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A follow up with some good commentary on Global Trends 2025.

Dave Schuler writing at Outside the Beltway:

…This idea goes gack to Thomas Carlyle. It’s the “Great Man” theory of history and I think it’s a load of bull. While individual historical figures, e. g. Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Mao, may bring color and texture to the fabric of history that fabric is formed by economics, demographics, and social structures. Gaius Julius Caesar might have elected never to cross the Rubicon into the precincts of Rome, fomenting the collapse of the Republic and the rise of the Empire. Rome would still have been expansionist and there would still have been an empire. Rome’s location, population, and way of life demanded it. We’d just have used some other word for monarch than Kaiser or tsar.

France was loaded for bear after the French Revolution. Even without Napoleon’s military genius it still would have spread the Revolution all over Europe. It might not have invaded Russia but it most certainly would have invaded Italy.

And so on. The ghastly thing about that pronouncement in this document is that it has nothing whatever to do with the meat of the document at all. Nowhere do the authors demonstrate how the choices of individual leaders will influence the world of 2025. If they’re saying that the world of 2025 is completely unpredictable because it will be so completely formed by the decisions of unpredictable leaders in that world they could have stopped this 120 page report at page 25.

There is a repeated confusion of absolute growth with relative growth. While emphasizing the significance of the latter they don’t seem to appreciate that it’s absolute power, strength, and wealth that’s important not relative power, strength, and wealth. China is powerful because of its enormous size not just because of its relative growth, however dramatic that might be. The U. S.’s continued absolute power, strength, and wealth despite the relative change in power, strength, and wealth insures U. S. pre-eminence for the foreseeable future, even with our present economic downturn. Were it otherwise Luxembourg would be the most important country in the world.

Read the rest here. 

There’s a synergy between great men and their times. Without Adolf Hitler, WWII is a localized, limited, war over the degree to which France and Britain  were going to accept Germany politically dominating the smaller states of Eastern Europe (Germany’s economic domination was inevitable). Without Germany’s defeat in WWI, Versailles and the Depression there would have been no Hitler as Fuhrer of a Nazi regime.

Dave is right that the document is very weak and in need of systems thinkers from the hard and soft sciences and experts on cultural touchstones. Except for a distinct minority, most professional historians shy away from that kind of extrapolation and speculation due to their methodology regarding evidence, or at least they limit the scope of such activities. Historians and futurists are not the same thing, though the two should engage with one another.

Historians as a group tend to excel at going deep on particular subjects with only secondary concern how that subject relates to everything else.  I’ve never been content to accept that, seeing historical knowledge as a platform or scaffold upon which to build new ideas. When I began my first master’s degree, I proposed doing a comparison of the development of the American Populist movement with the Russian Narodniki and People’s Will of the same period. The professor smiled wryly and said that topic was interesting but of a suitable size to be better left for a magnum opus to close out my career.

Analysis is enriched by consilience.

Professor Sam “Selil” Liles has two posts, thoughtful essays to be more precise, to which I must give my earnest recommendation to read in full. Here they are with some short excerpts and then  brief comments by me:

“The dark ages: Modern anti-intellectualism and failure of the thinking man”

….Where is the modern age renaissance man? A little over 100 years ago there were two degrees in the undergraduate curriculum. The Bachelor of Science, and the Bachelor of Arts were regarded as the pinnacle of education. Then specialization began a long swing into the collective consciousness of academia. The business world looked to academia to solve the middling problems of commerce. A government swath of intervention cut through the academic ranks of research. All of this resulted in further specialization. In the short term likely it resulted in gains in the intellectual output of a generation of scientists.

So, from a system where knowledge was gathered from many sources and a pyramid of knowledge and facts represented the intellectual catalog of an individual we have now the reverse. Broad based programs that widened in scope to a point where a person of the highest rank could discuss a variety of topics is no longer. Specialization has resulted in a trend to specious specialization where the pinnacle academic achievement is hyper-specialization. This has driven a coterie of programs into inter-disciplinary prima-facie collaborations but we know that the simple human interactions degrade the efforts.

This is the downside of analytical-reductionism, the powerful tool with which (among others) man has managed to shatter and reorganize a once unknowable reality into discernable, quantifiable, comprehensible parts. But with all tools there are limitations in terms of efficiencies as well as costs. Microscopes and telescopes are powerful augmentations to human vision but you wouldn’t look through either one while driving your car.

