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WARNING: RANT AHEAD! 

NYT Columnist David Brooks (via Metamodern):

A Case of Mental Courage

….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.

Pundita detects the Old Gray Lady going off Rahm Emanuel’s reservation:

Afghanistan War: Obama tries to quash New York Times mutiny

I don’t know whether the mutiny is actually against the White House or the ISAF command or both. All I’ve been able to piece together is that after fortifying themselves with rum and the battle cry, ‘We’re nobody’s poodle!‘ the New York Times editorial board gave the heave-ho to NATO’s march to the rear in Afghanistan.

So this is a very strange turn of events and worthy of examination.The mutiny might have started earlier but as near as I can figure it began June 11. On that date the New York Times reported on a version of what transpired during Karzai’s dispute with two officials….

….State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley, who evidently had not gotten the memo about the mutiny by the time of his June 25 press briefing, only poured fuel on the fire started by the mutineers:

QUESTION: … the New York Times today reported that the Pakistan army has offered to mediate for peace talks with the Taliban and also with the Haqqani network. Is the offer with you?MR. CROWLEY: Well, as we’ve said many times, this is an Afghan-led process, but obviously there are discussions going on between Afghan officials and Pakistani officials, and we certainly want to see ways in which Pakistan can be supportive of this broader process.

QUESTION: Do you see the Haqqani network coming – sharing power with the Afghan Government? Do you support that?

MR. CROWLEY: We have been very clear in terms of the conditions that any individual or any entity need to meet in order to have a constructive role in Afghanistan’s future: renouncing violence, terminating any ties to al-Qaida, and respecting the Afghan constitution. Anyone who meets those criteria can play a role in Afghan’s future.

The White House, more alarmed by the Times mutiny than Crowley’s foot-in-mouth replies, scrambled to do damage control. Yesterday Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein and a toady in the GOP camp, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, were packed off to Fox News Cable’s Sunday show to give assurances that if General Petraeus needed more time to win the war in Afghanistan he had it.Leon Panetta was also dispatched to the Sunday morning TV network circuit, which receives close attention here in the nation’s capital. So it came to pass that Panetta made his first appearance on American network television since he became director of the CIA. He appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and faced questions from Jake Tapper, who soon turned discussion to the June 24 Times report:

Pundita has much more here.

The problem for the Obama administration is that if the generally incurious and poorly informed American public ever grasped the nature and an accurate record of Pakistan’s ongoing sponsorship the Taliban, Pakistan would quickly become an object of hatred in the eyes of US voters which, with the right visceral image, could quickly turn passive disquiet into righteous rage. My read, and it is just an informal sense, is that frustrations with the war are building into a dangerous powder keg beneath a placid surface of widespread anxiety and concern for the well-being of the troops.

A mass-casualty act of terror on American soil traced back to Pakistan, or some grisly image broadcast from the Afghan battlefield could unleash a political tsunami.

Just received a review copy of Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, which is about the special operations soldiers who infiltrated Taliban held Afghanistan and who were forced to blend the ancient with the postmodern on the battlefield. Horse Soldiers is doing very well on The New York Time’s bestseller list and is up near the very top of that prestigious category.

The promotion people also included the audio book as well in a 7 hour  CD set. I’ve never listened to a “book on tape”, as they used to be called back in the day, so this might be the opportunity to give that format a try and review.

Flipping through the pages, the Horse Soldiers is not at all dry military history but action-packed narrative to which a general audience might relate. Here is an excerpt from the prologue:

Qala-i-Janghi Fortress
Mazar-i-Sharif, AfghanistanNovember 24-25, 2001Trouble came in the night, riding out of the dust and the darkness.
Trouble rolled past the refugee camp, past the tattered tents
shuddering in the moonlight, the lone cry of a baby driving high into
the sky, like a nail. Sunrise was no better; at sunrise, trouble was
still there, bristling with AKs and RPGs, engines idling, waiting to
roll into the city. Waiting.These were the baddest of the bad, the real masters of mayhem, the
death dealers with God stamped firmly in their minds. The city groaned
and shook to life. Soon everyone knew trouble had arrived at the gates
of the city.

Major Mark Mitchell heard the news at headquarters nine miles away and
thought, You’re kidding. We got bad guys at the wire?

He ran downstairs, looking for Master Sergeant Dave Betz. Maybe he
would know what was happening.

But Betz didn’t know anything. He blustered, “One of the Agency guys
came down and told us we got six hundred Taliban surrendering. Can you
believe that?”

Surrendering? Mitchell couldn’t figure out why. He thought the Taliban
had fled from the approaching forces of the Northern Alliance to
Konduz, miles away. American Special Forces and the Northern Alliance
had been beating them back for weeks, in battle after battle, rolling
up territory by coordinating airstrikes from the sky and thousands of
Northern Alliance soldiers on the ground. They now stood on the verge
of total victory. Konduz was where the war was supposed to go next.
Not here. Not in Mazar. Not at Club Mez.

