….Burney’s struggle reminds one that character is not only moral, it is also mental. Heroism exists not only on the battlefield or in public but also inside the head, in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts.
She lived at a time when people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one’s weakness.
In the mental sphere, this meant conquering mental laziness with arduous and sometimes numbingly boring lessons. It meant conquering frivolity by sitting through earnest sermons and speeches. It meant conquering self- approval by staring straight at what was painful.
This emphasis on mental character lasted for a time, but it has abated. There’s less talk of sin and frailty these days. Capitalism has also undermined this ethos. In the media competition for eyeballs, everyone is rewarded for producing enjoyable and affirming content. Output is measured by ratings and page views, so much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.
In this atmosphere, we’re all less conscious of our severe mental shortcomings and less inclined to be skeptical of our own opinions. Occasionally you surf around the Web and find someone who takes mental limitations seriously. For example, Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway once gave a speech called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” He and others list our natural weaknesses: We have confirmation bias; we pick out evidence that supports our views. We are cognitive misers; we try to think as little as possible. We are herd thinkers and conform our perceptions to fit in with the group.
But, in general, the culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse
True, and kudos to David Brooks for calling attention to the deficit in metacognition. However, I suspect that there is more to this phenomena than decadence, ADHD and a handy internet connection. There’s a problem with our epistemology. To be specific, a common epistemological standard is fading from American life, giving license to demagogues and emboldening fools.
There are many possible causes. The decline of critical thinking, logic, history and science in the curricular standards of American public schools; the disappearance of liberal education and the excesses of postmodernism, deconstructionism, constructivism and crit theory in our universities; the dumbing down of the MSM into 7 second sound bite infotainment and partisan agitprop; political correctness and its fetishes of race and gender victimization and witch-hunting; the growing legitimization of magical thinking inherent in religious fundamentalism and secular equivalents in irrationality like “deep ecology” or crackpot conspiracy theories. All of these and more have combined to erode standards of public discourse to an ever lower common denominator.
John Adams once argued before a Massachusetts jury that “facts are stubborn things”. Today it is unlikely that such an appeal would work. Not only do many people believe that they are entitled to their own set of “facts” but that they can, if they wish, dispense with facts entirely, yet self-righteously insist that their deliberate ignorance should be given the same weight as an informed argument because they “have a right to their opinion” without anyone daring to ask them why they are so morally and intellectually retarded.
Where once intellectual embarrassment prevented outright lies or inane arguments from being made in respectable forums, the popular deference to the dignity of cranks puts tin-foil hatters and their OCD political convictions about Bush orchestrating 9/11 or Obama being a secret Muslim in the center of public debate instead being confined to off-center mimeographed pamphlets passed out at airports by glassy-eyed true-believers. We feel compelled as a society to politely entertain drivel that should never have been heard past a kitchen table with a three quarters empty bottle of whiskey on it.
The country needs to regain a common intellectual ground that eschews nonsense for what it is.
I found this interesting. It is science and technology journalist Micheal Specterat TED where he is blasting “science denial”:
I may be wrong, but I suspect that Specter’s political and perhaps, economic, views, are to the left of my own. That’s ok – he has a scientific-empirical-rational epistemology, which means there’s an intellectual common ground where debates can actually be resolved or final conclusions arrived at that can be recognized as sensible, even if disagreement based on value choices remained.
More and more, I run across people on the Left and Right using magical, tribalistic, emotionally atavistic or other variations of irrational thinking to justify their positions. Worse, this intellectual equivalent of grunting tends to be coupled with a churlishly defiant refusal to honestly consider the costs (monetary or opportunity) involved or the logical, and still less, the unintended, consequences. Am I just getting old, or is this social phenomena getting rapidly worse?
Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of because we are all, in varying degrees, ignorant about many things. The important choice as individuals and as a society is adopting an epistemology of rational-scientific-empiricism that, if steadily applied, allows us to chip away at our ignorance and become aware of our errors and solve problems. On the other hand, adopting a posture of belligerent, stubborn, defense of our own ignorance by evading facts, logic and the conclusions drawn from the evidence of experience is the road to certain disaster.
Today, a student came to me with a question that their science instructor could not answer (the curriculum is mostly intro to chem with some classical physics). I am in no way, shape or form, a scientist or even a teacher of science, but the students know I’m interested in many odd things and like to reason through intriguing problems with them. The student asked:
“How can a photon – which has 0 mass – have 0 kinetic energy even though it is moving? If it does have mass, how can a photon go the speed of light?”
Now, I knew that the answer had to be explained via quantum mechanics and was fuzzily certain it was because particles did not behave as particles should in this scenario, but the ability to give a coherent and scientifically accurate explanation that related to the student’s current knowledge base was beyond me. I do not have a good enough grasp of the basics of quantum physics to lead the student to particles and waves through a series of questions. So, after complimenting him on his insightful question, I said I would contact an expert, Dr. Von, and get him a concise, equation-free, answer, which Von helpfully provided.
The point here, however, is not the answer (Newtonian physics is invalid at this scale and momentum is redefined in relativity theory which leads to particle-wave duality, uncertainty and other aspects of quantum mechanics) but the excellence of the student’s thinking that went into the question.
The student knew very little about physics except what was presented in the course – essentially, some laws of Newtonian physics, basic constituent parts of matter, simple atomic models etc. Given that information and having – this part is critical – no prior assumptions, having understood the “rules”, in a few minutes he identified a contradiction or paradox that undermined the authority of an elegantly constructed system of great explanatory power, conceived by the greatest genius to ever walk the Earth.
Not too shabby for a younger American teen-ager. Remember him the next time some loudmouthed fool opines how worthless kids are today or how they learn nothing at school.
