It rained much of yesterday and today, making the walk from L’Enfant Plaza Metro to NDU less pleasant. It is interesting to walk around SW, however. It takes around twenty five minutes from the metro to walk to the Lincoln Hall at Ft. McNair. SW is undergoing really big changes with lots of new construction. The projects are moving along ahead of schedule, since the generally bad housing and building environment has freed up a lot of construction assets.
SW is also improving since the new metros (such as Waterfront & Navy Yard) and the stadium have come on line. I have never been to the stadium and probably will never go, but lots of people like sports so it improves values. SW used to be a dangerous place to walk and there is still some crime, but less. Washington generally has improved.
I am having the various routine medical exams, the ones I neglected when in Iraq. So far, it looks good. Blood pressure is 110/80; cholesterol is 135 (thanks to Lipitor); blood sugar is okay. I had them check for Lyme disease, since I spend so much time in the woods. I don’t have it. I have the eye tests and dentists coming up, as well as that nasty test that you have to get after 50. The dentist is the worst. I didn’t take good care of my teeth when I was a kid and I have been paying for it ever since. Otherwise, I don’t get sick. My father only went to the doctor one time between when he got out of the Army in 1945 until the day he died. I don’t go that far, but it is possible to get too much medical attention. I think this will be about enough for a while.
This is the gloomiest time of the year, but spring will come soon. Besides the rain is good for the trees. Below is a very big Japanese zelkova. These trees look like American elms, but they are shorter, with a flaky bark. They were used as a replacement for the elms, but now are less in favor, as Amerian elms resistant to the Dutch elm disease are available. The prefered variety is called the Princeton elm. It has the traditional vase shape (some of the earlier generation of hybrids were gangly, runtish and unattractive) and grows around ninety feet tall, as a normal elm would. You don’t see those big ones very often anymore. The next generation will have them back. There are lots of elms planted near the Smithsonian, the White House and around the Mall. They will be superb in around twenty-five years.
Below are some young American elms at the American Indian Museum on 4th St SW.
The New Year season is a time for reflection. I have been thinking a lot about the new communication technologies and my job. I know this is boring to some/most of the people reading this, and I know that I am being repetitive, but I still don’t have this sorted out in my own mind.
Decisions are easy when values and priorities are clear. The hard part is figuring them out.
I got along well with Internet in its early incarnations. It fulfilled dreams of my youth. They were nerdy dreams, I admit. I dreamed of a comprehensive searchable data base that could answer all my questions if I posed them correctly. We got it. I wanted easy access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind. We got that too. I dreamed of instant communications networks to pass new ideas. Got it.
My dreams were myopic, just projections and amplifications of what I already knew. But the world doesn’t stop and innovations spawn unexpected changes. The Internet shot clean past my slow moving dreams.
Internet revolutionized the pursuit of knowledge in mostly good ways. You can find out almost anything you want to know and connectedness of the web is increasing scientific and practical knowledge immensely. Knowledge and politics, however, don’t always intersect. Metastasizing politics on the Internet has been less a good thing. Let me clarify with an example.
Blogs made it possible to write about your opinions and experience and easily publish it for others to read and comment. This is just an old technique adapted to new technologies. It is kind of the Federalist Papers on steroids; a quicker marketplace of ideas, this I like. But it didn’t stay on that high plane very long. The messages slid downhill and became shorter and more vitriolic.
The blogosphere and cyberspace in general experienced a kind of evolution, where selection favored the nastiest and the most extreme. Rather than a universe of ideas, it debauched into a multiverse of pseudo-intellectual hostility. Many of the online communities became intolerantly self-policing, driving out anybody with divergent views and in the process increasingly coarsening the rhetoric. Too many online communities became autoerotic circles of hatred, where participants confirmed each other’s prejudices, sharpened their collective teeth, and pulled their groups farther out of the mainstream. We often cannot persuade or be persuaded by others because we occupy completely different dimensions.
There used to be a saying that you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. The new media has developed different fact-universes, each with its own specific sets. This is a challenge and it gets worse.
Now we have all the interactive systems, the Facebooks etc, Twitter as well as interactive gaming. I just don’t know what to do with them. I am not sure it is possible for government based public affairs (i.e. someone in my job) to use these technologies because they are so labor intensive and the messages so often intensely idiosyncratic.
Consider the strengths and weaknesses of a government information operation. My job is to explain the U.S. and U.S. policies to people in other countries. In what we see in retrospect as the golden age (it didn’t seem that back then), we had certain advantages. Most important was that government had a monopoly over some sorts of information, but there were other structural advantages. The technologies favored the one speaker to many listeners paradigm, so a relatively small number of writers could reach a large number of readers/listeners/viewers. Beyond that, our enemies were easy to identify and possible to count. The Soviets produced a lot of deceitful propaganda, but we could usually find the return address if we looked hard enough.
None of this is true anymore. The government no longer has information dominance and is often not the first or the best source even of things about its own activities. The information market has splintered into millions of pieces and our adversaries are harder to identify. Essentially, we went from a situation with one big and dangerous bad guy (or a couple of them) to a world where there are thousands of little ones. The dragon has been replaced by insects, each one inconsequential, but collectively heavier and more intractable. And they are more quickly adaptive to changing circumstances. You could always expect the Soviets to be slow and ponderous, not so our new adversaries.
When it was one-to-many communications, we happy few at State or USIA had a chance to move the communication needle. In the one-to-dozens communication environment, we just don’t have enough people and never will. We can get the occasional “viral” hit, but not with any predictability.
