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RECOMMENDED READING [ UPDATED]

Just one today. Dave at the Glittering Eye has an excellent post entitled “ Orality and Iraq” which points to some very significant aspects of cross-cultural communication between America and the Arab world. I note that while Dave is not an Arabist he does have some background as a linguist in some difficult languages for Westerners to learn and his comments are informed from that perspective:

“In an oral world you know what you can remember.

This has real relevance and real practical application. The Bush Administration has made bringing democracy to Iraq a keystone of its policy in the War on Terror. This would be a formidable task under any circumstances but a major complication is the oral or vestigial oral nature of the culture. When the United States began its own experiment with democracy the literacy in the adult population in New England is estimated at around 90% (somewhat lower in the rest of the new country although statistics are very hard to come by).

I’m not saying, by the way, that orality means that democracy is impossible. I believe, along with Mr. Bush, that all people aspire to freedom. But communicating effectively with the people and making freedom part of the prevailing wisdom in the society requires using modalities of communication that are meaningful to the people.”

Read the whole thing. Later I’ll update with some observations from a historical and epistemological angle.

UPDATE:

The following are some selected observations that I have already shared for the most part with Dave on his Orality post. Dave’s view additionally meshes somewhat with an explanation of the Arab literacy problem once expressed here by Collounsbury quite a long time ago in regard to reconstructing Iraq. My remarks in no particular order:

• Oral traditions have been recently proven, much to the surprise of academic historians who have derided the value of oral histories in favor of documents for the last century, to be relatively accurate and consistent across generations, even centuries. Much that was once central to the ancient western canon – Homer for example – was memorized long before it was ever written down. By giving up that practice, in favor of writing, Western civilization underwent a cognitive reorientation and much mental energy and time was freed up for other things. All that memorization takes up space in the brain, neurons are connecting here and I think, arguably, that left a lot of abilities in the population untapped even without considerations of scarcity and want.
• Not only is Diglossia a factor but Arab elites are Westernized by education in Europe and America create a huge intellectual gulf; some think more frequently or faster in English or French than they do in colloquial Arabic.
  Who are the radical Islamists ? Mostly middle-class guys with traditional Arab educations as preparation before modern scientific, medical, computer science, engineering or mathematical fields where their subsequently learned critical thining skills were acquired primarily on the nonverbal side of the IQ/ “g” rather than the verbal side through study of the humanities. You just don’t see many Art History majors in al Qaida or Islamic Jihad.
• With a lack of abstraction comes a lack of emotional detachment. In a zero-sum game tribal culture this means disputes more easily escalate toward violence and adversaries have fewer psychologically and socially acceptable ways of backing down once they have gotten themselves into a corner

A NIETZSCHEAN LOOK AT THE EUROPEAN DISEASE

Chirol at Coming Anarchy has an analytical post up drawing a historical analogy between the spread of Christianity in the late Roman empire and the effect of Socialism on continental European civilization. You should read the whole thing but here are some excerpts from ” The Sick Man IS Europe”:

“With the Edict of Milan in 313AD, the Roman Empire officially became a Christian empire. While the empire lasted until 476, it was clearly already in decline. According to German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the root cause was neither the Germanic hordes nor anything as direct as war or political instability but instead something much more sinister: Christianity…

…While discussing value rivalry which threatens explicit rule sets by promoting implicit rules or values that encourage destructive behavior, Mark Safranski notes that “such a conflict is typical of a dysfunctional rule set that characterizes a system at risk of decline.”(Rule Set Journal Feb 05.) One of the most important and overlooked questions with regard to Christianity is its roots. Christianity, unlike other religions such as Islam, has its roots in the disenfranchised slave classes. Who were the first Christians? The weak, the outcasts, the powerless. This much is indisputable. However, how did a simple belief system, founded by a “traitor” and propagated amongst the lower classes end up conquering the entire empire all the way up to the emperors? Nietzsche thought it was possibly spread intentionally by St. Paul to undermine the Roman system.

Without getting into too much historical depth on this, Nietzsche essentially theorized that Rome was the target of an ideological insurgency bent on undermining Rome. Perhaps one of the first and most famous fourth generation wars? (Dan?) While many more direct factors led to the actual fall of Rome, it was this disease from within which continued to weaken it and make it more and more susceptible to outside attacks just as AIDS destroys your immune system from within leaving some minor external disease to ultimately kill the victim. What does this have to do with me you ask? The parallels between Christianity, the geneology of its morals and present day Leftism/Socialism is quite interesting.

