Tag: talks

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Historical Paradigms

Writers lose control of their work as soon as somebody else reads it, since each reader will bring a different perspective and a different train of thought. If what was written is interesting, it will take on a life of its own. Readers may disparage the authors for claims they never made or praise them for insight they never had, but there is no use in authors trying to “correct” interpreters. Of course they can try to explain and get others to hop onto their own preferred train of thought, but the indignation some creative types feel when they find their work misinterpreted is inappropriate.

These are some of the insights I took away from a lecture by Patrick Allitt who talked about writing history during a Bradley lecture at AEI. Of course, as Allitt conceded, there are no truly new ideas and this concern with losing control of one’s ideas goes back at least as far as Plato. Plato purported to be concerned that his writings might be misused w/o him being there to explain and illustrate with examples. Of course, among ancient philosophers Plato was one of the most diligent about making sure that his works were copied and distributed widely, which is one reason we know Plato so well while many other ancient writers are known only in fragments or lost entirely. This illustrates the dilemma. Writers want to use the written word to communicate.They know, or should know, that their work may be misinterpreted, but they really still want to get it into the hands of those potentially unworthy consumers.

BTW – What you will be reading below will provide an example of the slippage Allitt (and Plato) talked about. I take Allitt’s comments as my starting point, but I will riff off that, so unless I mention him specifically, he may not be to blame for some of the ideas.

Allitt’s was talking about historical writing and writing about conservatism specifically and he acknowledged another problem for writers of history. Where do you start? You can always go “back to the beginning” but when you arrive there you find that the beginning has its own roots in the past and this goes back endlessly.

Allitt thinks that a good place to start talking about conservatism in the U.S. is with the Federalist. America doesn’t really have conservatism in the sense that they might in places with ancient roots. Nobody can seriously advocate a RETURN to royalty, feudalism or the old empire, because we never had any of those things. The United States of America is a creation of human endeavor with some specific starting dates. There were no “Americans” (in the sense of people of the U.S.) before 1776 or 1787 (if you prefer the Constitution), and you could even argue for a more recent date.

American conservatism, according to Allitt, is more of an attitude than a specific set of beliefs. It is a outlook that looks for support in historical precedents and in experience, rather than sweeping theories that purport to completely explain current reality, or at least history, and are able to prescribe yet untried comprehensive solutions. To be conservative is to not believe in comprehensive changes and to understand that there is no finish line or a utopia attainable on earth. Human nature and the challenges faced by people are similar enough that we can understand and learn from the experience of people in ancient times, even though their lives were very different.

Unlike Marxists, conservatives don’t have a good explanation for everything that happens. Marx thought up all sorts of stages and rules of history. He provided a good narrative and even non-Marxists get caught up in his stages. Marx explained how we move from feudalism to capitalism and he projected how we would move out of capitalism into communism. Marx even developed a good way to smack down non-believers. They were victims of “false consciousness.” This explained content workers or peasants. They just were too dumb and misguided to understand their own plight, according to Marxists.

Although Marx was wrong in all the important details of his theory, it is attractive to have a story line. It is particularly attractive to intellectuals, because it is complex and knowable only to those who really study it. Beyond that, Marxism provides a specific role for intellectuals as the vanguard of the proletariat. What more could the mediocre PhD student with poor job prospects ask for?

Conservatism, in contrast, doesn’t have a theory with neat stages, each leading forward to the ultimate utopia where everybody is fulfilled and nobody even thinks about carrying out aggressions against their neighbors. Conservatives understand that people want different things and even the same person changes his preferences with monotonous regularity. History has no overarching goal or directions, according to conservatives. This means that conservatives cannot project progressive history onto current events the way progressives can. This puts conservatives at a steep rhetorical disadvantage. People like to have a detailed story about where things are going to go, even if they understand that the story is wrong and the goals practically unattainable with the methods proposed or by the people designated.

Conservatives become an easy target for the label of “do nothing.” In the field of government, conservatives often do believe in doing nothing, or at least doing less by government. There is a paradox of conservatives in government, since they are using a tool (government) that they think should be used less or not at all in many situations. It is tempting to leave it to those who want to use it, but that is impossible.

You may want to ignore politics, but politics won’t ignore you. Since there is no op-out option, conservatives have the responsibility to op-in and take the heat for being against changes that will ostensibly mitigate misery and help solve the people’s problems. It is not that conservatives are unaware of these problems or that they don’t want them addressed, it is just that they understand that government, although indispensable within its own sphere, is not the proper tool to deliver many changes that the people want. Conservatives in the American tradition are in favor of many changes, but are less confident that government is the proper tool.

Perhaps the central paradox of conservatism in the United States, and to some extent in other free market places, is the conservatives defend the free market, which it the most revolutionary system in human history. The free market means constant change, but it is change that bubbles up from below, from diverse and unexpected sources. There is no direction that can be predicted in advance. Historians often create what looks like a progress narrative by weaving ex-post-facto weaving together disparate threads, but it wasn’t like that at the time. The test of any theory is its ability to predict future events, not merely explaining the past in what seems to be a coherent way. By that measure, all the fancy theories of historical inevitability have been wrong. The free market is a process, but not a plan. That is how it works and why it delivers such radical change w/o making the promise.

Cultures can go along for decades or centuries with few significant changes, but when market forces get to work, suddenly change comes fast and furious. It is one of the things “conservatives” in from non-market cultures most dislike. **

So the liberal-conservative divide (defining both terms in the modern American sense, since liberal & conservative mean very different things in different places and times) is not about change or no change. It is a difference of whether the primary agent of change should be centralized and government or distributed and non-governmental. It is also not an argument about government or no government. It is about the size and the roles government should play.

A few odd & ends from the Q&A – One of the questions concerned leadership. Allitt pointed out that conservatives tend to believe more in leadership as the agency of change or progress. Liberals tend to believe more in wider historical forces. This is no surprise, given the more general philosophical differences.

