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.

This Scientific American article (Evolutionary Origins of Your Right and Left Brain) presents a new hypothesis about the evolution of the left and right hemispheres of the human brain:

The specialization of each hemisphere in the human brain, we argue, was already present in its basic form when vertebrates emerged about 500 million years ago. We suggest that the more recent specializations of the brain hemispheres, including those of humans, evolved from the original ones…Our hypothesis holds that the left hemisphere of the vertebrate brain was originally specialized for the control of well-established patterns of behavior under ordinary and familiar circumstances. In contrast, the right hemisphere, the primary seat of emotional arousal, was at first specialized for detecting and responding to unexpected stimuli in the environment.

In early vertebrates such a division of labor probably got its start when one or the other hemisphere developed a tendency to take control in particular circumstances. From that simple beginning, we propose, the right hemisphere took primary control in potentially dangerous circumstances that called for a rapid reaction from the animal—detecting a predator nearby, for instance. Otherwise, control passed to the left hemisphere. In other words, the left hemisphere became the seat of self-motivated behavior, sometimes called top-down control…The right hemisphere became the seat of environmentally motivated behavior, or bottom-up control. The processing that directs more specialized behaviors—language, toolmaking, spatial interrelations, facial recognition, and the like—evolved from those two basic controls…

We have argued for a basic distinction between the role of the left hemisphere in normal action and the role of the right hemisphere in unusual circumstances. But investigators have highlighted additional dichotomies of hemispheric function as well. In humans the right hemisphere “takes in the whole scene,” attending to the global aspects of its environment rather than focusing on a limited number of features. That capacity gives it substantial advantages in analyzing spatial relations. Memories stored by the right hemisphere tend to be organized and recalled as overall patterns rather than as a series of single items. In contrast, the left hemisphere tends to focus on local aspects of its environment…

Why have vertebrates favored the segregation of certain functions in one or the other half of the brain? To assess an incoming stimulus, an organism must carry out two kinds of analyses simultaneously. It must estimate the overall novelty of the stimulus and take decisive emergency action if needed (right hemisphere). And it must determine whether the stimulus fits some familiar category, so as to make whatever well-established response, if any, is called for (left hemisphere).

To detect novelty, the organism must attend to features that mark an experience as unique. Spatial perception calls for virtually that same kind of “nose for novelty,” because almost any standpoint an animal adopts results in a new configuration of stimuli. That is the function of the right hemisphere. In contrast, to categorize an experience, the organism must recognize which of its features are recurring, while ignoring or discarding its unique or idiosyncratic ones. The result is selective attention, one of the brain’s most important capabilities. That is the function of the left hemisphere…Perhaps, then, those hemispheric specializations initially evolved because collectively they do a more efficient job of processing both kinds of information at the same time than a brain without such specialized system…

Enabling separate and parallel processing to take place in the two hemispheres may increase brain efficiency, but it does not explain why, within a species, one or the other specialization tends to predominate. Why, in most animals, is the left eye (and the right hemisphere) better suited than the right eye (and the left hemisphere) for vigilance against predation? What makes the predominance of one kind of handedness more likely than a symmetric, 50–50 mixture of both?

From an evolutionary standpoint a “broken” symmetry, in which populations are made up mainly of left types or mainly of right types, could be disadvantageous because the behavior of individuals would be more predictable to predators. Predators could learn to approach on the prey’s less vigilant side, thereby reducing the chance of being detected. The uneven proportion of left- and right-type individuals in many populations thus indicates that the imbalance must be so valuable that it persists despite the increased vulnerability to predators. [Scientists] have suggested that, among social animals, the advantage of conformity may lie in knowing what to expect from others of one’s own species.