…Thus, as people climb the ladder of wealth and development, they slowly discard weaker values and adopt new ones. Keep in mind a person may still call himself Christian, but it’s the practice we’re worried about, not the label. What are the ramifications of this for the US and Europe? The disease of Communism, also an ideology of the weak, rose quickly in Russia in the early 1900s and spread like a plague across the globe ultimately destroying its host states. Socialism is merely a weaker varient thereof yet Europe has long since succumbed to it and its values that favor the weak. Is the United States going to face such a battle in the future? Could it undermine our American values as it has done to other countries past and present? Maybe.”

Dan of tdaxp has already posted on Christianity as the 4GW movement of the Roman world, complete with his usual excellent, open-source graphics. I will take that as a sign that my part of the division of labor will be the other half of Chirol’s analogy, the question of European modernity and its value-rivalry with the United States.

Some years ago, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks published It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States which neatly summed up the ideological differences in the history of the American and European Labor movements and why the Socialist idea caught fire in Europe but died in America. Essentially, they found the same answer as did Alexis de Tocqueville, American social mobility and the lack of any class/caste legacy of feudalism left American workers and labor activists unreceptive to calls for revolution. Trade unions like the AFL-CIO became, as Lenin predicted, bastions of anti-Communism and sought material improvements for their members and not Bolshevism. Or even Social-Democracy, as a German or a Scandinavian would understand that term.

Where did American Socialism flourish if it failed among the mass of citizenry ? Primarily among materially secure but psychologically alienated intellectuals.

As a rival Rule-set to liberal, market democracy, the Socialist idea offers little that is attractive in the objective measurements of GDP, economy of resources, living standards or even the ability to plan social outcomes, the supposed strength of that value-system. What Socialism retains however, is its utility as a rationale to invest great swaths of arbitrary authority in a mandarin class of intellectuals who can fill the ranks of a regulatory state machine – lawyers, social workers, economists, statisticians and various kinds of apparatchiks. Socialism is attractive to them for the same reason American society is not – self-aggrandizing will to power as a class.

The heyday of these people had its origin in WWI where administrators like Herbert Hoover and William McAdoo were the heroic celebrities of that war moreso than generals. When the calamity of the great Depression and the Second World War struck America, the public was ready in the spirit of emergency to go along with the vast expansion of the state and the methods of the would-be planners. This phenomena was in sync with a global shift toward the state and was examined in detail by Friedrich von Hayek in his classic Road to Serfdom.

What did not happen however, was a fundamental shift in American values away from liberty and equality toward statism and paternalism on the European model. The socialist intellectuals had the keys to the kingdom on an empirical-results trial basis only and when their demand-side Keynesian prescriptions broke down in the 1970’s with stagflation the voters threw the Left and their premises out on their ear in 1980. This would not have happened on the European continent where parties come and go but the welfare state remains inviolate and the regulatory Brussells leviathan is actually be regarded by some as being ” ultraliberal”.

As a value-rival Rule-set, Socialism failed here as it dies in any cultural soil rich in optimism and well grounded in the concepts of cause and effect. It needs envy and fatalism to grow.

MUSINGS

Not much that is new to say on the London bombings yet but I can recommend John Robb’s analysis at Global Guerillas in the meantime regarding al Qaida’s probable evolution toward ” Open Source ” warfare. I don’t think they are quite as far along that curve as Robb does, there are alternate channels of communication, albeit slower ones, that may be keeping the top tier of al Qaida leaders plugged into the operational decisions of their national terror franchises to a greater degree than we realize.

I have a wedding to attend today, a friend from way back in grad school so posting will be light until late this evening. I will probably put up another book review though, either The Sling and the Stone by Thomas X. Hammes or The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans. Put your money on the former because my copy of the latter appears to have grown legs and wandered off somewhere.

CONQUEST THE DRAGON

I’m starting a new book review series, mostly the odd assortment that have crossed my nightstand table recently but also a few timely public policy books. I’m going to begin with Robert Conquest’s newest work, The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History.

I very much enjoys books by scholars of the old type, rarely seen in universities today, who command not just depth in their field or subspecialty but real breadth of knowledge as well. Men of Letters and not mere writers. Robert Conquest, is of course, most famous for his seminal work, The Great Terror, on Stalin’s crescendo of systemic mass-murder in the Soviet Union during the 1930’s. At the time of publication, Conquest was savaged by those in academia sympathetic toward the USSR or at least uncomfortable with any manifestations of anti-Communism and the critics said that Conquest’s figures couldn’t possibly be right. To an extent, the critics were correct… but only in the sense that Conquest had underestimated Stalin’s crimes. When the Soviet archives briefly opened and vomited forth long-concealed horrors, Conquest issued a reassessment of The Great Terror to examine the greater orders of magnitude of Stalin’s institutional state terrorism .

