The spring of healing: what a lackluster novel I read as a kid tells us about "America first" philosophies

I read a lot as a kid, although I may not have always read the best the world had to offer. My mom, something of an expert in early literacy, believed it was important for young people to read what they liked to read, rather than for parents to obsess over whether their children picked entirely edifying material. Therefore, I was given a relatively long leash with my reading choices, as long as I was reading something. For a few years, one of the chief sources of reading material for my brothers and me were the slightly dated copies of Sports Illustrated my grandfather brought us. I don't know where he got them, but they were free, and we all liked reading the same articles and then going over favorite lines with each other afterwards. 

When I got older, I started to get into fantasy novels a little bit. Not obsessively--sports-based reading was still my favorite--but enough that I would mix it up here and there. One series I picked up from my dad was Piers Anthony's Xanth series. It was set in a magical world with a geography very similar to Anthony's native Florida. It was also full of puns, something I found funny enough to read maybe the first dozen or so novels in the series, but eventually tiring enough I never read the many he's written since then. 

I might have begun to catch on even as a young reader that Anthony isn't a virtuoso as a writer. If I didn't then, I definitely realized it when I read of few of his novels to my son several years ago. Even my son seemed to realize something was amiss. He kind of liked the first novel, but by the end of the second, he was ready to move on to something new. 

Still, I wouldn't say that Anthony is a bad writer. He's an example of a kind of writing I have a greater tolerance for than many people in literary fiction seem to have, one with some great ideas but who is a little bumpy getting those ideas across. (One of the things that perhaps delayed my ability to get stories published was my level of tolerance in my own work for less than stellar presentation as long as the idea underlying it seemed sound to me.) In particular, I was fond of the thought experiments that appeared in his work.  

Probably the most notable thought experiments in Xanth are the meetings various mortals have with the demon who created the world. This demon is apparently locked in some kind of supernatural game with other demons, and he twice (that I read) asked mortals for help in winning his game. (If I recall correctly, Anthony admitted to borrowing some ideas for these scenes from articles he read about game theory.)

(Aside: I won't delve into the alleged misogyny in his works. I'm sure it's there, but for me to deal with it, I'd have to go back and read him seriously, something I just don't have time to do right now. It's got nothing to do with what made me remember Xanth recently.)

Yeah, like, a whole lot of puns

Reading about "realist" political philosophy brought another Xanth scene to mind

There's another, less pronounced thought experiment from Xanth that came to mind for me the other day. I was thinking about the nature of  "America first" arguments, and, more broadly, about "realist" philosophies of how a government should behave in international geopolitics. It started when I read about John Mearsheimer's belief that Western bad behavior was primarily to blame for Russian aggression in Ukraine. It echoed comments I've heard from other quarters, always coming from people who identify themselves as proponents of "realist" political philosophies. 

According to this line of thinking, the West has made a mistake trying to promote the growth of liberal democracies friendly to the West in places like Georgia and Ukraine. Expansion of the EU and NATO were needlessly poking the Russian bear, which nobody thought of as a threat prior to 2014. These analysts claim the US should have allowed Russia to maintain enough hegemony over its near neighbors for its own comfort, even if this meant letting those countries fester in a quasi-vassal state status. Even if it meant their citizens had to live under autocracy. 

Realists would argue that the reason we should have allowed this to happen, rather than attempting to bring these countries more closely into a Western orbit, was for one simple reason: it would have been in our self-interest to do so. In "great powers" politics, the U.S. should no more think of fostering friendly democracies on Moscow's doorstep than Moscow should think of placing a missile base in the Yucatan Peninsula. This just foments conflict, and conflict is bad for U.S. interests, measured--I suppose--in things like stock values and gas prices and GDP and whether people have the emotional energy to spend on some dumb event that happened at the Oscars. 

Trump was apparently influenced by this kind of thinking. His "America first" concept (I won't call it a political philosophy, because I don't think Trump is capable of sustaining any line of thinking deeply enough that it could rightly be called a "philosophy") seemed to involve a fairly straightforward, transactional calculation of debits and credits of any possible move in international politics. If something was "good" for America (according to whatever measuring stick he used for "good"), then we did it. If it was bad for America, we didn't. 

The healing spring and the complexities of self-interest

While thinking about this whole realist idea of how the world works lately, some neuron in my brain harkened back to something from Xanth. I had to get onto Reddit, find an Anthony community, ask a question, and wait a few days to fully remember what it was, but eventually, I found it. 

In the first novel in the Xanth series, A Spell for Chameleon, the main character Bink comes across a wounded soldier. He is directed by a dryad to a nearby magical spring that brings healing to those who touch or drink its waters. While Bink is investigating the spring, a finger he lost as a child is restored. However, the spring stirs to life and warns him that. "Who drinks of me and acts against my interest will lose all that I bring him." 

