The Committee of Public Safety

The Ten

Mark Safranski posts over at Zenpundit:

“The Big Picture”- the Nexus between Education and Grand Strategy

Here’s an extract with the key points highlighted (emphasis mine):

[M]ost students graduate high school and college unaffected by the large amounts of rubbish and trivia they have been exposed to because it was presented without any kind of sensible context and being committed to short term memory, quickly forgotten. The real damage to students comes from the cumulative effect of the absence of substance – the waste of time where meaningful content and the pressure to think through hard problems should have been.

The costs of educational myopia are here and they will grow worse with time. We already see sharply declining public support for science (because more people are now ignorant of basic scientific literacy),  lower rates of innovation and other negative economic effects. In the area of governance, across the board, regardless of party label or ideology, we have national leaders in their 40’s, 50’s and early 60’s who see the world primarily in short-term, tactical terms and who confuse career or class interest with governing in the national interest. Oligarchy is inherently a non-strategic worldview because it eschews making choices because choices require sacrifice in the near term in order to acquire systemic advantages in the long term…

This is not a question of smart or dumb or of expecting politicians to be moral paragons. There’s plenty of IQ wattage inside and outside of Washington, DC and petty larceny in politics goes back to the stone age. Rather, on average, the difficulty is that our nation’s intellectual potential has not been effectively maximized. Is it reasonable to educate people in a way where all subjects are disconnected from one another, prioritizing narrow specialization, emphasizing accumulating facts over understanding principles, rewarding the “right answer” instead of the “best question”, demanding conformity instead of curiosity and then expect our leaders to be visionaries and adaptively creative statesmen who think in strategic terms?

Why would our societal orientation in complex, dynamic, fast moving situations be good when our educational system trains people only to think through simplified, linear, sequential problems? Strategic thinkers need to be able to see “the big picture” and handle uncertainty, or they cannot be said to be strategic thinkers.

This dovetails with this hypothesis. It asserts that the human brain (in common with other vertebrates) evolved two distinct roles to its left and right hemispheres. The left brain’s focus is the routine, specific, and local. The right brain’s focus is the irregular, general, and global. The left handles adaptation to the normal, the concrete, and the immediate. The right handles adaptation to the unexpected, the fluid, and the far-flung.

How does society divide its resources between the need to adapt to the routine, specific, and local and the need to deal with the unforseen, the general, and the global? How does it prepare the individuals who have to be the cogs in the social machinery of adaptation? As Zen points out, contemporary American social organizations thrive on the endless vivisection, propagation, and flagellation of minutia. If the sheer volume of the trivial is any gauge, Americans have mastered the tasks that nature has devolved to the left brain. It’s the tasks that have gathered in the right brain that America is short on. The ability to see the big picture, to correctly react to the challenging, to go from the specific from the general is in doubt. This is the distinction between strategy and tactics. As Svechin notes in his introduction to Strategy:

While strategy pursues goals, tactics solve problems. A goal means a comprehensive major objective from which we are separated by a certain distance; the achievement of one goal requires the solution of several problems; the problems facing us grow in immediate proximity to us and become very urgent in nature. By this we would like to emphasize that strategy is essentially future-oriented, while tactics are practically immeasurable in time: while tactics may divide the conduct of a battle into certain phases, these phases are very close to one another and follow one another very quickly.

America presents a bewildering array of tactics to both enemy and friend alike. Part of this is due to the high quality of some of the tactics. Look at the average American summer blockbuster. Usually the technical or, dare we say, tactical parts of the movie such as special effects or costuming are first rate. The problem is generally not with the tactics, it’s with the st0ry. There’s lots of flash and bang but no substance. Similarly, America continually produces a radical incoherence between the often contradictory ends and means that it claims to follow. Joining them into a coherent narrative taxes the strongest storytellers among us. Yet this reconciliation of ends and means, of power and desire, is the essence of strategy. This is where the void in American adaptability appears, as Zen points out. The social institutions intended to provide this adaptability can barely handle routine. How will they handle the black swan?

In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb deals with the relationship between humans and rare but consequential events i.e. “black swans”. Humans, Taleb argues, have a hard time dealing with black swans because their brains are optimized for a world of cause and effect that is predictable and follows a normal statistical distribution, the predictable world of the ancestral hunter-gatherer. Black swans tend to be governed by Pareto distributions where rare events have a disproportionate impact. The human brain can’t anticipate them; it can only moralize about them afterwords, beating their Pareto curve into a bell curve. It’s not that the human brain is dysfunctional, it’s just maladaptive:

If…the environment changes, then it should come as no surprise that the heuristics of the old environment are not necessarily suited to the new. In such cases, we observe behavioral biases—actions that are apparently ill advised in the context in which we observe them. But rather than labeling such behavior irrational, we should recognize that suboptimal behavior is likely when we take heuristics out of their evolutionary context. A more accurate term for such behavior might be “maladaptive.” The flopping of a fish on dry land may seem strange and unproductive, but under water, the same motions propel the fish away from its predators. And the antagonistic effect of human emotional reactions on logical reasoning described earlier is maladaptive for many…contexts.

An example of a “maladaption” of the human brain that Taleb uses is what happens when you see a leopard. What does your brain decide to do in the blink of an eye? Run. It’s a predictable response that yields a reasonable chance of escape. When you see a stock market crashing, what’s is the mind response? Run. While the coming of the leopard is the sort of event that the hypothesis argues that the right brain is optimized for, a non-regular but normal event for an evolving hominid. Call the right brain a hemisphere optimized for micro-black swans.