[Scientists] recently showed mathe­matically that populations dominated by left-type or by right-type individuals can indeed arise spontaneously if such a population has frequency-dependent costs and benefits. The mathematical theory of games often shows that the best course of action for an individual may depend on what most other members of its own group decide to do. Applying game theory, [scientists] demonstrated that left- or right-type behavior can evolve in a population under social selection pressures—that is, when asymmetrical individuals must coordinate with others of their species. For example, one would expect schooling fish to have evolved mostly uniform turning preferences, the better to remain together as a school. Solitary fish, in contrast, would probably vary randomly in their turning preferences, because they have little need to swim together. This is in fact the case.

Two academic programs, one at Yale University and one at Duke University, have the laudable goal of teaching American students grand strategy. Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy:

[S]eeks to revive the study and practice of grand strategy by devising methods to teach that subject at the graduate and undergraduate levels, by training future leaders to think about and implement grand strategies in imaginative and effective ways, and by organizing public events that emphasize the importance of grand strategy.

We define ‘grand strategy’ as a comprehensive plan of action, based on the calculated relationship of means to large ends. Never an exact science, grand strategy requires constant reassessment and adjustment. Flexibility is key. Traditionally believed to belong to and best-developed in the politico-military and governmental realms, the concept of grand strategy applies—and ISS believes is essential—to a broad spectrum of human activities, not least those of international institutions, non-governmental organizations, and private businesses and corporations.

The Yale program features such heavyweights as John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy, Charles Hill, and Walter Russell Mead, and Paul Solman. Duke’s program follows a similar path:

American grand strategy is the collection of plans and policies by which the leadership of the United States mobilizes and deploys the country’s resources and capabilities, both military and non-military, to achieve its national goals. Grand strategy exists in the real world of governing, whether it is carefully formulated and articulated in advance, or whether it evolves ad hoc out of the world-views, predilections, and subjectivities of those who govern. It is a fruitful field for scholars and students to study so that those who govern and those who are governed might have the richest conceptual repertoire with which to construct and evaluate national policies.

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We have distinctive strengths in political science and public policy, including a diversity of experience across the partisan divide, and we complement that with a rich tradition of close collaboration with military and diplomatic history. Through workshops, distinguished lectures, and courses, participants in the Program on American Grand Strategy have the opportunity to interact with leaders in policy and the academy.

[...]

Grand strategy is a quintessentially interdisciplinary concept, approach, and field of study:

• Grand strategy is the art of reconciling ends and means. It involves purposive action – what leaders think and want.
• It operates in peacetime and wartime, incorporating military and non-military tools, and aggregating subsidiary tactics, operations, and policies.
• Grand strategy begins with theory: leaders’ ideas about how the world and what is or ought to be their states’ roles in that world. Yet it is embodied in policy and practice: government action and reaction in response to real (or perceived) threats and opportunities.
• It lends itself to vigorous interpretive academic debates, yet it is so realistic that practitioners can and must contribute for it to be properly understood.

The Director of Duke’s program, Peter Feaver, blogged on teaching grand strategy recently at Foreign Policy (What is grand strategy and why do we need it?):

The study of grand strategy — and arguing about grand strategy, for you cannot study something without arguing about it — is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Yale has pioneered an extraordinarily popular Grand Strategy Program headed by distinguished historians, John Lewis Gaddis and Paul Kennedy, and distinguished practitioner Charlie Hill. Several graduates of that program have gone on to positions of responsibility in the Clinton, Bush, and now Obama administrations…

I am starting a similar program at Duke and I find it is an excellent way to bridge theory and practice. Grand Strategy begins with theory: leaders’ theories about how the world works and what is or ought to be their states’ roles in that world. Yet it is embodied in policy and practice: government action and reaction in response to real (or perceived) threats and opportunities. Grand strategy may be born in debates at the highest levels of national power, but it lives or dies in the collaborative action of myriad junior officials.

Grand strategy lends itself to vigorous interpretive academic debates, yet it is so realistic that practitioners, current and former, can and must contribute for it to be properly understood. It leads to constructively critical appraisals of leaders: helping students empathize with the leaders even as they critically evaluate their choices.

