The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

A PHENOMENON noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be.

Why did Chiang Kai-shek refuse to heed any voice of reform or alarm until he woke up to find his country had slid from under him?

“While all other sciences have advanced,” confessed our second President, John Adams, “government is at a stand; little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago.”

1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they do not need citing;

2) excessive ambition, such as Athens’ attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War,

3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire,

4) folly or perversity.

it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight.

Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. To remove the problem from personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.

folly in government has more impact on more people than individual follies, and therefore governments have a greater duty to act according to reason.

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.

Why do we invest all our skills and resources in a contest for armed superiority which can never be attained for long enough to make it worth having, rather than in an effort to find a modus vivendi with our antagonist—that is to say, a way of living, not dying?

disorder is the least tolerable of social conditions, government began to take shape in the Middle Ages and afterward as a recognized function with recognized principles, methods, agencies, parliaments, bureaucracies.

an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.

For two centuries, the American arrangement has always managed to right itself under pressure without discarding the system and trying another after every crisis, as have Italy and Germany, France and Spain. Under accelerating incompetence in America, this may change.

When Louis XIV, outliving son and grandson, died in 1715 after a reign of 72 years, he bequeathed, not the national unity that had been his objective, but an enlivened and embittered dissent, not national aggrandizement in wealth and power, but a weakened, disordered and impoverished state. Never had so self-centered a ruler so effectively despoiled self-interest.

a perceptive comment by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who cautioned, “In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.”

Charles was determined to rule and, while lightly endowed for the task intellectually, was rich in the Bourbon capacity to learn nothing and forget nothing.

Germany was not fighting for the status quo but for German hegemony of Europe and a greater empire overseas. She wanted not a mediated but a dictated peace and had no wish, as the Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmermann, wrote to Bernstorff, “to risk being cheated of what we hope to gain from the war” by a neutral mediator.

a better outcome could have been won by accepting Wilson’s proposal, knowing it would be a dead end, thus preventing or certainly postponing the addition of American strength to the enemy. Without America, the Allies could not have held out for victory, and as victory was probably beyond Germany’s power too, both sides would have slogged to an exhausted but more or less equal peace. For the world the consequences of that unused alternative would have changed history; no victory, no reparations, no war guilt, no Hitler, possibly no Second World War.

Japan faced a similar decision. Her plan of empire, called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, with the subjugation of China at its core, was a vision of Japanese rule stretching from Manchuria through the Philippines, Netherlands Indies, Malaya, Siam, Burma to (and sometimes including, depending on the discretion of the spokesman) Australia, New Zealand and India.

Despite isolationist sentiment, America would not acquiesce in Japanese control of China while Japan would accept no limitations there or restraints on her freedom of movement elsewhere in Asia.

Over a generation, pressure from the aggressive army in China and from its partisans at home had fused Japan to the goal of an impossible empire from which she could not now retreat. She had become a prisoner of her oversize ambitions.

Japan seems never to have considered that the effect of an attack on Pearl Harbor might be not to crush morale but to unite the nation for combat. This curious vacuum of understanding came from what might be called cultural ignorance, a frequent component of folly.

The overall responsibility of power is to govern as reasonably as possible in the interest of the state and its citizens. A duty in that process is to keep well-informed, to heed information, to keep mind and judgment open and to resist the insidious spell of wooden-headedness.

the Renaissance—which is to say the period when the values of this world replaced those of the hereafter—was in full flower in Italy. Under its impulse the individual found in himself, rather than in God, the designer and captain of his fate.

Because income too was divided, the Schism commercialized as well as politicized the Papacy, making revenue its primary concern. From this time, the sale of everything spiritual or material in the grant of the Church, from absolution and salvation to episcopates and abbeys, swelled into a perpetual commerce, attractive for what it offered yet repellent for what it made of religion.

Pursuing the spoils of office like hounds on a scent, each of the six, who included a Borgia and two Medicis, was obsessed by ambition to establish a family fortune that would outlive him.

What frustrated reform was the absence of support, if not active dislike, for it by a hierarchy and Papacy whose personal fortunes were embedded in the existing system and who equated reform with Councils and the devolution of papal sovereignty.

They regarded protest merely as dissent to be suppressed, not as a serious challenge to their validity.

Prison does not silence ideas whose time has come, a fact that generally escapes despots, who by nature are rulers of little wisdom.

Machiavelli found proof of decadence in the fact “that the nearer people are to the Church of Rome, which is the head of our religion, the less religious are they.”

When pardoners allowed the belief—though never explicitly stated by the popes—that indulgences could take care of future sins not yet committed, the Church had reached the point of virtually encouraging sin, as its critics did not fail to point out.

They possessed no sense of spiritual mission, provided no meaningful religious guidance, performed no moral service for the Christian world.

Their three outstanding attitudes—obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status—are persistent aspects of folly.

Edmund Burke, perceived and said, “The retention of America was worth far more to the mother country economically, politically and even morally than any sum which might be raised by taxation, or even than any principle so-called of the Constitution.”

The Tour usually included Rome, which seems not to have greatly changed since the times of the Renaissance popes. Its government was “the worst possible,” wrote an English visitor. “Of the population a quarter are priests, a quarter are statues, a quarter are people who do nothing.”

If revenue from the colonies to pay the cost of their defense was what Britain wanted—which was reasonable enough—she could and should have put it to the colonies to raise it themselves.

The evidence was ample that taxation by Parliament would meet adamant resistance in the colonies. It was ignored because the policy-makers regarded Britain as sovereign and the colonials as subjects, because Americans were not taken too seriously, and because Grenville and his associates, having some doubts themselves as to the rights in the case, wanted to obtain the revenue in a way that would establish Parliament’s eminent domain.

The English had contrived a convenient theory of “virtual representation” to cover the masses who lacked votes or members to represent them. Every member of the House, it was maintained, represented the whole body politic, not a particular constituency, and if Manchester, Sheffield and Birmingham had no seats and London had only six while Devon and Cornwall had seventy, the former could take comfort in being “virtually represented”

Americans tended to see a conscious plan to enslave them in every British measure. They assumed the British were more rational, just as the British government assumed they were more rebellious, than was true in either case.

the Government’s instinct was punitive. Having maneuvered itself into a situation of challenge from its subjects, it felt obliged to make a demonstration of authority, the more so as it was feared that American protest, if it succeeded, would inspire the spirit of emulation in English and Irish mobs.

The Government complacently ignored the criticism, secure in its large majority.

You may exert power over, but you can never govern an unwilling people.”

Pownall had formulated a principle worth the attention of all who rule at any time—that government must conduct itself with regard to the feelings of the governed, and ignores them at its peril.

The colonies were bent on redress of grievances and autonomy in their own affairs, not on independence.

Fixed in the preconception of “our inherent pre-eminence,” in Hillsborough’s phrase, Englishmen held to the view of Americans as uncouth obstreperous trouble-makers, regardless of the example in their midst, among others, of Benjamin Franklin, as variously talented and politically sophisticated as anyone in Europe, and thoroughly dedicated to the goal of reconciliation.

The argument of power held that if untaxed, the colonies would attract many English skilled workmen and manufacturers to settle there, would prosper and eventually dominate, leaving old England “A poor deserted deplorable Kingdom.”

Britain’s interest might have suggested at this point a review of the series of increasingly negative results in the colonies with the aim of re-directing the by now alarming course of events. That would have required thought instead of mere reaction, and pause for serious thought is not a habit of governments.

In formulating Cassandra’s curse—that she would tell the truth and not be believed—the ancient Greeks showed their remarkable early insight into the human psyche.