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I was rooting around for my passport today and in the course of opening a strongbox I came across one of my grandfather’s old pocket watches, the kind men once wore with three piece suits on a chain with a fob. My father had given them to me around twenty years ago during one of his moves ( pocket watches were not in style then and have not been since) saying they had belonged to my grandfather but were probably broken. I put the everyday watch (on the left with the chain) in a box of knicknacks. The gold watch (on the right) came with a display stand and it sat gathering dust during my twenties and thirties.

Curious, I began fiddling with a watch and found that it still worked, so I wound it and found that the gold watch was also functional. My grandfather, who died of pancreatic cancer when I was still a child, had been a very successful corporate tax attorney who had graduated from DePaul Law School in 1932. He was extremely conservative and had worked for the FBI for a time before settling into tax law and he did not travel or indulge in many extravagances. However, he did like to live well – my grandparents frequently entertained ( they had a full bar downstairs) and my grandfather liked good cigars, good food and dressing stylishly – the pocket watches were part of “the look” that a man at a certain level of success had in those days.

The everyday watch was made by Gruen, which went out of business in 1958. It is a Verithin model where the numerals show an edge of art deco while the hands have an older, gothic, style and it requires winding about twice a day. The gold watch, which was monogrammed and has decorative inlay on the case was made by Elgin National Watch Company, which once produced half of all the watches used in the United States and closed its’ original factory in 1964 and sold the rights to the name, which is now owned by a Chinese concern. The long abandoned  factory in Elgin, Illinois was converted into trendy “loft” condos sometime in the last decade. I opened the back panel and the inside is still as polished as a mirror. The parts are paper thin metal and show a precision of mechanical design that no longer is associated with the United States – at least in consumer items of this kind.

I like to think my grandfather took some pleasure in owning these watches. He certainly took care of them; the Gruen watch may date back to the thirties and they both have a heavy, masculine quality. The watches feel “solid” in the palm of your hand and give a sense of a different, calmer, era. At some point, I will pass them on to my own children when they are mature enough to value such things, and with some luck, they will continue the tradition.

“Time is what we want most, but… what we use worst”  – William Penn

“The Blago…it’s Effing Golden!”

I had not intended to blog but I was struck by a news article on political corruption in New Jersey – so much so that I am instituting an award for politicians or other public figures who get caught making damning statements regarding their own political corruption. I am calling the award “the Blago“, in honor of the impeached and indicted ex-Governor of Illinois.

Our first nominee for this prestigious award is Peter Cammarano III, Mayor of Hoboken New Jersey, now facing Federal charges:

Among those ensnared by the informant was Hoboken Mayor Peter Cammarano III, prosecutors said. The 32-year-old Cammarano, who won a runoff election last month, was accused of accepting money from the developer at a Hoboken diner.

“There’s the people who were with us, and that’s you guys,” the complaint quotes Cammarano saying. “There’s the people who climbed on board in the runoff. They can get in line. … And then there are the people who were against us the whole way. … They get ground into powder.”

I suspect that time will deliver us no shortage of contenders for the Blago.

“I seen my opportunities and I took’em”

 – George Washington Plunkett.

Steven Pressfield is the acclaimed author of Gates of Fire and Killing Rommel: A Novel and other works of historical fiction, who recently began blogging at It’s the Tribes, Stupid! . Steve graciously agreed to contribute a guest post here at Zenpundit and I’m very pleased to present the following: 

                                                                     THE SPARTAN SENSE OF HUMOR

                                                                      by Steven Pressfield

[Fair warning: this is NOT a political column.]

In ancient Sparta, there was a law prohibiting all citizens from hewing the roofbeams of their houses with any tool finer than an axe.  The Spartans wanted their homes to be–spartan.  Result: roofbeamsin Sparta were just tree trunks with the limbs lopped off.

Once a Spartan was visiting at Athens, staying in an elegant home with frescoes, marble statuary–and impeccably-squared ceiling beams.  Admiring these, the Spartan asked his host if trees grew square at Athens.  The gentleman laughed.  “Of course not; they grow round, as trees grow everywhere.” 

“And if they grew square,” asked the Spartan, “would you make them round?”