I think we still have a chance. The Internet is starved for content. We can produce content and/or pictures. We can also build relationships that might leverage to larger populations. We can succeed, but I am worried that we will not. I am also worried that I cannot go along on this ride. I have been in this business for a quarter century, but I am afraid I might have reached a river I cannot cross. I have always believed that with the proper tools and permission, I could make a difference and sometimes I have succeeded. I have not always had the means, but I always had the vision, at least I thought I did.
My vision is now failing with the newest technologies. I can understand how something like Twitter can be used to organize a demonstration, communicate sports scores or stock averages, or help maintain an existing social network, but I cannot figure out how we can pass the nuanced explanation of policy over these sorts of networks, nor can I see a way that government officials like me and my colleagues make ourselves trusted participants in enough social networks to make a significant impact. I can understand the theoretical potential for online communities, but cannot stand the profound lameness of “worlds” like Second Life and I cannot figure out its wider impact. It is a big world out there and our efforts may just be a p*ss in the ocean.
This worries me. I don’t know whether it cannot be done in general or if it is just ME that cannot do it. I have a responsibility to add value and I always promised myself that I would not hang around after I outlived my usefulness. I don’t want to try to apply yesterday’s solutions to tomorrow’s problems. It is funny how things come in circles. I am having the equivalent of adolescent angst at my age.
I guess I will figure it out, or more correctly I will find people who have figured it out to work with me. I really don’t understand much of anything, but I have always had the good fortune to find people who do and I have been able to bring out their talents. I add value the old fashioned way – through good people. Maybe the old tricks still work for the old dog. When I cannot do that anymore I will go quietly into that good night – someday, but probably not today. I still have a lot of thinking to do.
There is trouble in Gaza again. Like so many other places around the Middle East, the longest time of sustained peace and prosperity came courtesy of the Romans. Under the Roman Empire, Gaza enjoyed six centuries of peace and prosperity.
Above – This is in Amman. In Roman times it was called Philadelphia. This is the marketplace where merchants met and scholars discussed.
At that time, the inhabitants spoke Greek and the city was a center of culture, known for its sophistication and love of the ancient customs. Probably for that reason, Gaza remained pagan longer than many other cities. It didn’t become Christian until the middle of the fourth Century.
Anyway, the point is that Gaza is not naturally a terrible place. If Hamas would wise up, it could be a nice place to live, as it was when it was under better management for six centuries during the Roman times. Too bad the Romans are no longer in the business. Please see this link for our visit to the Roman city of Jarash.
It reminds me of Monty Python, when the militants ask “What have the Romans ever done for us?”
From “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”
Reg: They’ve bled us white, the bastards. They’ve taken everything we had, not just from us, from our fathers and from our fathers’ fathers. Stan: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Reg: Yes. Stan: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Reg: All right, Stan. Don’t labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return? Xerxes: The aqueduct. Reg: Oh yeah, yeah they gave us that. Yeah. That’s true. Masked Activist: And the sanitation! Stan: Oh yes… sanitation, Reg, you remember what the city used to be like. Reg: All right, I’ll grant you that the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done… Matthias: And the roads… Reg: (sharply) Well yes obviously the roads… the roads go without saying. But apart from the aqueduct, the sanitation and the roads… Another Masked Activist: Irrigation… Other Masked Voices: Medicine… Education… Health… Reg: Yes… all right, fair enough… Activist Near Front: And the wine… Omnes: Oh yes! True! Francis: Yeah. That’s something we’d really miss if the Romans left, Reg. Masked Activist at Back: Public baths! Stan: And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now. Francis: Yes, they certainly know how to keep order… (general nodding)… let’s face it, they’re the only ones who could in a place like this. (more general murmurs of agreement) Reg: All right… all right… but apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order… what have the Romans done for us? Xerxes: Brought peace! Reg: (very angry, he’s not having a good meeting at all) What!? Oh… (scornfully) Peace, yes… shut up!
BTW – The ancient Middle East was nothing like the modern one. First off, there were almost no Arabs. Around the coast, most people were Greek, at least in language and outlook. In Egypt the upper classes spoke Greek and had a Hellenistic culture, while the common people lived a lot like they had under the pharaohs. Inland in much of what is now Israel, Jordan and Iraq, people spoke Aramaic. This was the language had been a common language of the Persian Empire. There were many nationalities in the region, but Arabs were not prominent among them at this time. Arabs arrived in the 7th Century, when they conquered those places from the Roman (Byzantine) rulers.
The Arab conquest is one of the great historical anomalies. They came just at the right time. The Byzantine Empire had just finished a long and mutually exhausting war with the Persians. Either of these great Empires could have dispatched the Arab raiders at almost any other time, but in these particular decades they were weakened. The Byzantines also had a schism problem. The Christians of Egypt and Syria had a doctrinal dispute with the Christians in Constantinople. In other words, the armies of the prophet came upon a weakened and divided empire. Such is the role of chance in history.
No matter how it happened, it is truly astonishing to anybody who studied ancient history to contemplate the complete transformation and in many cases destruction of the ancient cultures of the region. A thousand years of Greek culture was submerged in a couple of decades. It was a much more complete change than happened in the West, where the lands of the Western Roman Empire still speak languages descended from Latin and still have cultures that can be traced to their ancient heritage. Northern Africa, which is now Libya, Algeria and Tunisia, were very Roman, but that heritage is gone.