He also pointed out the good historians try to be fair and impartial, but that they really cannot, since they choose the subjects to study based on their interests, preferences and what they think are important subjects, focusing attention on some areas by necessity means neglecting others. People also write about what they like or are passionate about. It becomes very hard not to take sides.

Allitt said that if you feel very good after reading a history, it is probably poorly done, since the historians has created, perhaps, inadvertently, a good guy-bad guy narrative. No matter how they look in retrospect, nobody thinks of himself as the villain of the story and they don’t go into conflicts expecting to lose. Historians sometimes don’t consider the motivations and aspirations of the losers, or at least the other side. History is often the story of people doing very bad things, but perhaps it would be enlightening to understand why they thought they were good or at least expedient. On the other hand the “heroes” are also always flawed. We can recognize this w/o becoming cynical about the good people have done or absolutely despairing about the evil. There are lessons to be drawn from both.

Speaking of lessons, Allitt said that we should not take more from lessons that they have to teach. For example, after World War II, historians and leaders took the broad lesson that they had countries had acted too quickly and w/o sufficient compromise. That was what contributed to the terrible war. So in the 1930s, the Democracies were more accommodating – appeasing the dictators. We now look at that as a big mistake, but at the time it seemed like a good idea – “peace for our time.” The experience of World War II gave us the need to act and prevent countries from falling to dictators. This had its own downsides. In fact, each situation is different. What works in one time or place may be just the wrong thing to do in another. Of course, it is easy to see that in retrospect and much harder when you are making decisions in a climate of uncertainty.

Anyway, if you are interested in this subject, I suggest you watch for yourself. As I said, I started with Allitt’s talk, but extrapolated. If you want what he actually said, you have to listen to him.

BTW – Fox News is featuring a series on conservatism that starts tonight (Sunday)

The pictures in this piece are unrelated to the text. I just like to put in what scenes I have noticed recently.The top shows Jesus in front of the Cathedral of St Thomas Moore in Arlington. A similar but much bigger and more famous Jesus looks out over Rio de Janiero; this one looks out over US 50, maybe as far as Glebe Road. Below that is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Building in Washington.  It is across from the White House on Lafayette Park. Next is Thomas St in Arlington VA. I just like that neighborhood, mostly because of the big trees. I walk that way to FSI.  Finally is Rochambeau, the French general who helped us win independence.  He is in Lafayette Park. 

BTW, for reasons I cannot explain, Rochambeau is also another name for the game rock-paper-scissors as well as for a stupid game some of us “played” as kids, which involves getting kicked in the groin. Actually, you didn’t play voluntarily and I never understood the rules. It usually resulted in a fight or a quest for revenge. I do not think there is a relation to the general.

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The New Brazil

I attended a  launching of a book “The New Brazil” at the Wilson Center’s Brazil Institute yesterday.  Riordan Roett, the author, is a professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University & director of the Western Hemisphere Studies and Latin American Studies Programs.  He claimed that he had been studying Brazil for more than fifty years and seemed to be telling the truth. The book’s main emphasis is on the last sixteen years during the Presidencies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

The discussion at the meeting centered on what or who should get credit for Brazil’s remarkable success since the middle of the 1990s.  Like most success, it is the result of good decisions and good luck and it is hard to tell where one leaves off.  The most obvious place to start is with government policy.  Many other things about Brazil remained the same, so the change in policy was probably a major factor.  The big change in direction came with the “Plano Real”.  Fernando Henrique Cardoso, as Finance Minister, led the team that created the plan and then as president brought it to maturity. I won’t go into details about the plan, since I have not yet studied the details, but in general is stabilized the currency and created economic stability. It took many of the economic decisions out of the hands of politicians and privatized many state enterprises.  And it opened the Brazilian economy to foreign investment and trade by lowing tariffs and making it generally easier to do business.

When I lived in Brazil twenty-five years ago, we talked a lot about the fact that the Brazilian people were very enterprising but that obsessive rules and government interference kept the country from achieving its potential.  Extensive parallel markets developed, which drained much of the energy out of the official enterprises.

The Plano Real seemed to work and Brazil has leapt forward.  Of course, there are also aspects of good fortune.  One of the biggest factors working in Brazil’s favor has been the rise of China.  Brazil remains primarily a producer of primary products, agricultural products, minerals etc.  The rise of China, and to a lesser extent other Asian economies, vastly increased the demand for products that Brazil could profitably produce.   (My one good investment (which unfortunately I have to sell before going to Brazil to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest) was in the stock of a Brazilian company called Vale do Rio Doce, or just Vale (pronounced VaLay).  Vale is a mining company, mostly iron ore.  I bought the stock in 2003 and I only wish I had bought more.  The Economist just published an article about it.  It is one of those world class Brazilian firms that were quickly able to take advantage of opening markets.)

Another piece of good luck, for Brazil if not others, was the rising price of oil, which made profitable their investments in ethanol produced from sugarcane.  Now Brazil has also discovered vast reserves of oil and gas off the Atlantic coast in a formation called pre-salt. To help finance exploration and exploitation, the Brazilian oil firm, Petrobas recently floated a $67 billion stock share offer, the largest in history.  These developments will make Brazil energy independent and maybe even an oil exporter.  The Brazilians already produce most of their electricity from renewable hydropower.  They have developed ways to produce hydropower w/o the extensive ecological damage associated with previous large water projects.  Of course, no energy source is worry frees and there is still controversy, but manageable.

There is some bad news, of course.  Brazilian infrastructure is poor.  This already impacts prosperity and will do it more in the future.  The price of sugar, for example, spiked a couple weeks ago because of backlogs at the Brazilian port of Santos.   Brazil is the world’s second leading producer of soybeans (behind us).  Infrastructure is what keeps them from becoming #1. They can grow soybeans in the grasslands of the cerrado, but they often cannot ship them to market.  Many of the connecting roads and even some important highways are poorly maintained and sometimes not properly paved at all.   Brazil will need to invest heavily in improvements and it will have the incentive and money to do it, which will be a great opportunity for construction firms.

