America’s dilemma – Idealism vs pragmatism

Americans bear a special burden. Though the seeds of our idealism can be traced back at least to the early Greeks, we are the first major nation in the world to have been established from the beginning on the basis of ideals like individual freedom and universal equality. All other major nations evolved historically from more pragmatic principles of power politics – growing slowly and painfully from monarchies and autocratic regimes toward more democratic societies, and many still have a long way to go to achieve the freedoms Americans started with in the first place, even if they wanted to, and some don’t.

The problem this legacy poses for us is that we are always torn between our high ideals and pragmatic realism. The nation began with the tension between our ideals of universal freedom and equality and the reality of slavery. It continued with the tension between those ideals and the pragmatic conflicts between immigrant settlers and native Americans. More recently during the cold war this tension was evident in our uneasy support of unsavory dictators for the pragmatic reason that they helped, we hoped, to contain the spread of Communism.

And it continues today with the tension between those same ideals and the realities of world politics and cultural differences. On the one hand we would like to bring democracy to nations like Iraq, and human rights to nations like China and Russia. On the other hand, pragmatically, a democratic Iraq might very well be thoroughly hostile to us, and trying to meddle too much in the internal affairs of China or Russia might turn out to be thoroughly counterproductive, and even produce another great power confrontation.

There is no simple answer to this dilemma. I would hope we would never lose our high ideals; they are worth preserving and spreading to other nations and cultures when and as we can. On the other hand, naïve idealism can blind us to the realities of the world, and can be the cause of great damage to others.

The American burden is to learn to manage this tension between our ideals and what is actually possible in the world. “Spreading democracy” is a great ideal, but a very poor basis on which to build an effective foreign policy. If the world can avoid destroying itself in war over the next few hundred years, ideals like democracy and individual freedom may eventually, slowly, spread to other nations and cultures, but it will be a slow process, taking generations. We ought not to be so naïve as to think we can force it into any culture or on any nation in a few years. This is where pragmatism is neccessary.

How stupid stuff starts

I saw one of my dear friends, a teacher, at Starbucks today helping another teacher prepare some of her materials required under the “No Child Left Behind” Act – dozens and dozen of pages that every teacher is required to submit, but that probably no one at the state or federal level really reads. It reminded me of similarly stupid things that went on in companies I have worked in – such as 100 page “process documents” that cost the company tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare, but that no one read or used.

I have a theory about how these things come into being. Somewhere in the upper levels of management some senior manager proclaims a “thou shalt”, usually in response to some problem or mistake the company has just made, and usually without thinking about it very much. The underlings all race to implement something that will let them report in the next month or so that they have complied with the “thou shalt” and checked off the action item. The senior manager, if he/she even remembers issuing the “thou shalt”, eventually gets briefed that his/her action has been implemented, and never bothers to see whether the implementation is actually solving the problem it was supposed to solve, and the underlings of course all give glowing reports about how well it is going, and yet another really stupid idea gets foisted on the people who are trying to get the real work done.

I recall a retired chemist here at Los Alamos Lab telling me that he finally retired when he found it took two days of safety paperwork before he could pour a substance from one beaker to another. No doubt all this paperwork originated in some accident or near-accident that prompted some senior manager to require better record keeping ( a perfectly reasonable idea ), and that then ,through the inevitable bureaucracy, morphed into the ridiculous requirement that eventually emerged, impeding everyone’s work and costing the lab thousands of unnecessary labor hours.

In my experience in large companies, I would estimate something like 20-30% of the effort, labor hours, and budget is wasted on such foolishness. Goals like “zero defects”, or “documented processes”, or ISO9000 or CMM compliance or "six sigma" programs spawn whole departments that take on a life of their own and justify their existence by imposing yet more requirements on the people doing real productive work. It’s not that these ideas are bad – many of them are quite sound. It’s that the organization loses sight of what it is really trying to accomplish with these ideas, and morphs them into unnecessary and usually ineffective makework.

I don’t have a solution for this, and it may simply be inevitable in large organizations, but senior managers would do well to pay more attention to how their “thou shalts” are being implemented, and whether they are really effective. I recall that Robert Townsend, onetime CEO of AVIS (and the man who made them a real contender in the field), ruled that no new paperwork could be created anywhere in AVIS without his express approval, and it was hard to get his approval. That was smart.

Wasting our money on schools?

The US spent $536 billion on elementary and secondary education in 2004-5, the most recent year for which I can find comprehensive figures. We currently spend about $9000 annually per student, more than any other nation in the world except Switzerland and Norway. And what do we get for all this investment?

The 2006 version of the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) International Student Assessment is a complex document (the key tables can be found at their site at http://www.pisa.oecd.org/). But however you cut it, the news isn’t good. On most measures of math, science and reading proficiency the US ranks 21st among the 27 OECD countries with available data, followed only by Spain, New Zealand, Portugal, Turkey and Mexico.

I suspect a surprisingly small fraction of the $9000 per student goes into paying good teachers – the majority almost certainly goes to support an immense local, state and federal education bureaucracy that manifestly contributes little or nothing to the quality of our children’s education.

So while our local school boards across the nation are arguing about whether to forbid the teaching of evolution or force the teaching of intelligent design as a pseudo-science, and while our textbook publishers are busy dumbing down the textbooks so that no child will feel left out, the rest of the developed world is producing better-educated children. “No child left behind” really translates to “All American children left behind”. It shouldn’t take more than a generation or two for that difference to begin to have a profound effect on our economy.

What will it take to break us out of this morass?

In praise of our Armed Forces

I have written several times about the self-serving nature of Washington bureaucracies and political life, and I have not been especially flattering. But I want to make a distinction here between the other federal bureaucracies and the American Armed Forces.

Certainly the American Armed Forces are federal bureaucracies, and vast ones at that. And certainly they contain their fair share of incompetents, time-servers, martinets and bullies, and dirty office politics, just like any large organization. But there is something different here as well that I have sensed over the years from all the active and retired military people I have been privileged to work with. There is a prevailing sense of mission, a sense that there are causes beyond oneself that are worth fighting and even dying for, a sense of taking care of one’s people, a can-do spirit in the face of difficulties.

When there is a problem, the first instinct of the politician seems to be to find someone to blame, preferably from the other party. The first instinct of the bureaucrat is to be sure they can’t be blamed. But over and over again I have seen military leaders say explicitly. “It doesn’t matter how we got into this mess. Just tell me how we are going to recover.”

Perhaps if politicians and bureaucrats had to work on military pay scales, and risk their lives every now and then, they too would learn this spirit.

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Einstein and drugs

Einstein is supposed to have once said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. I thought of this last night as I was reading something about the “drug war” in America. We have been interdicting drug smugglers and prosecuting drug vendors and users for decades now, filling our prisons with drug-related offenders. Consider:

• “Overall, the United States incarcerated 2,320,359 persons at year end 2005….At year end 2005, one in every 136 U.S. residents was incarcerated in a State or Federal prison or a local jail.” Source: Harrison, Paige M. & Beck, Allen J., Ph.D., US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2005 (Washington DC: US Department of Justice, Nov. 2006), pp. 1-2.

• "More than 9.25 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, mostly as pre-trial detainees (remand prisoners) or as sentenced prisoners. Almost half of these are in the United States (2.19m), China (1.55m plus pretrial detainees and prisoners in 'administrative detention') or Russia (0.87m)." Source: Walmsley, Roy, "World Prison Population List (Seventh Edition)" (London, England: International Centre for Prison Studies, 2007), p. 1

• "In 1995, 23% of state prisoners were incarcerated for drug offenses in contrast to 9% of drug offenders in state prisons in 1986. In fact, the proportion of drug offenders in the state prison population nearly tripled by 1990, when it reached 21%, and has remained at close to that level since then. The proportion of federal prisoners held for drug violations doubled during the past 10 years. In 1985, 34% of federal prisoners were incarcerated for drug violations. By 1995, the proportion had risen to 60%." Source: Craig Haney, Ph.D., and Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D., "The Past and Future of U.S. Prison Policy: Twenty-five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment," American Psychologist, Vol. 53, No. 7 (July 1998), p. 715.