Obviously, my student is quite bright, but his reasoning was also not polluted with the preconceptions we all pick up as we gain ever greater depth of mastery of a field. It was fundamentally new to him, so he did not yet have the kind of blind confidence in “the rules that everyone knows to be true” possessed by most adults and nearly all experts. He was still skeptical. Few content domain experts are innovaters for this reason. They are mostly overconfident masters with answers – not makers who create or discover the novel by asking questions. They are not skeptics, they are guardians of received knowledge.
We all need to step back, periodically, from the rush of life and our own pride and try to look at the things we think we know with a fresh mind.
….The Wikileaks release apparently caught the Defense Department flatfooted. Even today, three days after its release, there is largely silence from DOD, save a brief public comment and a link to documents and photos at http://www.centcom.mil/ (hidden in plain sight through the link labeled “Link to FOIA documents on July 2007 New Baghdad Combat Action“). Don’t bother going to http://www.defense.mil/ as that site, and hence the Pentagon, has nothing readily available either. The April 6 briefing pack did not include the explanatory imagery and there is no news release explanation the Department’s position. It’s as if nothing happened. When asked about the situation, senior official at DOD pointed me to the “great piece” in The New York Timesexplaining how trained soldiers view and operate in these events differently than civilians. This, however, misses the point.
Despite the vigorous discussion online and over the air whether there was a violation of the laws of war, the old belief that if you ignore a problem it will go away continues to dominate.
….We can argue about how many other factors aside from U.S. diplomatic and military operations led to the stunning drop in violence in 2007. There was a civil war in 2005 and 2006, tribes from al-Anbar “flipped” in 2006, and Muqtada al-Sadr decided to keep his troops out of the fight for reasons that are still not entirely clear. Those are just three factors which might not have had anything to do with U.S. operations. But there can be no denying that a space has indeed been created for a more or less peaceful political process to take place. Acts of heinous violence still take place in Baghdad, but so too does a relatively peaceful political process.
….Violence was a problem for Iraqi civilians and for the U.S. military. Reducing violence has unquestionably served humanitarian purposes in Iraq and has also saved American lives. But that has nothing to do with “conceptual space” or the broader “success” of the surge.
I mean, come on, if you’re going to write a post that essential expects to settle a debate like this one, snark and assertions much be balanced with rigorous analysis. But Exum doesn’t demonstrate any real understanding of the dynamics of violence in civil conflicts.
My suggestion is that you first read each gentleman’s posts in their entirety.
The first part of the dispute would be what is the standard of “success” that we are going to use to evaluate “the Surge”. I’m not certain that Exum and Finel, both of whom are experts in areas of national security and defense, would easily arrive at a consensus as to what that standard of measurement would be. Perhaps if they sat across from one another at a table and went back and forth for an hour or so. Or perhaps not. I have even less confidence that folks whose interests are primarily “gotcha” type partisan political point-scoring on the internet, rather than defense or foreign policy, could agree on a standard. Actually, I think people of that type would go to great lengths to avoid doing so but without agreement on a standard or standards the discussion degenerates into people shouting past one another.
In my view, “the Surge” was as much about domestic political requirements of the Bush administration after November 2006 as it was about the situation on the ground in Iraq. In my humble opinion, COIN was a better operational paradigm that what we had been doing previously in Iraq under Rumsfeld and Bremer, but the Bush administration accepted that change in military policy only out of desperation, as a life preserver. That isn’t either good or bad, it simply means that measuring the Surge is probably multidimensional and the importance of particular aspects depends on who you are. An Iraqi shopkeeper or insurgent has a different view from a USMC colonel or a blogger-political operative like Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga. Ultimately, the standard selected involves a level of arbitrary judgment. I can say the Surge was a success because the US was not forced to execute a fighting withdrawal from Iraq as some, like William Lind, was likely to happen but that’s probably not a narrow enough standard to measure the Surge fairly.
The second part of the dispute involves methodological validity, or “rigor” in making the evaluation, which was raised by Dr. Finel. I agree with Finel that in intellectual debate, rigor is a good thing. Generally in academia, where social scientists frequently suffer from a bad case of “physics envy”, this means unleashing the quants to build a mathematical model to isolate the hypothetical effects of a particular variable. I freely admit that I am not certain how this could be done in a situation as complex as the Iraqi insurgency-counterinsurgency in 2007 and still retain enough reliability to relate to reality. The act of isolating one variable is itself a gross distortion of the reality of war. There would have to be some kind of reasonable combination of quantitative and qualitative methods here to construct an argument that is comprehensive, rigorous and valid. I think Bernard should propose what that combination might be in approximate terms.
The third part of the dispute involves the medium for the rigorous argument over the Surge. I’d suggest that, generally, a blog post is not going to cut it for reasons intrinsic to the medium. First, blog posts have an unspoken requirement of brevity due the fact that audience reads them on a computer screen. While you can say something profound in just a few words, assembling satisfactory evidentiary proofs in a scholarly sense requires more space – such as that provided by a journal article or book. Blogging is good for a fast-paced exchange of ideas, brainstorming, speculation and, on occasion, investigative journalism. It’s a viral, dynamic medium. While there are examples of bloggers rising to levels of greater intellectual depth, these are exceptions rather than the rule in the blogosphere.
This is not a dispute that is going to be resolved because the parties are unlikely to find a common ground on which they can agree to stand.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
nothing readily available either. The April 6 briefing pack did not include the explanatory imagery and there is no news release explanation the Department’s position. It’s as if nothing happened. When asked about the situation, senior official at DOD pointed me to the “great piece” in The New York Times 