Human infrastructure is also a weakness.  Brazil has excellent public universities and produces great engineers, doctors and lawyers.  But the level down is very bad and there is a big gap.  Many people remain functionally illiterate and significant numbers are just illiterate, period.  The lack of basic education in the work force makes it difficult to devolve decision making and innovation to the workers on the shop floor, as is required by many modern processes.  

Again to interject a personal note, I remember when Mariza was born in Brazil.  The doctors were great, as good as anything we could expect in the U.S., but the quality quickly fell off and you had to be very careful with the nursing staff and especially with the aids.  I had some dental work done in Porto Alegre.   The dentist was great, but his assistant was less well trained. He was putting a cap on one of my teeth and had exposed the nerve. As he stepped away for a minute, he told his assistant to keep the area on the tooth clean.  She alternatively squirted water and compressed air onto the raw nerve until I begged her to stop and wait until he got back for the final cleaning squirt.

Brazil’s educational system is very uneven and counter intuitive to an American. The best universities are public.  They are tuition-free and open to all through a highly competitive test.  But the only way to properly prepare for that test is to go through private grade schools and HS, since the public schools at the lower level are generally bad.   In America, our top universities (Harvard, Yale, & Stanford) are often private and smart rich people want to go there.  Private universities in Brazil are not on top and poorer Brazilians are more common in them.  It is a little odd that those who could afford to pay get to take advantage of the public universities while the private ones are the ones that serve the others.

Professor Roett thinks that the educational system will soon improve, as people will demand it.  The Brazilian middle class has grown significantly during the boom times. For the time being, they are happy that they can afford new refrigerators and nicer apartments.  But there is a Maslow principle at work here.  As their material needs are better satisfied, they will start to want more intangible, such as better education for their children.  Beyond that, the more developed economy is demanding higher level skills.

Somebody asked the question about evangelicals.  Brazil has traditionally been a casually Catholic country, but you cannot help noticing the vast numbers of evangelical protestant churches, often in storefronts or other general buildings.  The evangelicals also exhibit a lot of energy and a strong work ethic. Brazil is actually exporting evangelical missionaries to Spanish speaking America and Africa.  Evangelicals could play a pivotal role in Brazil’s presidential election at the end of the month.  This is the first time they have been recognized as a political force.

Anyway, I am enjoying learning and relearning about Brazil.  My Portuguese starts in November and I will be able to devote even more time to learning about my once and future post. 

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Biofuels: Food, Fuel & the Future

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. 

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Time Real & Imaginary

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,

Two lovely children run an endless race,

A sister and a brother!

This far outstripp’d the other;

Yet ever runs she with reverted face,

And looks and listens for the boy behind:

For he, alas! is blind!

O’er rough and smooth with even step he passed,

And knows not whether he be first or last.

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War – The father of us all

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.  

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Nobody Can Buy it for You

Money can’t buy happiness. Beyond minimum levels, people do not become happier as their countries get richer. Studies show, however, that those who have relatively more money compared to their peers tend to be happier, no matter what the general level of wealth. Maybe everybody has got to have somebody to look down on. Maybe we feel threatened by the success of others because we are just big bipedal apes we still see our relative status in Darwinian terms. Or maybe knowing that we have earned what we got has something to do with it.

Don’t underestimate the power of envy & resentment (people often dislike those who do better than they do) but don’t think that there is no more to life than greed and material considerations. I attended a good talk at AEI discussing the morality of free enterprise.

Arthur Brooks, the speaker, made several good points, such as a majority of Americans still favor free enterprise and smaller government despite all the economic setbacks of the past couple years. But the most interesting part of the discussion was when he talked about earned success.

Brooks mentioned the studies I alluded to up top about how people feel good about their own success mostly in relation to others, i.e. the rich are happier, but then he took the numbers apart. It is not being rich that counts; it is the idea of earned success. People need to feel that they have done something useful to get what they have got. And it really doesn’t have that much to do with money.

Money & relative status just tend to correlate with the feeling of earned success because those are often the rewards of earning. But correlation is not causality. People engaged in what they consider a good cause or good work also can achieve the feeling of earned success even if it doesn’t pay well. Satisfaction is common among skilled craftsmen, who use their skills to create something special. People often report more satisfaction working to achieve something than in the achievement itself. We want to fight the good fight and prove our character.

Brooks cited studies showing that lottery winners didn’t win long-term happiness along with their Powerball millions. After the euphoria of the first few days, they drift back to their previous levels of happiness, only with a little less joy. Unhappy lottery winners is a cliché and maybe it says more about the type of people who “invest” heavily in lottery tickets than it does about winning. But Brooks also mentioned studies that looked at people who came into unexpected inheritances. These people were presumably a different group but the results were the same. This makes sense anecdotally. Paris Hilton has piles of money, but she doesn’t seem to have much soul. You can have piles of money and still know you are not worth very much and that hurts.

All human civilization is based on reciprocity. We cooperate together because we are better off when we help each other. Our primitive ancestors learned that before we were even fully human. If I share with you when I have a successful hunt, you will share with me when I don’t. Reciprocity doesn’t have to be perfectly symmetrical. Good parents get joy from giving to their children w/o the reasonable expectation of ever recouping their investment. Most of us leave tips in restaurants even in places we will never return. Most of us like to be generous. But we do these things with the implicit expectation that there will be some kind of balance and most of us hate “free riders,” people who give less than they should and try consistently to sponge off others. Among our primitive ancestors, such shirking was easy to detect, and consistent shirkers might end up smilodon lunch. Reciprocity was an evolutionary plus. The idea of reciprocity is programmed into our cultural DNA and maybe our actual DNA. Good people feel an obligation to return good for good. Those who don’t care about these things we call sociopaths.