• States spent $42.89 billion on Corrections in 2005 alone. To compare, states only spent $24.69 billion on public assistance. Source: National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO), 2005 State Expenditure Report (Washington, DC: NASBO, Fall 2006), p. 35, Table 18, and p. 58, Table 32.

• Since the enactment of mandatory minimum sentencing for drug users, the Federal Bureau of Prisons budget has increased by 1,954%. Its budget jumped from $220 million in 1986 to more than $4.3 billion in 2001. Sources: US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics 1996 (Washington DC: US Department of Justice, 1997), p. 20; Executive Office of the President, Budget of the United States Government, FY 2002 (Washington DC: US Government Printing Office, 2001), p. 134.

• According to ONDCP, federal spending to incarcerate drug offenders totals nearly $3 Billion a year -- $2.525 Billion by the Bureau of Prisons, and $429.4 Million by Federal Prisoner Detention. Source: Office of National Drug Control Policy, "National Drug Control Strategy: FY 2003 Budget Summary" (Washington, DC: Office of the President, February 2002), Table 3, pp. 7-9.

You would think we might have learned something from prohibition, which didn’t significantly impede the supply of alcohol, but did spawn a highly profitable smuggling trade run by organized crime, since it effectively produced a monopoly and drove the price of alcohol higher, even though the production costs stayed very low.

Our largely ineffectual attempts at constraining the supply of drugs to the US has had essentially the same effect – it has produced a highly profitable monopoly. Plants (cannabis and poppies) which grow like roadside weeds produce a product that can be sold for astronomical prices on American streets. This has produced an international narcotics business estimated to earn drug traffickers $300-400 billion per year, enough that they essentially own states like Afghanistan and Columbia.

I don’t know what the answer is – drugs are addictive and it is hard to wean people from addictions. But Einstein had a point – whatever we are doing now certainly isn’t working, and to continue just to do more of the same and expect anything to improve is the definition of insanity. It’s too bad that it seems to be political suicide to suggest we try a different approach, because that effectively constrains us to keep doing the same ineffectual things and wasting billions of dollars a year of approaches that don’t work.

I suspect if we spent even a fraction of those billions on treatments and education – trying to reduce the demand instead of focusing on the supply – we would have much better results.

Religion and culture

In any discussion about religion, one must account for the fact that a religion and the culture within which it evolves are inextricably intertwined. Each shapes and is shaped by the other. So it is almost impossible to understand or discuss one without understanding and discussing the other.

More than that, it is almost impossible to fully “convert” to a religion one didn’t grow up in. One can certainly learn the theology and the rituals, but it is almost impossible to learn all the subtle cultural aspects, the unspoken attitudes and assumptions, and the many unspoken things no one even thinks to teach a newcomer because they are simply obviously “the way things are”. Converts certainly have a valid religion, but it isn’t quite the same religion as practiced and experienced by those who were raised from childhood in that religion.

What draws many people to their religion is only partly the dogmas and beliefs of that religion. The rest of the pull is to the familiar and comforting cultural aspects. It is perfectly possible to find comfort in the rituals and music and group support of a religion, and yet question or outright disbelieve that religion’s dogmas. Indeed, I suspect many people who are religiously observant are not wholly in agreement with all the beliefs they profess.

This is one of the reasons it is difficult to change cultures, or religions. It’s not possible to change the one without changing the other.

Who wants war?

In popular fiction, it is frequently generals who are advocating war, and there is some tendency in the American public to assume that the military must always be looking for an opportunity to try out its new weapons. In fact, I think that is a myth.

My reading of both recent and distant history suggests that it is usually the politicians – those who have never studied military history and know little or nothing about the real complexities of managing and supplying a battlefield army - who are most eager to find military solutions to difficult political problems. It is the generals, who have studied military history and understand the enormous uncertainties of wars and the terrible costs, who are most reticent to rush into war.

The brilliant Confederate general Robert E. Lee understood full well that the Confederacy was taking a terrible gamble to fight the northern states with their much greater manufacturing capabilities, while the Confederate political leaders were eager for a military confrontation. The equally brilliant WWII Japanese admiral Isoroko Yamamoto (who by the way attended Harvard and Annapolis, and understood Americans) was against a war with the US, and told the Japanese political leaders that with a surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet he could run wild in the Pacific for perhaps six months at the most, after which the enormous productive force of the US would make things increasingly difficult for the Japanese, but his political masters didn’t believe him. And in recent history the Bush administration launched a war in Iraq against the advice of some of the senior military staff, and with far fewer troops than the experienced generals wanted, leading us to the debacle we now face.

Is it stupidity or is it arrogance that deludes politicians, most of them lawyers, into thinking they know more about warfare than the professional military people who have studied the field throughout their entire careers?

What a good manager does

My father spent his career establishing and running large research laboratories, and he taught me early on that a manager’s job is not to “manage” her/his people. A good manager’s job is to hire the best people he/she can find, and then protect them from outside interference so that they can get on with the job at hand.

Too many people reach management with the idea that a manager’s job is to sit in a big office and give orders. They use management as a way to gratify their need for power or status. I once worked in an organization (which shall remain nameless) in which everyone from the president down ate together in the same cafeteria and had offices about the same size. Some years later significant changes appeared: managers began to get bigger offices with fancier furniture, reserved parking places appeared for them, upper managers got permission to travel first class, they built a separate dining room for the managers so that they wouldn’t have to eat in the cafeteria with the rest of the staff. It is probably no surprise that within a few years the company was in deep trouble.

My principle has always been that a manager’s primary job is to run interference for his/her staff, and to do whatever tasks need to be done, no matter how “menial”, to help her/his staff get on with their jobs unimpeded. There are some other important tasks for managers – mentoring young staff is one, helping to provide a guiding vision is another, encouraging staff to improve their skills and keep up with their field is another. But the single most important task is to face outward and protect one’s staff from the inevitable inanities of the corporate bureaucracy that always exists.

Counterinsurgency strategies

Insurgencies – unofficial underground military and terrorist groups who use unconventional means of waging war, like car bombs and suicide bombers – are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. It is one of the consequences of developing an overwhelmingly powerful military force; insurgency is the only effective avenue we have left opposition groups.

The November/December 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs contains a review essay by Colin Kahl on the new US Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which was issued in its new revised form last December after considerable debate within the military establishment and its think tanks. I recommend this essay.

Looking at the history of insurgencies from the time of the Romans to the present day, only two effective counterinsurgency methods have emerged: (1) the old Roman method of brutally crushing all opposition and ruling the territory with an iron hand, and (2) the very slow process of winning the hearts and minds of the populace so that they themselves turn against the insurgency and deprive it of the indigenous support and cover that makes it possible. In general, America has tried to follow a middle path between these two, combining the worst elements of both. Not surprisingly, this has usually been not only ineffective, but actually counterproductive. In Iraq, for example, we don’t really offer the populace enough stability and safety to win them to our side, and our occasional ham-handed military sweep-and-clear operations produce enough civilian casualties and bad media exposure to help the insurgency recruit more members, yet not enough enemy casualties to really tip the balance.

The thing to remember is that insurgencies don’t have to win to succeed. They only have to produce enough pain for long enough to wear down the resolve and patience of their opponent and make them abandon the field of battle. Moreover, the modern world works in favor of insurgencies. On the one hand democracies are notoriously unable to keep a long term perspective or maintain a patient long-term policy. Voters will tolerate casualties for only so long, especially if there is no visible progress. On the other hand the worldwide media is easy to enlist and manipulate, and the emergence of the internet has simplified the propaganda, communications and organizational tasks of any insurgency.

The new US Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual tries to address these issues, but however enlightened it is, the military approach will always be hobbled by the constraints and inconstancy and limited time horizons of democratic governments and their constituents, we the voters of America.

