The panel works a lot like a jury is supposed to work; it aggregates the experience of a reasonably well informed group, sometimes tapping into expertise that single individuals could not use. Our group had five senior FSOs from various cones and with various career paths, alone with one member of the public for proper leavening. We made special efforts NOT to fall into either groupthink, where we have too much early consensus, or chaos, where we don’t achieve consensus at all. This meant initially ranking files w/o deliberation and then voting on those we thought were high, low or middle.
I was surprised how often we came independently to similar conclusions. There were often overwhelming majorities on one side or the other. We discussed some of them briefly as a form of quality control. Perhaps more interesting than the near unanimity of the results was the fact that often the reasons for the decisions were very different. This made me more confident of the decision, since each person bringing his/her experience to bear on the aspect of the decision they knew the best had led to this aggregated decision.
Of course, there were some close votes and those required more deliberation. Nobody tried to dominate the group, but each member came to be recognized as having particular expertise in some things. I, for example, had more experience in public diplomacy and in running PRTs and that experience helped me understand if particular claims or achievements were really significant or just things that would have happened anyway. I could also point to instances where officers had tried very hard to achieve a very difficult goal and even in failure had demonstrated the characteristics we are looking for in our senior leadership. We tried not to penalize innovators, even if their reach sometimes exceeded their grasp, but of course you have to draw distinctions between innovation and recklessness. This is not always as clearly evident as we might like. I was glad to contribute my own expertise and grateful that my fellow board members also brought a lot to the table.
I believe we made good decisions and that our group decision was better than any one of us could have done alone.
I have more formal education than I can practically use and that is the way I wanted it. I just liked to study when I was in college and for my leisure today I do things very much like studying. I read books and write essays (now known as blog posts). But I think you don’t understand real education until you understand that all of life is – or should be – about learning.
I took the formal “book learning” education route; others chose different ways. Sometimes we make too much of a distinction. Learning, whether it comes from books, experience or anything else, has to be integrated into a person’s life and outlook. Some people despise “useless” education. Others boldly assert that no education is useless. I think both miss the point. Education of any kind is useful if it changes how you look at and/or do things, if it spawns new ideas or skills or if it just makes you think. This definition would seem to include almost everything, but it doesn’t. There is useless education, although it has more to do with the recipient than the subject. Some people just don’t pay attention or don’t integrate what they learned into their behaviors or thoughts. They don’t turn information into knowledge. These are the kinds of people who memorize lots of things, but cannot recognize them when they are a little changed or in different contexts. Unfortunately, these are often the people who call for more “education” and are most interested in official credentials. These are the guys that try to trump you by quoting experts or citing their own expertise. I recall discussing economics with a guy who didn’t like my opinion. He said something like, “Wouldn’t you feel stupid if I told you that I wrote my PhD dissertation on this subject?” I just said no. I should have elaborated, “Wouldn’t you feel stupid if I told you that you went through all that trouble and learned so little?”
I have to admit that I take some refuge in my own formal education credentials. I can be a lot more of a smart-ass because I have some of the smart papers. Lately I have been in closer contact with practical people who know things I want to learn about buying land, developing property, building roads and sustainable forestry/agriculture. These guys know all sorts of detailed things, like the quality of dirt or the type of rocks you need to use to shore up a bank. Lots of these things seem really easy until you have to make the decision yourself. As with anything else, some people are better at what they do than others. I was thinking about the type of education you might need and how you could figure it out. There are some places where my education has a very direct connection. For example, figuring out how much I can pay for things and still make profits and payments is something I did indeed learn in finance class, although I have to admit that I really didn’t understand it until I bought my first house. Let me jump back to my other life for a minute.