Grand strategy blends the disciplines of history (what happened and why?), political science (what underlying patterns and causal mechanisms are at work?), public policy (how well did it work and how could it be done better?), and economics (how are national resources produced and protected?). Students are especially drawn to grand strategy because it makes history more relevant, political science more concrete, public policy more broadly contextualized, and economics more security-oriented.

Indeed, the study of grand strategy may require a revolution of sorts in the way that we educate students. That, at least, is the thesis of a talk given by John Gaddis at Duke recently (and available here). He argues, persuasively to my ears, that grand strategy is a useful way of blending academic history, academic political science, and the real-world experience of practitioners. He argues, less persuasively to my ears, that the United States does not do grand strategy well and hasn’t had a functioning one since the end of the Cold War. But he is absolutely correct that we need to do a better job of training the next generation to engage critically in the hard work of designing, implementing, and revising American grand strategy.

The talk by John Lewis Gaddis is an illuminating discussion of grand strategy (read the whole thing). On the problem of establishing grand strategy as a course subject:

When my colleagues Paul Kennedy, Charlie Hill, and I first began talking about
setting up a grand strategy course at Yale in the late 1990s, at least half the people to
whom we tried to explain this thought we were talking about “grant” strategy:  how do
you get the next federal or foundation grant?

On the genesis of the course on grand strategy:

Let me begin with the event that caused us to begin teaching this [grand strategy] class.  The date was September 24, 1998.  A NATO briefing team had invited itself to Yale to make the case for the Clinton administration’s policy of expanding the alliance eastward.  There would be no problem about including the Czechs, the Poles, and the Hungarians, the briefers told us, because so much effort had gone into reorganizing committees in Brussels to make them feel welcome.  The briefing concluded after about half an hour, and questions were called for.

Our colleague Bruce Russett raised his hand and asked whether NATO expansion might not cause difficulties with the Russians, perhaps undermining President Yeltsin’s efforts to democratize the country, perhaps creating an awkward situation for the new or prospective members of the alliance as Russian power revived, perhaps even driving Russia into some new form of cooperation with the Chinese, thereby reversing one of the greatest victories for the West in the Cold War, which was the Sino-Soviet split.  There was a moment of shocked silence.  Then one of the briefers exclaimed, in front of our entire audience:  “Good God!  We’d never thought of that!”

[...]

And as Professors Kennedy, Hill, and I walked out of the briefing that afternoon, shaking our heads at what we’d heard, we agreed that something had to be done.  That was the beginning of the Yale grand strategy seminar.

On what is taught as grand strategy:

So maybe our Yale briefing was not an anomaly.  Perhaps with respect to NATO expansion, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern really have been in charge.  And if that’s the case, then similar experts may have been designing other aspects of post-Cold War American grand strategy, thereby contributing to the grand strategic deficit I mentioned. But let’s reserve judgment on that unhappy thought for the moment.  Instead, I want to repay the debt my colleagues and I owe to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, who without quite realizing what they were doing, contributed so much to getting the Yale grand strategy seminar underway.  It seems only fair now to admit them belatedly to that class, and to review what we might have tried to teach them.

We’d have begun by reminding Roz and Gil – as they’d have asked us to call them – that we we’d not be offering them a public policy course…We’d not be trying to influence what was happening in Washington now or in the foreseeable future.  Instead we’d be building on Henry Kissinger’s observation that “the convictions that leaders have formed before reaching high office are the intellectual capital they will consume as long as they continue in office.”  We’d be trying to enhance the intellectual capital of Roz, Gil, and their fellow students.  This would be a hedge against the day when they’d be running things and we’d dead, or senile, or they’d be too busy to take our phone calls or track our twitters.  We’d have their attention at the moment – at least as much as it’s possible to get the attention of any overcommitted Wi-Fi addicted Yalie – and we’d be taking advantage of it.