It seems to me the only solution here is to improve our skills at winning the hearts and minds of foreign populations, which is not a military task and will not be accomplished by military means, though security forces can certainly help maintain stability at times.

Spending billions producing yet more high-tech weapons systems is not likely to solve the current insurgency problem. Spending a fraction of that money on staffing our intelligence and diplomatic and aid agencies with people who really understand other countries and their languages and their cultures would pay far better dividends.

Unless, of course, the administration in power, in its arrogance, decides once again to ignore their input, as they did with Iraq.

The European Union

Our Lindblad cruise on the Danube included some outstanding lectures by one of Lindblad’s resident historians, David Barnes, who incidentally is a Fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Historical Society (all the Lindblad staff we have met thus far are truly outstanding!). In one of his lectures he attempted to give us – all of us Americans – a European historian’s perspective on the EU. To begin with, he pointed out that recent polls show that less than a quarter of Americans are even aware that there is such a thing as the European Union, and even fewer have any idea what it is trying to accomplish.

Those Americans that are at least dimly aware of the EU tend to think of it as simply a large trading block, assembled to compete with America and therefore perhaps something of a threat to our economy. That, he argues, misses the point entirely.

To understand the political vision behind the EU, he argues, one must understand how thoroughly devastated all of Europe was by the two horrendous world wars of the 20^th century. The vision of the original founders of the EU was to knit all of Europe together so tightly – socially, economically, and politically – that there could never again be such wars among its member states. The vision is not unlike the vision the founders of the United States had, to bind the separate state into a single nation, while yet keeping the individuality of the member states. A byproduct of that effort may indeed include creation of economic and political power, but in the long run it is very much in our interests as well as Europe’s to avoid any further world wars on the European continent.

There are some in America, especially among the conservative right, who see the rise of the EU as a threat to our nation. That is probably a very short-sighted view, since a new world war on the European continent would be a much larger threat to us than any economic competition the EU might give us.

Life emulating art

I have been rereading John LeCarre’s wonderful book The Tailor of Panama. I think LeCarre has a wonderful talent for developing characters, even though many of his characters lead somewhat tortured internal lives. George Smiley, his quintessential spy character, mixes brilliance in his work with a quiet desperation in his home life. In the Tailor of Panama, a small-time British con man and ex-convict who has reinvented himself as a high-class gentlemen’s tailor in Panama is recruited (or rather blackmailed) by an ambitious British Secret Service agent into spying. Since he really knows no secrets, he is forced to invent his intelligence product, and his network of sources. As a good con man, he invents what his masters want to hear, so of course they believe him. In LeCarre’s novel, as in life, such a situation doesn’t end well.

By chance I am reading this just as the news breaks about the administration’s primary source of information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction; the source upon whom they relied in launching the invasion of Iraq and embroiling us in the current tar pit there. Rafid Ahmed Alwan (codename “Curveball”) turns out to be, in essence, a small-time Iraqi con man who made up a lot of stuff to make himself more attractive to the German intelligence agencies, and to improve his chances of winning asylum in Germany. The German intelligence agencies passed along his stories to the US intelligence community, but refused to let anyone but their own German intelligence agents interview him directly. And since his stories supported what the Bush administration wanted to hear and already believed, few questioned his reliability. Those few in the intelligence community who pointed out that there was little or no corroborating evidence to support his stories were pointedly ignored, just as they are in LeCarre’s story.

Many of LeCarre’s stories are about the workings of a bumbling, incompetent, even immoral intelligence agency staffed with self-serving career bureaucrats and presided over by not-very-intelligent political masters who hold their positions by virtue of belonging to the ruling class, and because of who they know rather than what they know. One cannot but wonder how far life in the present American administration mirrors the art in LeCarre’s novels.

Prague – Oct 18

Prague is a beautiful city, home of intellectual and artistic giants like Franz Kafka and Alfonse Mucha, and beloved of Mozart. But behind the elegant beauty of Prague lie dark shadows to remind us of the fearsome intolerance of which supposedly-civilized humans are still capable. In the old Jewish quarter in the heart of present-day Prague stands the Pinkas Synagogue, built in 1535 and in peaceful daily use thereafter for almost 400 years, closed by the Nazis when they invaded Prague and kept closed by the Communist reign that followed the war. On its walls today are inscribed the names of almost 80,000 Prague Jews who were deported to Nazi concentration camps and never returned, some 10,000 of them children. It is a profoundly moving experience to walk through this building, reading the names and looking at the pictures that the children drew as they awaited deportation and death.

We ought never to forget that this Nazi atrocity was committed by a modern, Western, democratically elected government (yes, Hitler was lawfully elected by his constituents), operating within the legal framework in place at the time, justified by a “scientific” racial theory and a coherent official foreign policy, and with the full support of a great many people both within his nation and outside of it. If we think it can’t happen again, we are deluding ourselves. If we think it could never happen in America, we are deluding ourselves. Intolerance, irrationality, oppression and violence are endemic in human cultures, and are kept at bay only by ceaseless vigilance. We forget that lesson at our peril.

Postings will now resume

We are back from our trip and in reach of the internet again, so postings will now resume. Some of the next few posting will be based on experiences during the trip.

No new posts until November

We will be out of the country and out of reach of internet connections until early next month, so there will be no new posts until early November.

The importance of cultural context

There is a myth in the world that important things can be studied in the abstract. For example, there is a prevalent myth in the scientific world that scientific subjects like physics or mathematics or molecular biology can be studied in a “pure” form, unaffected by culture. The field of economics has been laboring for decades to build complex models that largely ignore culture. Our foreign policy in recent years has been pursued largely in ignorance of cultural effects.

I would argue that no human endeavor is free of cultural effects, not even pure science. Culture has significant effects in steering scientific research toward some areas and away from others – science is as driven by fads and prejudices and dominant “schools” of thought as any other human activity. Religion is certainly all about culture. And politics is all about culture, as is economics, which is why we are having such difficulty in exporting our political and economic systems to some other parts of the world.

Of course cultures are not synonymous with nationalities or ethnic groups. Families have unique cultures. Companies and corporations have unique cultures. Religions have unique cultures. All sorts of human groupings – teams, play groups, bridge clubs, army platoons, etc. – have cultural aspects. Newcomers to these groups have to learn “the way things are done” before they are fully accepted and integrated. Any married couple knows that the two sides of the family have cultural differences – for example a story that might be funny to one side of the family may be offensive to the other side, and woe betide the couple that doesn’t learn this quickly.

Indeed, I expect that most of the difficulties in cross-religion and cross-nationality marriages come from differing cultural expectations – on the proper roles of men and women, on the way to raise children, on the manner in which money is handled, on the acceptable ways to express closeness or anger, and thousands of other cultural aspects, most of them unspoken and even invisible to those within the culture – its just “the way things are done”.

So my argument is that the study of culture is fundamental to the study of just about anything else, and an awareness of these important cultural influences is central to understanding just about anything that matters, from science to economics to religion to politics to history to literature. To ignore the cultural influences that shape these enterprises is to miss the most important driving and shaping forces.

The Wisdom of History

The Teaching Company has put out another brilliant lecture series by Professor J. Rufus Fears (see my book list on the sidebar) entitled “The Wisdom of History”. Professor Fears argues that most of the really terrible things that have happened recently, such as World Wars I and II, Vietnam, and our current mess in Iraq could have been avoided had the nations involved only had leaders who had understood and learned from history. Or as Colin Gray has put it in the introduction to his book “Another Bloody Century: Future Warfare”: “[I do]…not argue that nothing changes, only that little if anything of importance does.” And of course the famous quotation from George Santayana also applies: “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Working his way from Ancient Greece forward to the modern day, Rufus Fears shows that each age thought that “things were different” in their age, and the horrors of history couldn’t possibly be repeated in their time – an argument one hears yet again in our time. Surely democracies don’t fight wars with each other (in fact they do, and they are generally longer and bloodier than wars between tyrants), surely modern weapons have made all-out world warfare unthinkable (the same was said of the machine gun and the crossbow in their time), surely if we are all interconnected in a global economy we won’t have such wars (it has happened before, more than once). As usual, we all live in the midst of myths unsupported by history.