“….Perhaps the issue is thinking strategies. The fact remains that the common scientist is woefully deficient in thinking and intellectual strategies. Within their discipline they may be exposed to specifics that they may need but I rather doubt most PhD candidates for chemistry are being exposed to Dewey or Kant at the doctoral course work level. Specialization has eroded the human aspects of educations. The Renaissance man is dead and the University killed him. I have seen the response of several science faculty at the senior level who have realized this fact about themselves. They may be an international expert and have a great reputation but upon reaching full professor they reach out and start taking liberal arts and humanities courses. I have met many junior faculty and professionals who have a master’s degree in a liberal art and another masters degree in a science or engineering discipline. These are the hope of Lazarus rising and the rebirth of the Renaissance man. Yet in academia they are pushed aside as not having focus or depth.”

Read the rest here. Here is Selil’s next post which contains a number of visual slides that you should check out because they crystallize some of the points of the argument:

“Education paradigm: How you get there may not be where you are going”

“….The education paradigm is also somewhat limited. The pinnacle of the education paradigm is theory. The creating of new knowledge through the process of research as a doctoral student as evidenced by the dissertation is end of academic achievement. The missing point that the University often struggles with is the application of that highly specialized theoretical knowledge. Industry rarely has need of that kind of knowledge until there is a perceived need. This is where much of the “what use is a PhD” argument comes from. Yet it is of national and strategic importance to create and innovate not simply make small movements forward through incremental improvement. Creativity is energy fed by the fuel of intellectual discourse and domain knowledge. The broader the domain knowledge of an individual the more likely that they can draw upon new and more effective tools to solve problems.

Synthesis paradigm

For the most effective educated work force that serves the needs of all stake holders including the student a new paradigm for education is needed. The paradigm should build upon the entirety of the general education that a student receives in high school. Because the volume of knowledge is so vast it should approach the application side of the equation first thereby producing a capable work force entrant at the community college level. The bachelor degree level should have some theory and each discipline may need more or less depending on their field. The bachelor degree though should create a journeyman practitioner or engineer capable managing and inclemently advancing the discipline. The spilt between theory and application for a masters degree should equate to near equality. The master degree suggests that a student has relative mastery of a topic or discipline. At this point the student should have a breadth of knowledge that is inclusive of the discipline. At the point the doctoral degree is awarded application has been overtaken by theory. This is not the end as there is even more theory to be worked with but the scope broadens.”

This excerpt was from the second half of the post which I selected to show what Sam is driving toward, shifting the paradigm of education toward synthesis. In my view, a useful remediation of the current system’s deficiencies and a way to teach people to build their own “dialectical engines”, to use John Boyd’s phrase, for the generation of insights. Not in my view a full replacement of analytical-reductionism ( would you “replace” your left hand with your right or would you want to use both of them?) but a powerful complement and imaginative driver toward “vitality and growth”.

DNI has an excellent link to a powerpoint from a British military institution ( Defence Academy). The early slides, however poorly constructed from a visual standpoint, have conceptual density. And Dr. Marc Tyrell of The Small Wars Council gets a special mention in it to boot.

A Framework for Strategic Cultural Analysis

They are trying to build a new analytical paradigm here and they get many elements right, in my view.

My esteemed blogfriend of longstanding, Sir Younghusband of Coming Anarchy, took issue with my remarks in the previous post and commented ( seconded by ubiwar):

“Historians and futurists use complementary methodologies …”In my experience futurists and historians are at one another’s throats over methodology. I would like to compare these methodologies in more detail. Can you elaborate on what you mean?

There is a clash of professional cultures and perspectives between academic historians and futurists, no argument. That’s why I used the term “complementary” in the previous post – the respective methodologies are divergent enough to remediate the weaknesses of the other for those thinkers open to broadening their analytical horizons. Not everyone has the comfort zone demonstratedby Niall Ferguson and Peter Schwartz; methodologically conservative “old school” historians who disdain the skill-sets of even cognate social science fields and highly speculative futurists are quite likely to talk past one another. A shame, in my view.