I think some of it has to do with the natural environment. Barbarian invasions in places like France or Italy destroyed much of the infrastructure of civilization, but the environment was more forgiving. Ancient cities could grow back as times improved. Roman and Greek cities in the arid places like the Middle East or North Africa were more dependent on the engineering infrastructure. The Arabs invaders in the south and the Germans in the north were all interested in taking the riches of the Roman Empire, but didn’t really understand the complexities of making it work.
When the Roman engineers died off or left their work, and no new ones were trained, the great aqueducts broke down. This didn’t happen all at once, but in the course of some years, the knowledge was lost. In the areas of the German conquests, natural rainfall allowed a fall back. Not so in the more arid regions. That is why you see those Roman cities in the middle of the deserts. The Romans knew how to make these places productive.
I went to see the new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace. It is not as good, IMO, as the old Bond movies because Bond has lost his edge, or more correctly, the rest of us have caught up. In one scene, Bond calls back to his HQ for a name check. After a couple seconds, the super spy commuter comes up with a picture of the miscreant. Very impressive, but you or I could come up with the same result on Google Images in around 0.9 seconds. Bond would have been better off just using his I-Phone himself. This is the new world of communications.
Web 2.0/PD 2.0
Initial use of the web for public diplomacy and strategic communications involved online versions of familiar delivery methods, such as magazines, radio and television. Despite vast differences among them, all these shared the paradigm of one-way communications, where a set message was delivered to a passive audience in a one speaker to many recipients model. It ignored the web’s special capacity for interaction. Web 2.0 refers to the way the web has changed the nature of communications, making it interactive, more fluid and less centrally organized. Last year, Internet passed newspapers as a source of news in the U.S. For young people Internet is beginning to rival television. [1] This new world can make many people in governments or powerful institutions uncomfortable, since it signals a diminution of their power over information and a dilution of their messages.
We tend to focus on the instant communication aspect of the Internet, but the sinews of its influence are its capacity to find, sort and distribute information. Powerful search engines give individuals the power enjoyed only by world leaders few decades ago and before that time by nobody at all. Governments have lost what monopolies they once enjoyed and are now sometimes not even the most prominent voices. Controlling information is no longer possible. On the other hand, there is a greater opportunity for engagement to harness the power of the nation and the wisdom of the crowds to produce better and more robust products. There is no option of ignoring the development. Internet users demand a degree of interactivity and accept a measure of ambiguity unpredicted a decade ago. These trends will accelerate as the first generation of digital natives (i.e. kids who don’t remember a world w/o Internet) has reached adulthood. This is the new world of communications. Whether we are ready or not, the future has already arrived.
Interactivity and interrelations
The two concepts to keep in mind are interactivity and interrelatedness. The first concept is more obvious but the second is more pervasive. Internet users ostensibly love the possibility of interactivity, but most don’t use it to an extent commensurate with their stated preferences. On any blog, there are dozens, hundreds or thousands of “lurkers” for every active participant. On the other hand, interrelatedness represents the fundamental power of the Internet and its search engines. It is the interrelatedness – the unexpected relationships – that makes the Internet such a wonderful and terrible place to do public affairs. Some say the web provides a venue for the best and the brightest to share ideas w/o the constraints of status or station; others contend it is a place where peculiar people congregate to accrete one dumb notion on top of another. Both points of view are correct. The medium of free and often anonymous exchange produces the best and the worst as it emphasizes people on the long tails of the normal distribution.
Mass customization
The ubiquity and interactive aspects of Web 2.0 offer public diplomacy the possibility of direct engagement with thousands of individuals on a global scale. We can bypass the state run media and the various despotic gatekeepers that have long hounded the quest for truth & knowledge. In the exchange, however, we get a world of constant change, requiring flexibility and creativity, where you have to earn attention again and again every day. The interactivity means just what the word says. When we are trying to influence others, we need to open the possibility of being influenced by them. In a free marketplace of ideas, this would be all to the good. It would produce a synergy greater than the sum of the parts. The caveat is that this marketplace of ideas is not as free and open as it would appear.
Our own presence in the mix is the first sign of a constrained freedom. Although our opponents disagree, our activities are generally benign and broadly truthful. The USG is constrained to tell the truth by its own rules as well as the continual monitoring by our own free media, interests groups and political leaders in opposition. For the most part, we are probably too timid in the defense of our positions. Not so our adversaries. Most of them are heavy handed and incompetent peddlers of web influence, but there are so many out there that some get it right sometimes and others get it right a lot. When it works for them, their campaign is based on plausible lies, ones that play to stereotypes and prejudice, and often based on caricatures and exaggerations of our own real and verifiable mistakes and missteps. In a world where significant numbers of people doubt that there was ever a moon landing and where in communities where majorities don’t think Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, conspiracy theories go a long way. And the U.S. is probably the single biggest victim of conspiracy theories. In a world often driven by dispersed impersonal forces, people look for someone to blame. The U.S. is always there for that purpose.
Countering conspiracy theories with facts and information is futile. Most conspiracy theories have a built in defense against such quaint ideas as truth or fact. They are, after all based on “hidden,” “denied,” “secret,” or “occult” information. True believers in conspiracies derive significant personal status and feelings of self worth from the idea that they know things overlooked by or kept from the masses of people. It is a true Gnosticism. As they see it, any counter arguments are merely examples of clever attempts to discredit them. We have to recognize that some people are incurable conspiracy theory believers. Others are susceptible to the contagion, but can be cured, but through relationships, not information alone. A trusted and credible source of the information is what makes the difference. Web 2.0 provides the opportunity to create such relationships.