I have been sitting on promotion panels and trying to judge which of my esteemed colleagues should move to the next level. Many of us get formal training at the upper-middle or lower senior level. I valued that training, but I wanted to see what they did with it two or three years later. I wanted to know if it took root and grew or if it was just a pleasant sojourn in academia. I found some of each. Some people were clearly changed and improved by their educations, i.e. they learned something. Among others you just couldn’t tell. Everybody had earned the same credentials, but it was different. So I guess I am advocating a kind of “Gold’s Gym standard.” I go to Gold’s Gym three times a week. I do an intense workout that takes me less than 15 minutes and then I am out. People make fun of me for that. I get a variation of “Leaving so soon?” with monotonous regularity. Most people spend more time than I do and many spend a lot more time, but time in doesn’t matter. It is like the credentials. The only thing that matters is whether or not you can pick up the weights. The answer to the question, “Can you bench press 250 lbs?” is not, “Well, I come here every day and workout really hard for at least an hour.” All that matters is yes or no, probably followed by an actual demonstration if you answered in the affirmative. Educational achievement is harder to measure, but the same type of standard should apply.
College is not the only place you get educated. Increasingly, there are other options. Many firms have their own training programs, which are often more up-to-date and almost always more specific than the program at the local college. Community colleges are increasingly important because of their low-cost, almost universal access and flexibility. Of course, online options are exploding. Aristotle thought that the best education was just to live in a good city. I think if he were alive today, he might call it lifetime learning and advocate a learning culture. Learning, like art, truth and beauty, is ubiquitous. We just need to be aware and constantly searching. And our needs are protean. (Me use hard words from education). I never thought that variations in rocks and dirt would absorb so much of my intellectual energy.
I apologize if this post has gone off in so many directions, but I think the idea of education is like that. We talk a lot about the need to educate our population. We say that education is the key to the future. This is true. But too often we are thinking narrowly of a specific place and time where education will be delivered by certified professionals who will hand out certificates when all the education is done. Maybe instead of education, we should think more about learning.* *How about a little display of etymological erudition, which is usually not of much value but fits here? Think about the words. Education is a Latin-based word. It means to bring out or lead out. The one being educated may be a little passive in this case. You can be educated by someone else. Learn is a Germanic based word. Its original meaning was to get knowledge. It requires that you take an active part. Learning is what you are supposed to do during your education. Some people do.
The reason I made the distinction between Latin and German was because of the nature of our wonderful English language. English is a Germanic language, but it is heavily Latinized, much of it through the use of Norman French (descended from Latin). After the Norman conquest, since the rich guys spoke French, the educated people read Latin and the poor guys spoke Anglo-Saxon (old-middle English), we tend to have a rich vocabulary of overlapping words; the Latin-French words tend to be classier than the Germanic-Saxon ones that mean almost the same things.
Most swear words are Germanic. In Latin-French based English, for example, people have intercourse in the bedroom and they defecate in the bathroom. The German-Saxon words for those things cannot be spoken on network television. But the twin words do not always mean exactly the same things. So it is with education and learning. My education taught me the things I just wrote, but I have learned that most people don’t know or care about them. That is another difference between learning and education.
I wrote these notes for these posts during my time on promotion boards, but held off posting them until the work was done.
After many years of trying to figure out the tricks of getting promoted, I finally got it. It is an epiphany. After now reading the files of 100s of my very competent colleagues, I found that the secret of success is to be good at what you do. Of course, the write up is important. If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, it doesn’t make a sound for any practical purpose. But you have to have something to write about. A week of energetic writing and spinning won’t make up for a year of lethargy on the job. You just cannot sell Edsels. On the other hand, people stand in line to get the good products they want.
I like the fact that people write their own first pages on their assessments. It gives a better look at what they can do and what they think is important. Some people “get it” more than others. In their own write-ups they emphasize the right things first and they make logical and meaningful connections among the things they accomplished.
There is focus. In the good EERs, I notice a “purposes principle” at work. They explain the “so what?” and list the results and outcomes of what they have accomplished. I also get the impression that they frequently ask the purpose question. When someone gives you a task, it is not impertinent to ask, “what do you plan to use it for?” This will often make the person focus more, give you a better idea of what is necessary and maybe make it more of a partnership. The person getting the task might know, for example, that there is a better way to achieve the goal. Of course, you have to ask the question in the right way, but a good leader should be glad to have subordinates who try to improve on what they are given.