In fact, Fears argues, history shows that individual freedom is not a universal value, despite our current political rhetoric. Throughout history, the Middle East has been the graveyard of empires, a fact apparently unknown to the neoconservatives. History shows that nationalism (national self-determination) and religion are far more powerful and universal drivers of history, and that the lust for power is probably the single most durable and dependable human value across all societies. This will offend many who hold sacred our current American idealism, but his arguments and the lessons of history that support them deserve serious attention, if only because the history-blindness of our current political establishment will no doubt sooner or later put America on the “trash heap of history” along with all the great powers and empires of the past.

The neurobiology of the true believer

Recent work in neurobiology suggests the possibility that people who become “true believers” may in fact be mentally wired to believe things absolutely, or at least to be predisposed to believe things absolutely. I suspect they are predisposed to be uncomfortable with ambiguity, and so are easily converted to whatever political, social or religious dogma that happens by that offers them a sense of certainty and fits moderately well with their cultural upbringing. Which one of the many competing dogmas they latch on to is of course a matter of chance, of what culture they were born into and what people they chanced to meet and which dogmas they happened to be exposed to.

And I would guess that the majority of the human population is so wired, because the majority of the population seems to be predisposed to see things in black and white, to want simple answers, and to want to be “right” and even enjoy thinking they have the truth without looking for evidence, and that everyone else is wrong.

This conclusion, if correct, suggests to me two things:

1. If this tendency to be a “true believer” is really a built-in neurobiological characteristic of a great many people, there is little prospect of ever having the majority of the population behave rationally, and anyone who tries to build a workable political system needs to account for this.

2. If this tendency to be a “true believer” is really a built-in neurobiological characteristic of a great many people, the only thing that stands a chance of displacing irrational beliefs and dogmas is a competing dogma based on a more rational foundation, but still a dogma. I know that a “rational dogma” sounds like an oxymoron, but I don’t know how else to express the concept. What would such a dogma look like, I wonder?

It’s an interesting conjecture.

The critic’s role

I had a project manager once who taught all of us on his staff never to bring him a problem without also proposing to him one or more viable solutions to that problem. I recall him dressing down a manager once (not me, thank goodness) for bringing just the problem. As he said, we were paid to think of solutions – if we were going to leave that to him then why was he paying us?

I think of this often as I listen to critics of the administration’s Iraq policy. There certainly is a problem here. Whatever we are doing doesn’t seem to be working, as the critics remind us daily. But where are the viable alternatives these critics should be proposing? I don’t see any.

Just packing up, declaring victory and pulling our troops out isn’t a viable alternative, popular as it may be with voters. It would just leave Iraq mired in sectarian bloodshed, a new safe haven for terrorist organizations, and a tempting target for Iran to expand its anti-American influence in the Middle East. A viable alternative has to account for these possibilities, and many others.

So I’m waiting for all these vocal critics to propose one or more viable alternative strategies. If they can’t propose viable alternatives, their criticism isn’t really worth much.

Political rhetoric

As we move into the political campaign season, with all its political rhetoric, it’s worth remembering some basic truths:

1. Politicians get elected by telling voters what they want to hear, not what is true.

2. Politicians get elected by reinforcing the myths and prejudices voters already believe in, not by showing them that their myths and prejudices are false -- indeed, they may well share those myths and prejudices.

3. Politicians get elected by addressing the issues voters happen to care about at the moment, not the issues that will affect voters most in the long run.

4. Politicians get elected by promising decisive action to fix problems, not by admitting that no one really knows how to fix those problems.

5. Politicians get elected by simplifying complex issues down to catchy tag lines, not by explaining the real complexity of issues (and most important issues are very complex indeed).

6. Politicians get elected by emphasizing what they are going to give voters, not what it will cost the voters.

7. Politicians get elected by looking competent, not by being competent – image is everything.

8. Politicians get elected by appealing to voter’s emotions, not to their rationality.

9. Politicians know that more people vote against a candidate than for their opponent. That’s why attack ads and negative campaigns work so well.

10. Successful politicians are good at getting elected, which is an entirely different skill set than that required to run a government effectively.

If you think that I am overly cynical. I can only suggest you watch the upcoming campaign with an open mind and judge for yourself.

The importance of oil

A good many Americans are aware by now that we use too much of the world’s oil to fuel our oversized SUVs and cars, and produce too much CO₂ as a byproduct. But few understand how completely dependent our entire way of life is on cheap petroleum.

Without cheap oil most of us wouldn’t have enough to eat. Oil is the source of the pesticides and fertilizers and machinery that make our farms about 10 times more productive than they were in pre-oil days. Vast amounts of oil are needed to make and fuel the farm machinery that allows less than 2% of the population to grow enough food for the rest of us, and yet more oil is used to transport that food throughout the country, and yet more oil is required to keep much of that food fresh with refrigerators. The average American corn field produces about 130-150 bushels per acre today. Before oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and modern farm machinery the average yield was around 14-16 bushels to the acre. (1) One acre of corn production in the U.S. requires approximately 140 gallons of oil (2) in the form of fuel, fertilizer and pesticides. To process 1 pound of coffee requires the equivalent energy found in nearly a quart of crude oil by the time it is grown, shipped, processes and packaged (3).

The pre-oil world supported about a billion people. We now support almost 7 billion people. Let’s be optimistic and assume that technology (genetic engineering and the like) might double our potential non-oil food production capacity, so that in a post-oil world we could feed 2 billion people. That means the lives of at least 5 billion people hang on the balance as we run out of oil. And some of those people will be in our own nation.

Without cheap oil most of us wouldn’t have electricity, and without electricity most of our economy won’t run. Although coal is the fuel that drives the majority (about 60%) of our generating plants, cheap oil is what makes it economically possible to manufacture and run the equipment used to mine and transport the coal, to build and maintain the generating machinery and electric transmission infrastructure, and to build all the electric devices we depend on, from furnaces and air conditioners and refrigerators to Ipods and computers and electric light bulbs.

Without cheap oil many products will disappear or become prohibitively expensive, since oil is the feedstock for many chemical processes, including most plastics.

Directly or indirectly cheap oil makes possible most of our industrial capability, most of our technological advances, most of our imports, most of our food, most of our environmental control (heating and cooling) most of our medical services, most of our sources of entertainment and recreation, most of our information infrastructure, and almost all of our transportation.

The current evidence is that we will run out of cheap oil over the next few decades as we are forced to recover oil from more remote regions and in more inaccessible forms (such as tar sands) – that ought to worry us and be a source of wide public and political discussion. That fact that it isn’t widely discussed, certainly not in the political arena, doesn’t bode well for the world’s future.

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1. Walter Youngquist, “The Post-Petroleum Paradigm -- and Population”, Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies Volume 20, Number 4, March 1999
   

2. David Pimentel, Encyclopedia of Physical Sciences and Technology, September 2001
   

3. Chad Heeter, “The oil in your oatmeal - A lot of fossil fuel goes into producing, packaging and shipping our breakfast”, 25 Mar 2006, The San Francisco Chronicle

The only three questions

Investor Ken Fisher has written a book entitled “The Only Three Questions That Count: Investing By Knowing What Others Don’t”. In it he makes the point that the market is pretty efficient at pricing in “common knowledge” and common expectations. If everyone thinks stocks will go down next month, that prediction will already be priced into the market. If everyone thinks they will go up, that premium will already be priced into the market. And the market is to a large extent driven by the herd psychology of investors, who all tend to believe much the same things, whether they be truths or myths.

Fisher’s point is that the way to make money in investing is to know something that isn’t commonly known, and hence isn’t already priced into the market. Of course insider traders already know this, and even though the practice is illegal no doubt some are clever enough to get away with it anyway. However Fisher argues that much of what investors believe is mythology unsupported by the data, and ordinary investors who can see through that mythology have the same kind of advantage as insider traders, but legally.

