Joshual Cooper Ramo
Little Brown and Company, March 2009
The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Cooper Ramo attempts to establish a new paradigm for understanding global politics and international relations in a fast-changing world. It therefore marks a shift and rejects older models as obsolete ways of thinking. The “unthinkable,” for Ramo, is any unpredictable event that defies the logic of mainstream science and cannot be interpreted within the framework of existing paradigms. Our age, the author argues, abounds with such events which, for better or worse, are reshaping the world. Two examples he gives of the unthinkable are the internet’s largest website, Google, and Hezbollah’s 500-men army's deterrence of Israel's 30,000 soldier army. In the age of the unthinkable, the link between cause and effect is lost.
Thus, Kissinger's historical paradigm of global politics is abandoned since it relies on history as a starting point for interpreting the present and predicting the future. The unthinkable does not conform to any historical precedent and represents what is called in science as 'the irreducible unknown'. According to Ramo, Dean Babst's peaceful democracy theory is also doomed since it postulates that democracies never wage war with one another. Consequently US bomber attacks on the elected government of Serbia in 1999 is counter -evidence provided by the author which disproves the theory.
For Ramo, what matters is therefore not just to prevent disaster but to have a vision of how to withstand stress without cracking when disasters actually take place. In other words, the key word in our world is not rational morality but creativity. Since the unthinkable by definition defies any paradigmatic regularization, it is not surprising that at the end of the day the author does not provide us with an alternative paradigm per se. Instead, he furnishes us with a method or strategy for coping with the unthinkable and neutralizing its dangers- this strategy is resilience versus resistance. In other words, we should enhance our positive institutions already at work, making them resilient in case of calamity, rather than strain our nerves on sharpening passive defence systems and keeping hysterically alert to unexpected dangers.
Sometimes self-contradiction on the author's part looms. At the very outset, he rides the roughshod over Hezbollah party considering it a criminal group and a force of evil. Later he acknowledges that the age of the unthinkable is one in which states are not the only key players in world-politics and non-state entities like Hezbollah party have an effective role to play. By incriminating groups who are on "the axis of evil", he follows the same over simplistic attitude which he rejects, ignoring Hezbollah deep and non-criminal involvement in regional and local politics which needs to be considered.
The question now remains: is the elusive nature of unthinkable phenomena a plausible excuse for treating them as irreducible residuals of science. The author himself acknowledges that what were formerly one-in-a hundred –year events are now monthly occurrences. Thus when irregularities occur regularly, they form a pattern and can be subdued to scientific investigation. One great psycholinguist once wrote on "The non-anomalous nature of anomalous utterances". Can we, by analogy, talk about a non-anomalous pattern of anomalous, that is, unpredictable events in today's world? Perhaps this is a possibility that the author still needs to probe.