Nobody is perfect and I like it when I can find areas of actual conflict or mistakes that provided learning opportunities. This is perhaps the hardest part to get right. Nobody likes to be criticized and it is always a risk to have any criticism prominently mentioned. However, it may be a acceptable risk that sets you apart. Nobody has a good year every year. It is unlikely that someone goes from one success to another w/o any setbacks. I was reminded of the juvenile lovers who ask their partners whether they love them more today than yesterday. Despite what we hear in song and story, the inevitable true answer eventually must be “no”. It doesn’t mean that careers, or love, do not or cannot grow over a long period, but it will never be a straight and clear path in either case.
That said, it makes no sense to dwell on failure. One of the things I dislike most is when people seem to revel in the hard times they have suffered. Difficult conditions are a mitigating factor, but the fact is that there are two sorts of criteria. You either did something or you didn’t. Almost fought the great chicken of Bristol just doesn’t compare to actual achievement. Ideally, you should mention the problem immediately followed by how you moved on from it. And remember that most FS careers have had some hardships. I served a year in the Western Desert of Iraq, with dust in the air and bad guys behind the rocks; many of our colleagues have had worse. The bad plumbing or poor phone service at someone’s post just doesn’t sound very impressive.
Overall, some files just seem to sing beautifully, others are a little off key and a few are bad. Sometimes one person manages to be/do all three. That is why I like to see the person in more than one type of job or place. Some people can do well one time and in one place. That is admirable but doesn’t mean they should be promoted to more responsibility. It is not the one home run that counts but the day-to-day success that adds up over a long period.
Northern Virginia has an interesting hitchhiking system called slugging. Drivers who want to use the HOV lanes, but don’t have the required three passengers, pick up “slugs” at various lots south of DC. The occupants allow the use of the HOV lane and get both drivers and passengers there much faster. No money is exchanged and there are some simple rules, such as no talking unless the driver initiates it. This form of transport has been around since 1975 and it is evidently as fast or faster than taking the bus and significantly faster than driving as a single person in traffic. A couple of my colleagues slug to work w/o any significant problems.
It is interesting that such a cooperative market has grown up w/o outside regulation. Local governments accept it and welcome it as a way to reduce congestion. There have been occasional calls for the government to somehow regulate the system, but that would probably make it collapse. If it ain’t broken …
A practical and effective cultural relativism would start with the premise that if people are doing something for a long time, they must have a reason. It does not suppose that the reason is a good one or that it remains valid. Many parts of culture become fossilized. People continue to do things that were once useful and adaptive but are no longer. This has been most tragically-comic and obvious in military affairs, where warriors often continue to use weapons and techniques made obsolete by advancing technologies. A Samurai warrior, all decked out in his panoply of armor and edged weapons is a wonder to behold, but he is no match for a kid with a pistol. The Japanese, BTW, addressed this cultural problem by banning firearms (as European knights had tried to ban longbows and crossbows) and managed to hold technological progress at bay for a couple centuries.
You must acknowledge that the cultural trait is done for a reason and has/had value. After that you try to put the trait in context. This helps understand the culture. Seek first to understand before trying to be understood. But at some point soon after that, you have to start making judgments and choices.
I have been trying to brush up on my things Brazilian. I have a favorable attitude toward the place and a general affection for the people left over from when I lived there twenty-five years ago. But I recognize that there are challenges. I just finished reading a book on sociology called “A Cabeca do Brasileiro” (the mind of the Brazilian) and I have been watching Globo (Brazilian TV) every day on the Internet. All this reminds me of things I liked about the place and some things I didn’t like. It is condescending to talk about only the good things and churlish to emphasize only the bad. Anyway, many of the traits have aspects of both.
The author, Alberto Carlos Almeida, devotes his first chapter to “jeitinho brasileiro.” I don’t know how to explain what that is to an American reader and it is obviously hard even for Brazilians to explain it to each other if the guy writes a whole chapter about it. Suffice to say that it lies in the twilight zone between a favor and corruption. The jeitinho is a way around something, often a way around a regulation or procedure that everybody knows doesn’t make sense. One of the things I loved about Brazilians was/is their cleverness and flexibly. They can always think of a way to get something or get something done. You can easily see how this “good” trait could cut both ways.
So should we accept, celebrate or condemn the jeitinho? You really cannot ignore it because people will be asking you for it and doing it for you even if you don’t ask. Would you be an “ugly American” if you insisted that you – as an American – don’t do Jeito? Or would you be an even uglier American if you took advantage of it?