Probably the two most celebrated Spartan sayings come from the battle of Thermopylae.  First is King Leonidas’ admonishment to his comrades onthe final morning, when the defenders knew they were all going to die.”Now eat a good breakfast, men, for we’ll all be sharing dinner in hell.”

The second is from the warriorDienekes, on the afternoon before Xerxes’ million-man army first appeared.  The Spartans had taken possession of the pass but had not yet seen the enemy.  As they were going about their preparations, a local Greek came running in, wild-eyed, having just gotten a glimpse of the Persian multitudes approaching.  The invaders’ archers were so numerous, the man breathlessly told the Spartans, that when they fired their volleys, the mass of arrows blocked out the sun.  “Good,” replied Dienekes, “then we’ll have our battle in the shade.”

Spartans liked their quips terse and lean.  They trained their young men for this.  Youths in the agoge (“the Upbringing”), the notorious eleven-year training regimen that turned Spartan boys into warriors, would from time to time be called out before their elders and grilled with rapid-fire questions.  The boys were judged on the wit and economy of their answers.

The reason for this was fear.  The Spartans developed their style of humor from combat and from the apprehension that precedes combat.  Hoplite warfare was surely among the most terror-inducing for the individual fighter, not only because he knew that all the killing would be done hand-to-hand, but because he often had hours preceding a battle to stare at the enemy phalanx across the field, while his own imagination ran riot.The Spartans prized the type of wit that cut such tension, the kind of humor that could release fear with a laugh and pull each individual out of his own head and his own isolation.

Think about Dienekes’ quip for a moment.  If we imagine ourselves there at the “Hot Gates,” it’s not hard to picture our imaginations working overtime as we wait for the enemy host to make its appearance.  What would these alien invaders be like? We knew they were fierce horsemen and warriors, drawn from the bravest nations of the East.  And we knew they’d outnumber us 100 to one.  What weapons would they carry?  What tactics would they employ?  Could we stand up to them?  Now suddenly a local farmer comes racing into camp, bug-eyed and out of breath, and starts regaling us with tales of the scale and magnitude of the enemy army.  Were we scared?  Hell, yes!  You can bet the young warriors clustered around this messenger, each of them thinking, “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”  Then Dienekes, a commander of proven valor about forty years old, offered his icy, unperturbed quip.  What happened?  You can bet that after the defendershad their laugh, they noticed that their palms weren’t as clammy as they had been thirty seconds earlier.  The warriors looked at each other–darkly no doubt, and grimly–and went back to their tasks of preparation for battle.

Several qualities are worth noting, I think, about both Dienekes’ and Leonidas’ one-liners.  First, they’re not jokes.  They’re not meant just to raise a laugh.  Yet they’re funny, they’re on-point.  Second, they don’t solve the problem.  Neither remarkoffers hope or promises a happy ending.  They’re not inspirational.  They don’t point to glory or triumph–or seek to allay their comrades’ anxiety by holding out the prospect of some rosy future outcome.  They face reality. They say, “Some heavy shit is coming down, brothers, and we’re going to go through it.”

And they’re inclusive.  They’re about “us.”  The grim prospect they acknowledge is one that all of us will undergo together.  They draw each individual out of his private terror and yoke him to the group.

That’s it.  That’s enough.

The reason contemporary Marines relate so instinctively to the Spartan mind-set, I suspect, is that their own attitude is so similar.  Marine training, as anyone who has gone through it knows, doesn’t build supermen.  Marines don’t have any special tricks to kill you with a butter knife.  But what Marines know how to do better than anybody isto be miserable.  That’s what Marine training teaches.  Marines take a perverse pride in having the crappiest equipment, coldest chow and highest casualty rates of any American armed force.  What’s the dirtiest, crummiest, most dangerous assignment?  That’s the one Marines want.  They’re pissed off if they don’t get it.  Nothing infuriates Marines more than to learn that the army has gotten a crappier assignment than they have.

I recommend this attitude, by the way, for all artists, entrepreneurs and anyone (including bloggers) who has to motivate himself and validate himself all on his own.  For facing the blank page, nothing beats it.  It also engenders a wholesome species of dark, gallows pride.

Another Spartan was visiting Athens.  (The river at Athens, we should note, is the Cephisus; at Sparta the river is theEurotas.  The Spartans were famous, as well, for never letting any invader get anywhere near their city.)  The Athenian was bragging about prior wars between the two rivals.  “We have buried many Spartans,” he declared, “beside the Cephisus.” 