In a New World Where Nobody is Well-Loved
We also need to recognize that the constant vetting and finding of flaws, even when done honestly, will create a permanent state of dissatisfaction among large numbers of people. This is what happens when campaigns go negative and it is just easier to go negative than to defend a positive position. The U.S., as the most ubiquitous presence in the history of the world, will naturally come under the most scrutiny, fair and foul, but it is a general trend that affects everybody. The good new in this is that it applies to our adversaries as well as to ourselves. Al Qaeda’s popularity has also plummeted in recent years among Muslims, for example. [2]
Insiders & Outsiders
Internet 2.0 will strengthen “tribes” as people can go online to find others with whom they identify even across great geographical distances. (Of course, the tribes I am not talking about are not kinship of linage, but kinship of ideas.) This may lead to greater trust within groups, as they become more uniform and homogeneous, but also lead to a general decline in tolerance overall, since most people will be out-groups to any particular in groups. Early hopes that Internet would weave the world together in a kind of cyber age of Aquarius have been dashed against the reality of self-selection and segregation. In a mass information market, differing viewpoints must be tolerated, not so in the case of core groups of believers autoerotically communicating among themselves on the Internet. Where websites and blogs are most developed, disagreements have become sharper and more venomous. However, the impersonal/personalization of web interactions allows people with very divergent views to coexist and performs mutually beneficial transactions that would be impossible in a face-to-face world. General “approval ratings” have already become more transactional and unstable, making it even more important to discount what people tell opinion pollsters and watch what they do and get an idea of their true beliefs by their revealed preferences.
Public diplomacy and the marketing mix
The analogy of public diplomacy with marketing is far from perfect, but it provides some useful insights. When marketing a product or service, you have to understand which communications techniques are appropriate. Those useful for selling Coca-Cola are often not valuable for selling passenger jets or legal services. The same goes for public diplomacy. Our business is more analogous to selling high end legal services than consumer products. This informs and constrains our choices.
Public diplomacy involves communicating complicated concepts to people who come from a variety of backgrounds and the U.S. operates in a truly global environment. It involves long term relationship and trust building. Messages are more problematic. Some of our world audiences will react in sometimes violently different ways to the same subject. Imagine the discussion of U.S. attitudes toward same sex marriage at venues in Amsterdam and Jeddah. Aspects of the discussion popular in one venue would be odious in the other. In this interconnected world, messages cannot be neatly targeted to a discrete audience. Even more challenging is that the more extreme members of each audience will seize on the aspects they find most objectionable rather than look for areas of compatibility. This has long been a problem, but web 2.0 exacerbates it, since one blogger in an audience of hundreds can characterize a discussion for thousands of his compatriots back home.
In other words, web 2.0 has as much or more capacity to puncture and disassemble public diplomacy messages as it does to deliver them. The shorter the attention spans media, the more likely this is to be the case. Twitter with its 140 character limit is a good example. We have used Twitter successfully to send short messages and a give a “heads up” about bigger things, but it doesn’t easily lend itself to any proactive public affairs task beyond notices and reporting the equivalent of scores or stock averages. One the other hand, 140 characters is plenty of space for a slogan or attack. BTW – the last two sentences of the paragraph above had 327 characters counting spaces. These two directly above are 140 characters – exactly the right size for a tweet. Good luck with deep explanations.
So what do we do?
We look beyond or through the technology to our purpose. You cannot answer the how question until you have address they why question. Communication and relationship building is our goal. Rather than be beguiled or intimidated by technology, we simply need to keep our focus on the goal and use whatever technological tools are most appropriate. But we do need to acknowledge that changing technologies have changed the game.
Common themes not unified messages
There is much talk in public affairs about having a unified message. The new technologies, with all the links and leaks they entail in the information net, mean we can no longer have one unified centrally crafted message. We can have themes and goals that are interpreted and alerted by the individuals on the ground and closest to the challenges. We will, however, need to tolerate significant local variations on the themes and welcome the ambiguity of message delivery.
Delivering variations on the themes is much more labor intensive than cranking out a single message because rather than one voice speaking to millions (on the model of the national television program) we will have many voices speaking to thousands or maybe even to hundreds and not only varying the theme to suit particular audiences, but also responding to them and quickly responsive to changes in the environment. It is important that the theme be consistent but the delivery is protean. It requires more of a robust process than a comprehensive plan.
Set the Proper Goals for Each Situation
There are many degrees of distinction between active opposition and enthusiastic support. Americans are particularly afflicted by the desire to be loved in the world, but all that is often required is compliance or even indifference. Although outright opposition constrains our policy options, America’s image in the world has no discernible impact on the sale of U.S. goods or the acceptance of U.S. cultural products. Much of the sound and fury of anti-American prejudice signifies nothing or not very much. The fragmentation of media on the web means that those who dislike us will always have an outlet for their vitriol and they will probably be among those yelping the loudest. The majority may not have a strong opinion on a particular issue. They may voice support for our opponents, but take no steps to provide anything practical.
Military action, which by its very nature is coercive, will almost never be popular and any exercise of power, which inevitably means choosing among priorities, will annoy somebody. Since you usually get less credit for the good things you do than blame for the bad, any use of power will probably create more perceived losers than winners. (The world’s superpower is always on the hot seat. President Clinton gets blamed for not sending troops to Rwanda; President Bush is excoriated for sending troops to Iraq.) Lack of practical support for extremism and neutrality or even indifference toward our policies among the mass of a country’s people may be sufficient to accomplish our purposes. Often neutralizing or discrediting opposition will be the most appropriate tact, and Internet is well suited to this task. We should consider this on a case-by-case basis, rather than compromise practical goals by pursuing the chimera of seeking full throated outright approval.