Biofuels can be a part of our energy future, but are not a solution and they will never play a dominant role. That one of the big ideas I took away from a talk on biofuels at the Wilson Center, called Biofuels: Food, Fuel & the Future. The reason we use fossil fuels is that they are so wonderfully concentrated. Coal, gas or oil represent millions of years of concentrated power of the sun captured by photosynthesis. Any crop we grow captures only one season of energy or maybe a couple decades in the case of trees. This is a fundamental limit even if we can figure out how to efficiently capture the energy stored in corn, sugar, wood, palm oil or switchgrass.
We noticed the BP oil spill because it is quick and compelling, but scientists have long known about the Gulf dead zone, a more persistently serious problem. This is a vast area of the sea near the mouth of the Mississippi where fertilizer runoff (especially nitrogen and phosphorus) have caused extravagant growth of algae. When the algae die back and decompose, it sucks the oxygen out of the water, making life for fish impossible. Much of this fertilizer runs off of corn fields. To the extent we turn more corn into ethanol, we increase this problem. We tend to notice fast developing problems like the BP spill while the slow motions ones, like the dead zones, escape notice.
One of the dangers of something like the BP spill is that people panic and politicians and special interests take advantage. You can see this already in the calls for more biofuels and other alternatives. Remember the cause of the dead zone in the paragraph above. But it gets worse. The nitrogen fertilizer for the corn is often derived in part from natural gas and we have to account for the fossil fuels that go into planting, moving and refining the 1/3 of the American corn crop that becomes ethanol.
W/o massive government intervention, there would still be an ethanol industry. It would just be a lot smaller. Ethanol has a good use as an oxygenator added to gasoline. It makes gasoline burn more effectively & cleaner. In the early 2000s it replaced MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether), which had itself replaced lead as an octane enhancer a generation ago. But a little ethanol is good; a lot is less useful. Gasoline packs a lot more energy per gallon than ethanol. As you add ethanol beyond a small amount, it begins to decrease mileage. There are also other problems related to corrosion and evaporation, but I will let anybody who cares learn about that elsewhere.
Suffice to say that the push to use more ethanol as transport fuel moved it from being a high end additive to extend gasoline mileage to a low end commodity. Since it is less efficient & more expensive than gas, it raised the prices. Yet the push for more ethanol continues because it is driven by politics, not by economics or common sense.
Let’s digress a little. You can make alcohol from almost anything that grows on earth. You can see that from the vast array of alcoholic beverages available worldwide, made from potatoes, corn, cactus, grapes, apples and even watermelon. But it is easier to make ethanol from some things than it is from others. It is relatively easy to make ethanol from sugar cane. That is why Brazil has an ethanol advantage. It is significantly less efficient to make it from corn and so far prohibitively expensive to make it from cellulous (i.e. switchgrass, wood chips etc).
The U.S. does not have a competitive advantage in making ethanol. For one thing, corn is not a great feedstock and to make that worse we (the U.S.) has a relative advantage growing corn as food for man and beast, but when we make it into ethanol, we manage to negate our natural advantages, converting a product we do well into a product that we do merely okay. Beyond that, corn ethanol tends to be produced near where corn grows, i.e. in the middle of the country. Much of the demand for liquid fuel is on the coasts. Ethanol cannot be transported via gasoline pipelines because it is corrosive and tends to create evaporation problems. Transporting ethanol by road and rail is relatively expensive. On the other hand, ethanol from Brazil is cheaper and closer – in terms of transport – because it is produced near ports in Sao Paulo state and can be easily sent via sea transport to places like Norfolk. That is why we have to subsidize ethanol production in the U.S. by $0.45 a gallon AND put a tariff of $0.54 on ethanol from Brazil.
In other words, public policy is pushing us toward one of the most expensive energy alternatives made even more expensive by public policy.
What about cellulosic ethanol? This can be made from materials that now go to waste, such as forestry waste or stalks and sticks from crops. We can also easily grow some crops, such as hybrid poplars or switchgrass, specifically for energy. The biggest problem is that we still cannot do it efficiently. Nature has been evolving for millions of years to prevent wood from easily being converted (i.e. fermented or rotted). There are better alternatives. The more you have to process something, the more costs you add. Wood chips, for example, CAN be turned into ethanol. But it is a lot easier to make them into pellets or burn them directly to make heat or electricity.
