Positive Quiddity: Sun Tzu

February 8, 2011

Sun Tzu: The Enemy of the Bureaucratic Mind

Walter Russell Mead

Reading Sun Tzu’s classic The Art of War for the Bard grand strategy seminar this winter was an unsettling experience.  Of course, that is the point.  The Art of War is one of those books that doesn’t want to sit there in your lap; it wants to reach up and slap you in the face.

My predecessor at Bard and the man for whom the chair I hold was named was the writer and editor James Clarke Chace.  James always started his courses by telling students that “Many of your teachers have tried to tell you how the world ought to work.  In this class I’m going to teach you about power: about how things actually happen.”

That is a very Sun Tzu thing to say.  The Art of War comes out of a culture where political correctness reigned: Confucian China attached enormous importance to ideas of correct conduct and correct speech.  To do something in the wrong way was to do the wrong thing.  Ethical Chinese scholars rejected concepts like the use of deception in warfare and believed that the aim of politics was to establish a benevolent state under a wise and absolute ruler who would use unlimited power to promote the general good.

It was a culture of bureaucracy and meritocracy.  China is famous for inventing the rigorous civil service exam, with posts awarded to candidates based on their demonstrated academic knowledge.  By and large the classical works of Chinese literature on the exams celebrated the ideals of propriety, conformity, and respect for the ancient traditions.  In the quiet library of Confucian literary studies, The Art of War is like a fart in church.

In Sun Tzu’s world, war is the most important thing for the ruler to study.  Winning is the most important thing in war.  Deception is the way to win.  Sun Tzu plays the same role in Confucian China that Machiavelli plays in the Christian west: both writers say that the basic institutions and power arrangements of their society depend on qualities and behavior that can and frequently do violate that society’s deepest beliefs and ideals.
Our ideals and our values tell us that social justice and righteous dealing win out in the end.  If we want to be powerful we must support democracy and human rights around the world.  Sun Tzu begs to differ.  He is a deeply offensive man and no decent university in the United States would allow him to teach.

Take his attitude toward women.  Testing to see if Sun Tzu’s methods would in fact lead to better military performance, the king of Wu told Sun Tzu to teach the king’s 180 concubines to march in good order.  Very systematically Master Sun instructed the women until he was sure they knew what to do.  He gave the order to march; they laughed.  He reviewed the procedures one more time; when they failed once again he took the two ‘generals’ — the king’s favorites — and had them beheaded.  The king told him to stop the exercise and spare the women; “No”, said Master Sun.  “You’ve put me in charge of the army; it’s military justice on the field.” The two favorites died; the rest of the women marched in perfect order.  Master Sun was confirmed in high command.

Sexism, trafficking in persons, violation of human and legal rights, insubordination, militarism and general authoritarianism: a modern American university would be more likely to send Sun Tzu to the Hague to be tried for war crimes than to give him tenure.  Many ancient Confucians felt the same way, but nevertheless Sun Tzu’s influence survives.  Morality counts, but at least for some benighted people winning also matters.
Some have tried to turn The Art of War into an antiwar classic.  It is true that Sun Tzu speaks constantly about the wastefulness of war, and urges kings and generals to avoid fighting whenever possible.  The greatest general is the one who wins without fighting, Sun Tzu says piously (and correctly), but then goes on through the rest of his text to give advice to those lesser generals who are forced into war.  And that advice is pretty ruthless.  There are no tactics and no weapons that Sun Tzu would exclude on moral grounds.  This is not a book from which international lawyers and disarmament activists can take much comfort.

The Art of War, a book which has inspired Chinese emperors, Japanese shoguns, Napoleon, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, does not just subvert conventional morality.  It is even more profoundly opposed to the bureaucratic mind: the approach to the world that believes that everything can be reduced to technique and procedures.

Much of America today is as addicted to bureaucratic, rule based thinking as ancient China.  The uncertainties of life in a thermonuclear world haunt us.  There must, we feel, be infallible techniques for making the economy grow, keeping inflation at bay, understanding international events and managing American foreign policy.  When there is a problem — a financial crash, a revolution in a friendly country, an attack by hostile forces — somebody must have made an obvious mistake.  They must have misapplied or failed to apply an obvious technique.  We would rather believe that our leaders are foolish and incompetent (which they often are) than face the truth that we live in a radically unpredictable world in which no methods and no rules can guarantee safety.

Sun Tzu’s approach is directly opposed to most modern thought about social problems.  He speaks about art and comes to war from a deeply Taoist worldview that highlights chaos, evanescence and change.  We study “IR theory” and “political science” in the hope that some rational explanations exist that will hold all this chaos at bay.  (At Bard I am happy to say we have “Political Studies” instead of “Political Science”; the more modest title recognizes the limits of the discipline. Sun Tzu, I think, would approve.)  We want sure and safe rules: democracies don’t go to war with each other, rational considerations guide the policy of great states, most problems have win-win solutions that everyone can accept, the age of great power war is behind us.  Sun Tzu says we are fooling ourselves by inventing these rules, blinding ourselves to perils on every side.
The Art of War is a handbook for living in an uncertain and dangerous world.  It is dominated by paradox: training is necessary to produce a good general, but any general who comes to trust the rules he has learned is headed for defeat.  The successful general will have studied The Art of War so profoundly that he ceases to trust it.

I was not reaching for hyperbole when I wrote that this is a book that wants to slap its readers in the face.  Like a Zen monk trying to astonish and trick the novice into a moment of enlightenment, Sun Tzu seeks to surprise, to shock and ultimately to awaken his readers.  He is not teaching a body of doctrine but a habit of mind: a habit of attentive clarity out of which can come true judgment and decisive action.  To the one with this habit, Sun Tzu’s specific precepts about war are highly useful and applicable to many domains beyond war.  To the one lacking this awareness, Sun Tzu is worse than useless; he can breed that false confidence which is, next to despair itself, the attitude most likely lead to utter and overwhelming defeat.

The nested paradoxes of Sun Tzu remain the Alpha and the Omega of the study of war.  That is why we start our study of grand strategy with this book; I hope students in the class and those who follow us online will keep those paradoxes in mind as we move through the semester.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/02/08/sun-tzu-the-enemy-of-the-bureaucratic-mind/