Within these limits, we’d conceive of grand strategy very broadly.  My own definition – not shared by my colleagues, for we are argumentative in the classroom – is that grand strategy is the calculated relationship of means to large ends.  It’s about how one uses whatever one has to get to wherever it is one wants to go.  Our knowledge of it derives chiefly from the realm of war and statecraft, because the fighting of wars and the management of states have demanded the calculation of relationships between means and ends for a longer stretch of time than any other documented area of collective human activity.

But grand strategy need not apply only to war and statecraft:  it’s potentially applicable to any endeavor in which means must be deployed in the pursuit of important ends.  That’s why we regularly get papers from our students on the grand strategy of navigating the Yale curriculum, or of surviving a summer internship, or of achieving success in soccer, football, and especially rowing, a sport that particularly attracts the members of our class, probably because of its ancient echoes in Herodotus and Thucydides.  As does, predictably, one other topic of great significance to them, which is the grand strategy of falling in and out of love.

The actual process of teaching:

How, though, would we teach this subject?  We’d explain to Roz and Gil that our course, which begins in the spring, extends over the summer, and concludes in the fall, encompasses three schools:  a school of the classics, a school of surprise, and a school of responsibility.  Let me explain what I mean by each of these, starting with the classics.

There’s a reason why people continue to read them, but hardly anyone ever tells you precisely what it is.  George Kennan, looking backward, came close in 1959 when he wrote that only the study of history “can expose the nature of man as revealed in simpler and more natural conditions, where that which was elemental was less concealed by artificialities.”  Thucydides, looking forward, said much the same thing 24 centuries earlier when he introduced his great history of the Peloponnesian War as “a possession for all time,” meant for those “who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.”

Roz and Gil would be studying Thucydides and Kennan in the spring semester of our Yale seminar, and a good many other chroniclers and practitioners of grand strategy as well.  They’d include Sun Tzu, Polybius, Machiavelli, Elizabeth I, Philip II, the Founding Fathers, Kant, Metternich, Clausewitz, Lincoln, Bismarck, Salisbury, Wilson, Churchill, the two Roosevelts, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Kissinger, Isaiah Berlin, and Ronald Reagan – all within thirteen weeks.  Some of our colleagues at Yale find this eclecticism a bit alarming, so we’ve tried to reassure them in a couple of ways.

One has been to suggest that we’re vicariously enlarging our students’ experience, which is what all educators do.  It’s true that babies quickly develop strategies for getting what they want without ever having read Sun Tzu or Clausewitz.  But their parents do, nonetheless, eventually pack them off to school, on the grounds that it would be inefficient for them to go through life making it all up as they go along:  that there’s value in exposing them, in a properly distilled form, to the accumulated wisdom of those who have gone before.  They do so in the spirit of Machiavelli, who reminded his prince that “no greater gift could be made by me than to give you the capacity to be able to understand in a very short time all that I have learned and understood in so many years and with so many hardships and dangers for myself.”

[...]

Roz and Gil would come out of our spring semester, then, steeped – even if superficially – in the classics.  But what are young people supposed to do with a classical education, however compressed it may be, once they’ve got it?  We’ve thought a lot about that question, and have found an answer of sorts in another classical tradition, which is the odyssey.  Thucydides wrote of “experience which is learnt in the school of danger,” and that’s how an odyssey has usually been understood:  it’s a time of testing in which you pit your own strength and cunning against ogres, gorgons, sirens, cyclopic giants, and sometimes really bad weather…

If updated for the opportunities and constraints of our own age, it can certainly be a useful thing for grand strategy students to do.  All of them learn, from reading Clausewitz, that on battlefields “the light of reason is refracted in a manner quite different from that which is normal in academic speculation.”  Most of our students won’t be on military battlefields, but their lives will be filled with other battles in which the light of reason will not be refracted as it was in our classroom.  That’s what we hope to give them a sense of in our summer school of surprise.

An odyssey, we believe, should be something more than an internship, where the only monsters confronted tend to be difficult bosses, recalcitrant copying machines, and boring routines:  if there are ogres or gorgons, they operate on a small scale.  So rather than sending Roz and Gil on one of those assignments, we’d try if at all possible to give them…an adventure that would get them out into the wide surprising world, with the great classical texts still fresh in their mind.