Fisher’s three key questions are:

1. What do I believe that is actually false?
2. What can I fathom that others find unfathomable?
3. What the heck is my brain doing to mislead and misguide me now?

In the course of the book, he explores a number of beliefs that are common in our country, such as that high price to earning ratios mean a given stock or the market as a whole is overpriced and due to fall, or that debt is bad and we have too much of it, and he makes a good case for their being false. He also explores some of the human psychology that makes it hard for us to think rationally about investing. For investors it’s a book well worth reading, though it will take some work because he delves into the data pretty deeply to disprove some of the common investor myths.

But the reason I mention this book is because his three investment questions apply just as well to life as a whole. We all believe all sorts of things that are false, and that we could tell were false if we simply looked at the data with an open mind. We are all subverted in our daily lives by some of the quirks of the human mind (it’s hard to have a truly open mind). And for all of us there are concepts that we think are unfathomable (to us, at least), but that we could master to our advantage if we only put our minds to it. And, as in investing, seeing through the myths most others believe gives us a substantial advantage in life.

Recommended: We Are Not Losing The War Against Radical Islam

I recommend Fareed Zakaria's July 2, 2007 article "We Are Not Losing The War Against Radical Islam" in Newsweek. It offers an alternate perspective to the political fear mongering that permeates some of the current campaign rhetoric.

The myths of liberals and conservatives

The nation is sharply split between the liberals and the conservatives, the red and blue states. Yet the fundamental mythology of both sides is faulty.

Put simply, the liberal belief in the effectiveness of government to solve all ills is unrealistic. And the conservative belief in “natural selection” and “free markets” to produce the most efficient allocation of resources is equally unrealistic.

The liberal mythology first: liberals believe that government policy and programs are the way to solve major social ills. Historically liberals have relied on government, and especially the courts, to try to impose their liberal views on the nation. And on occasion it has worked, as in the Civil Rights laws. But the executive branch, Congress, and the many government agencies respond primarily to their own agendas – to survive, to acquire and maintain power and budgets, and (for elected officials) to get re-elected. They are at best a blunt one-size-fits-all instrument, and a very expensive one at that, for tasks that really require a myriad of different approaches for different parts of the population. And all too often, despite the best of liberal intentions, liberal programs simply become one more vehicle for channeling public money to this or that special interest group or corporate sponsor, and one more means for some government agency to expand its charter and budget.

The conservative mythology is just as flawed. It might be (though it is yet to be demonstrated) that a truly free market would allocate resources optimally. It might be (though it is yet to be demonstrated) that unbiased natural selection would really let the best and the brightest rise to the top. But in fact we don’t have the free markets or unbiased natural selection that conservatives postulate. Money talks – those with money and the influence money buys skew the system, quite naturally, to favor themselves and their own offspring. Corporations arrange, through their campaign contributions and in other ways, for “friendly” legislation to give them an advantage over competitors in the market. Wealthier people arrange for their offspring to have better educations and better job contacts than less wealthy people. People with “contacts” among the ruling elite do better than the rest of us. So the conservative mythology really just supports the status quo.

Having said all of that, these mythologies will no doubt persist. People are remarkably resistant to changing their views, whatever the evidence.

Who has the “true” church?

Pope Benedict’s recent approval of a document from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “correcting” what he says are erroneous interpretations of the Second Vatican Council and asserting that all other Christian communities are either defective or not true churches has caused a great deal of concerned, even outraged, discussion. But in fact this has been the historic position of the Catholic Church through the centuries, so it really is nothing new. The Catholic Church bases its claim on the words of Jesus in Matthew 16:18 “…you are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church…”. There are alternate interpretations of this passage in which the rock referred to is Peter’s confession of faith, not Peter himself, with a play on words since rock in Aramaic is petros, and in Greek is petra. And it is not clear how this passage sorts with Jesus’ words in Matthew 5:18 "For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled." That would seem to imply that Jesus thought the true religion was Judaism.

But Catholics are not the only ones to hold the view that theirs is the only true religion. That is certainly at the core of orthodox Islamic beliefs, though Muslim teachings do accord Christians and Jews some status as “People of the Book”, believers in earlier but incomplete or defective revelations from God. Mormons are pretty sure that the “latter day” revelations to Joseph Smith make theirs the true religion. And a good many Protestant religions, especially on the fringes, are just as certain that the rest of us will spend an uncomfortable afterlife for not adhering strictly to their views.

This sort of intolerant certainty seems to go with monotheistic believers, because I don’t get the impression that the polytheistic and non-theistic religions of the East carry this sort of absolute certainty and condemnation of non-believers. In fact, among many Eastern religions there seem to be a comfortable “live and let live” approach, with Hindus and Buddhists even sharing temples in some places, just as some temple precincts in Japan are shared by Buddhists and Shintos.

In any case, all these raucous claims to absolute religious certainty put me in mind of the words of the King of Siam in Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s 1951 hit musical “The King and I” :

And it puzzle me to learn
That tho' a man may be in doubt of what he know,
Very quickly he will fight...
He'll fight to prove that what he does not know is so!

A’s, B’s and C’c

There is a common saying in business that A’s hire other A’s, but B’s hire C’s. Managers who are outstanding tend to recruit outstanding people, but managers who are less than outstanding are threatened by outstanding people and tend to hire people who aren’t even as good as they are, and who therefore don’t threaten to show up their deficiencies. David Ogilvy had it right when he said “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”

This doesn’t just happen in business of course. It is a common feature of all human institutions. Only people who are truly confident of their own abilities are comfortable around other people whose abilities are exceptional. That may explain why so many leaders surround themselves with lesser lights who don’t threaten them.

But just occasionally, perhaps when the stars are in the right conjunction, a really bright manager will manage to assemble a group of really bright people, and then wondrous things happen for a while!

Helicopter parenting

I recently heard this generation of parents described as “helicopter parents”, because they hover ceaselessly around their children. I know parents who are like this; they are in their child’s face every day all day long. They seem to feel they would be failing their children if they didn’t participate in every activity the child undertakes. They worry endlessly about protecting their children from anything that might possibly be the slightest bit disturbing. They are deeply concerned about their diet, their bedtimes, their homework, what they read, what they wear, how they keep their room, who their friends are, and above all keeping them safe from any possible risk, however small.

While this approach is certainly better than being completely disinterested in one’s children, I can’t help thinking that this sort of child-centered family life can’t be all that good for either the children or their parents.

Childhood should be a time when children explore and experiment and find out who they really are. It’s hard to find out who you really are if someone else is trying to control every detail and aspect of your daily life.

Children need a chance to try things and fail, and discover that failing sometimes is OK, it’s a natural part of life. They need a chance to make decisions, good ones and bad ones, and learn from their bad decisions. They need the freedom to take risks, within reasonable bounds.

Childhood should be a time when parents let children begin to learn about and participate occasionally in adult activities, not when parents participate endlessly in childhood activities.

Childhood is life’s gift of time to be creative and imaginative; a time for unscheduled, free-form play, not a daily regime in which every hour not filled by organized sports or classes is consumed driving to and from all of these scheduled appointments. . Children need down-time; they need lots of it.

It seems to me that in such child-centered families both the children and their parents need to get a life!

Heaven and hell

I’m not much of a religious believer, but I do believe in heaven and hell. But not the afterlife sort that dominates most theology. I believe heaven and hell exist right here on earth, while we are living.

There are people who are content and happy in life, happy with what they do, happy in their relationships. I think this is as close to heaven as any of us could imagine. I certainly feel that way.

And there are people whose lives are a daily misery, and if that isn’t hell I don’t know what is.

Now whether we are in heaven or hell is to a certain extent a matter of luck. Some people get through life without major tragedy, and some people just have the bad luck to inherit depression genes or to be born in a war zone or into abject, grinding poverty. Still, there is more than luck involved.