“Yes,” replied the Spartan, “but we have buried no Athenians beside the Eurotas.”

This will be the first of several related posts. 

The other day, I happened to be talking to my friend Dr. Von, a physicist and educator, and he brought up a post by The Eide Neurolearning Blog, on educating children in terms of “big picture thinking”:

What is ‘big picture’ thinking? Business consultant Andrew Sobel described it as:

1. Having a simple framework
2. Using analogies and metaphors
3. Developing multiple perspectives
4. Looking for patterns and commonalities….

Instead of training for compliance, careful rule-following, and exact memorization or a paragon of crystallized intelligence, we need to make more room for ‘big picture’ thinkers – while still recognizing the need for basic skills and knowledge.….Pint-sized big picture thinkers really do exist and they seem to be over-represented among gifted children who underperform or cause behavioral disruptions in their early elementary school years. Many of these kids are ‘high conceptual’ thinkers, those who like discovering novel subjects, themes, and things that don’t make sense(“The thing that doesn’t fit is the interesting thing” – Richard Feynman), but the reason for this is often not random – inductive learners (learners who derive rules from examples) use novelties to generate new hypotheses or new rules.If you really want to teach and interest big picture thinkers, you would expose them to rich multisensory and chronologically-advanced experiences. Look for subjects, phenomena and ideas that could be compared and contrasted. Complexity should be embraced and not shunned. For big picture thinkers – complex is simple and simple is complex. Complexity often brings more meaning because there are enough examples that one can make a pattern.….Many of them are seeking the overarching framework inside which they can put their new bit of knowledge. Often these are ‘why’ kids – who need to know why something is true, not just that something is true.

The Eides have given an excellent explanation of the big picture thinker as a cognitive type and had some implied suggestions in that description on how a teacher or professor could approach students to get them thinking – models, metaphors, analogies, exposure to patterns and multiple perspectives. Note: all students willl derive some benefit from these techniques and become better at seeing the larger context. Many people can, with sufficient practice, can become significantly better, but the natural big picture thinkers are the ones who will react with insightful leaps of reasoning, imagination and questions with little or no prompting.

Unfortunately, such experiences in public schools and even our universities have become increasingly rare. Dr. Von explains why:

When I talk with students (juniors and seniors in high school) about how different subjects and classes are taught, invariably it comes down to great amounts of memorization. Most students, when you engage them in real conversations about the education they receive, will open up freely and get right to the point…because of the continued emphasis on grades and GPAs by colleges, students feel the need to focus first on memorization and get the grade on the test, and then move on to the next topic without much concern with what was just studied. When this is the case in school, has true learning just occurred? Likely not, if students are unable to recall and actually apply concepts that were covered in the past.

….To make matters worse, as students rely so heavily on memorization and short-term success on tests (and this is driven home even more in the ‘high stakes testing’ environment we find ourselves in in the era of No Child Left Behind, as resently implemented), those students, many of whom are gifted, as the Eides point out, who prefer complexity in their learning, are not benefitting from the way many (most) classrooms are run. By complexity, I mean those students who want to ‘see the big picture.’ Those students who want to know why something works, and how it is related to the material that was studied last semester as well as to the material that was covered in another class. For example, I love when students in my physics classes come to me asking about how to interpret and apply a particular integral result which was just studied in calculus class, or how Einstein’s theories changed political and military history, as studied in a history course. Those moments happen every so often, as a result of student curiosity and their wanting to truly learn about the material rather than memorize something for the test, and good teachers recognize such moments when they happen…

It falls to me to discuss why it matters: As a nation we are crippling the next generation of visionaries by retarding their intellectual growth with bad educational policy as surely as we might if we were adding lead to their drinking water.

Scientists and inventors, philosophers and artists, entrepreneurs and statesmen, individuals who conceive of and accomplish great things do not emerge from schools and colleges that emphasize low-level thinking and a curriculum without intellectual depth or rigor. They emerge in spite of them.

To force a systemic improvement in public education, the Bush administration pushed through “No Child Left Behind” with rigid timetables, mandated high stakes testing and punitive consequences for schools and districts not making standards. That is to say, the Bush administration addressed the lack of rigor in educational process with a sledgehammer – but ignored the lack of rigor in educational substance ( at least directly – under NCLB some schools had to toughen their curriculum to teach to the state test, but other schools or schools in different states dumbed down for the same reason – curricular alignment).

