A friend of mine has lent me an old copy of the London Review of Books (December 2008 – such are the luxuries of an island paradise). Part of a letter it published caught my attention:
This is what I remember [Chistopher Isherwood] saying about Klaus Mann:Economists will recognise the pledge made by Mann and his fellow (apparently exceedingly optimistic) intellectuals and artists as a version of the Prisoner's Dilemma. It appears as if each of the people involved welshed on the promise to kill themselves in the hope that enough of the others would still do so to bring about their desired outcome, namely unilateral disarmament of nuclear capabilities.‘Klaus was in despair, always, but in the 1940s, during the days of the Stockholm Peace Pledge, he and many other famous European intellectuals and artists set up a plan for all of them – in protest against the development of atomic bombs – to create and sign a document of protest in which they would declare their agreement to kill themselves on a certain specific date. This mass suicide of artists and intellectuals would draw attention in all the news media all around the world and the impact would bring peace for ever’
It turned out that Klaus Mann was the only one of those who had pledged to kill themselves on the set date who did kill himself on that date. His death received little attention anywhere.
What interests me is why Klaus Mann didn’t do the same. I think it has something to do with the power of an idea to motivate action, even when it appears to fly in the face of rationality. Resistance movements very often are characterised by this: think of the Maji Maji rebellion, for example, or John Chilembwe’s rising in Malawi. These were resistance actions that were objectively almost certain to fail (as they did). Still, many gave their lives in support of them. This isn’t something economics deals with very well, which is why, for all the proliferation of economists dealing with conflict, we should never let go of the importance of historical and sociological analysis of motivation.
4 Comments
I think it has more to do with beliefs and reputation. Many individuals have drastically different world views than we do - their actions may appear to be irrational, but their just acting with a different information set. It is much easier to judge actions as "certain failure" with hindsight.
Well, beliefs certainly - but this isn't so different to the 'power of ideas'. The Maji Maji Rebellion for example was definitely doomed to failure, by rational analysis. People were convinced that they were immune to bullets because of blessed water. That was never going to end in victory. But the power of the ideas and the leadership of that Rebellion still convinced people to fight in it.
You can argue that this is still rationality, but for me, we get into murky waters when we keep expanding what rationality is: we end up losing any real sense of what it means and we wind up in a situation where literally anything can be defined as rational so long as we look at certain things in certain ways.
The other point, with regard to Mann was that he almost certainly would have known that the fellow intellectuals he signed that document with were not going to commit suicide. It doesn't hold that he wouldn't have had any communication with them. But the power of the idea for him outweighed any consideration of welshing on his part of the bargain.
Of course, he may just have been profoundly depressed, coming from his family.
One of the earliest incidents of taking one's life for what you believe was by Socratese but he made great impression and we after almost 2400 years hear of this event. Thanks to his pupil Plato without whom Socrates would have been little known as Mann. The moral of the story is it is life that could perpetuate your beliefs and not in death. After all what is belief but conditional thinking. It is great to change unjust events but route to change may not lie in death. Is taking life in this event is inverted ego? None of us may have the full understanding of life, despite labelling as intellectuals, it seems to me that they are being short of wise. I heard and interesting story from Ajahn Brahmawansa a buddhist priest in Perth. He quoted from Sufi tradition. An intellectual by the name Nasoorudin during the time of King of Persia had made a heretic statement and was doomed to be killed, when he appeared before the king he said" it is a shame that I would be killed as I was planning to train the King's donkey to fly, King was impressed being aware of his abilities defered the death penalty by one year to train the donkey. Upon which a friend of Nasoorudin ask him whether he could do it, he laughed and said no I cant but I got one year to live uncertainities are such I may die in 6 months or may be King would die in 9 months. The moral is you cannot change things in death. So change what you can and have the humility to accept what you cannot and wisdom to know the difference. That is perhaps a hallmark of the wise
Nihal, this is true - I don't hold up Mann as a great example to follow, but just as an example of how an idea can make people do things that run counter to rationality - and humility.