To a large extent we make our own reality with our own attitudes. I think of Stephen Hawkings, locked in his wheelchair for 40 years, hardly able to communicate any more. Yet he continues to express joy (most recently at experiencing zero gravity) and do impressive work in physics. I think of Christopher Reeve, struck down as a quadriplegic in the prime of his life, he went on to continue to direct and act in movies, and encourage others with disabilities not to despair. I have a friend who has been battling cancer for as long as I have known her – perhaps 20+ years now – but she gets on with life, occasionally disappearing for a while for chemotherapy and then reappearing wearing a wig, but having a good time all the while. Attitude.

On the other hand the world, or at least America, seems to be full of celebrities and stars with all the fame and fortune anyone could wish for, who bounce from one disastrous relationship to another, often sinking in misery with drugs or alcohol until they do themselves in.

In truth, it rains on everyone’s parade from time to time, and whether that ruins our life or not is simply a matter of our attitude. So in the end, I think what gets us into heaven or hell is our outlook on life, not our theology. And I feel sorry for all those who spend their lives waiting and working to get into heaven after their death, and thereby miss the heaven possible in their lifetime.

Civilized politics

It’s true that American politics can seem pretty dirty when one sees some of the attack ads and negative campaigning. Still, let’s keep this in perspective. Compared to much of the rest of the world, politics in the USA is still pretty gentle. Losers for president don’t set up parallel shadow governments and refuse to recognize the winner, as has been happening in Mexico recently. Mobs don’t roam the streets burning cars when their candidate loses. Although we have had a few assassinations of government figures or candidates in our history, in general these have not been political in nature, with one party assassinating members of the opposite party. It has been a long time since there were fist fights in Congress. We don’t have armed coups. Republicans and Democrats don’t have armed supporters roaming the streets, kidnapping opponents and having firefights in the middle of towns.

Looked at in comparison to other countries, even some other first world countries, American politics is really pretty civilized. We ought to be thankful for that.

Re: Is Islam a Peaceful Religion?

Here is an alternate view on Islam from a retired Episcopal priest who has spent some years actively engaged with Mosques near his parish. Since his retirement party included two Imams along with several bishops, his views deserve to be listened to.

For one of the few instances in the time we have known each other, I find that I must disagree with you and your view on Islam. My experience of Muslims here in Maryland has been totally different. From 9/11 on, the Muslims here have spoken out forcefully against the violence that has perpetrated in the name of Islam. This includes Shia, Sufi, Sunni and Admadaya Muslims.

As for the violence in the Qur'an, I find it to be as culturally determined as both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures. Even Jesus said that he had come to bring not peace, but a sword and to divide family member against family (probably had a really bad day that time.)

The thing I see is that the media are not very interested in reporting those who do speak out but interested in reporting those who advocate violence. Case in point, when the former president of Iran, Mohammad Khatami spoke at Washington Cathedral and engaged in dialogue with Dean Lloyd and Bishop Chane(I also think that it was probably the first time that I had been protested against, rather than being a protestor. There go my 60's credentials.) In addition, there was virtually no coverage of Bishop Chane's trip to Iran in further engage the government and Khatami there.

Just a few days ago, the Pew Global Attitudes Project's 47 nation survey finds that 34% of Lebanese Muslims think suicide bombing is sometimes justified (vs 74% in 2002). In Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia, the proportion of Muslims who view suicide bombing and other attacks against civilians as being often or sometimes justified has declined by half or more over the past five years.

The Washington Post reported on a conference of young Muslim American leaders and there emerging as a force in this country. Since most of the Muslims in America are foreign born, this bodes well for the future of Muslims in America as they begin to emerge as leaders of their community. It seems important to me that the rest of us keep in touch with these young people as they grow into our diverse society.

Finally, the Washington Post did an excellent series of editorials but Muslims on what is the future and present of Islam in the world and in this country. (July 22, 2007).

Again, I don't know if you have seen the online "On Faith" discussion that is currently going on at newsweek.washingtonpost.com/on faith. I find it very encouraging.

My personal view is that Islam is in need of a Reformation such as happened to Christianity about 500 years ago. Islamic countries are also in need of a middle class, because that is where I find the moderates. Extreme poverty and lack of education means that dictatorial rulers can and do manipulate people. My biggest hope is all those programs that are working for the education of girls. Women can, do and have changed the world.

My friend, Sabir Rahman, past president of the Sunni and Shia mosque up the road from me, maintains that the Muslim experience in the United States will eventually change Islam world wide. His reasoning is that Muslims here are learning how to exist as "one of many" in a diverse society and that will spread back. He cites the fact that in his mosque, Sunni's and Shiites worship side by side and together run the mosque.

What are the real priorities?

I had a friend once who taught me to ignore the words of upper management about priorities and just pay attention to what gets funded. If an activity or task gets fully funded, it’s important to upper management. If it doesn’t get funded or it just gets token funding, then whatever they may say, it really isn’t important to them.

The same can be said for ordinary people in their own lives. To see what is really important to people, as opposed to what they will say is important, look at where they spend their time and money.

And the same can be said for politicians and political parties. To see what really matters to them, ignore the campaign rhetoric and simply look at what activities they are willing to fight for and fund.

Why Study History?

There are many reasons to study history, but I submit that the most important reason is to give us a realistic perspective on our own beliefs and assumptions.

The followers of Plato and Aristotle thought they had a good understanding of the world, as did many scholars right through the medieval period, yet now we see how naïve many of their views were, and how much more complex the world really is. How naïve will some of our current scientific theories seem to our descendants a thousand years from now?

Our civilization (at least in the developed world) is appalled at earlier practices such as child labor, slavery, serfdom, drawing and quartering, human sacrifices, and the like. Yet at the time these were common, accepted practices – nothing to even comment on. What common practices do we all take for granted today that will horrify our descendants a thousand years from now?

No doubt the followers of ancient religions were just as sure they were right as followers of today’s religions are sure they have the truth. Yet the worship of Poseidon and Augusta and Athena and the various river gods and mountain gods and the like seem so dated, so naïve in today’s world. How naïve will our own religious beliefs seem to our descendents a thousand years from now?

In earlier times the general population subscribed to all manner of social and political beliefs which we no longer hold, such as the divine right of kings or the inherent superiority of men over women. What social and political beliefs do we accept that will seem outlandish and naïve to our descendants a thousand years from now?

It would take a large dose of hubris to look at all the naive and erroneous beliefs and assumptions of our ancestors revealed by a study of history, and yet believe that we ourselves are free from such errors and naiveté. The study of history ought to keep us humble, and give us clues to where our own current views and assumptions might be suspect.

Status symbols

Nature is composed of predators and prey, though of course many predators are themselves prey for other, larger predators. Prey multiply into vast herds or schools or whatever, and the predators come along periodically and harvest them, like a blue whale gulping down tons of krill.

I was thinking of this the other day as I read an advertisement for a vastly overpriced watch. Being social animals, humans are status conscious – it matters to them where they are in the group’s pecking order. And among the alpha humans or those who aspire to alpha status, status displays are important.

This has spawned a whole group of predators selling overpriced stuff to the masses of status-conscious prey: oversized McMansions, overpriced watches and cars and art and purses and suits. If one child has an iPod, every other child wants one too. In the ghettos, young people sometimes even kill for overpriced “status” athletic shoes.

I’m sure a $150,000 Bentley is better built than a $25,000 Ford, but surely not 6 times better! Perhaps a $5000 Rolex watch really is better built than a $50 Timex, but odds are they tell time just the same. A 25,000 square foot house certainly has more room than a 2,500 square foot house, but who really needs that much extra room?

It is amusing to watch nature at work – the alpha humans oh-so-proud that they made it, being harvested systematically by those predators who, for a good price, cater to their need for ostentatious status displays.

Civilian control of the military

One of the foundation principles of American government is that our military is always ultimately under civilian control, with the President as the Commander in Chief acting through his Secretary of Defense. In general this is a wise policy. From the Roman Praetorian Guard to the present day, military organizations that became powerful and unfettered political organizations within their country or empire have inevitably caused havoc and bloodshed in the end, and often installed and maintained brutal and unprincipled dictators as leaders.