[...]

By the beginning of the fall semester, then, our students Roz and Gil will have arrived back in New Haven, smiling, sun-tanned, and a little shaggy, ready to begin the third part of our course, which is the school of responsibility.  Our objective here is to preview the world in which they’ll work, for we don’t want them doing odysseys all their lives.  That means mastering the contemporary classics:  Fukuyama, Huntington, Zakaria, Kagan, and now Walter Russell Mead, who is co-teaching the class with us this year.  Theirs are the books that have defined the post-Cold War world.  We use them as a framework for what follows, which is the most dreaded portion of our course:  the seven weeks we spend on student policy briefs or, as the military likes to call them, murder boards.

Up to this point, we’ve been nice to our students;  but now this stops, because we don’t want them to get the idea that the world is going to be nice to them.  So we turn ourselves into ogres, requiring the students, in teams of three or four each week, to brief us on one of several broad issues that current and future leaders are going to have to face…

It’s up to the students to decide what policy-makers need to know about these problems, in terms of action that needs to be taken now, what the present administration should try to accomplish before it leaves office, and where the long-term national interest lies.  We require written briefs prepared according to General Marshall’s specifications from World War II:  hence, they’re called “Marshall briefs.”  But the students must also deliver their briefs orally in business attire using Power Point, before their classmates and their professors.  The faculty particularly enjoy this part of the course, because we get to play the president of the United States and his top advisers.  Sometimes, we’re even able to arrange for real or recent top advisers, without warning, to walk in the door.

We simulate as closely as possible the conditions of a real-world briefing, interrupting our students frequently, demanding to know the sources of the information they’re giving us, chewing them out for not having it on hand or presenting it well.  If they start reading their Power Point slides aloud to us, we’ll stop them, or even get up and stalk out of the room.  We haven’t yet taken up Kissinger’s old habit of ripping apart written briefs, wadding them into little balls, and throwing them at the oral briefers, but I have that on my list of things to try this fall.

Our objective is to train our students to handle responsibility, for virtually all of them, sooner than they may realize, will be called upon to brief a boss.  We expect them to compress complexity while conveying it clearly – in short, to generalize, that skill so rarely taught in Yale’s increasingly professionalized, specialized curriculum.  Most of all, though, we’re trying to teach poise under pressure.  We want our students to learn how not to get rattled.  We want them to be able to say, without embarrassment:  “I don’t know, sir (or ma’am), but I’ll get you that information.”

[...]

Our course concludes by relinquishing responsibility to our students.  They elect a president and vice-president of the United States, who in turn appoint a staff, a cabinet, and a press secretary.  On two successive weekends in December, we take over a Yale building, turn it into the White House, and from our secure control room run a crisis simulation exercise in two stages.

The “administration” first has to prepare a national strategy statement on something, but they won’t know what it is until they come in at the beginning of the day.  They have to do this under the scrutiny of the media – Yale Daily News reporters perform that function – while fending off Congressional investigations and defusing diplomatic crises.  Former students from the class play these roles gleefully, using appropriate regional accents and, for the diplomacy, difficult foreign languages.  And of course the president is called out of the Oval Office frequently for ceremonial occasions, such as reading to school children, pardoning Thanksgiving turkeys, or lighting the national Christmas tree:  we have a particular tree outside which we use for this purpose each year.

On the second weekend, a full-blown crisis erupts that requires the administration to put its strategy into operation.  Quite often, under the pressures we create, the students forget that they had a strategy, which is in itself a useful lesson.  In several instances, our scenarios have come unsettlingly close to real events.  Three years ago, for example, our crisis involved a small former republic of the Soviet Union, now an independent state, whose American-educated president was keen to take his country into NATO.  The Russians objected to this, and at a critical moment seized a small portion of the country’s territory.  Our simulated administration responded by deploying the Sixth Fleet into the Black Sea, and having it sail up the Dneister River.  Without checking the water depths.  And Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern weren’t even in the class that year.