That NCLB forced public schools to ensure that our weakest students verifiably succeed at understanding the fundamentals is laudable. That this emphasis increasingly comes at the cost of schools only educating all their students at the level of the fundamentals is inexcusable. Perhaps criminal. NCLB is the overarching legal framework that was superimposed on a system whose content was (and often still is) frequently less than demanding and taught by instructors who themselves have not majored in the subject they are teaching. 

At the postsecondary level, long before the measure and punish model of NCLB arrived at k-12 schools, colleges and universities abandoned any semblance of a core curriculum or traditional canon and undergraduate degree requirements were larded with plenty of au courant esoterica as course options. Esoterica formerly left for footnotes in dissertations or as the subject of longwinded, diatribes at the dreary meetings of extremist splinter parties. Ivy League, big state schools, small third tier colleges – it does not matter; with only a few exceptions, the “cafeteria a la carte” model of undergraduate education prevails.

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

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

“Oligarchy” seems like a a harsh word because we think of “oligarchs” as being selfish, exceedingly greedy, political sociopaths. While such figures do exist outside of TV and the movies (Burmese junta, Iranian hardliners, Soviet politburo etc.) most people are neither particularly malicious nor eager to consciously and openly do things society acknowledges to be wrong or counterproductive. Even less so are they eager to be seen by the public as incompetent. The problem is that, frequently, people are prisoners of their own limited frame of reference and, when their conscience might be tweaked, they excel at rationalization and denial.

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

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

The ship of state has been steered, over the last forty or so years, into an epistemological cul-de-sac and we are headed for the rocks. America needs a grand strategy for a competent citizenry in order to reach the point where it can again have a grand strategy to deal with an unruly world.

LINKING TO THIS POST:

Red Herrings

Project White Horse

Fabius Maximus

The Committee of Public Safety ( provides an extensive analysis of the subject)

RELATED TOPIC:

Liberty/Security – Rethinking liberal arts

Blogfriend Matt Armstrong had an important post regarding The Strategic Communication Science and Technology Plan, April 2009. An excerpt:

The plan describes current efforts within the Department of Defense, the military services, the combatant commands and other agencies on SC. In total, these efforts could be linked together to form the foundation of an S&T thrust area for strategic communication. The report also includes a macro-analysis of capability gaps not being addressed by ongoing initiatives and lays out potential areas for future S&T investment.

While the request for the plan itself represents recognition from Congress that SC plays a critical role in the public and private response to current and emerging threats, it also highlights that there is much research and development already underway and many tools available to increase the government’s effectiveness in global engagement. The rub today is the need for strong leadership and coordination to ensure: 1) awareness of the long list of capabilities; 2) incorporating these capabilities into plans; and 3) participation by stakeholders across the US government, NGO’s, industry, and private citizens.

The S&T plan sorts current efforts into the following categories:

• Infrastructure: Enabling and facilitating access to information from news to markets to vocational
• Social Media: Knowledge Management, Social Media, and Virtual Worlds
• Discourse: Analysis of radical and counter-radical messages and ideas
• Modeling and Forecasting: Gaming and anticipating adversarial messages and ideas as well as our counters and pre-emptive measures
• Collaboration: Increasing collaboration and training across and beyond Government
• First Three Feet: Empowering, Equipping, Educating, and Encouraging media and others to exist and freely report on events for what they really are
• Understanding: Develop country, culture, and regional expertise, including polling
• Psychological Defense: Planning and capacity building for dealing with critical strains on society in peacetime and wartime

The interesting thing here for me is that “strong leadership” is lacking because the people spread across and outside government who have the shared awareness of technology, social media and national security at a level of sophistication where they could actually craft a strategic communication policy, are usually many levels removed from the appointee policy deciders for whom these variables are (usually) fuzzily understood.

To use an analogy, the chefs are valet parking cars outside while trying to get the manager of the restaurant to acknowledge their recipes. Or, maybe that there should be cooking going on in the kitchen if they want to have any customers. Or that the business is, in fact, a restaurant and not a nicely organized room full of tables.