Neil Smelser Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Page 6 of 6
Your recent work is, as we said, on the social sciences and our understanding of terrorism, and your book will be published in the spring by the National Academy of Sciences. How did you come to be involved in this work, and what can sociology tell us about what terrorism is and the nature of the problem?
My own involvement came, more or less, immediately after 9/11. I hadn't studied this phenomenon much beyond being casually acquainted with it as a form of conflict. But after 9/11 -- everybody mobilized after 9/11, that's part of the trauma, and the National Academy of Sciences volunteered its own efforts to understand and contribute toward the understanding of terrorism in the way that sciences might. I was made a member of a major committee that published a report called "Making the Nation Safer." Mostly other kinds of scientists, there are only two social scientists on it. That spawned out two sub-committees, one on the limitations of deterrence and one on what the behavioral and social sciences might say. I chaired those last two.
So, I was drawn in, in the first six months after 9/11, into active intellectual engagement with the problem. I became a scholar [of terrorism], whether I liked it or not, and in the wake of that I've served on various advisory committees and panels through the National Academies, on activities related to terrorism, including some advisory work with the Homeland Security department. I had an idea -- a few people said to me, at the time I was on these committees, "You ought to put this into a book," because a lot of my past was very relevant to it. So, the National Academy's press and I negotiated out a project where I would write a book on the subject.
Terrorism has been studied remarkably little by the social scientists. Political scientists, some policy makers and a few psychologists have been the main ones to be interested in it. It's been kind of left alone by sociologists, by anthropologists and by economists, with some exceptions. The literature on it now is not very good, or not very many people go into it. It's a mystery. I don't know exactly why. But there's a lot of social science that's relevant. I mean, just think of the literature on social movements. You can't understand what's going on in the Middle Eastern countries without direct application of a lot of things we know generally about social movements. And that whole question about when does evil get perpetrated and how it gets legitimized, and so on -- these are things that have been thought about by psychologists and by sociologists in various ways. So, it's moving general insights that we have about these phenomena in on the understanding of terrorism.
The whole idea of recruitment resembles very much processes such as religious conversion, and there's a rich literature on that which comes to bear, small group processes and understanding what goes on in these cells -- you can't study the cells very well but you can make some inferences out of related social science work. Reaction to disaster, sociology of disaster, is very relevant to the old issues of warning and preparation and reaction to attack. So, as much as that book is anything, it's bringing together all these different lines of independent social science work, which throws light and helps explain something that's very, very difficult to study directly.
You propose a strategy, but before we talk about that, you point out some conclusions you reached about the nature of terrorism which suggest a problem with some of our responses. You're talking about your strategy of discouragement. You say, "This strategy recognizes the contingent long-term probabilistic and never fool-proof problem that we're dealing with, and then it recognizes the need for a multiplicity of adaptive strategies." So, terrorism, you're saying, is something that's not going to go away.
That's precisely correct. And furthermore, terrorism is not as we (as a nation under attack and as American heritage) have defined it. We have tended to define it in moralistic terms and as instrumental terms, a problem to be solved, a war to be won.
And we're the good guys.
We're the good guys -- that's the moralistic side -- and then the war to be won is the instrumental side. I have a little catch phrase in my preface to that book that refers to this mentality as "gadgets, game theory, and goodness," as constraining our response to terrorism, which doesn't recognize it for what it is. It's contingent, it's long-term, it's organized in such a way that it can't be settled by conventional wartime measures, we can't influence many of the conditions that give rise to it, and it is a method which defies our conventional way of dealing with force and violence in our midst. The police powers are not exactly right, armies are certainly not the right way to go after it, and so we need invention. We also need to recognize that there are many multiple causes that go into the process. Earlier in the book I try to analyze the cumulative determinants that eventuate in the terrorist-inclined group, and my positive strategy comes out of the idea that you can't solve this problem once and for all, you've got to scratch at it in its many manifestations, and in that way discourage it, not prevent it and not beat it in a war. [The strategy is] a kind of combination of a theory of containment and a theory of deterrence put together but in a very new rationale.
And your list includes modifying the conditions of terrorism, attacking terrorism at its source, assembling reliable intelligence, stopping the flow of resources, discrediting their ideologies, diminishing support groups, monitoring movement of people and weapons at the border, and hardening potential targets. Do you think there's an audience for this in Washington?
The toughest [part is] to get that message through. [We're] confronted with a granite rock and the way you get that granite rock is you scratch at it and you're lucky if you find a place you can hold on to or chip away at. This is so far from the dominant mentality, I don't think it'll be listened to. I think it's sensible and I think it's right. I think it respects the nature of the beast. And it's not especially dramatic, it's not terribly sexy, it doesn't say, "Here's a problem, we're going to eradicate it. We're going to either destroy it or cure it." That's the mentality that is all around.
I expect this book -- I modestly say the book is very sensible, but sensibility is not the major orientation that almost all contending parties in the terrorism arena share. It's an area that's very threatening, it makes for non-sensible solutions, and unfortunately, the ineffectiveness that we've seen in dealing with terrorism reflects that confusion.
In your last chapter you're looking at the United States and its place in the world as a constraint on the process of moving toward more sensible policies, if that's a fair re-statement of what you're saying. I want to focus on this notion, because you see a very important ambivalence on our part in the way we deal with the world, because we have so much economic power and so much military, and to a lesser extent some compelling ideas, ideological ideas, which we espouse ...