On what teaching grand strategy is supposed to accomplish:

So what exactly are we trying to accomplish with this year-long seminar in grand strategy, how does it relate to the larger grand strategic deficit I’ve been describing?  Let me reiterate that we aren’t trying to connect our course in any immediate way with the course of the country.  We’re not sitting by our phones waiting from calls from Washington.  We’re not even regularly checking our Blackberrys.  We don’t expect our students to go right away from running a simulated administration to significant responsibilities within a real one.

We are, however, thinking about long-term leverage:  the possibility that a small but well-placed investment of thought, or effort, or money can – with patience – bring disproportionate benefits over an extended period of time.  I emphasize those words because I don’t want to suggest analogies with the shorter-term leveraged assets that have been in the news recently.

I have in mind, rather, the leverage that comes from educating bright young people who, at the moment, have no clearer idea than we do of what they’ll wind up doing or how they’ll use the instruction we’re providing them.  The only bet we’re making is that some of our students, at some point in the future, will be in a position to do some great things.  Our only assumption is that, when they reach that point, some of them will remember something of what we tried to teach them.

And what was that?  Chiefly, I hope, that it’s risky just to make it all up as you go along.  That it helps to know something about what’s worked and what hasn’t over a period of time that exceeds your own.  That Thucydides was onto something when he wrote that although history doesn’t repeat, it does resemble.  Or, as Mark Twain added, it rhymes.

Hence, it’s useful to know how the Athenian democracy – the world’s first – became an overstretched, brutal, and self-destructive empire.  Or how Rome, which was never a democracy, was able to hold on to its empire so much longer than Athens did.  Or how Philip II and Elizabeth I anticipated a modern management dilemma – whether to concentrate authority or to delegate it – at the time of the Spanish Armada.  Or how Kant and Metternich defined a civil society:  they were closer than you might think.  Or how Napoleon, like Hannibal, overextended his supply lines, and how Kutuzov, like Fabius Maximus Cunctator, was able to exploit that mistake.  Or how the American Founding Fathers – including Lincoln, the nation’s Re-Founder – made so many tough choices that turned out to be right choices.  Or how Churchill, at a critical moment in the spring of 1940, made a few great speeches that began the rescue of western civilization from the evils that had arisen within it.  Knowing these things can give you a conceptual center of gravity.  It can keep you from being swept away by foolish things.

History alone, though, is not enough:  it’s equally important to do theory.  Here the best guide is Clausewitz, who condemned:

those people . . . who “never rise above anecdote” . . . and who would construct all history of individual cases – starting always with the most striking feature, the high point of the event, and digging down only as deep as suits them, never get[ting] down to the general factors that govern the matter.  Consequently, their findings will never be valid for more than a single case. Theory, Clausewitz insisted, “teaches us to recognize the relations that essential elements bear to one another.”  But, he also pointed out, “it would indeed be rash from this to deduce universal laws governing every single case, regardless of all haphazard influences.”

So how can there be a theory that’s not universal?  That allows for haphazard influences while rising above anecdote?  Clausewitz’s answer comes close to what Machiavelli told his prince:

Theory exists so that one need not start afresh each time sorting out the material and plowing through it, but will find it ready to hand and in good order.  It is meant to educate the mind of the future commander, or, more accurately, to guide him in his self-education, [but] not to accompany him to the battlefield;  just as a wise teacher guides and stimulates a young man’s intellectual development, but is careful not to lead him by the hand for the rest of his life.

Or, as Machiavelli himself put it:  “God does not want to do everything.”  And where have you heard this before?  Well, probably from parents, teachers, and even coaches, who sooner or later told you:  “We’ve done all we can for you, kid, now you’re on your own.”