The problem is liquid fuel. Gasoline makes great liquid fuel and alternatives cannot compete. Direct government attempts (such as subsidies and mandates) to change this equation don’t work well for that reason. Beyond that, alternatives and gasoline are locked in a feedback loop. If alternatives, such as biofuels displace a lot of gasoline, the price of gasoline drops relative to the biofuels in question, making them less competitive.
Government has a role, but it is supportive and indirect. Government should not try to pick particular technologies. The ethanol debacle should have taught us that. It can help with infrastructure and basic research. Real, sustainable gains come from increasing productivity that lowers costs or costs of doing business, rather than tries to pay them down with taxpayer money.
A final interesting concept they talked about at the seminar was “peak gasoline.” People talk about peak oil. Peak oil is the theoretical spot where we have used up half of the petroleum available on earth. It is a slippery concept that is meaningless w/o specifying a price. At $5 a barrel, we reached peak oil years ago. We may never reach peak oil at $500 a barrel. Peak gasoline is an easier concept. Given the changing nature of our society, our driving habits and mileage efficiency, we probably reached the maximum amount of gasoline we will ever use. We cannot expect consumption to rise forever. Consumption is already dropping. Of course, we have not and may never reach “peak energy.”
There will be no magic solution to the energy problem. We choose our energy portfolio based on cost, convenience, availability and mere preference. This is how it will always be. It is an ongoing situation, not a problem that can be solved. No matter what elegant and wonderful solutions we devise (and we will come up with some) we will still be talking about the same sorts of things fifty years from now. It is good to remember – despite the current pessimism – that our energy situation is better than that of our ancestors in terms of the amount of work we need to perform for each unit of energy. But as energy gets easier to get, we want more of it.
The picture up top is the inside of the Wilson Center. In the middle is the outside of the of the Reagan building, where the Wilson Center is located. In the lower middle is a sign warning that if you step on the grass, motion activated sprinklers will flow. It is an idle threat. I tested it and stayed dry.
I read Amity Shlaes’ book “the Forgotten Man” a couple of years when it first came out, just before the big economic downturn. Her timing was excellent in the light of subsequent events and the insights for the Great Depression have been helping me understand the events of the great recession.
History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain quipped, and some of the arguments of the 1930s seem very contemporary indeed. One of the themes most pervasive in Shlaes’ book was the importance of confidence, consistency and trust. These things are the true basis of a prosperous economy, but they are impossible to measure accurately and so are often overlooked or downplayed.
Why are you willing to exchange your real labor or goods for a piece of paper with the picture of a dead president? It is backed by nothing but trust. I lived in Brazil during a time of hyperinflation. People didn’t trust that their money would hold its value or their government not to be capricious (and they were right) so to protect themselves they had had to devise all sorts of tricks and techniques that were often wasteful and destructive to the system as a whole. And once trust breaks down in something as important as money itself, it spreads to other areas, creating a general state of uncertainly and feelings of helplessness.
One of the most important functions of government is to create as much certainty and predictability in society so that people can plan for the future and feel secure in their transactions with each other. When fails in its duty to maintain stability or, worse, when government itself comes to be viewed as unpredictable, arbitrary or capricious, the bonds of society begin to erode.
Some actually welcome this. Disorder reduces the aggregate level of wealth but often has the effect or redistributing income, or at least distributing pain since people who cannot properly plan cannot do better than those who just wouldn’t. Making opportunity generally less available tends to equalize outcomes by negating the cumulative value of hard work, talent and foresight.
What the FDR administration did to harm economic recovery was to create uncertainty, according to Shlaes. She gives many examples. The one I like best is the Schechter chicken case. Part of the New Deal legislation, regulated poultry prices, making it illegal to offer discounts or allow customers to choose their own chickens. The Schechter brothers, a couple of kosher butchers, were accused of doing these things and of “destructive price cutting.” They were found guilty, given a fine of $7424 (big money in those days) and tossed in jail for a couple months. When the full weight of Federal power can come down on kosher butchers for selling a chicken and they can get jail time for doing business as they always have, you have significant uncertainty.