Since then the academic Leftists have not forgiven Conquest for being right and Conquest, for his part, refuses to let them forget it either. That legacy forms the raison d’etre of The Dragons of Expectation.

Conquest has penned a withering critique of 20th century Western intellectuals as prisoners of a delusional mindset that prevented them from acknowledging the full reality of Soviet conduct or the motivational roots from whence such behavior sprung. Conquest is unsparing in his judgement and explains in detail why that should be so. Eric Hobsbawm, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, John Kenneth Galbraith, E.H. Carr, Ted Turner, Simone de Beauvoir, C.P. Snow and others are quite mercilessly ( and often deservedly) savaged with their own words by Conquest, who approaches his task with a hint of glee.

Conquest, who is a poet as well as a historian, remains an artful turner of phrases ( though I’m sure his targets were less than enchanted with his prose) . Some samples:

“Their establishment of a state inherently hostile to all others in a country as large and powerful as Russia was a main factor in destabilizing the world: it started in Lenin’s time – but went on long after what a frivolous historian might call the elimination of Germany in the semifinals “

“One of the oddest of the verbal expressions is the condemnation often to be found in the West of ‘ Triumphalism’. This strange term is used to deplore any sign of being glad that the Soviet Union failed and that the Western world ‘triumped ‘. It seems to imply, above all, that such an attitude is in bad taste. The poor, unfortunate totalitarian anti-Western regimes collapsed, but one shouldn’t crow “

“More generally,at the highest levels, academic writing-in English – is stupefying in two different, though often complementary,ways. First, we everywhere find a groteaque vocabulary held together by a tangled syntax, if such it can be called. But second, going a leap further, we get theory”

“But, as has been rightly commented,if you know no other language than your own, you really don’t know your own. You have no perspective in which to see it.”

Conquest probably did not expect to win over many opponents with his arguments and, in light of his long careeer and numerous clashes, there is an a strong air of score-settling and ” I told you so”. However, if you are going to read books launched as intellectual attacks it makes sense to read well-written and thoughtful ones rather than the hamfisted, political Don Rickles acts between two covers, pumped out regularly by lightweight Cable TV/Talk Radio wingnuts.

BIG TROUBLE OVER A LITTLE CHINA REPORT

Bill Gertz reports intra-IC wrangling over the Pentagon’s annual report on Chinese military power between China softliners and those painting a more dire picture of Chinese capabilities.

“The draft report had included tough assessments of China’s arms buildup and a stark conclusion that the military balance of power across the Taiwan Strait was shifting in Beijing’s favor. The shift is because of a sharp increase in China’s arms purchases and deployments, that include new missiles, warships, aircraft and communications gear.

…Among those who do not regard China as a near-term threat are Thomas Fingar, the former State Department intelligence analyst who is now the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst under Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte. Mr. Fingar recently hired former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst Lonnie Henley, who during his career at DIA developed a reputation as someone who played down China’s military developments. “

The hardliners and skeptics here would include Naval intelligence, PACOM, the submarine community, current and former NSC and DoD political appointees of a neocon orientation who developed the idea of deterring the emergence of a ” peer-competitor” in the National Security Strategy of the United States .

What the hardliners have in their favor is that official Chinese statistics are, quite simply, bilge. Like the former Soviet Union, China attempts to conceal their actual military budget by dispersion through a range of military, economic, scientific and state security agencies and a bewildering array of PLA-connected companies. Estimating actual Chinese expenditures is at best an educated guess from what we know the Chinese to have actually produced or are in the stages of designing and testing.

The softliners can point to the fact that paper capabilities mean a lot less than what a military force can logistically bring to bear and sustain for a significant length of time in the field. China is not in America’s class. In fact, China is not in PACOM’s class, even given the assumption that PACOM is operating in China’s theater and conceding ” home field advantage”, much less PACOM plus Taiwan.

The short and medium term danger is that China is gaining ground on Taiwan and closing the qualitative gap that is the bedrock of Taiwan’s security, increasing the incentives for Chinese generals and Politburo officials to play at brinksmanship. This is best remediated by the Taiwanese to increase their own anemic defense spending to keep the transaction costs of a Chinese attack on Taipei as high as possible. Going the ” free rider” route of the Europeans in the post-Soviet NATO 1990’s is a luxury Taiwan cannot afford, particularly when coupled with periodic bursts of Taiwanese nationalist rhetoric calculated to give Beijing fits.

To paraphrase Brooks Adams, to be disarmed and aggressive is a particularly stupid policy and one that endangers American national interests. The purpose of Taiwan Relations Act is to commit America to defend Taiwan from Chinese aggression, a pact that helps stabilize East Asia and keep the peace.

What is not, is a blank check to encourage Taipei to indulge in European-style geopolitical immaturity.