Besides, these guys didn’t surrender. They fought to the death……

Hmmmmm. Note to self. If you want to sell books, write more like this and less like an academic in a dusty cubicle at an obscure think tank.:)

The New York Times had a major and significantly positive profile of former Speaker of the House Newt Gincrich the other day ( Hat tip to Nate). It’s worth reading. The NYT gets many things right about Gingrich and Gingrich nails many of the problems currently bedeviling the Republican Party:

Newt. Again.

 …..Now, as Republicans on the Hill begin to awaken from a November beating that left them semiconscious, Gingrich finds himself, once again, at the zenith of influence in conservative Washington. It is a fortuitous collision of man and moment. Having ceded the agenda to a Republican president for the past eight years (and having mostly obsessed over White House scandals for much of the decade before that), Republicans now find that they have strikingly little to say that isn’t entirely reactive – or reactionary. “It was like ‘The Matrix,’ when Keanu Reeves wakes up and his eyes hurt because he hasn’t used them,” David Winston, a pollster for House Republicans, told me recently, talking about the 2006 election that relegated Republicans to the minority for the first time since 1994. “We just didn’t know how to do ideas anymore.” Whatever else you think of Gingrich, he has always been considered a prospector in bold and counterintuitive thinking – floating ideas, throughout his career, that have ranged from giving every poor child a laptop to abolishing the entire concept of adolescence.

….Gingrich is all about offering, as he puts it, a “better value” for the American customer – constructive solutions Republicans can take on the road during the next midterm election season and beyond. “Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial,” he lamented to me. “They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas, because ideas have edges, and they’re not totally formed, and you’ve got to prove them, and they sound strange because they’re new, and if it’s new how do you know it’s any good, because, after all, it’s new and you’ve never heard it before.”

Newt is a horizontal thinker with a high level of expertise in a number of fields and a considerable degree of creativity. As a political figure, he does several important things exceptionally well:

• First Newt conceives of politics in strategic, structural, longitudinal, terms.
• Secondly, Newt is an idea merchant. He has them and he is quick to recognize the potential of ideas generated by others. Often, Newt’s capacity for horizontal thinking leads him to appropriate attractive concepts or proposals that are neither “conservative” or even “political” and make them conservative Republican signature policies.
• Third, Newt excels at crafting and framing tactical messages. He regularly comes up with phrases  that have strong memetic “pull” or “hooks” to them and distill the essential idea out of a complicated policy and he can use this ability to punish enemies or promote his own side. This is not the same thing as being a great tactician. Arguably, when Newt as Speaker had to juggle managing the House, formulating strategy and tactics, the latter consistently suffered to Newt’s personal disadvantage. Gingrich demonstrated better tactical skills as a Minority Leader and especially as a Whip but he had far fewer distractions at that time.
• Fourth, Newt cultivates leadership in others. He makes connections. He educates. He gives his assistance freely and promotes the careers of proteges and allies.

This is not to say Newt is without flaws. Politically, for the Democratic Party, Newt is a “target rich environment” whose unpredictability in the public spotlight can generate incidents that become the story rather than the message Newt was trying to get across. However, lacking any official position, it is much harder for Democrats to represent any gaffe by Newt as coming from the Pope of the GOP. In fact, engaging Newt directly in public debate at this time, especially by a senior member of the Democratic Party leadership or President Obama, will superempower Gingrich politically and increase his influence and profile regardless of what they say. The mere fact they are saying anything confirms Gingrich’s status as a major “player”. Nor can they ignore him forever if his advice permits the Republicans to score significant victories.

Gingrich has his opponents in a familiar bind and I’m sure he likes it that way.

Dave Schuler, a longtime blogfriend, had a post up the other day at The Glittering Eye that examined some commentary on the War on Terror by The New York Times and Dan Drezner, whom I have not read much lately.

Developments in U. S. Strategy in War on Terror

Contra Drezner the best description of the tactic is neither deterrence nor containment but fourth generation warfare. We’re attempting to get into the enemy’s decision-making loop and the NYT article is a very interesting description of that process….The methods described are all excellent method of getting into the enemy’s decision-making process and it’s about damned time. More, please.

It is indeed about damned time. Dave is undoubtedly correct that Drezner is getting it as wrong with his “containment” analogy as the NYT ( which did not even recognize the tactic used by the NYPD in the article was swarming) was with “deterrence”. Neither is really an adequate descriptor of what the NYT reporter is attempting to articulate.

As I read the original article, I see institutions (finally) experimenting with applying a variety of tactics – swarming, psychological warfare, IO, soft power – to create disorientation in our adversaries and a mismatch between their perceptions and their response. By intent or

by default, we seem to be moving, however tentatively, to getting on the good side of John Boyd’s OODA Loop dynamic rather than being hammered on the receiving end. As the article also points to a concern with the moral level of warfare, in undermining Islamist terrorist’s reputation for piety and impugning them with shame, Dave is correct in seeing progress toward the state adapting to 4GW.

This would be a rare good piece of news because it would mean that our security and law enforcement bureaucracies are starting to overcome years of inertia and are taking some baby steps toward becoming adaptive, learning, organizations that act from forethought rather than from “going by the book”.  When they internalize that “the book” isn’t really a book but a process of continuous creative destruction, we’ll be halfway home.

UPDATE:

HG’s World and Asia Logistic Wrap are also posting on the OODA Loop.  Thanks HistoryGuy99!