The relevant New Deal Federal laws were declared unconstitutional when the case reached the Supreme Court. Justice Louis Brandeis took aside one of Roosevelt’s aides and told him, “This is the end of this business of centralization, and I want you to go back and tell the president that we’re not going to let this government centralize everything.”
Most of the New Deal programs & ideas did not survive the test of time or the courts. The reason we don’t understand that is we look back at it now with a kind of “survivor bias,” i.e. we judge it by those that did survive – a relatively small and more successful subset. But what really saved the New Deal’s reputation was the onset of World War II. To his eternal credit, Roosevelt saw the trouble on the horizon and he understood that he would have to harness the power of the United States – all of its power – to fight the threat of totalitarianism. So the always pragmatic president chucked or let fall away many of the more radical New Deal programs and much of the anti-enterprise rhetoric into the dust bin of history, much to the chagrin of his more radical associates, such as Harry Hopkins and his wife Eleanor. We kept the songs, murals, myths and lots of mixed feelings.
My father grew up during the Depression and always took a kind of pride in the fact that he could trump any contemporary hard times stories. No matter what happened, he could say, “You are lucky. When I was growing up things were a lot worse.” And he was always right. You just couldn’t argue with the old man when he played the “Great Depression card.”
Yesterday I watched an episode of “Law & Order –Criminal Intent” that featured a murderer obsessed with proving that people were not moral. He captured loving couples and forced them into situations where one killed the other to save his/her own life. Today I read about criticisms of “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Evidently modern activists feel Atticus was not sufficiently outraged by the racism around him. As different as these seem to be, they are both based on pernicious and self-indulgent interpretation of human morality, an interpretation that is superficially perceptive and intelligent, but is in fact just sophomoric.
I understand that my own interpretation will sound shallow compared with the deep thinking that some of the chattering classes do about historical transgressions like racism or the Holocaust, but I think it has the advantage of being more useful. It has to do with capacities, and sometimes going beyond what we can expect of ourselves and other humans.
There are two types of judgments that are worthless: standards that are so high that nobody can pass and standards so low that everybody can. Both, unfortunately, are attractive because we can alternatively claim to have high standards or to be inclusive. I was on the swim team in HS, but I cannot swim as fast as Olympic champion Michael Phelps. But there are two sorts of swimming contests where I am his equal. If the test is simply the ability to swim 100 yards w/o any reference to the time involved in getting there, both of us can do it. If the test is to swim across Lake Michigan, neither of us can make it. It sounds silly when I put it in these terms, but that is what we constantly do in our moral judgments of others, especially when we are thinking historically.
If you prove that Michael Phelps cannot swim across Lake Michigan, have you proven that he is a poor swimmer? Of course not. What if you put a person into an impossible moral situation? You might conclude that this person is morally lacking, and you would be wrong. You might conclude that all humans were morally lacking and you would be right by the standard you set up, but it is a stupid standard. If nobody can succeed, the test is useless. Why do people insist on postulating such things? I think it is because it makes them feel better about their own personal moral shortcomings.
Just as a reasonable person – even a great swimmer – would avoid jumping off the car-ferry in the middle of Lake Michigan because he knows that he cannot swim forty miles to the other side, so a moral person avoids situations where he will be pushed beyond his breaking point. This is the moral thing to do. You need to anticipate challenges and take steps in advance to address them. In my experience, people who constantly get in trouble are not always worse at resisting temptation, but they are very clumsy about falling into situations where they cannot. Taken to a higher level, a good society is one that permits and facilitates moral choices. One of the biggest crimes committed in un-free societies is that they corrupt good people by making it very difficult for to make moral choices, or even recognize that there is a moral choice to be made. As they are threatened or enticed into poor moral choices, they slip farther down the slope.
I am not arguing for moral relativism when I say that we have to judge people’s choices in the context of their situations. There are standards we should uphold, but we have to recognize that when you are sitting in a comfortable chair in the safety of your home it is easier to postulate that you would make the right choice than if the Gestapo was asking you whether or not you saw someone hiding in a shed.