All of the above
Using technology to communicate will be an all of the above proposition, with a cocktail of technologies usually more appropriate than reliance on any one. We will never find the Holy Grail or silver bullet of communications technology and we will never again have anything comparable to the nationwide television network where everybody is watching at the same time. The ability to reach the whole nation was a historical anomaly. Throughout most of history and in the future, the communication environment was and will be fractured. It is only because we all grew up in that unusually homogeneous media environment that we think of it as normal in any way.
The right tools
We cannot prescribe the particular technological tools for any public affairs task until we have assessed the task and the environment. What we should be looking for is synergy among the tools. For example, a live speaker is very compelling but not particularly memorable, while an internet page has the built in memory (you can refer back to it) but is unlikely to be compelling. Twitter can announce the availability of some piece of information or some event, but it cannot explain the nuances. An event might be very informative, but nobody comes unless they can be told and reminded. Obviously a combination of technologies works best, changing them to adapt to circumstances. BTW – technology is not only high tech or electronic. A technology is merely a way of doing something. A personal meeting is a kind of technology. Sometime the thousands year old technology is the way to go. We seek the right MIX of technologies, not the right ONE technology. There is no silver bullet or Holy Grail of communications. It is easy to be beguiled by the new or the latest big thing, but technology is not communication and the medium is not the message. It is only the method.
Other information is based on personal interviews with those doing public diplomacy as well as extensive personal experience working with USG webpages and blogs.
Below is the personal story from one of the blog readers about his great grandfather who came from the city of Anah. It is an interesting and tragic family history. With his permission I am posting it here. I will let professional historians sort out the connections and timelines. I just think it is worth reading and have placed it as it is.
I am going to tell you the story about my great grandfather Isaak El Eini. As I mentioned El Eini means in Arabic from Anah. The picture I am attaching is not a good picture taken in the 1930s in Khartoum, Sudan. He is the elderly man in the back alone. He was thin, tall, dark. The lady in the front was his niece whose parents had moved from Anah to Khartoum around 1900.
He was born in the 1860s. He came from a Jewish family. Anah had been a part of the ancient Babylonian Empire. The Jews had been brought over from Judea by King Nebuchadnezzar in 586BC.
Jews, Christians and Moslems lived in the town in harmony with no problems. Each in their own neighborhoods. The family were in the Caravan business. They took care of the camels, merchandise etc. Anah was an important station on the Damascus to Baghdad caravan route (it took 33 days). The caravans comprising of as many as 1,200 camels carrying textiles from Britain, sugar, tobacco, drugs etc would stop in Anah for 3 days as it was here where they would cross the Euphrates river. From Baghdad there were caravans to Basra where merchandise would continue to India and Asia by ship.
After 1888 when the Suez Canal was opened for all shipping it was quicker to transport goods by ship. This devastated the family business. So Isaak left Anah and moved to Egypt, which was prospering from the construction of the Canal. In those days there was no Iraq. It was known as Mesopotamia and like Egypt was part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
He moved to Aswan in southern Egypt and began trading with the tribes in the Sudan. In the late 1890s the British decided to take over the Sudan which was ruled by the Mahdi. Lord Kitchener headed the Anglo Egyptian Army. Isaak followed the army as a civilian trading with the Sudanese all the time. When they arrived in Omdurman (Khartoum) they put a siege on the city. However the siege was not working and the Mahdi was holding out.
Lord Kitchener chose Isaak to act as a spy, enter Omdurman and to pretend he was a trader who had crossed the Red Sea from Arabia. He brought many gifts to the Mahdi. In return the Mahdi gave Isaak a young boy and girl as a gift to be raised as slaves. Isaak had no choice but to accept the gift.
While in Omdurman Isaak found out that the Mahdi was holding off the siege because some Egyptian Officers were giving / selling arms to him. He left the city and gave all the information to Lord Kitchener.
Kitchener won the battle and became a hero in Britain. As a reward he gave Isaak a lot of fertile land in Omdurman. Soon later he told all his brothers and sisters to leave Anah and come live in Omdurman / Khartoum. They lived there till 1967 and became Sudanese citizens. But in 1967 when Israel and the Arabs went to war, Sudan expelled all the Jews. The family then moved to Britain and Switzerland.
Now Isaak stopped working. He lived off the land holdings and every few years he would sell some acres to live on. He was a terrible husband. and playboy. His wife lived in Cairo all the time with his only daughter Massouda, my grandmother. He would travel to Cairo about once a year to see them. It was basically like being divorced.
In his 70s he had spent all his money. In the early 1940s my father living in Cairo, heard a knock on the door and it was Isaak. He was sick and died soon afterwards.
As to the two children who were given as gifts by the Mahdi: one was a boy and the other a girl. Isaak’s wife and my grandmother raised them and sent them to school. At 16 the girl got pregnant. Because they wore long wide dresses my grandmother did not realise that she was pregnant. She tried to give birth to the baby and kill it. My grandmother rushed her to the hospital. The needle was infected and she died in the hospital; so did the baby.
The boy later got a job at a bank. His son became a very important official at the same bank.
The neighborhood was very different when we bought our townhouse eleven years ago. Actually we bought a piece or red dirt and the promise that they would build a townhouse. Ours was the first new development of its kind in our immediate area. At that time it was a kind of pass over zone. There were nice neighborhoods all around, but we had some gas stations, warehouses and fast food outlets. It was a low rise neighborhood. But it had two big assets. There was the Dunn Loring Metro stop. We bought because the Metro was only a seven minute walk from our front door. It was also a central place on the way to Tyson Corner.