Nevertheless, there is an important division of labor needed here. Civilians should certainly determine the high level policies and objectives for the military, but then they ought to leave the details of the execution to their experienced military leaders. The persistent failure in American politics from Vietnam right through to the current Iraq mess is the tendency for Washington politicians, and particularly Presidents and their Secretaries of Defense, to try to micromanage the military operations they have set in motion, with uniformly disastrous results. During the Vietnam war President Johnson and Secretary McNamara would sometimes involve themselves in the details of the daily Air Force targeting list, and Secretary Rumsfeld meddled continuously in the planning for the Iraq invasion, overruling his experienced generals repeatedly, with disastrous consequences.

These people, if they needed an operation, would never think of going to a politician rather than an experienced surgeon. If they needed a house designed, they would go to an experienced architect, not a politician. Why then are they so arrogant or ignorant as to assume that they know how to manage military affairs better than people who have spent their entire life in the military?

The way the system should work is that the civilian political leaders should determine what the high level military objectives should be, after consulting with their military leaders as to how feasible these objectives are, and then issue the orders to their generals and admirals, and get out of the way and let the military experts do what they have spent their life learning to do. In general, it is the civilians who are often eager to use military power, and the military, who after all are the ones who will have to bury the dead, who are more cautious.

Perhaps there is something about the Washington air that inflates politician’s egos to the point where they fancy themselves experts in everything. In military matters, that is a very dangerous illusion.

Why do we get such poor leaders?

Have you ever noticed how many of our leaders – presidents, CEOs, generals and admirals, prime ministers, and kings – are unsuitable to their position? Of course the Peter Principle plays a part – many were talented in lower level positions, but have simply been promoted to their level of incompetence.

But there is another factor in play here – it often takes a different skill set to win the position than to function effectively in it. A CEO may reach his/her position by being expert in brutal office politics, but that is not the skill set needed to be an effective CEO. A general or admiral may get promoted to the rank by never taking risks and therefore having no blots on his/her record. But an effective military leader has to be able to take calculated risks. Presidents and prime ministers get where they are by being good at partisan politics, but the job requires a broader perspective than that.

One advance the world could use is a better way of promoting people to top jobs – one that improves the odds that they can really do the job once they get it.

Recommended – Why We Fight

I highly recommend the documentary “Why We Fight”, a film by Eugene Jarecki which won the 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Award. President Eisenhower in his farewell address to the nation warned us about the military-industrial complex, and this movie explores that theme in a pretty well-balanced manner. As one who has worked in the military-industrial complex, I know all too well how tightly the Pentagon, the defense contractors and Congress work together to advance their own parochial interests at the expense of the rest of the American public. This film ought to make you thoughtful, and very uneasy.

The Marines

Many years ago I attended a performance of the Black Watch in a large Washington stadium. Their playing was stirring, and the vast audience was duly appreciative. At one point midway through the show the pipers began to play the Marine Hymn, and to my amazement, scattered all thorough that vast audience men rose and stood at attention, old men and young men, veterans of World War II and Korea and Vietnam and current marines, in uniform and out. I was deeply moved at the bond all those men had, across time and generations, to an organization like the Marines.

There is something special about the Marine ethic. I recall some years ago reading a business book about how to run a business along Marine principles, written of course by an active duty Marine. Two things impressed me about that book – the emphasis on mission focus and the emphasis on taking care of one’s people.

During the second Gulf War I happened to be working on a project with lots of retired Marines, and they shared with me the informal “lessons learned” emails that were being circulating in the Marine community from colleagues in the field in Iraq. Once again, the overall emphasis was on taking care of their people, getting them enough sleep, getting their mail to them, cobbling together makeshift armor for their inadequately-protected vehicles, boosting their morale.

American politicians could learn a lot from the Marines, if only they would.

Is Islam a peaceful religion?

We in the modern Western world have been trying our liberal best to believe that Islam is really a peaceful religion, and that the recent actions of terrorists are really not driven by the religion of Islam. We have been trying to be multicultural and politically correct and sensitive to the religious feelings of others. But you know, it just doesn’t wash.

As the old saying goes, “actions speak louder than words”. Despite the protests from some scholars and liberals that Islam is really a peaceful religion, the world, and especially the Middle East, is awash daily in bloodletting in the name of Islam. If they aren’t killing the infidels (us), they are busy pitting Shia against Sunni and killing each other over who was the rightful successor to the prophet centuries ago.

The terrorists themselves tell us in no uncertain terms that they are acting from their beliefs in Islam. They tell us this repeatedly and unambiguously and proudly in their internet sites, manifestos, videos, public speeches and prayers, fatwas, and grisly videos of beheadings and suicide bombers making their last proud declarations before going off to kill as many unbelievers as possible. It would hard to be more explicit than that.

Then Islam’s holy scripture, the Qur'an says such things as “Kill disbelievers wherever you find them. If they attack you, then kill them. Such is the reward of disbelievers.” (2:191-2) and “Have no unbelieving friends. Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them.” (4:89). It would hard to be more explicit than that.

And then there are the local Islamic madrassas (schools) throughout places like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia where the young are drilled daily in hatred of the infidel (us), and their Islamic duty to give their lives to our extermination. And the mosques throughout the world (even, apparently, in London) where mullas weekly preach hatred of the West and advocate violence. It would hard to be more explicit than that.

Certainly many Muslims, indeed the vast majority of Muslims worldwide, don’t follow these precepts, and are content to live in peace with non-Muslims. But in fact the terrorists have sound theological support from the Qur'an itself, as well as from the Sharia law that has been built up over the centuries, for most of their actions. And although most Muslims don’t participate in terrorists actions themselves, it is clear from the street celebrations following terrorist killings, the writings of many Muslim clerics, and the generous contributions to terrorist organizations that a great many of them approve of and support such actions by others, privately if not in public. If such acts really are against the principles of Islam, one would expect much more outcry against them from Muslims worldwide. In fact one of the most disturbing aspects of all this is the resounding silence from most of the Muslim world in the face of these terrorist actions.

Try as we might to hide our heads in the sand and be politically correct and pretend that Islam as a theology is a peaceful religion, it really isn’t. It never has been, as any competent historian of the Middle East knows. For Islam, the world is divided into dar al-Islam, the house of peace (nations ruled by Islam) and dar al-Harb, the house of war (everyone else). It is the duty of any good Muslim to defend dar al-Islam and to convert to Islam, by force if necessary, dar al-Harb. Moreover, for devout Muslims it is an intolerable affront to Allah that any land that has ever in the past been part of dar al-Islam should now be in dar al-Harb, and that affront calls for the devout to win that land back, by whatever means possible.

It is true that Christianity, like most major religions, also has a bloody and intolerant past -- in some periods of history far more intolerant that Islam -- and even some unpleasant aspects in the present. But Christian scripture and religious dogma does not require the devout to kill unbelievers (you can be nasty to them, but you are not required to kill them). Islamic scripture and dogma do enjoin the devout Muslim to kill unbelievers, even if that injunction is ignored by the majority of Muslims.

We had better wake up soon to the fact that we in the Western world face, not a rag-tag little group of criminal extremists from the religious fringes, but a large and dedicated and increasingly competent group of warriors, numbering by now in the tens or hundreds of thousands if not more, profoundly driven by their Islamic creed. They are not going to be defeated by military might; this is going to be a battle of ideas, not tanks. It’s hard to know how to face this threat effectively, but we certainly won’t ever figure it out if we persist in pretending that the fundamental nature of the religion of Islam isn’t a major component.

People who never make mistakes

Have you ever noticed that class of people who never make mistakes. Whatever goes wrong (and lots always goes wrong for them) is always someone else’s fault, never their own. Never, never, never do you hear from their lips the words “Oops, I made a mistake”.

It took me years to realize what was going on here. These are people whose self- confidence and self-image are so poor that they simply can’t face admitting to a mistake. They will change history in their own minds to avoid facing the consequences of their own mistakes.

