Cold War Psychology

Abstract

How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality, by Paul Erickson, Judy L. Klein, Lorraine Daston, Rebecca Lemov, Thomas Sturm and Michael D. Gordin. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2013. viii, 259 pp. $35.00 US (cloth), $21.00 US (paper). The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and Sciences of Human Nature, by Jamie Cohen-Cole. Chicago & London, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 397 pp. $45.00 US (cloth), $27.00 US (paper). The Cold War abounds with ironies of fighting in war room type, to paraphrase a gag from Kubrick's pitch-black nuclear satire, Dr. Strangelove. Perhaps most flagrant one is America's elaborate and expensive effort to rationally control a fundamentally irrational threat. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind quotes George Kennan, one of America's most prominent strategists of containment, who said that nuclear bomb was the most useless weapon ever invented. It can be employed to no rational purpose (83). These two books elucidate roles academics played in military-industrial complex and creation of Cold War's liberal consensus, and how this altered academy, especially social or human sciences. Both books are from University of Chicago Press, and complement each other nicely. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind unpacks ideas of an elite echelon of Cold War thinkers, action intellectuals working in hard and social sciences who circulated through universities, an alphabet soup of acronymic think tanks, government, and mainstream press. The Open Mind has much to say about these thinkers as well, but is more interested in way Cold War thought trickled down to general public, and was integrated into education and discourse. Cohen-Cole details promulgation of idea an open mind was best--and most American--intellectual disposition. Given that few North Americans, to this day, pride themselves on their closed-mindedness, popularization of open-mindedness is an example of an exceptionally efficacious Western propaganda campaign. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind originated at Max Planck Institute's 2010 workshop on Strangelovian Sciences. It is work of an interdisciplinary team of six scholars specializing in history of science, economics, and philosophy. As interdisciplinarity was one of hallmarks of Cold War rationality--a feature of era's ethos that Cohen-Cole treats at length--their approach is a neat match for topic. The authors begin by distinguishing reason from rationality. Reason and arguments about it have a long history in West, culminating in Enlightenment enthusiasm for rule-based thinking as a superior replacement for tradition or superstition. But authors insist that Leibniz's declaration, let us calculate, gained new meaning and urgency after World War II, with development of computing power and in face of staggering logistical challenges such as Berlin Airlift (63). The delightfully-named Operation Vittles, which conveyed supplies to Berlin, gave birth to Project scoop, an acronym for Scientific Computation of Optimum Programs. Even though ibm had yet to produce a computer that could satisfy military's voracious demand for information and calculations, programming and algorithms became important components of, and models for, Cold War rationality. Algorithms did not suffer from fear, or any other potentially distorting feeling. Computational rationality was but one model researchers deployed. Game theory was another, and authors focus on its strange career in chapter five, explaining development of The Prisoner's Dilemma, and eventual diminution of game theory's sway. In sixth and final chapter, authors contend that rise of cognitive science, especially heuristics-and-biases work of Kahneman and Tversky, hastened collapse of Cold War conceptions of rationality. …