Culture.
Yeah, culture. Talk a little about that problem, because we have to get over that hump. In looking at the unilateral versus the multilateral, or hard power versus soft power, you tilt toward the latter in both cases.
I don't rule out the hard power. I think a reasonably intelligent use of military force did occur in Afghanistan. We somewhat botched it up afterwards, but nonetheless, here was a case where there was a terrorist base in a nation run by a national group and we were getting at it. I do not argue against military interventions, though I argue strongly about how selective they have to be and how targeted they have to be, and that war is not a very good weapon against terrorists. I try to do kind of a cost benefit analysis, if you will, or a costs and gains analysis of the different approaches to the world. You see, it seems to me that most of the post -World War II success of the United States, when it emerged as the hegemonic (if you want to use that word) power is it never used all the power it had. There was a lot of shoving around, a lot of influencing and a lot of sanctioning, and some war making. But the triumphs of the recovery of postwar Europe, of the maintenance of the basically stable, if unhappy, situation in the Cold War, and so on, all depended on a kind of restraint. That's tough in a society that is so strong and a country that is so powerful in all the ways we've mentioned. You're tempted to just muscle through because you can. And that's particularly true of war. We're the champion war-makers, and unchallengeable by conventional war at the present time. The tendency is to take that literally and to muscle the world around. Well, the world isn't that simple. The costs that I tried to fix on, both international and domestic, are such that you simply have to come up with a much more contingent view of how we work to solve these intractable problems in the world.
In the book The Social Edges of Psychoanalysis is another essay that struck me because it relates to what we were just talking about, namely the influence of theory on policy. And you say this -- let me quote you: "Yet neither psychoanalysis nor sociology in uncovering such irritating and pressing knowledge" -- that is, you're revealing the truths, the structures hidden both in the mind and society -- "Neither of these disciplines is in a position of being able to say exactly what should be done with the knowledge in a moral sense." So, there is a point at which work like yours is not necessarily a formula for how we should act in the world, in an era of terrorism, but rather a statement that seeks to lay out all the structures in place. Is that fair?
I conclude the final chapter of the book, if you remember, by saying what is absolutely essential is to recognize these realities, and that any benefit that we can contribute is enlightenment, not specific solutions. But if those ingredients of our, say, fight against terrorism continue to be unconscious and under the surface, we're going to make no headway, because our debates and our understanding will not progress beyond these repetitive ensnarlements that we've got ourselves into in thinking about it. Consciousness raising is extremely powerful because you re-define the issues, if you take this knowledge seriously. You don't generate a final solution. No knowledge is a final solution, because so many contingencies are at hand and they're not responsible for the solutions, but they are responsible for edification and enlightenment and consciousness raising.
We've covered a lot in this interview. Of course, you've done so much it's impossible to cover it all, but briefly talk about another role that I know that you've had as an advisor to chancellors on this campus. I'm curious about to what extent you learned anything new about what we were just talking about, namely the relationship that theory can have in elucidating problems that are before chancellors, like affirmative action, like social disturbance, and so on. Did the fact that you were at Berkeley and had insights which they clearly wanted to listen to -- did that make a difference, and in what ways did it make a difference, or did you still confront the same limits that we've just been talking about?
Well, I think I did some good. The role that was most important in this general advisory role came right in the middle of the Free Speech Movement. I was called into acting Chancellor Meyerson's office as his special advisor in the area of student political activity. So, I was negotiator with Free Speech Movement and a lot of other movements, and I was also in his cabinet. I found a culture in the Chancellor's office that was the following: that we're confronted with a kind of evil out there, and these people are thinking all the time how they can make our lives impossible, how they're going to destroy us really, and furthermore, they're planning all the time, and furthermore, they know what they're doing. There was a kind of almost conspiratorial [view], and the Free Speech Movement had the same view of the administration: they're plotting precisely how to get them as though they were the center of our attention and we had a plan and we didn't make a move without knowing a part of that plan, and so on. So, there was an imposition of complete rationality to the other party, in both cases, whereas the reality was both sides were bumbling. And I could see that. I saw that in my own studies, actually, of social movements.
So, I think I brought some intelligence to bear, saying, "These people are as confused as we are, and we don't take the bait, we don't fall into that game of responding," because the whole culture of the administration was nothing can happen without our making a proper response. My idea was, "Look, they're as confused as we are. Could we let this one die? It's going to go away in a week, and if we try to punish these people or land on them or take some strong counter-action, there's going to be more cost than gain." I think that voice was somewhat heard during the period in which I was there, and that's, I guess, what you call application of knowledge.
One final question: If students were to watch this interview, how would you advise them to prepare for the future if they see sociology or academic studies, or just in the social sciences generally, as part of their future?
My advice would have to be rather trite, and that would be to somehow strive toward a world outlook (and your education can help you in this) that combines criticism with responsibility. Our country would not survive without internal criticism, and those times in which it has teetered near the edge of real trouble is when that criticism becomes the basis for acting irresponsibly, both by government, by protest groups, by citizens, by McCarthy, you name it, and that the balm, the healing of the society is this mix of criticism and responsibility.
Neil, on that positive note I want to thank you for taking time to be here today, and thank you for writing all that you've written.
Thank you.
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.
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