There is also the element of knowledge and experience. I know that I have become more interested in acting ethically as I have become older. I don’t think it is merely age. As I experienced more and learned more, my feeling of responsibility has grown. Some of us like to idealize children as innocents who instinctually know right from wrong. This is not true. It is just that we cut them a lot of slack and we don’t expect them to make the really hard choices. IMO, true ethics requires learning and introspection. In a similar vein, I am not a big believer in the noble savage ideal. I think Roseau was full of shit and besides his occasionally stirring phrases; he was harmful to the ethical development of humanity.
We all understand the concept of time … until we have to explain it. Time progresses at an even pace (at least in our local reality) but time is not experienced the same by everybody or in every situation. A poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge sums it up well. I have included it at the end. Chrissy & I got some more scientific insights at a lecture at Smithsonian by neuroscientist Richard Restak called Time & the Brain. Some would have been obvious to Coleridge, but it is interesting to get it from the science perspective.
Restak started by talking about “real” time, the kind we measure. Our machines can measure it in nanoseconds, but we don’t perceive it at that level. Events have to be communicated and interpreted by our brains before we can “see” them. That takes time and in the interpretation time is experienced. Uncommon or exciting events seem to last longer. These are times when events seem to unfold in slow motion. It is an artifact of memory. When the memories are packed tightly, we have more to remember and we tend to perceive it as a longer time.
This accounts for a paradox is excitement and boredom. Restak talked about an experiment where some people watch an exciting movie, while others languish in a waiting room. For the people in the movie, time flies by, while it drags for those in the waiting room. However, when both groups are asked to estimate the time actually spent in each activity, the people who watched the movie estimate 10% too high. That explains why people whose life is boring say that the days drag, but the years fly by. I recall when I worked at Medusa Cement loading bags for twelve hours a day. Each day seemed interminable, but when I think back about each summer it went by quickly. That is because not much changed. This is also why you tend to remember things that happen early on a job or task, when you are learning it.
Restak explained that in memory past, present and future are not always distinct and if you cannot picture yourself in the past, you cannot project into the future. That is a problem for people with Alzheimer’s disease. They cannot envision the future because they cannot recall themselves in the past. There is no longer a continuous identity. This is also a problem for people experiencing depression. They just cannot envision a brighter future, which affects their perception of the past and the present.
Different cultures perceive time differently. An important factor in the material success of the West has been our ability to control, or at least to parcel time. Before the industrial revolution, there was no much need for clocks to have minute hands. Processes were uncoordinated and time was “wasted”. Even today, not everybody has the concept of time and some people don’t really think we should.
Our time has become maybe too regimented. Because of our devices like mobile phones and computers, we always have the possibility of doing something. It takes away from leisure, but also from time to contemplate and think. Thinking takes time and if you move from one event or quick decision to the other, you may never have time to understand the purposes and connections. That is a modern curse. I remember when the Marine at TQ explained to me that I had to embrace the suck. What that really means is to take the time you have.
Anyway, Calvin Coolidge said that you should always leave when they still want you to stay. The Q&A lasted a bit too long, with some people just trying to demonstrate their erudition in front of a groups of strangers. I have been having a little problem with sciatica and I just cannot sit still for more than an hour, so we slunk out. Always get a chair convenient to the exit. I think we got all we could from the talk anyway.
This is the Coleridge poem:
Time Real & Imaginary
On the wide level of a mountain’s head,
(I knew not where, but ’twas some faery place)
Their pinions, ostrich-like, for sails out-spread,
In early human societies, and among the less technologically advanced until now, war is/was endemic. Simple societies are warrior societies that live in a constant state of lethal conflict. These are small fights, murder raids & minor skirmishes, but they are never ending. The “noble savage” was kept in top form by the exigencies of war. We cherish a myth about people before civilization – that they lived in harmony with each other and with nature. The fact is that it was more like road warrior, with death, capture and rape a constant reality. The only protection was the ability to defend yourself or hide in vast spaces. It was constant war and disease that kept the population below the carrying capacity of the land. It didn’t take long for our brainy ancestors to control or kill most of our erstwhile predators, but man preys on man. This is not an optimistic view of our species, but it comports well with the facts. Fortunately, people respond to challenges and especially to challenges perceived as threats. What is more challenging or threatening than war? In many ways our civilized institutions are responses to the endemic conflicts of our ancestors. War is the father of us all.