The Metro was the real key.
The Dunn Loring Metro opened in 1986, but for the first ten years of its life was almost exclusively a park and ride. Our town house complex was one of the first walking distance developments. When we bought, there were big plans to in-fill the place and increase the density to encourage transit oriented development. We had to take that on faith, but it did start to happen. Since we bought, a big town house complex developed across from the Metro. There are also high rise condos near the Metro and down Gallows Road and we have a Marriott Courtyard Hotel. But the immediate area, the one we saw outside our door, didn’t change much. It was the ugly mix of cheap warehouses and metal buildings. Now the big changes are on the way.
Most of the buildings across the street are torn down and the others soon will be. I don’t mourn the loss, except I miss the Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. The plans are to build something like fifteen stories high. Condos and hotels will be on the top floors with retail on the ground floors. The plan is sound. I hope it works out. Our neighborhood will be a lot better. Our town house complex will go from one of the densest developments to one of the least dense. Don’t know how many more years we will be here. The irony will probably be that we will move away just about the time the neighborhood gets walkable and nice, but after we retire and no longer have the daily need for the metro, the high value property will be less attractive. When we chose to live near the Metro, we paid more for a smaller space in order to get the better commute. That logic will probably change.
Above are the old buildings being torn down. It takes only a day or so. The buildings int he background were built a couple years ago. Ones like that will go up. They are not so pretty, but they have retail etc. And they are better than what they replace.
I have a minor stomach bug and didn’t feel well enough to run on this beautiful day, so I went for a walk instead during lunchtime. I went down to the Roosevelt Memorial. It is a pretty big and impressive thing, as you can see in the picture, and there is a lot of flowing water.
This size and complexity of the memorial goes against Roosevelt ’s wishes. He told Felix Frankfurter that he wanted a memorial no bigger than his desk and there is a memorial about the size of a desk near the National Archives. But the Roosevelt legacy outgrew the man.
All monuments are really as much about the time when they are constructed as about the people or events depicted. You can see the 1990s (when the Memorial was built) in the Memorial itself. For example, although Roosevelt was crippled with polio, he didn’t allow himself to be pictured in a wheelchair. I think there is only one such photo. Many people at the time were not aware of the extent of his infirmity. By the 1990s, such attitudes were unpopular. The compromise, in my picture, shows him seated with his cape covering the wheelchair. This evidently offended some people, so there is also a statue of Roosevelt in his wheelchair.
I think we have an interesting question. Roosevelt expressed clearly in his words and actions that he would not have approved of the monument or of his depiction in the wheelchair. The question is, at what point does a man’s legacy become more important than he is and how much license should we have to fit a man of the past into contemporary morals and sensibilities?
In pictures from the times, Roosevelt is always shown with a cigarette. It was a big part of his personality. We won’t see that. This part of his image is gone. There was a controversy about a stamp featuring the artist Jackson Pollock, who evidently smoked all the time. The postal service made the stamp from a photo of Pollock. They airbrushed out the characteristic cigarette.
Modern technology makes this kind of ex-post-facto censorship much easier. I think it is better to leave such things in and explain that times were different. We cannot apply today’s standards to the people of the past.
This applies to Thomas Jefferson more than most. I also went to his memorial. Jefferson was knocked off his high pedestal by his slave owning. It is true that slavery was a terrible blight, but it had been around as long as human society. The pyramids were built with slave labor. Jefferson had the misfortune to be on the societal cusp that separated the 5000 years of human history when slavery was accepted from the last couple centuries when it was anathema to civilized people. It wasn’t until around the time of Jefferson that large numbers of people began to see slavery as an evil to be extirpated and that outrage was limited generally to the Western world at that time. There are still parts of Africa and Asia where forms of slavery are practiced.
It is hard not to judge Jefferson by today’s standards and harder still to understand how someone who could think so elegantly about freedom could have such a blind spot about the freedom of people he saw every day. But we really cannot judge him too harshly for not making a clean break with a tradition that stretched back to the dawn of history.
BTW – I met a former slave when I was in Poland . He and his family were captured by the Soviets in 1939 and sent to labor camps where only those who worked got food rations. The Soviets, enlightened as they were, would not officially allow children to work, so this guy’s underage brothers and sisters were not allowed to work and got no food. It was the perfectly logical workings of a diabolical bureaucracy. The family tried to share, but they all died except for the man I met. He survived the Russian death camps and returned to Poland where he became a wood worker and was making decorations for churches in Zakopane. He was a surprisingly cheerful man, with a still abiding faith in the goodness of God despite his ordeal, and not bitter at all against the Russians. “It was a different time and place,” he advised me. This is the only actual slave I ever met. In America , after nearly 150 years, there is no living memory of slavery. My friend’s conditions were much worse than those in Virginia during Jefferson ’s time. Perhaps we should take his advice.
Jefferson was a great man, although a flawed human being – like all of us. The genius of America is that we can take humans as they are, w/o demanding perfection, and through all these imperfect people create a more perfect country.
These might be a little boring and unorganized. My new job requires me to understand better how information is transmitted and received, especially via the new media. I am working this out by writing it. I would appreciate any comments from anybody who wants to read through.
A Few Good Men
The audience is meant to side with the Tom Cruise character when the Jack Nicholson character tells him that he can’t handle the raw truth. Cruise has cleverly manipulated Nicholson into incriminating himself on the witness stand. Nicholson doesn’t get it. He doesn’t like cruise; he see him as a pretty-boy w/o the experience, temperament or character to face the hard facts of life – the Truth with a capital T. The audience sides with Cruise. The court sides with Cruise. Justice sides with Cruise. But Nicholson told the truth. Or was it just a truth.