That is probably why earning your own way is important, why nobody really likes equal outcomes for unequal effort and why you cannot buy self respect. You can achieve monetary success through luck, dishonesty or the kindness of strangers, but unless you feel you earned it, it won’t buy you happiness.

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Public Diplomacy Persuasion

Another FSI lecture is below.   I am doing this one on Monday.   The PowerPoint is available below. It has a lot of the same themes as the last one, but is significantly different.

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Everything is always becoming something else

Πάντα ῥεῖ  – everything flows. That is what the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said more than two and half millennia ago and he was right. But the fact that he said it around 500 BC indicates that the concept has been around and talked about for a long time. Yet it seems to be a concept that each generation discovers for itself and then thinks that it is the most afflicted – ever – by change.

We always have and always will live in a dynamic environment.  What is more, our attempts to understand and act within it alter it, so that we never really face the same challenges twice.  (Heraclitus also said that you can never step twice into the same river – and he was right about that too.)  There is no finish line; there is no stable end goal.  Success means sustainable change.
So I don’t think my reference to Heraclitus is as obscure as it might seem in the context of something as dynamic as public diplomacy and the media. Our job as public affairs professions is to understand the ebbs and flows of events, to take advantage when things are flowing in the right direction, help direct them when we can and know when to get out of the way of the big waves.

Portfolio or Toolbox Strategy (for an uncertain world)

No technique or media tool will work in all situations.  That is why we need to deploy the whole panoply of tools and techniques and know which combinations are best.  This is more an art than a science.  The key is flexibility. Don’t get too enamored with anything in particular or develop strategies around one platform. You don’t want a Twitter strategy.  You want a strategy that may use Twitter as one of the tools. Carpenters don’t have “hammer strategies.”   They have building strategies that may involve hammers as one of the many tools in the box.

There is no such thing as a global brand or a one-size fits all

Even a ubiquitous & simple product like Coca-Cola tastes different and is marketed differently around the world.  The reason they teach us all these things and all these languages at FSI and the reason you make the big-bucks as public diplomacy professionals around the world is that you are supposed to understand the local cultures and environments and apply a nuanced and appropriate persuasion strategy.  I would add that almost all the effective public diplomacy (as opposed to public affairs, which happens mostly in Washington, BTW) work occurs at posts overseas.  Washington programs should be in business to support the field in this respect.   This is something we sometimes forget.
We are not allowed to change our “product,” i.e. the United States and its policies, but we can choose which aspect to emphasize, what analogies to make, what frames to deploy, what relationships to cultivate and when and where to do these things.

The human equation: bridging the last three feet

Edward R. Murrow, the greatest director of USIA or public diplomacy, observed that our communication technologies could span the world, but the real persuasion took place in the last three feet – human contact. He lived in the days before Internet. IMO, internet can (although less easily than people think) create or at least sustain the kinds of engaged relationships Murrow was talking about, but we still have to build those relationships. There is a cognitive limit to human engagement. You can only keep in real contact with a couple hundred people, although new technologies may expand that number, it does not reach into the millions or even the tens of thousands.  That is why you have to set priorities.  You just cannot love everyone equally and any strategy designed to reach everybody will satisfy nobody.

There is no garden w/o a gardener.   

You cannot outsource or compartmentalize your brains or your engagement.  The person doing the public diplomacy must be involved with the public diplomacy decisions.  There just is no way around this.  If we don’t get involved, we cannot make good decisions.  Too often, we just try to shunt off the PD function.  We hire consultants.   Many consultants are good, but a consultant is often like the guy who borrows your watch and then charges to tell you what time it is. If we outsource our decisions, we essentially outsource our intelligence. Then THEY know what we need to know.  It is a lot like hiring a guy to look after your spouse.  Even if it seems to make her happier, maybe that is your role. BTW – be very wary of pseudo-experts who claim to “speak for” large groups of people or have some kind of inside knowledge that cannot be replicated or properly explained.   If they cannot explain it to you even in broad strokes, they probably don’t understand it themselves and often they are just hucksters protecting their phony baloney jobs.   We have too many such people hanging around us not to trip over them occasionally.

So let me sum up before I move to the next part.  Technologies are new; human relations are old.  Our “new” methods return to an earlier age when communication was engaged, individualized, personal, two-way and interactive.  And for public diplomacy the lessons of anthropology (people) trump technology (machines.) How does public diplomacy really work?

Forget about mass marketing & advertising analogies. We are not selling something as simple as a can of soda and we do not have the resources to engage mass markets. We are not trying to build awareness (who is not aware of the U.S.?) and content DOES matter.Public diplomacy is a mass networking proposition, where we build key relationships with opinion leaders and use leverage to allow/encourage others to reach out, who in turn reach out …  We cannot reach THE common man (because he doesn’t exist) and we should be careful not to mistake A common man for THE common man.

There are thousands of books and experts who will point to the example of the obscure person who did something great.  They are right; but it is really easy to pick Bill Gates out of the crowd AFTER he has been wildly successful.   Then it is easy to explain why he succeeded.  Of course millions of others did similar things and did not become the richest man in the world.   They call this survivor bias.  In many ways it is like a lottery.  We can be sure that SOMEBODY will win, but we cannot tell who before the drawing.  So we have to play the odds and we cannot treat everybody who buys a lottery ticket like a potential millionaire. 

Humans are social creatures who make decisions in contexts of their culture & relationships We make a big mistake if we treat people as members of undifferentiated masses.  Human societies are lumpy. There are relationships that matter more and some that matter less.  And (as per Heraclitus) they are in a constant state of flux. People make most of their important decisions in context or in consultation with people they trust.  Later they might go the some media sources for confirmation or details. Probably the biggest decision you have ever made was buying a home.  Did you just read some literature and make an offer? Or did you ask around and talk to people you trusted?  How about the car you own?   We like to explain our behavior rationally, but relationally will provide more reliable assessments.

