Deep Blue Politics

The two brothers who watched my chess game looked like they were born about five years apart, the same gap in age between me and my opponent, my brother. I hadn't played chess in about a year, and my brother capitalized on my every mistake.

I found myself dodging and feinting as he snatched my powerful pieces away from me, blunder by blunder. Once he felt satisfied that I'd been neutralized, he pressed his own advantage. The elder observing kid-who was maybe 11 or 12 years old-nudged his little brother, expecting to see me burn out. I swung a couple of pieces across the board as my brother single-mindedly bore down on my defenses, preparing to box me in. Then I went for it.

"Checkmate," I said. I had to say it again before my brother took me seriously. He moved his king theoretically about the board, sighed, and stuffed the pieces back into the box. "You beat him with nothing!" said the older observer, thunderstruck. "Game's never over 'till it's over," I said. His little brother smiled.

As it turned out, my amateurish victory tapped into a key facet of chess... and something more. Chess, as documented in David Shenk's excellent new history The Immortal Game, is a deceptively complex pastime that has been metaphorically applied to the real world since its inception. Benjamin Franklin, an avid player in Shenk's account, described the "morals" necessary in chess as foresight, circumspection, caution, and perseverance. In that particular game with my younger brother, I managed to utilize only one of the four-perseverance- and yet it managed to be enough. But Franklin's "morals of chess," like so much else about the game, can extend far beyond the board.

We've had an awful lot of protests here at Columbia, and we pride ourselves on our "history of civil disobedience," muttering about the spirit of 1968 like it was some sort of touchstone for change. But the last time I checked, our student demands have failed much more often than they've succeeded.

The politics of Columbia's protests are often identical to the concepts of "romantic chess," which is described by Shenk as the school of desperate one-in-a-million gambits and swashbuckling flourishes of important pieces. It looks great on paper, but at the endgame, your careful adversary will simply swat you like a fly and go about his merry way.

Protests may be viewed as chess games. Even on the occasions when a protest's gambit is successful, the opponent makes middling sacrifices, then simply turns right back to a disadvantaged position. Does starting a department of African Studies and then not promoting it ring a bell? How about the space crunch and the ever-empty sixth floor of Lerner? If you want to be really insidious-I don't personally buy this, but some do-how about not building the gym in 1968, only to expand into Manhattanville now?

If an opponent like Columbia plays that long of a chess game, how many moves ahead do you think the U.S. government plays? How can a protest against something even bigger, like the war in Iraq or companies that operate in Darfur, possibly succeed? It's like playing chess against Deep Blue, the famous IBM computer that beat world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

Like players of any game-except maybe Ivy League football-we should realize that if a strategy isn't working, it'd be wise to alter it. Again, we're back to Franklin's "morals of chess": foresight, circumspection, caution, and perseverance. Calling for some sort of socialist walkabout and espousing tired "evil empire" rhetoric doesn't display, uh, any of those characteristics.

How do we play a good game of chess in protesting to bring about change? With careful but certain goals. Creating an anti-war coalition so fractured that one of its biggest collaborators walks out, as various groups did this winter, isn't exactly establishing your goals. Campaigning for something abstract like "multiculturalism" is fine, but have the foresight to realize that if you don't define what that is, the people you're begging from will not do it for you.

Change in this world has to come from the right mix of strategy and passion, a full commitment to the goal with knowledge of your alternative routes, your potential pitfalls, and your contingency plans. Before you make a bold move, like, say, jumping onto a stage with a banner or hosting a "hunt the immigrant" game down at New York University, consider what your opponent's next move might be. Blind idealism is very inspiring to your base, but it will not win you any chess games.

That's not to say that all calls for change should be amoral scheming. Remember Garry Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue? He fought a new, more clever machine to a draw in 2003 by playing a sly mix of deliberate chess mixed with some "romantic" moves that the computer just didn't know how to handle. Changing the world for the better isn't totally analogous to winning a game of chess, but it sure helps to study hard, know your gambits and goals, and persevere, even when it seems like mistakes were made. All the good and "romantic" intentions of our protests won't change the world-but if a human can still fight on against the successor to Deep Blue, I think we can change our little corner for the better.