What does that mean, though:  being on your own?  I think it means benefiting as much as you can from what your educators have taught you, but not looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life while you wait for them to whisper the next set of instructions into your ear.  It means being as much a fox as a hedgehog:  you’ve got to combine the knowledge you’ve accumulated of one big thing – the profession you’re about to enter – with the ability to cope with all the little things for which your professional training will not have prepared you.  That’s why, in our Yale course, the schools of the classics and of surprise precede the school of responsibility, for without that sequence, our students might do something irresponsible.  Like, in the words of Clausewitz’s warning, attempting “to deduce universal laws governing every single case, regardless of all haphazard influences.”

UPDATE:

MIT has a course available for download as part of their OpenCourseWare project.

If you can keep this passage from Nudge handy, you’re half the way there in sorting on what’s happening inside your head:

The Automatic System is rapid and is or feels instinctive, and it does not involve what we usually associate with the word thinking. When you duck because a ball is thrown at you unexpectedly, or get nervous when your airplane hits turbulence, or smile when you see a cute puppy, you are using your Automatic System. Brain scientists are able to say that the activities of the Automatic System are associated with the oldest parts of the brain, the parts we share with lizards (as well as puppies).

The Reflective System is more deliberate and self-conscious. We use the Reflective System when we are asked, “How much is 411 times 37?” Most people are also likely to use the Reflective System when deciding which route to take for a trip and whether to go to law school or business school. When we are writing this book we are (mostly) using our Reflective Systems, but sometimes ideas pop into our heads when we are in the shower or taking a walk and not thinking at all about the book, and these probably are coming from our Automatic Systems. (Voters, by the way, seem to rely primarily on their Automatic System. A candidate who makes a bad first impression, or who tries to win votes by complex arguments and statistical demonstrations, may well run into trouble.)

Niall Ferguson

Scottish historian Niall Ferguson is the most interesting contemporary historian. Even when he’s wrong, he at least never commits the sin of being dull.

The first Ferguson book I read was The Pity of War. In it, Ferguson argued  that the world would have been better off if Britain had either stayed out of World War I or delayed its entry (due to a fall in its Liberal Party government and the time taken to form a new government). Since the British Army provided the crucial edge in the historical 1914 campaign, this would have led to the Molkte Plan taking out France in 1914, leaving imperial Germany victorious on the continent and bringing about a German-dominated European Union 79 yearns sooner. This would have saved the British Empire, which Ferguson views as a benign institution, from the fatal financial and literal bloodletting that occurred from 1914-1921.

Another work of Ferguson’s I enjoyed is The House of Rothschild. Ferguson was the first historian given access to the full papers of the Rothchilds, a family of bankers that established a powerful financial presence in early nineteenth century Europe with branches in Frankfurt, Paris, London, Naples, and Vienna. He revealed many of the myths about the Rothchilds, how they gained their wealth, and that their supposed power over kings and nations, to start or stop wars, was a popular fiction. They come off as a rather normal family of astute business people rather than the all knowing centers of a global conspiracy that the overly excitable accused them of being. They are not Evil Incarnate like some.

Evil: real and incarnated

My personal favorite of Ferguson’s works is The Cash Nexus. The book covers a lot of territory but highlights are:

• How war was the driving force behind the creation of nascent financial markets.
• Government borrowing was an important part of the development of free markets.
• How society, instead of being seen as a battle between rich and poor as the conventional Marxist line goes, could instead be viewed as a battle between bondholders and debtors or the young and the old.
• That modern states could be seen as standing on four pillars: the central bank, the representative assembly, the tax collection bureaucracy, and the national debt.
• How humans are driven by forces besides economic rationality.
• Forseeing the popping of the Internet stock market bubble.