Alex and I went to see Victor Davis Hanson speak at the Smithsonian last week. He was one of the most engaging speakers I have ever seen. He was also very un-PC, as you can infer from the ideas up top that I took from the talk. He is one of the few historians that still characterizes himself as a military historian. Hanson points out that military history is extraordinarily popular. If you go to any bookstore, you see that a very part of the history section consists of accounts of wars and biographies of war leaders. Series like “the Civil War,” “Band of Brothers” or “the Pacific” win big audiences. But being popular with people in general and being accepted in academic history circles are different and often mutually exclusive things. I wrote about that before here, here, here and here.
Today people prefer to study peace, assuming that war is some kind of aberration and that peace is the natural human state. History does not back this up. As I mentioned above, our ancestors lived in a constant state of unrelenting war. Most of us personally live much more peaceful lives, but we live in a world that is still always at war somewhere. The ancient Greeks, Hanson says, recognized the ubiquity of war and didn’t give it much of a second thought. We can avoid some wars if we recognize what the Greeks knew and address the causes of war. So what are the causes of war? Hanson disagrees that they are primarily economic, although economics is a necessary part of most wars, it is not sufficient. Modern states do not have to conquer others to enjoy their resources. Albert Speer warned Hitler about invading the Soviet Union. He pointed out that as an ally Stalin was already supplying the Nazis with all the Soviet raw materials that they could expect to get by conquest and that he was doing it at a significantly lower price than the Germans would have to pay if they did it themselves. Speer was right and the Germans were never able to get as many resources from the Soviet Union after the invasion as they easily got before. Hitler invaded the Soviet Union for ideological or “honor” reasons. Economically, everybody knew it was a loser.
The same goes for our “war for oil” in Iraq. It makes absolutely no sense to view the conflict in these economic terms. Saddam Hussein was willing – even eager – to sell all the oil he could and he did it at a discount. After the war, we do not get more oil from Iraq and we did not take over any oil fields. If it was a war for oil, we forgot to pick up the prize. Some people might wish it was indeed a war for oil, because it is was we would have the oil. But we don’t. War is caused by a combination of many factors, such as fear, greed, honor and ambition. But these things are kept in check by deterrence of the power of others. Hanson says wars break out when there is a decline in the perception of deterrence. Put simply, people don’t go to war unless they think they have a reasonable chance of winning. It doesn’t mean that their perception is accurate or that they define winning in the same sense that we do, but war is not a random act and it is almost never the result of the oppressed just rising up, so we cannot solve the conflict by attacking the “root causes” if we find them in oppression and injustice.
Conflicts also require fuel. Consider the case of the Palestinians and the Israelis. This conflict has been going on since the 1940s (and before). The ostensible cause is that Palestinians were dispossessed of their land and they remain aggrieved. We take it for granted, but it is not the whole truth. In the late 1940s lots of people lost their ancestral lands. Around 15 million Germans were kicked out of places their ancestors had lived for centuries. The same happened to Poles, Ukrainians, Hungarians … the list goes on and on. Among the peoples dispossessed in the 1940s, the Palestinians were a fairly small group and not poorly treated in relation to the other examples. In fact, much more recently ancient Jewish & Christian communities were driven out of homes in Arab countries, where their ancestors had lived a thousand years before the coming of the Arabs or Islam. Why is it that after all these years only the Palestinian problem remains an open wound? Why doesn’t the Silesian liberation organization highjack airplanes? Where is the Galician liberation army? The simple answer is that they had nobody to bankroll their misery and encourage them to continue the fight. They were also allowed to resettle. Other Arab countries could have solved the Palestinian problem years ago by simply doing what Poland, Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, Finland and many others did with refugees associated with their countries. Why they didn’t can be explained by their perceptions of deterrence and their long-term perception of the chances of achieving their goals through conflict.
Anyway, both Alex and I enjoyed the talk. It gave us something to think about. One of the things l like best about Washington is the many opportunities we have to go to these sorts of things.
BTW – The picture up top is the Smithsonian castle looking NE on June 30 at around 6pm. It is what Alex and I saw as we headed for the lecture.