Information is almost free and a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention

We now must find or create social context for our message to get attention.   I always laugh (at least to myself) when I hear someone say that “we got the message out” or “We reached a million people”.  I am going to start calling this the barking dog strategy, because like the dogs, we just shout “I’m here; I’m here; I’m here.  It doesn’t matter what you say; it is what they hear that counts.   If your message does not say the right things, if it doesn’t fit into their cultural and socials contexts and if it is not delivered in an appropriate way, it doesn’t get through.   I will reiterate that the reason you get those big-bucks is to understand the right time, place and context of the communication.   The new technologies have not made this easier.

Understand – Everything has rules and patterns

I mentioned Heraclitus.  Let’s go a bit farther east and think of Lao Tzu.   He talked about the need to understand the “Tao”, the patterns and logic in all things.  Understanding these things could make the most difficult tasks fluid and easy.   There is usually easier and harder ways to do things.  Sometimes you CREATE more resistance and make less progress by pushing too hard.   So try to understand before you try to persuade.  If people have been doing things for a long time, there is a reason.  Figure out what that is and persuasion becomes much easier.   And always look for the links and relationships.  People may not be aware of what drives their own behavior, but it is often linked to social acceptance. And a person’s outlook often changes more based on the perceived future than on the present reality. 

Let me digress with a fish story from my time in Iraq.   During the late unpleasantness, Coalition forces had to ban fishing on the Euphrates River for a time, to prevent insurgents from using it as a highway.   But fishermen didn’t return after the ban was lifted, even though the fish were plentiful and bigger given the no-fishing respite.   We thought of helping them buy new boats, nets, sonar etc. But the reason that they weren’t fishing was much simpler – no ice.  The ice factory had shut down and in this hot climate if you cannot put the fish on ice, you cannot move them very far or sell them. We helped the ice house back into operation and the fishing started again.  

ENGAGE – influencing your community but also being part of it and willing to be influenced 

This story shows the importance of engagement.  You also have to get out – physically – and meet people where they are.

Inform & Interpret – turn information into useful knowledge

Engaging is fun and essential, but if we are not giving the taxpayer value for their money if we don’t inform and persuade.   Since information is almost free, what do I mean by inform?  This means turning raw information into useful knowledge and narratives.   Even simple facts must be put into contexts.  What if you didn’t have any dresser drawers or hangers in your closet?  What if you didn’t have any bookshelves or cabinets and all you stuff was just lying on the floor.  It would be hard to find things and many things would not be useful.  Turning information into knowledge is like putting things in some order.  In the public diplomacy realm, that usually means framing and narratives.   People understand stories and until they have a story that makes sense, information just sits there, useless as the shirt you cannot find under the pile of dirty clothes.  Analytical history, BTW, as opposed to antiquarianism or chronicles is depends almost entirely on framing. The historian must choose what to put in and what to leave out and that makes the story.

So if we are talking about actual persuasion, it probably won’t help just to make information available. Providing information was a key to our success in the Cold War because accurate information was in very short supply. Today in all but the dwindling coterie dictatorships in the world’s most benighted places, information is already available.  It is how that information is put together – the contexts, relationships and the narratives – that counts.

As persuaders we need to acknowledge what we know, what salesmen and marketers have long understood and what even science is beginning to explain. We are not in the information business. Information and facts are part of our raw material, but our business involves persuasion that is less like a library and more like a negotiation paradigm and rational decision making is not enough to achieve success. I mentioned framing, but I should say a little more.  The frame is how you characterize information or events.   If you want to be pejorative, you can sometimes call it spin, but there is no way you can understand complex reality w/o some kind of frame. Most of our frames are unconscious, but that doesn’t mean they are not powerful or pervasive.  Think of the ubiquitous sports frame.   Describing something like American football, (i.e. centrally planned, stop and start with specialized plays and players) versus football other places (i.e. fluid, fast breaking with the players less specialized) makes a big difference to how it will be perceived. Or think of how we try to frame our presidents.  We want our candidate to be in the frame with Lincoln and Washington, Warren G. Harding and Rutherford B Hayes, not so much.

Build a community & be part of a community

 Figure out what you can contribute and do it.  Remember people make decisions in the contexts of their relationships.  Also make sure that you get something back. 

The basis of almost all human relationships is reciprocity. All human societies believe in reciprocity. It has survival value. You want to be able to give to your fellow man and expect that he will do the same when you are in need. When that breaks down, so does civil society. It is probably a good idea to be SEEN to get something in return anyway, since if you don’t others will impute an ulterior motive anyway.

I know that this sounds crassly materialistic, but the reciprocity need not be material. You might help a person in the “pay it forward” mode, assuming that when he gets the opportunity he will help somebody else. The reciprocity might just be gratitude. But when a recipient is left w/o some way to reciprocate, a good person feels disrespected.  At first they are happy to get something for nothings, but they soon learn to despise their benefactor.  And maybe they should, since his “generosity” is taking their human dignity.

A simple rule in persuasion is that it is often better to receive than to give.  Let the other parties feel that they have discharged their social obligations, maybe even that THEY are the generous ones. You notice that the most popular individuals are rarely those who need or want nothing from others, even if they are very generous. And one of the most valuable gifts you can receive is advice and knowledge.  Let others share their culture and experience.

Just a few more short points …

Inclusive & Exclusive 

Communities are inclusive for members and exclusive for others. You attract nobody if you appeal to everybody. You have to earn membership in any community worth joining. 

Personal – or at least personalized  

Editors and marketers have tried for years to homogenize for the mass market. That’s how we got soft white Wonder bread and Budweiser beer.  Niche markets – and social media is a series of niche markets – require personality.  We do a poor job of segmenting our market in public diplomacy.  This is something I will work on when I get to Brazil and I suggest you think about when you get to your posts.

Reiterate

Success is continuous learning – an iterative   process- not a plan – and a never ending journey.  As I wrote up top, we never get to the end. We have to learn from our failures and our successes and move on. The best we can do is make our own ending worth of the start.   

