Psyvvar
John Gretton
War on the Mind: the Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology Peter Watson (Hutchinson £9.95) Twenty years ago, in the days of National Service, a good many of us were tested for 'officer-like qualities', or oily-Qs as they were more popularly known. For the central test, we were divided into groups of half a dozen or so. In turn, we had to lead our group across an imaginary divide with the aid of some logs, some tackle and an oildrum or whatever. It seemed at the time like a test of practical intelligence, so it came as no surprise that it took them two goes to discover that quality in me.
We couldn't have been more wrong. I now learn from Peter Watson's book that British psychiatrists and psychologists had pioneered this selection method during the second world war; that it was not a problem-solving exercise, but a test of the way we handled the other members of the group; and that the introduction of this method `led to the ultimate demise of the public schools' influence on Britain's professional army.'
Admittedly, I was in the Navy, but you could have fooled me. Both at the time and later, at Oxford, those whom I would have expected, on grounds of caste and intel ligence, to have passed the test, had, with few exceptions, done so. But Watson won't be denied. He quotes a Brigadier Bidwell who has written that by 1942 not enough officer candidates were coming forward, that of those who did up to half were failing the training courses, and that there was a high rate of psychiatric breakdown both among officers and officer candidates under training. In fact, the introduction of these selection techniques, again according to Bidwell, was as valuable to the war effort as the Bailey Bridge or the 25-pounder gun.
Which just shows how little most of us know about the military uses and importance of i psychology. There are at least 146 research institutes specialising in this field, of which
the great majority are in the United States. North Korea, Vietnam, Malaya, Northern
Ireland and Israel have all been used as test
beds. War on the Mind is a selective run around some of the more interesting results.
Some are merely cranky, and some pro saically concerned with the more efficient use of selection procedures, manpower or existing weapons. A good deal of the material Watson has assembled, however, makes uncomfortable, if not frankly horrifying, reading.
It is not just that, if you reach the conclusion that most guerrilla leaders are pathological cases, or that most of their fol lowers have joined them under some form of duress, you can hardly avoid belittling or ignoring the political or ideological groundswell which must be sustaining the guerrillas. Nor is it just that, if you can
screen out the sort of people who would commit a My Lai massacre, you can also screen for them. Watson, rightly, makes both those points.
Even more fundamentally, though, the psychologist's approach takes all moral responsibility out of human action: it just happens that there are certain sorts of people who, in certain circumstances, will turn their machine-guns on helpless women and children. As people who make moral judgments of one sort or another every day, we have learnt to live with that sort of ambi guity. We can say, for example, that not only should Captain Calley have been brought to trial, as he was, but those who were responsible for his selection should also have been called to account.
Where it becomes much more difficult is when soldiers become not just cannon fodder but impersonal, irresponsible units in what the manipulators call a psywar (for psychological warfare). One of the most horrifying experiments cited by Watson the Zimbardo prison study shows that, given the right conditions, we can all become, almost overnight, either sadistic prison guards or craven prisoners. It all depends on who is manipulating us, and for whatends. And the main lesson of Watson's book is that the number of possible ends is almost infinite. Certainly, on the evidence
he presents, it would be all too easy to overstep the limit between the military abuses of psychology and the civil abuses of it.
Where Watson is writing in the first person, so to speak, he writes well and clearly, as one would expect from a psychologist turned journalist. However, there are times when he must have got bored with converting the monstrous jargon of his erstwhile colleagues into plain English. Though they appear both in the Concise and the Shorter OED, I refuse to believe that it is necessary to use the word 'decrement' (which I associate not with increment but with excrement) and as for `sequelae', it ought to be, literally, beyond words.
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