviving companies and curing river blindness. 

Even his repentance highlights another key fact about the technocratic way: it didn't matter. The machine rolled on.

Anyone who's been reading here for awhile knows I'm a big fan of organization. In fact, my critiques of visions for the future usually center around a lack of organization or planning. But the other extreme can be just as bad.  

McNamara was the high priest of the future over-planned; of creativity pushed aside for productivity, with no possibility for contradiction or ambiguity. We live in many worlds, but in every massive surveillance network, every sprawling bureaucracy, every attempt to order things just so, his ghost will linger for long years to come.

Comments

[David]

I had previously been aware of McNamara's role in the Vietnam War, but never bothered to learn anything else about his life. While I still believe his choices at that time were contemptible and incredibly short-sighted, I have to thank you for opening my eyes to a less monolithic view of the man himself.