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Notes on Social Media & Public Diplomacy

A more mature understanding of the social media

It is no surprise that our early forays into the media felt a bit like returning to high school.   Much of the social media was for and by teenagers and catered to their motivations and predilections.   We followed through that door, looking for that ever elusive youth market and we were about as successful as adults always are when they try to “hang around” with teenagers and young adults.

This is one of the impressions I got from participating in an open discussion about how we (State) use social media in Washington and at posts at the tail end of the FSI course on using the social media.  In addition to teaching techniques this course was also designed to assimilate experience from those who actually work with the social media on a regular basis in real world public diplomacy, making, as course organizer Bruce Kleiner characterizes it, a “why-to” as well as a “how-to” course. 

Bruce ran what amounted to an informal expert practitioner focus group and since Bruce and I had worked together to design this module, I got to be there to take part and take notes.
The good news is that everybody is now using a wide variety of social media methods and platforms in public diplomacy.  We no longer have to do the sales job.  And we are maturing.  You can see the changes month-by-month.  Not much more than a year ago, it was enough to be on the media. 

At first we looked to the social media for numbers.  In many ways adopting the teenage paradigm of popularity, we measured our own worth and that of our programs by how many people put their names on lists, called themselves our friends or said they approved of our comments. We learned how to build audiences and found that it was easy.   But we don’t have the audiences we want and we don’t really have the audiences that want what we provide.

Several people complained that they were pressured to create and populate Facebook or Twitter realms w/o specification about the kinds of audiences they were supposed to get.   The result was massive, unsegmented groups of fans or friends, with little commonalities of interests.  We indiscriminately push our messages to these groups and call it a success if we reach a million people. But  we are now exiting this stage of development.

The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on

It seemed fairly unanimous that audiences and content count.   The social media can get people’s attention, but we have to hold it once we got it.  This is harder.  I compared some of the social media to barking dogs.  The bark says “I’m here; I’m here; I’m here.”  Our audiences are acknowledging our presence and now asking what is it we want to say?   If the content that follows is insufficient or not well targeted, we will be about as effective and maybe as annoying as a barking dog.

This transition will not be easy.  We have developed general social media audiences but we want to pass messages about specific topics.  It is unlikely that any particular people will be interested in all or even most of our topics and few people will sift through all of what we send to find the nuggets of gold. 

Segment the audience and sell to the segments

Skilled marketers know that marketing is not selling.  It requires understanding your customers, your products and your potential products and putting these things together.  It is easy to take marketing analogies too far, but this one fits public diplomacy well.

The first imperative is to segment our audiences.   This may mean trimming them to smaller and more interested proportions.   A community that allows everybody in quickly becomes a mob, where important ideas and messages are lost in a sea of inanity. This actually fairly describes much of the social media.  If we want to make this medium useful, we have to tend to our audience segments.

Of course addressing a market segment implies that you have some product particularly appropriate for that audience.   This means content and often very specific content.   An individual interested in climate change, for example, will not long remain satisfied with simple information aimed at a general audience.   This will apply to any subject we can think of and it will happen even if we are trying to talk to experts.  An informed layman will quickly move beyond the general information and demand more.   If they don’t find it with us, they will move elsewhere.   Information is easy to find on the web.

Social media exacerbates a classic sales temptation.  An aggressive salesman can sell products his organization cannot reasonably produce or deliver.   A good salesman ensures that customers get what they want and his organization can produce and deliver what he promises.   This is often the difference between short and long term success.  

Another temptation is to use the social media as a conduit to unload our products into the market.   I asked how many people would actually read the various speeches or watch the videos we send out.  The response was not overwhelming.   If we, who are more interested in such things than a most people, will not be interested in these things, why do we think others will want them?   We have an important role to play for sources or archiving.    Most people will not read through a whole speech by the Secretary of State or the President, but many people want to have it available as reference.   They essentially mine out the nuggets of information they want.   Filling this need is a web 1.0 function or even just an archiving task.   We might use social media to remind audiences that these things are available, but regularly sending out texts is probably a waste of time and may even morph into the barking dog mode of annoyance.

Culture matters

It was clear from the discussion that people at our posts have many similar problems and successes with social media.  It was equally clear that there are substantial differences in what is possible or desirable based on local cultures, environments and priorities.   There is no such thing as a global product and we need our people on the ground to tailor and modulate our messages.   BTW – it is also very important to have up-to-date information from people on the ground.  Conditions change rapidly and what worked last year may be a disastrous failure this year.   There is no substitute for local expertise.  Social media can leap borders, but it still has to appeal to local people when it arrives.

Answering criticism

Another audience question concerned responding to criticism.   Sometimes we just have to repeat the same answers over and over because there is nothing else to say. This may not be satisfying to us or others but it is the way it has to be.  We agreed that we should welcome legitimate criticism and answer it truthfully and forthrightly.   There is a danger, however, of getting too deeply involved.  We don’t know how many people are really involved in an online discussion and/or if it may reach a wider audience.   We also don’t know the level of commitment.    For example, there might be only a couple individuals criticizing us.  Maybe they have thousands of friends “involved” but these people don’t really care.  Remember the difference between involvement and commitment can be seen in a ham and eggs breakfast.  The chicken is involved; the pig is committed.

We can never be as efficient or nimble as a private firm

We talked a little about the differences between what we (USG) can do versus what private firms, or even smaller governments can do.  Much private effort in the social media is to simply build awareness or name recognition.  Unlike most private firms, the USG has no need to build awareness of itself.  Everybody knows who we are.   We also must recognize that people may see even our innocent effort as menacing.   I told the story about my recent experience with Amazon.com.  I checked out a few books on ancient Greek literature a few days ago. Now Amazon.com is sending me updates on books in ancient Greek.  Their machine has noticed and categorized me. I don’t find this offensive and it may help me find things I might want.   Now imagine that you are a citizen of a country where America is not universally liked.  You learn that we have the kind of information on you that Amazon.com has on me.  Are you happy about that?   What if you find out that the U.S. Government wants to “help” educate your kid?  We have to recognize that we are not a normal organization and that our embrace is not always welcome.   That means that we can almost never just copy what others are doing successfully and we will never be as efficient or nimble as private firms because we cannot let ourselves be so.