The use of the definite or the indefinite article makes a big difference. “A” truth (with the indefinite article) is different from “the” truth (with the definite article) and different from truth expressed with no article at all.* How different would it have been if Nicholson had shouted, “You can’t handle truth!” or “You can’t handle a truth!”
Thinking about a courtroom drama is appropriate when considering information on the Internet or in the new media. How useful is “raw truth?” How can we differentiate THE truth from a truth or truth? Has Steven Colbert’s truthiness replaced truth? Do we care if it has?
Eyewitness Not so Good
We overvalue eyewitness testimony and are improperly influenced by how much certainty and passion people express in defending their testimony. In the courtroom drama, we give a lot more credibility to the guy who says that he is certain. He may indeed be telling a truth, but he may also be wrong. A lot of things influence our memories and perceptions. There are things I believed to be true based on personal experience that have turned out to be objectively false. (I read a good book re called Witness for the Defense re which I recommend, but anybody who keeps a journal knows how memory can change.)
Failure of Memory
The key concept is change, not fade. The false analogy is that memory is like a book or a movie. We think that with time some things are lost, but the fundamental integrity of the information is sound. In fact, memory is living and reactive. It constantly reorders facts and perceptions to integrate new information. This is learning and is a good thing, but it changes memory. We usually don’t know this has happened and we are rarely put to the test. We all know that people’s honest recollections of events differ. We are less accepting of the fact that our own honest recollection of facts differs over time.
Memories change. That is why perjury is such a difficult concept and the concept of repressed memory led to such abuse and injustice. It is a virtual certainty that if you were asked under oath to describe a situation that happened six or eight months ago, you would be untruthful about some, or many, of the details. That is assuming that you are trying to be 100% honest. The irony is that some of the things you are most certain about & the things you felt most passionate about would be the ones that were the most wrong. Passion clouds judgment and alters memory. It is a truth; it is your truth, but it is not THE truth anymore.
When I stared to write this, I was thinking about the concept of truth on the Internet and in the new media. My digressions above were necessary because the Internet is a sort of collective memory and it is subject to a lot of the same risks and pattern mistakes as individuals. But it has the added factor of group activity and the magnification that technology offers.
The Myth of the Unfiltered Truth
Internet provides first-person immediacy with all the benefits and traps that entails. First-person accounts appeal to passion. Passion is a big part of humanity, but passion often destroys logic and makes it difficult to see the big picture. There is an old saying that if you make all your decisions with your heart, you will end up with heart disease. Passion tends to lead either to inappropriate action or just as often no effective action at all. First-person accounts are always incomplete.
Listen to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Everybody knows the story that he was deaf when he wrote it and he couldn’t physically hear the music that has evoked so much passion in listeners for generations since. Beethoven didn’t need to hear the music because he understood the concept and the context. He understood the big picture and could orchestrate it in a symphony. Now imagine you get to hear the oboe player and nobody else. What kind of impression do you have? Let’s expand your world. You “have access” to all the musicians. What are the chances that you can assemble them all into anything resembling the symphony? Well can you – maestro?
I know this from my experience in Iraq. I reported what I saw and heard, but I didn’t always have the context. I was surprised to see how my information, aggregated with others, produced a coherent big picture that was completely beyond, and sometimes ostensibly contradictory to, my on-the-spot perceptions.
Self Organizing Systems & Their Discontents
A lot of people put their faith in the self-organizing ability of the Internet. I have reasonable faith in things like Wikipedia to develop useful truth, although we clearly need to have a “trust but verify” attitude. But most of the Internet is not truly self organizing or truth seeking. Many of the participants on the Internet have no commitment to truth at all. In fact, much of the information on the Internet is put there by people actively spreading their biased viewpoints, if not actual disinformation and propaganda. Many contributors and webpages are well financed by governments, pressure organizations and wealthy individuals.
Internet is easily manipulated by trumped up facts and passions and it is getting worse. YouTube posting can provide compelling pictures and sound that are as manipulative as Nazi or Soviet propaganda shorts. Your intuition tells you to believe the evidence of your own eyes, but it is too easy to forget that the maker of the video controls all the angles, timing and perspectives your eyes are delivering.
The Golden Age That Never Was
Of course, speaking of Nazi & Soviet propaganda, there was really no golden age of truth. The new media doesn’t introduce more manipulation; it just sort of democratizes it. This probably means that most people have a better chance of finding the truth about things that concern them. It is simultaneously easier to pass lies off in the short term and harder to make them stick in the long term. The mass lies of propaganda past are probably made untenable by the Internet. On the other hand, the smaller lies will probably more persistent. “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time,” said Abraham Lincoln. The Internet doesn’t change the general categories, but it does change distribution. Internet makes it much harder to fool all of the people even some of the time, but it makes it easier to fool some of the people all of the time. More disturbingly, Internet facilitates the aggregation of those people fooled all of the time. A few isolated weirdos are just curiosities. If enough of them find each other, they may form enough of a mass to become a real menace. Like the embers of a dying campfire, if you spread them out they all burn out, but if you gather them together you can have a conflagration on your hands. Internet makes this much easier.
As I wrote in the first paragraph, I am just working through these ideas. I am done doing that for now, but I really need to get this clear in my mind so that I can do a good job in my new job.