To begin, it’s an epistemological error to confuse either field with physics. Futurism has strongly imaginative, insight-generative and generally “fuzzy” aspects even when rarefied computer modeling, prediction markets or mathematically advanced techniques for making probabilistic estimates are being employed  (none of which I am qualified to comment upon in depth) and as a field, it is still in the pioneering stage.  History has a longer intellectual pedigree, stretching back to Herodotus and Thucydides with the advent of modern historical techniques beginning with Leopold von Ranke and the professionalization of academia by the German university system that became the model for the Western world, particularly the noveau-riche United States of the late 19th century. Historical methodology is accepted by historians as a yardstick to measure one another’s work and is the basis for much of the nitpicking “gotcha” nature of historiagrahical criticism. Alternative methods are viewed with suspicion; it took decades for academic historians to begin giving any credence whatsoever to oral history, for example.

Ideally, historians approach a question with skepticism and attempt to fnd an explain causation within an accurate context by working backwards toward the point of origin. “Primary source” documents are privileged as evidence by which they mean certain kinds of documents, preferably government records and memoranda, alongside private papers, scrutinized with great care. These are supplemented by authoritative secondary material that helps the historian understand the primary sources within the accurate context of the time rather than anachronistically. These discrete facts and clues are then reinterpreted by the historian in the form of a comprehensible narrative that does not deviate from the evidentiary trail. History is a craft, not a science.

Naturally, historical methodology, which seeks to demonstrate the verifiable, is an approach with the potential for generating enormous lacunae. Government officials do not always put their most sensitive discussions or actions on paper or destroy such documents after the fact (ex.- both Beria and Khrushchev ransacked Stalin’s private archive after the dictator’s death). Even when such papers exist, they are seldom readily accessible or are written in euphemistic, elusive, terminology or bureaucratic jargon. The unofficial, personal, relationships upon which many decisions hinge are often entirely absent from the “official” paper record as are often the human circumstances of the “deciders”. It takes superhuman detective work to fill in these kinds of blanks and a tolerance for sources of uncertain reliability ( this is a job for…a biographer! See Ron Chernow, Robert Caro etc.).

Futurists, as the term implies, look forward, rather than back. They begin with intuitive assumptions and engage in a variety of means of extrapolation ranging from ( among many)  logical-philosophical thought experiments mapped out as decision trees to the construction of imaginative but complex scenarios for “free play” exercises to building models of great mathematical rigor. Futurists scan widely for potential variables and patterns. Imagination and synthesis play a significant role in framing the initial starting point for analytical extrapolation. Futurists are t panoramic vision to the historian’s telescope ( or at times, microscope).

The problem with futurists is that their predictions are all too frequently in error, generally suffering from a bias toward dystopian outcomes, overestimation of the linear downstream effect of favored variables relative to the effects of the variable’s interaction with all other variables along with overestimating of the synchronicity of all variables (most variables are asynchronous – otherwise the human race would be in a near-constant state of catastrophe. The “perfect storm” rarely comes together). Their scenarios, in other  words,  lack the level of “friction” present in historical case studies, much less that of real life.

Futurists can inject a far greater range of possibilities to consider for causation for historians while historians can help bring greater realism to futurist scenarios. The two fields, both of which must deal with uncertainty, are ready-made for collaboration

ubiwar points to an excellent post at The Long Now summarizing a debate-discussion between historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz:

….Ferguson ended with a critique of Schwartz’s book on scenario planning, THE ART OF THE LONG VIEW, which he thought showed signs of “heuristic bias.” When Schwartz asked Ferguson to expand on that idea, Ferguson pointed out there was a whole chapter in the book about “The Global Teenager,” which seemed spurious. It merely reflected Schwartz’s personal experience: “You were a teenager when teenagers mattered. “

Historians also have heuristic biases, Ferguson added, such as their expectation that “great events should have great causes.” Historians have much to learn from complexity theory and evolution, he said. His own work with “counter-factual history” helps expose critical moments in history and provides a way to “think about what didn’t happen.” The counter-factual technique is an application of scenario thinking to the past.

In Schwartz’s opening remarks, he said that his plans to write a book titled THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM were derailed by reading Ferguson’s WAR OF THE WORLD. He’s been grappling with the issues Ferguson raised for 18 months. “You do alternative pasts, I do alternative futures. Where historians commune with the dead, futurists have imaginary friends.”

Historians and futurists use complementary methodologies that can enrich and inspire each other’s work.

Historians, accustomed to analytical searches for causation, are excellent at vetting the plausibility of imagineered, hypothetical scenarios and can inform through historical analogies. Futurists, in turn, are analytically attuned to alternatives and points of divergence and can help unearth what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “silent evidence” lurking in the often excessively linear and simplified causation explanations of historical narratives.