Somebody has to do it

There was mention of the problems of staffing.  Social media duties tend to get tacked onto the workload.  Since most posts are already working with reduced staffs and already “doing more with less,” this can be a strain.  There are no easy solutions to the staffing problem.   All of them involve priorities.  We agreed that posts need to identify who will be doing the new work and how much time it will take.  Then they have to ask and answer the question whether the new duties are important enough to displace old ones, and if so what.   Of course, social media will sometimes automatically displace older duties.   The need to copy, collate and distribute is vastly decreased because of the social media, for example.   As with most management decisions, it might be better to reengineer and/or eliminate whole sets of tasks rather than tinker around the edges.  

A flatter hierarchy might be very helpful, since a great deal of time is spent getting clearances and making fairly meaningless cosmetic changes to documents.   The old saying that you shouldn’t spend a dollar to make a dime decision goes for wasting time too. 

The medium is not the message

Finally, we have to recognize that the advent of social media may be less immediately revolutionary than we initially thought.   Most people still get their information through traditional media, especially television and radio.  When President Obama spoke in Cairo, for example, it was hailed as a social media success but almost everybody who saw the speech, saw it on television.   Even people who saw it later on Internet saw it essentially through the television lens, just delivered differently.  And following up on social media has not proven as successful as the original excitement would have implied.  You still have to have something to say and you still have to maintain relationships.   Social media will become increasingly important as components in the toolbox of public diplomacy, but it will never be a standalone technique.   Social media can support programs, but it never can be the program itself.  The medium is not the message.  

BTW – I gave the keynote to this course.  The PowerPoint is available below.

Social_Media_FSI_April_5-1Download
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Computer Revolution #4 (and counting)

I am doing my FSI talk again on Monday.   It is very similar to the one I did in February, but there are some additions and changes.   The new PowerPoint is below.  I was thinking through the slides and about the impact of new media this time.  Below are a few ideas.  I don’t know if I will use them in the very short presentation, but maybe if somebody asks.

Social_Media_FSI_April_5Download

This is the forth computer revolution that I have personally experienced

The first was when I was still too young to have much of an understanding.   This was the one where computers were going to take over the world.  Science fiction movies had computers just usurping the thinking of humans.   There were “evil” computers like Hal on “2001: a Space Odyssey” (funny, 2001 came and went w/o that Jupiter mission) but mostly they were just better than we mere humans.  The irony is that the actual computing power was so low in those days that we just laugh at the perceived threat.

I was part of the next revolution, proud and excited.  This was when young people (like me at the time) were going to use computers to change the world and displace all the accumulated wisdom of the ages with our raw young intelligence bolstered by computer power. The problem was that we really didn’t know how to do anything.  The computers just helped us do nothing much faster than before and leveraged our mistakes.  I recall a saying on the wall the University of Minnesota, where I got my MBA. It said,

“to err is human, but if you really want to mess up you need computer support.”

The other MBA epitaph was, “Often wrong but never in doubt.” Harness that to the power of computers and see what you come up with.   The third revolution was the dot.com boom of the late 1990s.  This is the one we have to pay close attention to because it has lessons for today.  The idea of the dot.com is that you didn’t really need any content or products. The race was for attention – eye balls.  People set up web sites supposedly selling all sorts of things, but all they really cared about was exposure.  Money poured in to investments in dot.com. It wasn’t until around March of 2000 that people noticed that the emperor had no clothes. The demise of the dot.com pulled the market down with it and also much of the economy.  The NASDAQ still hasn’t fully recovered. Some firms like Amazon.com came out winners. The difference was their organizational skills and the fact that they delivered real products.

We have our own special dot.com cautionary tale. We (the USG, State, USIA) messed up big-time in the 1990s in relation to public affairs, or at least the concept did.  Many were taken in by the promise of the Internet and there were those who thought we didn’t need a real presence on the ground in other countries. We could do it all from Washington.  During the 1990s, we closed posts, shut down most of our libraries (made them into Information Resource Centers), eliminated many of our centers overseas and generally let our public affairs capacity atrophy. A simple but telling statistic is that there were only about half as many public diplomacy officers in 2000 as there had been in 1990.  After the attacks of 9/11, we really didn’t have the people on the ground or the experience needed to communicate with world publics. The website “air war” was a bust. You can reach millions of people, but you are just wasting your time if they aren’t paying attention or your message doesn’t appeal.

BTW – Rebuilding American diplomatic capacity began soon after 9/11. Colin Powell spearheaded a diplomatic readiness initiative to help compensate for the damage done during the 1990s Results are starting to show but rebuilding networks will take a while longer. U.S. diplomacy has a very peculiar age structure because of the nineties neglect. There are many new employees (>10 years experience) and many old employees (20 > years experience), but not many in the middle.  This will be a challenge in the next five years, as much of the experience will go out the door through retirements. (Career diplomats can retire after 20 years.) It will be a good time to look for a job in the Foreign Service, but our government will be paying for mistakes of the 1990s for the next ten years. You cannot turn these things on and off like a light bulb. Think of public affairs like a forest. Things take time.  The trees you plant today determine the forest years from now and you cannot expect to walk in the shade of your trees that you didn’t plant 15 years ago. Some things just take time.

Now here we are in revolution #4. I don’t know how this story will end.   My earnest hope is that we will remember that we are always and everywhere talking to people.   People are funny.  They don’t always do what you think they will.   You still have to understand them before you can expect them to understand you.   In this latest age of new media, reaching out with the newest tools is necessary, but not sufficient to achieve our goals

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Understanding Radicals

If we want to understand radicals and counter their influence, we have to get beyond pedantic debates about words. That is one of the ideas I took away from a discussion with Ghaffar Hussein, a representative of the Quilliam Foundation, a UK think tank that studies radicalization and how to prevent it.