——————————————-
*BTW while English makes these distinctions, many languages do not. Scandinavian languages stick the direct article on the ends of words with a pattern I never quite understood. Slavic languages don’t have articles (direct or indirect) at all. Arabic has only direct articles. These languages find different ways to make the distinctions I am talking about above, but I wonder sometimes how the ability to easily express certain concepts affects people’s perceptions of those concepts. Linguists and anthropologists have been on this case for many years. They seem to have discovered many truths, but not THE truth, although many particular experts will tell you that he has indeed discovered and explained the ultimate reality.
When I was in college, I read and liked a book called Language, Thought and Reality. This book explained the Whorf hypothesis about language. It made a lot of sense to me. My anthropology professor told me it was wrong and implied that I would get a bad grade if I didn’t agree with him.
That was back in the 1970s. A lot of things we learned in the 1970s, especially in anthropology and sociology, was crap. Those were proto-PC days. Most social scientist still believed some variation of the “blank slate” in those days and the very idea that human potential was limited or partially determined by structures or innate tendencies offended them viscerally. Noam Chomsky, despite his general pernicious misunderstanding of the world and politics is a good linguist, argued persuasively against the Whorf hypothesis. We have come a long way since then and, although the PC crowd still filters the public interface, the inquiry has become more of a science and the truth much more nuanced. The most recent good book on this subject, IMO, is Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought.
Below is the lantern Espen bought me at LL Bean. You crank it up and it produces light. I already had a crank up flashlight that I have been using for more than a year. These are great innovations. You don’t need to think of batteries or plugs, probably as close as you can come to that free lunch.
Anybody who tells you that he understands the economy in all its complexity is lying. It is not possible for one person or any group of persons to understand. The data is not available and even if it was there is no way to integrate it. Beyond those two formidable problems, the economy is constantly changing, so you will always be a couple steps behinds. These are some of the reasons why central economic planning has never worked. And the economic planners have even another hurdle: their plans and action will change the assumptions and facts.
Central planning is grabs the popular imagination because people haven’t thought through the factors and we just find it hard to accept that something so important to our lives is fundamentally unknowable, unplanned and chaotic. What I just said is another basis of misunderstanding because it is only true within a flawed set of assumptions. The economy cannot be comprehensively planned by anyone whose job it is to be a planner, but it is certainly not unplanned.
We have in place a wonderfully effective method of aggregating distributed knowledge and allowing for dispersed decision making. Our market system works better than any alternative to give most people the capacity to make choices about their lives. It produces the best results in the long term, but nothing is perfect all the time.
It seems a contradiction that the free market requires government intervention in the form of rule of law, regulation and periodic kicks in the ass. I learned this in Eastern Europe. When I went there after the collapse of communism, I thought that all that was required was to get rid of the oppressive state structures. The fall of communism provided a kind of laboratory, where we learned that removing the state interference was necessary but not sufficient. Governments and civil society have to build the sinews of the market economy.
The difference between a life saving medicine and a deadly poison is in the dosage and the application. The same goes for government intervention. We need to keep this in mind with all these bailouts. The lifesaving therapy, applied too broadly, becomes a deadly poison. It is also good to keep in mind that what worked yesterday may not work today or tomorrow and that this does not need to signify failure, abuse or incompetence. I ate a big meal yesterday, yet I think I will need to eat again today. I didn’t fail to eat properly yesterday; it is just an ongoing solution.
There exist truths that are unknowable by us in an absolute sense, but they are not unknowable in a practical sense. They may also be unknowable to any one or any group of us but they are not unknowable by all of us aggregated into societies and markets. When large groups of people make estimates independently, the aggregated estimate is usually better than the individual estimates of even the best and the brightest among them. That is why democracies and markets work. Governments can tap these reservoirs of human information, imagination and innovation but cannot control them. The seeming contradiction is that it only works as long as you don’t try to make it work.
Government management of the economy is a chimera. Having the government take decisive action is very appealing and we sometimes need the intervention, but knowing when to stop, combined with the wisdom to know that perfection is impossible and that we cannot get everything we want, is the key to long term prosperity.
The dates of these posts are out of order. I didn’t have Internet. I could not take pictures of the buildings in camp or the running trails, but imagine a parking lot paved with crushed stone surrounding a maintenance facility and you got it.
Below is the hall outside my quarters. This is how it looks day or night. I am on the second floor.
Yesterday and today I ran around the trail that follows the perimeter of the camp. It is five kilometers long. (Although I doubt the veracity of that claim since it is obviously taking me too long to run around it). The surface is good for running and the terrain is phenomenally flat. It is not a hard run, but it is boring. You can only tell how far you have come by looking at your watch. I suppose after a while I will notice differences. Maybe not, since I am running at night. Actually not night, but it gets dark at around 5pm. The trail is well lit, so there is no unusual falling hazard or chance of smacking into stationary objects.
The full moon was out today, which made the run more pleasant, as far as it is possible. It gets warm during the day, but is nice and cool in the evening. The weather has been great. If the place was more interesting, it would be really nice. Compared with this place, however, Al Asad is paradise. Well, maybe not paradise but much nicer.
Below is my room.
My discomfort is exacerbated by the jailhouse conditions of the cans. We are in a warehouse stacked on top of each other, literally. There is no connection to the outside and the window has the perpetual dull glow of artificial light. You cannot tell the nighttime from the day w/o looking at your watch. I like to be able to see the natural light. I saw a Sci-Fi movie with Sean Connery. I think it was called “Outland” about a mining colony on Io, one of the moons of Jupiter. It is that kind of place.