Seems legit. 

Bink immediately sees complications in this condition placed by the spring, because he wonders how the spring will judge actions for their effect relative to its interests. He assumes that there could be no logging or mining near the spring, because these would harm it in an immediate and tangible way. But what if a king levied a tax on lumber, and because of that tax, lumberjacks cut more wood in order to make up for lost revenue? Would the spring cause all those who had been helped by the spring to fight against the king? In fact, "...any action had widening results, like the ripples of a stone dropped in a pool. In time such ripples could cover the whole ocean. Or the whole of Xanth." Bink wonders if, should the spring's magic become strong enough, the spring might become the real ruler of Xanth. 

Bink realizes, though, that the interests of one spring are not the interests of all springs, nor of Xanth. He rejects the spring's terms and tells the spring to take its healing back. 

Bink was smart enough to realize something advocates of a narrowly defined self-interest fail to point out: that self-interest is complicated. Of course we all want what's good for us. Idealists want that, too. But what's ultimately good for us depends, often, on the unintended consequences of millions of decisions, none of which can be accurately guessed ahead of time, because the entire system is irreducibly complex. 

We have, of course, a great deal of responsibility to try to read the realities of the present, break down that which is complex, and make our best effort to calculate the effects of certain actions versus others. I myself mostly objected to the war in Iraq because of pragmatic, rather than idealistic reasons; that is, I thought the stated goals were unachievable, not necessarily immoral if they had been achieved. Right now, I'm more than half convinced the United States should get over the idealistic opposition to proliferation and accept North Korea as a nuclear state, mostly because the practical reality is that we've failed to prevent them from becoming one, so we might as well try to live with that reality. 

We have an obligation to reduce the complexity as much as we can, but at some point, we are making best guesses. A commitment to always keep recalculating for self-interest, based on new information, is a formula for being in a constant cycle of reassessment and reapplication of new strategies. That's great if you work for a think tank and you want to be producing a new calculation every few weeks, but it's bad for formulating a predictable and consistent policy.

Much more to the point than that, though, if we are humble enough to assume that we're going to miscalculate now and again and end up harming our interest in ways we didn't intend, shouldn't we do so for reasons we believe in, reasons we accept as worthy of suffering for? Rather than decide, case-by-case, whether supporting one would-be democracy or another is more trouble than it's worth, isn't it better to say that we believe, in the long run, that democracies (assuming they're organic and not something we're foisting on other countries) are worth supporting, even if there are costs? To say that in the long run, we believe that the costs of not supporting a democracy are worse? 

Mearsheimer stated that there are always practical and moral elements to politics. He said it would be great if the two always aligned, but that sometimes, a country has to accept an immoral policy because the costs of the moral policy are too great. I wonder, though, if in an irreducibly complex game, it isn't ultimately safer sometimes to take the moral route simply because it's the moral route. This is what Bink elected to do when he gave up his own physical wellbeing in order to keep from putting himself in a compromising position. (In the story, there is a twist when he makes this decision, but the point is that he was willing to make this decision.) Sometimes, the very complexity and danger of the game might make a certain moral naivete more, rather than less, safe.  

Realism in political science doesn't mean "realistic," as opposed to someone who believes in fantasy. Realists emphasize the fundamentality of conflict or competition in world events, while idealists emphasize cooperation. It's not supposed to be a question of dreamers versus realists, but I think the cognate nature of the two words has led some to believe that political realists are more grounded in the real world. In fact, though, both realists and idealists care about self-interest and are looking at the real world for clues about how to achieve it. One might say the fundamental difference between them is more one of how both come to grips with irreducible complexity.

The most realistic, pragmatic, eyes-wide-open, non-dreamy belief might be that making hard political choices for moral reasons might sometimes be the most pragmatic solution. As I've suggested before, sometimes, when faced with a decision where it's impossible to predict all the bifurcating future time lines, it might be best to rely not on calculations, but on what I've called ontological ethics. That is, when in doubt, we make decisions guided by a sense of who we are. 

We might still, of course, make wrong calls this way, but there are benefits that can accrue from making decisions out of a sense of who we are. It gives our allies reassurance that we will remain consistent even in the shifting face of events. It gives our adversaries security that they can predict our policies, making them less likely to miscalculate. It gives us an internal sense of purpose and mission. There are real, pragmatic values to these things. One could say that in the long run, moral decisions might be better for our self-interest. 

Or not. In the long run, as John Maynard Keynes is said to have noted, we're all dead. At some point, this experiment in democracy will fail or fade, or the multitudinous problems of the human race will doom us to extinction. If we have to go down, though, I'd rather go down for something I believe in than a wrong guess about what would have been good for us. I'd rather refuse the immediate good that seems to offer itself rather than be compromised by it. The only way to win a game of irreducible complexity, perhaps, is not to play it.