Ferguson also argued in The Cash Nexus that the United States, instead of being overstreched as argued by historian Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, was understretched in terms of its military commitments and should be more proactive in suppressing rogue states militarily. This thesis was put to the test in Iraq and Afghanistan and was found a little short. Ferguson’s search for why was contained in his imperfect follow up to The Cash Nexus, Colossus, which argued that America’s short falls were due to its financial overstretch in entitlements. Ferguson showed a less subtle grasp of the nuances of American history than he did of British or financial history, arguing, for example, that most of America’s early empire building was driven by purchases instead of military actions. In truth, the purchases of Florida and Northern Mexico, for example,  were both imposed at the point of a sword, the first by a punitive expedition led by Andrew Jackson and the second by the invasion and subjugation of Mexico, a war that produced the highest US casualties (proportionately out of forces engaged) in the nation’s history. Colossus felt rushed, like less time and thought had been put into it than his earlier works.

War of the World, Ferguson’s most recent, was better than Colossus but covered such a broad area that it felt as if it covered less than The Pity of War did. War of the World covers the period from the the end of the nineteenth century to the present. It’s highlights are:

• Invoking how prophetic H.G. Wells was in The War of the Worlds – in predicting what happened to cities during World War II.
• A detailed look at the mechanics of the anti-Jewish pogroms during the late 1900s.
• Tying two ethnically mixed marches of empires, Eastern Europe and Manchuria, and how they were the primary cockpits of war between 1904-1905 (Russo-Japanese War) and 1950-1953 (Korean War).
• How ethnic conflict between mixed communities, especially in Eastern Europe where there was a kalediscope of ethnicities living cheek to cheek, was a primary driver of the high casualties in both World Wars.

Ferguson has a new book coming out, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, which looks interesting:

Bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot: Call it what you like, it matters. To Christians, love of it is the root of all evil. To generals, it’s the sinews of war. To revolutionaries, it’s the chains of labour. But in The Ascent of Money, Niall Ferguson shows that finance is in fact the foundation of human progress. What’s more, he reveals financial history as the essential back-story behind all history.The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to the silver mines of Bolivia. Banks provided the material basis for the splendours of the Italian Renaissance, while the bond market was the decisive factor in conflicts from the Seven Years’ War to the American Civil War.

Niall Ferguson explains why the origins of the French Revolution lie in a stock market bubble caused by a convicted Scots murderer. He shows how financial failure turned Argentina from the world’s sixth richest country into an inflation-ridden basket case – and how a financial revolution is propelling the world’s most populous country from poverty to power in a single generation.

Yet the most important lesson of the financial history is that sooner or later every bubble bursts – sooner or later the bearish sellers outnumber the bullish buyers – sooner or later greed flips into fear. And that’s why, whether you’re scraping by or rolling in it, there’s never been a better time to understand the ascent of money.

In that vein, Ferguson has been writing on the recent financial crisis:

• How a local squall might become a global tempest (08/07/2008)
• Great Repression (09/30/2008)
• Geopolitical Consequences of the Credit Crunch (09/30/2008)
• The End of Prosperity? (10/02/2008)

Seth Klarman adds his thoughts on the crisis as well.

zenpundit, a blog I subscribe to, had a post on quantum libraries. Quantum libraries are those books you return to time and time again and glean fresh insights every time. Here’s mine:

• Dune (Frank Herbert)
• The Dune Encyclopedia (Willis E McNelly)
• Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson)
• The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
• The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
• Dawn and Decadence (Jacques Barzun)
• Chaos (James Gleick)
• Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond)
• The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)
• The Intelligent Investor (Benjamin Graham)
• The Cash Nexus (Niall Ferguson)
• The Pity of War (Niall Ferguson)
• Strange Victory (Ernest R. May)
• On War (Carl von Clausewitz)
• Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought (Michael Handel)
• War in Human Civilization (Azar Gat)
• The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China (Ralph Sawyer)
• The Face of Battle (John Keegan)
• The Pursuit of Power (William H. McNeill)
• The Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
• The Rise of the Roman Empire (Polybius)
• History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides)
• How to Make War (James F. Dunnigan)
• Novus Ordo Seclorum (Forrest McDonald)
• Python in a Nutshell (Alex Martinelli)
• Code Complete (Steve O’Connell)