Not getting bogged down in terms is the first step in making progress. It is good to have common understandings of terms, but some terms are too loaded for a common agreement. Radical is one such word. And it is worse than mere misunderstanding. Some people use linguistics as an offensive weapon to prevent real discussion. Mr. Hussein says that when he gets into these kinds of word-bogs, he just describes the behaviors and tells the person to call it whatever he wants. This pragmatic approach to distinctions reminded of the William James anecdote about the squirrel.

So readers can feel free to substitute what terms they want. I am going to use the words Mr. Hussein did to describe the concepts. BTW – I am using his talk as a starting off point and the basic ideas are his. However, I am riffing off them, not reporting, so I will take the position that the good ideas are probably his and the bad ones are more likely my extrapolations. I gave Mr. Hussein the URL for the blog and I hope that he writes in if I say anything too egregiously out there. Islamism describes an ideology, not a faith, because the ties with traditional Islam are sometimes tenuous and superficial. Islamism wears the clothes of Islam, but its operative ideology is borrowed eclectically from European totalitarian “revolutionary socialism” philosophies of Marxism and fascism. (Baathists, of which Saddam Hussein was the most famous, freely and openly borrowed from both Hitler and Stalin.) These kinds of ideas appeal to committed radicals, who embrace violence as a tactic and are small in number but seek to use masses of people instrumentally to totally change societies. Lenin and Hitler provided roadmaps that they can use.

Like the earlier European models, they tap into a sense of grievance. Of course, grievance alone is not revolutionary. Everybody has grievances and some peoples have been horribly oppressed for centuries w/o doing much of anything about it. You need a grievance as a push, but ideology is the pull. Hitler used the real grievances in postwar Germany and combined them with bogus ones about Jews and others, but w/o some unifying ideology to make it operational, you would just have had a lot of people grumbling and/or they might have worked through their problems and come out at a better place. A radical ideology is truly the serpent in the garden. They don’t want problems solved or mitigated because the grievances are the ostensible justifications that animate their movements. We talked a little about the profile of a radical. Although Marc Sageman wrote a good book profiling some of terrorists called Understanding Terror Networks, there isn’t one profile that fits them all.  And we should make the distinction between the activists and what we might call the foot soldiers. Most of those involved with radical organizations probably have not made a reasoned choice. In places like Pakistan or Afghanistan, many do to make a little money or they just drifted into it for circumstantial reasons. There are some correlations among activists, however, and perhaps some keys to motivation could be found there.

Sageman pointed out that most of the terrorists were not from the poorer parts of society. In fact, many were very well off. They also generally had not grown up in particularly religious households; they were not especially well-versed in the details of theology and many were not living very pious lifestyles. He suggested that some may even have got into being radicals as a result of a type of cognitive dissonance, since they are living a fairly non-pious lifestyle and they may see their radical behavior s a way of atoning. Many radical activists are well-educated in the secular way and most have hard science or engineering background. You can speculate as to why this would be true. Foreign students studying in Western universities often study science and engineering. It might just be that they are a subset of that. But it could also be that science tends to have specific rules, which appeals to someone who sees the world in yes/no form. They may think that this sort of thinking should also apply to human events, society and politics. One question that has interested observers for years is why members of U.S. Muslim community seem so much less subject to radicalization than those in Europe. Some recent events might call this premise into question, but we can still address some of the differing factors.

One reason is the type of immigrant is very different. U.S. Muslim immigrants have tended to be professional and educated and enjoy a higher median household income than the average non-Muslim American. The Muslim community in America also contains a large number of Iranians who fled the Ayatollahs. They are less inclined to view radicalism with much enthusiasm given their intimate experience with it. In contrast, immigrants to Europe tended to be lower skill and lower income workers. When the first waves came in the 1960s, many intended to return home and did not integrate into the local societies. This group was leavened by more radical elements, who couldn’t safely practice their brand of Islam in their native countries. It created a volatile mix. There is also the different nature of the host societies. The United States and Canada are countries of immigration. Immigrants can fairly easily adopt an American identity and find a place in the American mosaic. European countries were and still are to some extent more nation/ethic-states. Nobody has any trouble assuming a person can become American by choice and most Americans trace their own ancestry to an immigrant who did just that. It is harder to think of someone just choosing to become German, Italian or Danish, since there are lots of other things that go along with that designation. Mr. Hussein thinks that is changing, but it still hasn’t changed. Although he was born in the UK, he is still often considered an “immigrant” in Europe.

Another factor is the sheer size of the U.S. and Canada. Immigrants spread out over North America, while in more constrained European countries they tend to pool into homogenous communities. There is also a generational phenomenon. The risky time is the second generation. The immigrant generation knows what their native country is like. While they might not be perfectly at home in their new country, they don’t harbor as many illusions about what they exchanged for what they left behind. The second generation has to search for identity in more ways. They may feel that they are in, but not of, their new home country but they also don’t have much experience with the old one. They may seek to find or create “roots” and so may be susceptible to radical ideas purporting to do that for them. This may be exacerbated by parents, especially fathers, who really don’t address their concerns.

While I have no close experience of this with Muslim immigrants, I remember the phenomenon with European immigrant fathers in Wisconsin and some of their kids around my age. I bet the general conversation is similar. “What are you complaining about? You’ve got it easy. When I was growing up back in ____ we …” The difference was there was no radical ideology to appeal my Polish/Irish/Italian playmates back in the 1960s. As we discussed above, everybody has grievances, but without the ideology to pull them along, nothing may come of them but grumbling. We didn’t really talk about the “so what do we do?” question.  Read about this on the Quilliam Foundation webpage. I am not an expert on these things and never will be, but I found this a very interesting talk and thought I would write it down to share with others.