Academia

What Works

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(Ramblings with no links)

Some definitions of the “American Dream” don’t comport with human nature but then fault America for not achieving a fantasy no one (no sane man would have) ever posited. But the essential American dream is of a society freely joined, each respectful of others but autonomous and fulfilled.

That society tests the workability of our theories of the good life. We, if often unconsciously, value natural law: the primacy of moral fulfillment of our nature. The thinkers who defined our culture and then our government often spoke of the great irony of power through submission, becoming our best selves by acknowledging larger powers. That is most efficient not when we are clapped in a theoretical or real prison, but by enlarging horizons and testing ideas we learn humility through perspective & experience, we learn what works. The Puritans, not surprisingly, saw this in religious terms. Winthrop argues the test of their religious love for one another and their God: could they demonstrate a community bound by the ligaments of that love succeeds? If so, others might be persuaded; if they failed, certainly others would not choose their path.

Does it work? A century later, this guided Franklin’s experiments with bifocals and a government constrained by the Constitution. What works may be humbling Lysenko was surely humbled when he found his ideas replaced. But it is also bracing.

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An Update and Other Links

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This past Wednesday, I heard Bing West give a talk about Afghanistan and his new book The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan, at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. When I get a chance, I will write up a post. He is a very good public speaker: energetic, lively, clear.

Boston.com’s The Big Picture has some truly horrifying photos of the Japanese tsunami and earthquake. Here is the American Red Cross link. If our readers and commenters have additional links or sites they think important, please leave them in the comments section.

I think the following two articles might be of interest for our readers:

Bryson has pulled off a marvelous feat. He devotes almost every chapter to a room in his Victorian house in England. He then considers why the room is the way it is and what preceded it. In doing so he produces an important economic history, only some of which will be familiar to economic historians and almost all of which will be unfamiliar to pretty much everyone else. A large percentage of it is important, for two reasons: One, you get to pinch yourself, realizing just how wealthy you are; and two, you get a better understanding than you’ll get from almost any high school or college history textbook of the economic progress that made you wealthy. Not surprisingly, given that I’m an economist and Bryson isn’t, I have a few criticisms of places where he misleads by commission or omission. But At Home’s net effect on readers is likely to be a huge increase in understanding and appreciation of how we got to where we are.

– David R. Henderson, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

The disturbing truth that modern Western COIN theory is built on a handful of books based upon practitioner experiences in a handful of 20th-century conflicts is not mitigated by the less famous but broader COIN works. Country studies by lesser known writers are similarly restricted. The core texts cover Vietnam (French Indochina), Algeria, Northern Ireland, the Philippines, and Malaya. The less-well-known writers will go on to discuss Mozambique, Angola, El Salvador, or Afghanistan under the Soviets. Only the most adventurous writers and theorists braved traveling as far as Kashmir or India to look at what could be learned there. Subsequently, the modern study of counterinsurgency and the doctrine it gave birth to are limited to less than two dozen conflicts in a century that witnessed more than 150 wars and lesser conflicts, domestic and interstate (see table 1).

– Sebastian L.v. Gorka and David Kilcullen, Joint Force Quarterly (JFQ)

The Puritan Minister, The Pox, and How Much We Assume is Wrong

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The Puritans begin each semester. Their beliefs and modes of thought foreshadow much that comes after. Their emphasis upon the word understood, translated, interpreted – leads to reasoned argument; they do personal interpretation and respect biblical authority, they do introspection and encourage humility. These naturally lead to experimentation, scientific skepticism. How a Puritan Cotton Mather and a figure now seen as personifying the scientific method and American Enlightenment Benjamin Franklin reacted to the 1721 small pox epidemic in Boston is the subject of the short, quite readable The Pox and the Covenant by Tony Williams. The controversy over inoculation split the town, undercut the old traditions, and show us the universals that moved them and now move us. Reason, pride, passion, feeling for our fellows entered into a controvrsy which also challenges our assumptions, our sense of who Cotton Mather was and who Benjamin Franklin was.

The battle set authorities scientific and religious against one another. William Douglass, the most credentialed Boston doctor, countered Boylston, one of the most innovative of the American-trained practitioners. More important to our understanding of the period, perhaps, and to my lit class, it also set Cotton Mather (with his father Increase), the leading Puritan ministers, scholars and authorities of their day, against the Franklin brothers. The brilliant Benjamin was a mere apprentice but already the witty author of the Dogood letters. His brother, James, found that encouraging and exacerbating the controversy increased the popularity of the New England Courant, their new paper: what the Iran hostage crisis was for ABC’s nightly report, this battle was for the Frankllins.

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Obviously, Leftists’ “Hate Mongering” Caused the Frankfurt Shooting

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A shooter has opened fire on a bus carrying US military personnel at the Frankfurt airport. It looks like he killed the civilian bus driver and one American soldier. The killer reportedly “shouted Islamic slogans” as he fired.

In the past, I would have thought only the shooter himself, and perhaps some radical clerics from the Islamic world, bore any moral responsibility for the crime. However, our intellectual betters on the Left have graciously condescended to explain to us all that even seemingly innocuous political speech can drive individuals to lash out violently, and that therefore we all must hold those who engage in violence-promoting political speech strictly responsible for the violence itself.

For example, prior to the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords on January 8th of this year, I would have naively assumed that merely using the common motif of a crosshair in a political graphic could not possibly influence anyone enough to actually cause them to commit murderous violence.

Boy, was I wrong. The Left were nobly quick to educate us.

No less a luminary than that Nobel Prize-winning engine of reason Paul Krugman leaped into action within a couple of hours of the shooting itself. Krugman tore himself away from his glorious work to eruditely link the deceptively innocent graphic, and other non-leftists’ criticisms of the Left,  to the motivations of the shooter. Who can forget his sage sermon admonishing us inferiors to accept moral responsibility and mind our tongues?

You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.

Krugman and the other leftists really opened my eyes. Who knew that political speech was so dangerous? I certainly didn’t but then I was educated in the sciences and not the liberal-arts, so my mind is obviously too puny to understand these things.

So, when I read about a European Muslim shooting at American soldiers, I immediately applied the lessons taught to me by the wise and benevolent Krugman.

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DARPA, STORyNet and the Fate of the War by J. Scott Shipman

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[Cross-posted from zenpundit.com]

J. Scott Shipman, the owner of a boutique consulting firm in the Metro DC area that is putting Col. John Boyd’s ideas into action, is a longtime friend of zenpundit.com and Chicago Boyz and an occasional guest-poster. Scott has an important report regarding the “war of ideas” against the Islamist-Takfirist enemy in Afghanistan after attending a workshop hosted by DARPA.

DARPA, STORyNet and the Fate of the War

by J. Scott Shipman

I had the opportunity to attend a DARPA workshop yesterday called STORyNet. The purpose was to survey narrative theories, to better understand the role of narrative in security contexts, and to survey the state of the art in narrative analysis and decomposition tools (see below):

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