Understanding the Present through the Wooden Headiness Factor

“An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-1918, disillusion is deep and moves on to self—doubt and self-disgust.” [Barbara W. Tuchman, a Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century]

On September 11, 2008, The Jerusalem Post published a lengthy Op-Ed- Another Tack: The Wooden-Headedness Factor authored by Sarah Honig. A few extracts follow:

Insightful Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Barbara Tuchman died in February 1989, more than 4 years before Shimon Perez, Yossi Beilin and their group negotiated the Oslo Accords, which they passed onto Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and other unnamed Israelis. It was presented on September 13, and subsequently displayed, and formalized on the White House lawn.

Oslo sadly meets all of Tuchman’s conditions and then some. Rarely in human affairs is it as possible to point to a single inanity as the trigger which radically changed the fortunes of a people—in Israel’s case of a beleaguered people struggling for bare physical survival.

Oslo turned this once feisty and plucky little nation into an apathetic aggregate that has ceased to seethe about much of anything. It briefly appeared that the 2nd Lebanon War, Oslo’s direct defective descendent, might ignite the extinguished flicker of common sense yet again, but that spark quickly died out.

The Oslo-generated apathy allowed Ehud Barak‘s rash unilateral flight from Gaza and the Philadelphia corridor. Expulsion of its 10,000 Jews, and the relinquishing of the strategically indispensable Philadelphia corridor.

“The power to command” she stressed, “frequently causes failure to think.” The establishment of Hamastan, the continued funneling of funds, electricity and goods to Hamastan, the failure to react against the rocketing of Sderot and Ashkelon, the obsequious acquiescence to PA demands for “goodwill gestures

In “The March of Folly” historian Barbara Tuchman writes: Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists of assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. Some people would claim that what Tuchman calls wooden-headedness plays a remarkably large role in all organizations and, indeed, in all human affairs.

In her 1984 book ‘The March of Folly, From Troy to Vietnam” Wooden-headedness in statecraft, which she defined as “assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs, “has clearly become a prevailing factor in our politics. As Tuchman wrote, wooden-headedness was best captured in a remark about Philip 11 of Spain:” No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.”

Why did the Trojans allow the Greek horse within the gates? How did the Renaissance papacy so baldly misjudge the moment, accelerating the Protestant Reformation? What could the British ruling class have done differently to keep the American colonies within London’s reach?

In her 1984 “March of Folly, “Tuchman defined folly as “pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.” She added, “The power to command frequently causes failure to think.

She demanded that to qualify as folly, each policy examined needs to meet 3 criteria. “It must have been perceived as counterproductive in its own time, —-“a feasible alternative course of action must have been available and the— policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual leader and should persist beyond any one political lifetime. It must be adhered to by “collective government or a succession of rulers in the same office.”

Such recurrent wooden-headedness, she argues is “a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists of assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting ant contrary signs. It is acting according to wish, while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. Through weak writing before the event, Tuchman incredibly seems to have analyzed the Osloite folly with unerring acumen.

Consider “Oslo’s incontrovertible legacy to the Israeli psyche. Few dare insist on the justice of our cause. Fewer yet know our cause. The youngest Israelis are never taught it and remain ignorant to a degree that severely imperils Israel’s prospects of self-preservation. Increasingly we see ourselves as our enemies portray us, and insert their fraudulent narrative into our school curriculums, art, theater, and film.

We brainwash and browbeat ourselves, but call that enlightenment, and broadmindedness. Before Oslo, we retaliated for every terror onslaught and refused to give in even when hostages’ lives hung in the balance. Today the nation that rescued hijacked passengers at Entebbe debases itself by freeing barbaric mass murderers, and bankrolls the indiscriminate shelling of its own towns. The nation that liberated Jerusalem contemplates relinquishing it .

OSLO’S RATIONALE was to purchase a modicum of peace by sacrificing strategically vital territory. Yet our convoluted logic failed the test of simple popular perception. All our sophisticated argumentation notwithstanding, nothing could erase the core intuition that a people ready to surrender its patrimony isn’t genuinely attached to it.

By giving away bits of the Jewish heartland, we imparted the impression here and abroad that we have no roots, claim or connection to this country—that we’re not here by right. Israeli concessions underscored the slanderous image of Israelis as interlopers who plead to be allowed to retain a bit of what they usurped.

Oslo conferred legitimacy on the PLO, an organization whose raison d’etre is to cleanse this land of our presence. Whereas at Oslo’s outset we still counted what Rabin cynically dubbed “the victims of peace” we no longer do so. While Americans remember 9/11’s disaster—-most workaday Israelis don’t instantly recognize 9/13 for the disaster it was.

A few Barbara Tuchman quotes are representative of her mind and character.

“Diplomacy means all the wicked devices of the Old World, spheres of influence, balances of power, secret treaties, triple alliances, and during the interim period, appeasement of Fascism.”

“Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.”

“Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.”

“Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others—only to lose it over themselves.”

“The better part of valor is to spend it learning to live with differences, however hostile, unless and until we can find another planet.”