Since humans learn from their mistakes, it follows that people who can’t admit to their mistakes can’t learn from them either, which is why such people usually make so many bad decisions in their lives, and so often make the same bad decisions over and over again.

Whenever I meet someone who is always blaming others I know I am meeting someone with a poor self-image. Whenever I hear someone frankly admit to a mistake I know I am dealing with someone pretty healthy.

The unknown unknowns

Nassim Taleb has written a new book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. (See the description in my book list on the sidebar). His main point is that most of the highly trained and highly paid experts in government and industry and academia and the media who produce endless learned projections about future stock and commodity prices, oil prices, sales volumes, interest rate movements, government spending, projects costs and the like simply don’t know what they are doing. And in fact, a little simple research supports this observation. Look at the past projections in fields like these and the success rate is not much different from that of an untrained person simply predicting a continuation of whatever the current trend happens to be.

The experts will defend their analyses by pointing out that when they were wrong (which is more often than not) it was because unusual circumstances intervened – wars, unanticipated scientific breakthroughs, natural disasters, unusual weather, terrorist actions, the collapse of a government or an empire, an unexpected shift in fashions, labor unrest, or any of an endless litany of other “unusual”, “one-off” events that were extremely unlikely, and therefore not factored into their predictions.

Taleb’s point is that although each these events may be highly improbable and unlikely in themselves, for future projections over any significant period (say more than a few weeks) it is nevertheless highly likely that one or more highly improbable and unpredictable events will occur during the periods being projected, and that these improbable events will tend to have massive consequences, rendering the projection worthless.

Despite the impressive mathematical models and learned theories that the practitioners believe in, and use to impress the gullible public and clients and justify their high status and salaries, most of these projections are worthless for spans of more than a few weeks or perhaps a few months, because they have no way to factor in the (inevitable) unexpected and unanticipated.

The lesson here is to know what one does not know. Donald Rumsfeld took a lot of ridicule from the Plain English Campaign and many journalists for his statement many months ago that it was the “unknown unknowns” that were the biggest problem. But he was right (for once), and those who ridiculed him were just exposing their own ignorance. There are, in fact, “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”, as he correctly stated.

In fact, we each know a good bit less than we think we know, and we would be wise to always remember that. Weather forecasters know that they can’t predict accurately for more than a few days (actually significantly fewer days than most weather channels and newspapers report); they know what they don’t know. Would that other public pundits could learn the same humility.

What’s wrong with public education?

Historically public education in the United States has had a positive effect. Most of our population is reasonably literate, and most have at least a basic understanding of simple math, a rough idea of recent history, and some sense of the sciences. This is certainly an improvement from 100-150 years ago, and is largely due to universal free public education.

Having said that, it is pretty clear that our current public school system isn’t up to the task of preparing the next generation for today’s complex and technological world. In America we currently spend about $7000 per student per year, or about a third of a trillion dollars per year on public education, far more than any other nation. Even in terms of per capita spending, only Norway exceeds the United States. Yet in a recent United Nations ranking we are only about twelfth in the world in terms of education. One can quibble about what is the correct measurement, but even without measurements it is clear from the remedial work colleges need to do these days with incoming freshman that our public schools aren’t performing as they should.

I have one grandchild already being home schooled, and another that will be home schooled starting next year. The reason in both cases is the same – the public schools just aren’t good enough (and there are no adequate private schools nearby). Too much time each day is wasted in crowd control. Too much time is wasted in federally mandated testing to measure the school, not help the individual student. Too much time is wasted waiting for “mainstreamed” special needs students to catch up with the class. Too much of the evening is wasted on mindless fill-in-the-blanks homework. Too much time is wasted cramming canned facts rather than really learning. Too much time is wasted on textbooks designed for the lowest common denominator. It’s no wonder so many of our children grow to hate school, and hate learning!

The granddaughter who started home schooling last year is already at least a year ahead of her former classmates in most of her subjects, has far more time left over for other things she loves, like Irish step dancing, reading, violin and piano, and still has more time for simple childhood play than she used to. And she still loves learning. I suspect most children in public school could advance about as fast if the cookie-cutter mass production educational system didn’t hold them back so much.

Of course changing the public school system will be difficult. There are too many vested interests: unions, school boards, the state and Federal educational bureaucracy, and textbook publishers. Nevertheless, as I argued in a post months ago, our very survival as a nation, even as a civilization, depends on the quality of the education we give the next generation. Fixing this situation ought to be a high priority for all of us. Since it clearly isn’t, I expect more and more of the better-educated and better-off people to opt out of the system in the coming years and either home school or send their children to private schools. That will only make the problem worse, of course.

Recommended: The Real Problem with Pakistan

I recommend Fareed Zakaria's new Newsweek article, The Real Problem with Pakistan. As is so often the case these days, the simplistic public view of events doesn't match up with the real-world complexity of most interesting situations, and Pakistan is a prime example.

America’s shame?

Some people spend a lot of time reminding us of the shameful things in our past, like slavery and the way we dealt with native Americans and the expansionist policies that lead us to sweep across the American continent in the early days and absorb the land claims of the Spanish and French and British. Here is a somewhat different outlook on this history.

It is true that in our early days parts of our nation endorsed slavery, as has much of the rest of the world through most of history. But in fact we fought our way out of that mindset, at the cost of a bitter civil war, which is more than some parts of the world, especially northern Africa and some Middle East countries, have done to this day.

It is true that in earlier centuries we overran the Native American tribes, and broke most of the treaties we made with them, just as happened in almost all cases in history when a more advanced civilization displaced a less advanced one. But in fact we have largely grown out of that and our courts and legal system have been defending their rights in recent years, which is more than happens for minorities in many part of the world to this day.

It is true that in our early days we engaged is a systematic expansion to absorb the land claims on this continent of the Spanish, French and British, who of course would have just as readily taken land from the new American nation if they could. In that our behavior was exactly like that of most peoples through history, and like more than a few nations even today. But we have grown out of that, and despite plenty of opportunity to conquer more land with our superior armed forces, we no longer do so.

It is true that we have on occasion oppressed minorities, be they Irish or Italian or Native American or black or women, or what have you. But in fact we have been growing out of that, largely because of the American ethic of equality, which is more than can be said for most of the world, where oppression of this or that local minority often isn’t even a subject for public discussion.

I don’t think American’s have to apologize for ancestors who held views that, while not enlightened by today’s American standards, were common if not universal in their day, and are still common in parts of the world today. On the contrary, I think Americans ought to be proud of the steady progress our nation has made, and is still making, toward enlightened views. This is more than can be said for most of the rest of the world.

A republic….if you can keep it.

At the end of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on September 18, 1787, as Benjamin Franklin emerged from the last meeting, a Mrs. Powel, waiting outside, asked him: "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" "A republic if you can keep it" responded Franklin.

Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be keeping it.

A republic is a form of government whose legitimacy is based on popular consent and whose governance is based on popular representation and control. On the surface I guess we still look like a republic – we still vote for congressional representatives and presidential electors.

But in fact our federal government, and most of our state governments, are mostly run by unelected people to whom we have never given any consent and who don’t represent us in any meaningful way. It is in fact largely run by bureaucrats in federal and state agencies, legislative staffers, K-street lobbyists, and the wealthy senior managers of large businesses and organizations who fund political campaigns. These are the people who craft the laws and regulations and policies that actually affect our daily life. Some tiny fraction of these laws and regulations and policies are nominally debated and voted on in Congress or state legislators, but most are not – they are just promulgated and enforced by federal or state government agencies.

In the early days of our country the government was pretty small, and the government’s influence on people’s daily lives was pretty limited. And indeed many of the early bitter political battles were over the assumption of very minor powers by the federal government, like establishing a federal bank. I suppose it was inevitable that as the nation grew in size and power, the government and government powers would have had to grow as well. But we have long since reached the point where we are no longer truly a republic, but are ruled rather by a relatively small aristocracy composed of political insiders, senior civil servants, and wealthy political backers.

This ought to disturb us. It certainly would have disturbed Ben Franklin.