The hypothesis of deep left brain-right brain differences, if true, presents a situation in which an complex adaptive system is divided into specialized subsystems. One hemisphere is optimized for the unorthodox, general, and global, the other for the orthodox, specific, and local. How many human organizations have a similar division of labor? Most human organizations are set up for the bell curve, optimized to handle the regular and predictable. They rarely have a department for black swans. While many human organizations were originally formed to serve an instrumental purpose in fulfilling a specific need, they generally deteriorate into sinecures optimized for distributing power to their functionaries. A black swan event is anathema to such organizations because it upsets the predictable routine of extracting resources for personal gain. Yet, from time to time, such events come along and threaten organizations with destruction. Organizations that are too set in their ways find it difficult to adapt.

America, as a republic, would seem to have some advantages. As Machiavelli comments in his Discourses on Livy that:

Hence it happens that a republic has a longer life and has good fortune longer than a principality, because, thanks to the diversity of the citizens there are in it, it can adapt better to diversity of circumstances than a prince can. For, as has been stated, a man who is accustomed to proceeding in one way never changes; and when times unsuited to those ways of his change, he must necessarily fail.

Yet even the process of adaption for a republic is laced with landmines. Machiavelli writes in another section of the Discourses:

And certainly, of all Rome’s institutions, the Dictatorship is one that deserves to be considered and counted among the ones that led to the greatness of its power, for without such an institution cities will have difficulty getting out of extraordinary events. Because a republic’s customary institutions function slowly: no council or public official can run everything by itself; in many matters one needs the other. It takes time to reconcile their wills, so their remedies are very dangerous when they have to deal with something that cannot wait. And that is why republics must have some such means among their institutions. The Venetian republic, which excels among modern republics, has set aside powers for a few citizens who, in times of urgent need and without broader consultation, can make decisions unanimously. When a republic lacks such means, it is necessary for it either to collapse in observing the constitution or to break with it in order not to collapse. And in a republic nothing should ever occur that has to be dealt with by extraordinary means. Because, although the extraordinary means may work well then, the example does harm nevertheless: people become accustomed to breaking laws for a good purpose and then under that pretext they are broken for ill. So a republic will never be perfect unless its laws have provided for everything and supplied a remedy for any event and prescribed means for applying it. And therefore I say in conclusion: those republics that in cases of urgent danger do not have recourse either to a Dictator or to some such power will always collapse under serious events.

Throwing away rules intended for the routine in favor of resort to the emergency dictates of one man or of ten in a crisis has been a constant remedy since the dawn of history. There are arguments that the original city-states of ancient Sumer were republics. However, they gained the habit of elected a temporary war leader who eventually became less and less temporary and more and more a full time despot, the prototype of the Oriental despots that corrupt the world to this day. The Roman Republic was fatally undermined by Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Gaius Julius Caesar, and Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, two dictators and a far more insidious political insider. The American Republic had brushes with Lincoln, Wilson, and FDR. While Machiavelli waxed rhapsodical about dictators, Guicciardini was, as usual, more pragmatic:

There is no doubt tat one single man can organize matters better than many and that in a disordered city a man deserves praise if, when he is unable to reorganize it in any other way, he does so by violence or deception and extreme means. But pray God there should be no need to restore republics in such a way because, aside from the fact that men’s minds are false (and a man might become a tyrant under the guise of honesty), there is also danger that an intention that was good at the outset can become evil. Because someone who does this cannot relinquish his authority as soon as the laws have been formulated since once laws are ushered in violently they would immediately be annulled. Therefore he has to stay in power long enough for the passage of time and experience to stabilize them, and during this period it is possible for the sweetness of power and the unbridled power to rule to change his initial good intentions into evil ones. This sort of medicine is desirable, therefore, only if there is no other hope for cure, but it is dangerous and sets a bad example.

If you want to avoid the easy way of the dictator or the oligarchy, what do you do? How do you achieve the Adam Elkus special:

The essential element of TAC is the structured process by which the network develops information collection priorities. Truly crowdsourced TAC would mean more than just aggregation—TAC would help build greater qualitative understanding through analysis and synthesis. The network would actively synthesize information from the cloud, setting priorities about the kinds of “signatures” that must be observed, matched with patterns of activity into trends and potentials, and built into a collection plan that could prove or disprove the hypothesis created. Like Wikipedia, the model would marry the expertise and dedication of an administrative core with a mass of casual users. Collection, visualizations, and aggregation systems would be the processing tools for these networks. To be very clear, the purpose of visualization and aggregation systems would be as means rather than ends—tools to implement command concepts rather than conceive them.

One technique that might be worthy of examination is sortition or, even more extreme, demarchy. Taleb suggests we can’t handle true randomness. It might be time to embrace chance rather than flee from it. Since the American people are too corrupt to elect smart leaders, produce good teachers, or develop smart strategies, then a random sample mixing “rational” choice and randomly selection might inject new vigor into our national adaptiveness. Consider how the Venetians elected their Doge:

Their object [of the regulations for the elections] was to minimize as far as possible the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by a complex elective machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine and the nine elected forty-five. Then the forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who actually elected the doge.

Sortition or variants like demarchy, randomness mixed with election, may create enough diversity to produce adaptability. Perhaps the rationale behind sortition was best expressed in William F. Buckley’s statement that, “I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.” Any body that is self-selected (like a modern university faculty) is prone to groupthink. Groupthink is the enemy of the diversity generation necessary for successful adaptation. Especially when that groupthink misses the big picture. American society must have the equivalent of a right brain and a left brain if it is to survive and even prosper.